J ohn Darwin hadn’t kayaked in some time, but on the afternoon of March 21, 2002, he felt inspired. Neighbors recalled seeing him crossing the street with his bright red kayak—or “canoe” in local parlance—hoisted over his head. When the fifty-one-year-old corrections officer failed to appear for his shift that evening at the Holme House prison in Stockton-on-Tees, England, Anne, his high school sweetheart and wife of over thirty years, reported him missing. Authorities kicked off a search party, with helicopters from the Royal Air Force swarming the gray skies over the North Sea, hundreds of rescuers combing the rocky beaches, and coast guard boats hunting for Darwin. After scouring the area for sixteen hours, they discovered only a paddle a hundred yards offshore. Police canceled the search. Rescuers noted that the water had not been especially rough the day Darwin disappeared.
In the months that followed, no corpse washed ashore. Anne mused on her unique predicament to reporters: “People die, have a funeral, they have a headstone, there is something to mark the fact they existed. I want to bury his body, enabling me to move on,” she said. Her sons, Mark, twenty-six, and Anthony, twenty-four, returned home to care for their mother. She tossed rose petals out to sea at the spot where her husband vanished. But no bloated body would wash up to provide the family with closure or to make Anne an official widow.
No corpse would materialize because for a great deal of the time he was considered dead, John Darwin was actually upstairs in his own home. He had colluded with his wife to fake his death and erase his debt by collecting insurance payouts. He assumed the identity of John Jones, a man born the same year but who died in infancy. With an authentic British passport in Jones’s name, Darwin traveled the world while Anne sold off their properties in England. The couple used those proceeds to buy a penthouse in Panama City and a plot of virgin jungle. After Darwin turned himself in nearly six years after his initial disappearance, a photograph of Anne and John beaming in a Panamanian real estate office would surface. Mark and Anthony thought their father had been dead the entire time.
ON THE DAY I arrived in Seaton Carew, England, eleven years after John Darwin’s legendary disappearance, the clouds hung so low in the sky it felt like being in a basement. Situated an hour southeast of Newcastle on the North Sea, the silvery water is the main attraction here. Seaton Carew has been billed as a seaside resort town since the mid-1800s, when the stately Staincliffe Hotel was built. Since Darwin’s return, the Staincliffe has renamed two of its restaurants the Darwin Room and the Canoe Bar. And a few doors down and built not much later sit two mammoth adjoining Victorian gingerbread homes that John Darwin used to own. What led me here was the chance to learn from someone who had successfully faked his own death, at least for a while. I hoped that if I spent enough time with him and learned the particulars of his strategy, his knowledge and experience could seep into me via osmosis.
It’s hard to overstate John Darwin’s pop-culture cachet in the United Kingdom. I first read about him in Frank Ahearn’s How to Disappear , as Frank thanked him for the uptick in his business, mainly from UK media outlets that wanted him to comment on Darwin’s plan. When Darwin wandered into a London police station in December 2007, he quickly became the story of the year. Maybe it was the slow holiday news cycle, or the universal fantasy of leaving one’s life behind, or the delightful schadenfreude of the plan going awry, but readers couldn’t get enough. The former prison guard is still synonymous with pseudocide in the United Kingdom—every time I’ve mentioned my quest to a Briton, he or she immediately references the Canoe Man. Darwin’s death fraud has put him at the top of the pseudocide survival-of-the-fittest heap.
He had recently been released from prison when I sent him a letter. When I opened my email to be greeted by a message from “johndarwin6969,” a wave of adrenaline coursed through my body. Having devoured all the salacious tabloid articles about him, I felt like I was speaking to a celebrity. I was a little taken aback, yet totally psyched, that he was so game to talk to me. I didn’t know if, having lost so much, he’d be offended by the request. But it became clear pretty quickly that he has embraced the throne of the man who claimed dominion over his fate and paddled out to sea. He said I could come to England, and that he’d show me the beach where the course of his life took a sharp turn.
