The untold story of what happened next to John Darwin the canoe conman

telegraph.co.uk:

paddled his kayak out into the North Sea to fake his own death, this is where John Darwin’s journey has taken him, via Panama, prison and the divorce courts.

And life is certainly quiet. He has few friends, he is not in contact with most of his family back in the UK; in fact the only time he has drawn attention to himself locally was over a minor traffic dispute. ‘I remember John and Mercy got into an argument with a neighbour on a parking issue, because our streets are narrow,’ says a local resident. ‘After that everyone in our village started calling him The Briton, because he’s British and strict.’Few of the neighbours have any idea that Darwin is the ‘canoe man’ who pretended to have died at sea in order to access £250,000 in life insurance and other payments, after running up huge debts while trying to construct a property empire.For a man to fake his death is not unheard of, but what made the case of John Darwin almost unique was that his wife Anne was in on the plot, agreeing that their sons and every other member of the family should believe Darwin had perished, so that they would display genuine grief.Their crime was born out of desperation – and pride – but sustained by greed once the money poured in.

The Darwins began a new life in Central America, living out an equatorial adventure far away from the chilly seaside town of Seaton Carew, County Durham, until the moment inevitably came, five years after John’s disappearance, when their lies caught up with them.The extraordinary details of their deception caused an international sensation.