Episode Details

In March 2002, John Darwin paddled his canoe into the North Sea off Seaton Carew and disappeared. Searchers found wreckage, his family mourned, and his wife Anne claimed more than £500,000 in insurance and related payments. But Darwin had not drowned: he was alive, hiding in a bedsit next door to the family home while his two sons believed their father was dead.

Five years later, he walked into a London police station claiming he had amnesia. The story collapsed when investigators found a photograph of John and Anne together in Panama, taken while they were planning a new life abroad.

In 2008, both were convicted of fraud. John received six years and three months in prison, Anne six and a half years, after a deception that did not just target insurers, but shattered their own family.