Standing on the stretch of sand, if you squint, hold your breath, and focus your gaze on just a few inches of ocean horizon, the place looks pleasant enough. But inhale, and the olfactory system is assaulted with the stench of sewage draining into the ocean. Look to the left, and you see the old coal docks that serviced the underwater collieries. The beach is stained black from shale that still washes up onshore thirty years after the last mines closed. Industrious folks drive flatbed trucks down the shore and shovel the black sand to sell to the local power plant for cheap energy. Look to the right, and you’ve got the belching chimneys from the Petroplus Teesside Refinery and docks for shipping containers coming to port, flanked by giant turbines catching the relentless wind that slashes your face. Picture an off-season Myrtle Beach crossed with Pittsburgh, and you have Seaton Carew.
But the place does possess its own grim beauty. I found myself drawn viscerally to the winding old streets, the low-slung homes, and the wild elderberries that form canopies over the damp sidewalks. The land resonates with me in a primordial way. The rust-belt shit town where I grew up, Worcester, Massachusetts, boasts its own dreary downtown, much like Seaton Carew’s, where the main beachfront drag is home to a video arcade, a fish-and-chips shop, and a burger joint that roasts the patties to the consistency of mulch, and everything closes at four in the afternoon. My neighborhood in Worcester, too, possessed a handful of loiterer-friendly businesses like the minimart, the liquor store, and the keno lounge. Neighboring Hartlepool, a mile north of Seaton Carew, has a fluorescent-lit mall with the same hallmarks of my adolescence: dollar stores, a McDonald’s with a long line, and lots of skinny boys in track pants with sunken cheeks and narrowed eyes.
The North of England also resonates with me because this is the land of my ancestors. They were part of the Puritan diaspora from Yorkshire in the sixteen hundreds; part of the great migration to America—which begat the Appalachian white trash and aspiring southern gentry who would earn the distinction of “good name, no money” after the Civil War and ultimately evolve into our current manifestation of WASPs who get drunk in drafty houses in lieu of emoting. I’ve always felt that I came from no place. “Northern English” does not a spicy heritage make. Even the Irish Catholics who populated Worcester seemed downright exotic in comparison. This is, of course, the agony of being a privileged majority, but weirdly, here in the North of England, centuries after my relations boarded ships to evade being burned at the stake, I see myself in the citizens: the ghostly pallor; the hooded eyes heavy with alcoholism, depression, and lack of vitamin D; the upturned ski-slope noses the Viking pillagers gave us; the pudding-soft bellies. I have found my people.
John Darwin’s story struck me as an English story, but a Northern English story in particular. Many locals I talked to told me through gritted teeth that there are two Englands: the South and the North, or, more to the point, the rich and the poor. Industry has historically been located in the North, in the form of factories, shipbuilding, coal mining, and steelworks. Service and creative classes have always been located in the South. Prior to Darwin’s caper, this town did not register in anyone’s mind as a place with much to recommend it. But adjacent big brother Hartlepool is synonymous with the “monkey hanging,” a tale from the Napoleonic Wars that captures the nature of the sheltered locale. Fearing an attack, fishermen were on the lookout for invaders. They paid close attention as wreckage from a French ship washed ashore. There were no survivors save a soggy pet monkey, dressed in military garb for the sailors’ amusement. Having never met a Gaul, the fishermen questioned the monkey in an impromptu beach trial, and determined him to be a French spy. They sentenced him to death, and hung him from a fishing boat’s mast as a gallows. Today he is immortalized in a bronze monkey-hanging statue. Visitors can toss coins into his open arms. You can buy monkey-hanging key chains and mugs in the local history museum. “They really thought he was a person,” John would explain later. “The people are a bit backward here.”
John’s rubbery, expressive face betrays his British stoicism. He gives sidelong twinkling glances when he’s being mischievous, typically about whichever titsy Russian pops up on his cell phone—“women who want to meet me”—or when referring to “the pair of identical twins” who (you guessed it) also seek a private audience with the Canoe Man. He suffers from high self-esteem, which is what it takes to even conceive of faking your own death and getting away with it, outsmarting law enforcement and insurance investigators. “John from England with blue eyes” is how he describes himself to the women he meets in online role-playing games, several of whom he visited abroad when he was “dead.” When we met, he was sixty-two and balding, but in sturdy shape. He often goes for long walks along the blustery waterfront in steel-toed boots. He finds people his own age, especially women, to be adventure-averse wet blankets. Darwin speaks often of his acts of bravery: eating wild mushrooms covered in live maggots, kayaking without a helmet (“crash hats are for wimps!”), drinking water straight from the tap in every far-flung country he has visited. In another life, he might have been an explorer.
In his 2012 memoir, The Canoe Man: Panama and Back, he presents himself as haplessly virile, seduced by a parent when he was a young teacher (a profession he entered because he “loved the idea of long, long holidays”): “[T]here was me, a good Catholic teacher, standing behind and making love to the mother of two of my pupils in my own classroom . . . The noise seemed extremely loud, the sound of my hips slapping against her flesh . . .” He has programmed his cell phone ring tone to play a Clint Eastwood Western melody. He refers to the period of adventure after his disappearance as “when I was dead.” He lists foods that are aphrodisiacs and waits for your reaction. He says “women are my drug” and describes himself as a “randy old man” who, despite a six-year, three-month prison sentence, a divorce, and an estranged son who won’t talk to him, still has a lot of vim, vigor, and joie de vivre. His devil-may-care attitude toward life is inspiring, if a bit troubling.
Since his dramatic return from the dead nearly a decade ago, John Darwin has occupied that sweet spot of D-list celebrity that tabloids are built upon: not famous enough to be insulated by handlers, yet still popular enough to garner fascination. “People ask for me autograph,” he says with amusement. The British newspaper the Daily Mirror follows his goings-on with the same kind of train-wreck rubbernecking that In Touch Weekly magazine heaps on the likes of The Real Housewives reality stars in the United States. He went with a local radio host friend to see heavyweight champion boxer Frank Bruno give an after-dinner speech. Upon entering the banquet hall, Darwin was recognized instantly, and the audience began applauding for him in spite of the star onstage. He describes the encounter as a bit embarrassing—but also set up a makeshift photo booth for fans to take a picture with him for £5 a pop, the proceeds of which he says he donated to charity.
Such celebrity comes with rabid fans, such as a “stalker” (his word) named Lorraine Forbes. They struck up a correspondence when he was serving time. She wrote every few months, sealing her letters with lipstick kisses and promises of “Option 3.” Darwin explains the options: “When I was in prison, we wrote, and she gave me three options: number one is a meal, number two is the cinema, and number three is a damn good night bonking!” The perks of celebrity are not limited solely to groupies like Forbes but also extend even to Her Majesty’s Royal Mail. Forbes still writes Darwin, and, not knowing his latest whereabouts, simply addresses the envelope to:
John Darwin
“Canoe Man”
His Bungalow
Seaton Carew
And the letters always find him.
THOUGH FRANK AHEARN AND Steve Rambam had insisted that death fraud makes a poor exit strategy—for the sole reason that it’s far easier to get caught—Darwin’s story perhaps serves as the exception to their ironclad rule. I wanted to know what it felt like to be “dead” among the living, and what it is like to come back. But after getting to know Darwin personally and noting his refusal to obsess over having exploded his former life, a new question emerged: Can you ever escape the past, and can you ever escape yourself?
I suspect that Darwin’s blustering and chest puffery are rooted in something much deeper than machismo. The man is undeniably a product of the British class system and what happens, in the words of his father, Ronald, when one “has ideas above one’s station.” To his neighbors in Seaton Carew, his “getting one over on the insurance companies, the banks, and the government,” as some claim, is the stuff of folklore.
He describes his background as “working class with middle-class aspirations.” His mother was a dietician, and his father was a bricklayer. He grew up in a small bungalow in neighboring Blackhall Rocks, one of the local towns that exist to service the mines. “You had three choices,” he explains. “You could go down the pit at one colliery, or you could take the bus to another colliery, or you could go to the steelworks.” Rather than accepting this fate, Darwin extracted himself from such bleak prospects and attended the University of Manchester, where he studied to become a teacher. He felt resentment from friends when he returned home. “When they think educated people aren’t as good as them, it’s a kind of snobbery,” Darwin says.
He married Anne in 1972. They had known each other since high school. The couple soon had their first child, Mark. Anthony followed two years later. Anne came from a strict Catholic family, which John thinks drove a wedge between them from the earliest days of their relationship. In his memoir, John describes Anne’s family finding out that she was on birth control before they were married and forbidding her from seeing him. He describes her worldview as somewhat limited. (“She’d never had cheese before she met me!” he says, incredulous to this day.) After they married, when Anne was working as a secretary and he as a math and science teacher, John wanted the young couple to apply for an exchange in Australia. But, by his account, Anne’s provincial family forbade them from straying too far afield. So he dug in and ensconced himself in his role as a family man. “We were Mr. and Mrs. Average,” he writes in The Canoe Man . After being denied a promotion at the school, Darwin worked briefly at Barclays Bank but quit because he was “quickly disillusioned by their sales methods.” He then applied for teaching positions in London and for a job in the prison service. He received both, and opted for the prison because “there was a good chance that would be closer to home.” But those “ideas above one’s station” persisted.
He had grander aspirations to make money. “I don’t care what anyone says. Money isn’t everything, but it’s ninety-nine-point-nine percent of everything,” he tells me. He became involved in a number of endeavors to bolster his income, from trading stocks and shares (though he once got entangled in a pyramid scheme) to raising African snails to sell to local restaurants as escargot to crafting garden gnomes to peddle at markets. Darwin actually made money from these. He is quick to contradict the media narrative of his life: “It wasn’t just fail, fail, fail, and then canoe into the sea! The newspaper said, ‘Oh, he wanted to make a lot of money.’ Well, the British media has to castigate anyone who’s successful in this country. If you try to pull yourself up, they’ll kick you in the teeth.”
Turning his entrepreneurial eye to real estate was the financial decision that would forever alter the course of his life. According to his memoir, he saw buying rental properties as a way to provide Anne with security in old age, as her “piddly little job” would not provide a comfortable retirement: “We realized the rent from one tenant would make as much as her proposed pension, so the logical plan seemed to be to buy a house in Anne’s name and kit it out under the guise of bed-and-breakfast accommodation.”
John and Anne sold that first house and used the proceeds to buy cheaper properties to rent out. John describes his Donald Trump–like ascension: “Like a Monopoly player, I bought more houses, usually bank repossessions, finally only mentioning the fact to Anne in passing. She did not even know how many houses I owned or even their locations.” Darwin cultivated capital to purchase these homes by consulting a book that advises readers in the art of “creative banking.” Using a crafty system of financing deposits through loans (usually in the form of cash advances on credit cards), John steadily acquired a rental portfolio of a dozen homes over the course of two years.
In late 2000 the Darwins found the crown jewels of their portfolio at their friend’s home one night in Seaton Carew, when he showed them an advertisement for nos. 3 and 4 the Cliff, a pair of conjoined Victorian guesthouses connected by a series of interior corridors. The couple fell in love with the properties: their vast size, their craftsmanly charm, their oceanfront views. They decided to make no. 3 their dream home and turn its Siamese twin into a rental property. Anne dug up a photograph of her taken opposite the houses when she was eighteen. John remembers the nostalgia the photo evoked: “This brought back memories of how she looked when we first went out with each other many years ago.” They bought the homes at a decent price because they were fixer-uppers. “They seemed an incredible bargain,” John writes in his book, “£150,000 for the pair. . . . Of course, we had to raise the money, which involved a fair amount of creative accounting. Once again, I had to take out personal loans.” They now owned fourteen properties, an impressive feat in only four years.
Although they were living in the stately grandeur of no. 3 the Cliff, with its seven bedrooms, John was still shuffling funds from one venture to pay for another. And the income his rental properties generated turned out to be unreliable. Even though most of his rooms were rented out, the Darwins rarely received the rent on time because the majority of their tenants received a government housing benefit, which was often late. “The work was piling up,” he writes, “acts of vandalism by tenants, and late or nonpayment of housing benefits from councils pushed us deeper and deeper into debt.” He had not accounted for bureaucratic failings in his creative banking scheme. On the houses alone, he owed £240,000. Soon John couldn’t keep up with the payments. Since the homes were rental properties, he had taken out a commercial mortgage instead of a personal residential mortgage. According to Darwin, because of the nature of his financing, he could not declare bankruptcy on the properties. He would have lost everything.
The boiling point came in the form of another bureaucratic failing: a credit card bill never got forwarded to his new address at the Cliff. After months of notices, the credit card company didn’t just threaten legal action but also made charges imminent. Once the notice finally arrived, John opened the envelope to see that he owed £5,000, which would have to be paid within seven days. He writes, “Somehow, through juggling the house-move, my job, the upkeep, and maintenance of 14 properties and often just signing cheques for bills without looking properly at what they were for, we had never thought to check on this other card. . . . Think about it; does anyone remember to pay bills they have not actually received?” He called the credit card company and attempted to make a settlement, but it wouldn’t budge: pay up within one week or face bailiff action, meaning that everything the Darwins owned, including their property portfolio, could be repossessed. Darwin says that laws have since changed, but at the time, the relatively small credit card debt resulted in an unfortunate domino effect. As he explains it, “We would’ve been out on the street, and there was no guarantee that we’d be out of debt, because the government would’ve just sold the houses for nothing. I would be homeless, Anne would be homeless, and twenty-six people would have been homeless.” It was in this moment that he realized he was worth more dead than alive.
I’d read this account in his book, but it still hadn’t clicked into focus for me. Faking his death seemed a pretty big leap as the only viable option. “Unless you write it out on paper, it’s very hard for people to grab hold of,” he admits. Darwin’s life at that point had been constructed as a house of cards, with one precarious investment holding up the next, with all of their daily expenses, mortgage, and credit card payments hanging in the balance. And the law was not on his side.
I checked into this version of things with an English lawyer, someone more familiar with the systems of bankruptcy and foreclosure. He contradicted several of Darwin’s principal legal claims. Regarding the credit card catastrophe, Alan Hodge, a solicitor from Bristol, said, “The notion that all the card company had to do was employ a bailiff, without first obtaining a court order, is not plausible. Credit card companies are (and were at that time) governed by robust consumer regulations. The tenants he mentioned would be protected from any arbitrary eviction by the simple fact that eviction from residential premises cannot take place without a prior possession order.” Darwin wouldn’t have been able to sell off the houses without the bank’s blessing. Hodge also questions the credibility of Darwin’s point about not being able to declare bankruptcy: “Any individual who can prove their debts exceed their liabilities can ask the court for a voluntary bankruptcy order on a payment of fee.” But according to Darwin, this kind of public bank settlement could have cost him his job. He explains: “Since I was a prison officer, if I was taken to court, not only would the bank hear about it, but the prison authorities would also hear about it, and I’d be in danger of losing my job. If you’re a prison officer and you’ve got all these drug barons and they know you’re in financial trouble, they’ll put pressure on you. That’s why the prison authorities have the rules that you have to report trouble to them so you don’t get sucked in. If I was taken to court without telling them, then I would have gotten sacked.”
Still, this is the point in the story where most people would take a different course of action. Dusting off the old kayak, packing a rucksack with camping essentials, and colluding with one’s spouse to claim insurance money and pensions might not spring to mind as a first solution. It wasn’t Darwin’s first idea, either. Some of the options he entertained included robbing a gas station, mugging a pedestrian, and crashing his car for an insurance payout. He considered suicide, but claimed he wouldn’t do it given the effect on Anne and his family. Plus, from his research, there was no money in suicide. He considered simply disappearing, but that wouldn’t have solved the financial problem, either. So he gave the Walter White excuse: I committed the crime to save my family.
But beyond the problems with his prison officer job, beyond making Anne an accessory to fraud, there were two other people to consider: their sons, Mark and Anthony. That’s the part that casts a shadow over Darwin’s clever plan. How could you let your children think you’re dead?
“How old are you?” Darwin asks me in an echoey restaurant on the waterfront by the stretch of beach where he’d staged the accident.
“Thirty,” I tell him.
“The two kids were a couple of years younger than you. One was married. They weren’t babies. They were adults who had moved away from home, leading independent lives. So in that respect, they weren’t children,” he explains. John is quick to make the distinction each time his sons’ names come up: they were his kids, but they were not kids . He goes on to express, with exasperation, the thing he knows he is supposed to say:
“Yes, it was a terrible thing to do. You don’t think of these things when you’re under a lot of stress. In the cold light of day, you wouldn’t do it. But under stress, you’ll do extraordinary things,” he says. Darwin often employs the second person when reflecting on his actions. The goal, I think, is to put me in his shoes: What would you do under such excruciating pressure? You would do the same thing. He makes a macabre comparison: “In this county, there are a lot of people under financial stress who end up murdering their wives and kids.”
The plan was always supposed to be a temporary fix, as Darwin tells it. Rather than disappearing for life, he intended to collect the commercial mortgage insurance policy that would allow Anne to sell off the houses and then make good on his debt. The plan was just to “borrow” money from the insurance company and then pay it back once they’d liquidated their property assets. At the end of their trial in July 2008, he and Anne were charged with defrauding £250,000 total from Norwich Union and from John’s teaching and prison pensions. Of course, he figured he’d pay a fine and do some jail time, but that seemed a whole lot better than putting his family and tenants on the street and living under the draconian rule of an unjust financial system. “It wasn’t planned in the long term,” Darwin says, “it was something done to meet a requirement. I wanted to release the equity in the houses. It doesn’t matter how much equity you’ve got in the houses if you have to pay back the bank twenty dollars a month and if you can’t, they foreclose on you.”
The fact of his planned return is critical to Darwin’s narrative. It supports his contention that he was not caught, nor was he about to be caught, but rather that he turned himself in when the time was right. But Darwin also cites his devotion to Anne as a reason for faking his death instead of just disappearing and shirking his responsibilities—a point that would make the inevitable prison sentence worth it: “I would still be married. We would be able to live together as man and wife.”
Darwin writes poignantly in his memoir of the shame that propelled him toward the plan (“I don’t want to be seen as a failure . . . the man who lost his home, who couldn’t provide for his wife and family”) and the anxiety he experienced when, on a cold March day, he made the decision to go through with it. “Can I do it? Should I do it? I went to the hall door and then, as I put the key in the front door to unlock it, my hands started to shake. ‘Not again,’ I thought as I turned to the toilet, feeling distinctly sick. Dry retches wracked my body, but as I had nothing left in my stomach, only yellow bile emerged.” But the nerves eventually dissipated. A few pages later, he narrates, “Can I get away with it? Yes, I can.” What comes next is the part of the story he unabashedly loves to tell: the problem solving, the logical turns. He kept the red kayak in what was once a chapel but had become a storage shed.
“What, you don’t have a chapel in your backyard?” Darwin asks me as we stand across the street from no. 3 the Cliff. This is the great plan from the great man who got away with it. At least for a while. On a blustery day, he guides me down to the spot on the coal-flecked beach where he launched. The clouds are low and pregnant in the sky, threatening a downpour at any moment. The wind whips our faces, but Darwin is unmoved.
He carried the kayak out of storage in the chapel. Inside the boat, he had stuffed a plastic bag with a change of clothes, two T-shirts, a sweater, socks, underwear, two long-sleeved shirts, a money belt containing just over £150, a flashlight, matches, and a pair of sunglasses. He recalls his shoulders burning under the weight of the thing as he crossed over from his house to the beach, and pretending it was light as an empty shell.
“You’ve got to look down the beach,” Darwin explains in his science-teacher voice. “You’ve got people walking dogs, then over here it’s secluded.” He points to the area a ways down the shore, closer to the chemical plant and away from the houses and shops lining the Cliff. “So you’ve got to be seen kayaking out. What I did was, I timed it, so by the time I got here, it had started to get dark. I went out around four, and I was in no rush. This was in March, so it gets dark quite early. Once it was dark, I tried to push the kayak out, but it must’ve been a woman, because it was very obstinate! It was very frightening and exciting going in. I quite enjoy paddling!” Setting out, he still hadn’t made up his mind if he was going to go through with it or just turn back.
Once it was dark, Darwin crash-landed down the beach, away from his neighbors who often used binoculars to watch ships coming into port. He left one sneaker by the tide line for rescuers to discover hours later. The September day when we are standing on the beach brings the kind of English damp that just makes you sad. He says that day in March years earlier was even colder. He remembers wondering if he should just pack it in, go home, and take a hot shower. But instead, he paced around the sand dunes in drenched clothes with a pole slung over his shoulder so that he might be mistaken for a fisherman. He waited a few hours for Anne to pick him up and deposit him at the Durham train station, about twenty miles north. “The first place the police would look is the Hartlepool and Seaton Carew railway stations,” he explains. “In the U.K., there are closed-circuit cameras all over the place. You’ve got to think ahead.”
An older man walking a terrier passes us and does a double take and smirks. “He knows me! That one knew me!” Darwin whispers to me as soon as the dog walker is out of earshot. “You can always tell when they have a certain type of smile on their face. They recognize you.”
When we reach the end of the beach, we turn onto a path through tall grass of North Gare to a parking lot bordering a golf course a short walk away. This is where Anne picked up the freezing, shivering John, whose night shift at Holme House prison was to begin in a few hours.
Anne is the big question mark in the story. I sent her several letters, but she never replied, and she has not spoken to the press since her now ex-husband’s return. She seems eager to leave this chapter of her life in the past. Her only words are from a police interview that was made public. Explaining her role in the plan, Anne told investigators in December 2007, “I knew the day that John had gone missing . . . that he planned it. I got a telephone call from him at work that afternoon to say he was going out in the canoe and that he wanted me to get home by seven o’clock to pick him up and help him make his getaway. Eventually he came toward the car, and he said he had everything with him that he needed.” In an audio recording posted on YouTube, her voice in this interview is slow and deliberate. To me it sounds as if she’s recalling a really awful dream.
But even since their divorce in 2011, Anne still looms large in John’s life. He often refers to her not by her name but simply as “she.” As we walk along the gravel path to the almost empty parking lot, John offers, “She was really nervous; she’s not as strong-willed as me.” But when the couple’s debt seemed insurmountable, she threatened suicide, saying that she would “walk into the sea.” When he initially floated the plan of faking his death, Anne thought he had gone mad, he says. He convinced her that it was the only way they would be able to collect the mortgage insurance money that would allow them to release the equity in the houses, pay back their debt, and, one day, resume life as Mr. and Mrs. Average. When John broke the news to Anne of his plan the week before he staged the accident, she kept a stony distance from him until the morning he paddled out to sea, when she rolled over and, according to John, said, “I don’t want you to do this, but if you’re determined to carry it out, then I’ll help you. But only on the condition you’ll find a way to come back.”
When he climbed into Anne’s car, he was shivering, almost hypothermic. She told him he was a “silly old man” and forbade him from camping on the beach in Silloth, on the northwest coast, as he had planned. John had chosen Silloth because he knew that his accent gave him away as a northerner. He would stick out too much in the South. Anne had withdrawn the last £100 from their checking account and gave it to John to spend the night in a bed-and-breakfast once he arrived on the other side of the country. On the car ride to the train station, they discussed simply turning around and pretending the thing never happened. But as they took back roads to Durham, they kept driving. The plan was in motion. There was no turning back.
Somewhere between the Durham train station and the bed-and-breakfast in Silloth, Anne got a call from the prison that John had failed to appear for his night shift. Usually the couple might have grabbed a quick dinner before John headed out to work, but on this night, Anne told his supervisor, she had gone shopping and hadn’t seen him all day. His car was in the driveway, and his passport, credit cards, and phone were upstairs in the bedroom. The only thing missing from the house was the kayak.
“She must’ve had to act really panicky,” I say to John.
“If you are panicking because you’re doing wrong, you don’t have to act. You’re just panicking. She was scared stiff,” he explains.
It begins to rain as we stand in the parking lot. This is where the plan truly commenced, where the couple committed to the fraud. I’m straining to understand how he actually feels beneath all the bluster and bravado.
I ask him if he feels bad for having had Anne lie on his behalf.
“We were both under a lot of stress,” he explains. “Yes, you felt bad for putting her under the stress, but what’s the alternative? It’s not like the newspapers say: ‘I blame everybody but meself.’ I don’t!”
“So what responsibility do you take?” I ask.
“I bought the houses for Anne’s pension. This would be her security. For coming up with the plan, I suppose ninety percent.”
“What about the other ten percent?”
“If she was telling the police about ‘my dear departed husband,’ then she must have some responsibility, don’t you think? Or do you not agree with that?”
The thing I have noticed about John Darwin, as with so many of these other guys who fake their deaths, is that his ideas, while bizarre and demented, do possess a certain internal logic. It’s not like he was ripping off the insurance company—he was simply “borrowing money” from it! And his kids were adults with their own lives; they wouldn’t have cared if he’d died anyway! He was worth more dead than alive! If you allow John’s rationalizations to wash over you, you can see how once the plan was activated, it seemed easier to stay the course. And Darwin’s use of the second person is meant to help you see exactly that. So once you’re tucked into your bed-and-breakfast in Silloth—having successfully made the cross-country journey without incident—and you turn on the TV in your room and see the news reporting the disappearance of a middle-aged man off the coast of Seaton Carew, well, you can’t go turn yourself in now, can you? You absorb your own disappearance. You are officially on the run.
Lying low was critical those first few days of the investigation. John boasts that the police report (which was sent to Anne accidentally) stated there was not even a 0.1 percent chance he’d faked his death, but other investigators had their suspicions. In an interview during the initial investigation, the detective who led the inquiry said, “I am concerned that the absence of his body may lead people to think he did a Reggie Perrin.” The detective was referring to the main character of the (very British) mid-1970s sitcom The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin : a middle-aged middle manager at a dessert factory who stages his suicide by leaving his clothes folded neatly on the beach.
John Darwin is just the latest in a rich legacy of Britons faking their deaths, and doing it with panache. Graham Cardwell, a Lincolnshire dockmaster, staged his drowning in 1998, only to be discovered eight months later living on the other side of the country. He claimed to have cancer, and hadn’t wanted to burden his family. Richard John Bingham, also known as Lord Lucan, was a dashing titled graduate of tony Eton College who wrote a suicide note in 1974 after his children’s nanny was nearly bludgeoned to death. His wife identified her aristocratic husband as the assailant. Lucan sightings have been reported in Switzerland, New Zealand, and Africa. In an ironic twist, one of the reported Lucan sightings turned out to be John Stonehouse, a British Labour Party minister who had managed to successfully fake his death. Stonehouse had been caught skimming money from charities he’d set up. He was imprisoned for seven years but was released early because he’d suffered three heart attacks. Upon his release, he faked a drowning in Miami, Reggie Perrin–style, with a pile of clothes and the image of a swim, in November 1974, and collected insurance and pensions totaling $382,500. He managed to vanish, but for only one month. He was found alive with his former secretary in Australia on Christmas Eve of that same year, living under the name of a deceased former constituent. Stonehouse died for real in 1988. Just a few years ago, MI5, the British intelligence agency, revealed that Stonehouse was a Communist spy. Some historians have speculated that his involvement with the KGB provides an additional explanation as to why he faked his death. “Lord Lucan and John Stonehouse used to be the most famous for faking death,” Darwin tells me. “Now it’s John Darwin,” he concludes with a satisfied grin.
While authorities investigated John’s disappearance, he camped out on the rocky, frost-covered shore of Silloth on the west coast of the country for almost two months. “Living rough” is how Darwin describes the time after his initial disappearance and during the investigation. He slept on a cheap air mattress in a tent on the beach. He ate canned beans and candy bars, and read paperbacks from charity shops. He always had a fire going at night, not just to stay alive in the freezing weather but also to boost his morale. He explains his false identity: “I told people I’m from York”—about an hour south of Seaton Carew—“I’m an ornithologist, and I’m working my way down the coast. I knew people would accept that.” The secret to lying, he tells me, is “keeping as near the truth as possible.”
John would call his wife from a pay phone daily to get the updates. Disguising his voice in a deep grumble, he would pose as a prospective tenant. “It’s amateur dramatics,” he explains. If the police were in the house, Anne would keep up the ruse.
She controlled the purse strings and had begun submitting paperwork with the mortgage insurance company that would fix their financial bind. “I would call, and she’d say, ‘You trapped me!’ But I had no money, and she wasn’t going to contact me .” From John’s vantage, Anne was the one with the upper hand, not him.
Another part of the reason he camped in Silloth was to develop the pièce de résistance of his master plan, and what would actually keep him shrouded as he hid in plain sight: his disguise. He grew a long white beard, lost weight from “living rough,” bought a pair of tinted glasses, and added a limp and a walking stick (very Father Time). He practiced his new gait down the beach. When Anne eventually picked him up two months later to drive him back to the Cliff, she passed him “without a flicker of recognition. I looked right at her through my dark glasses. When your own wife doesn’t recognize you . . . I knew it was good,” he says.
By the time Anne retrieved her gaunt and bearded husband, police and family members were still coming around. But the thought of those luxurious empty guest rooms in the Cliff was enough to drive John crazy. “It had come to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore,” he says. So, with his disguise intact, Anne dropped him off a mile away from their home, the scene of the crime. He walked in the front door of no. 4, where all their other tenants entered, and opened the door to the room for Karl Fenwick—his assumed identity. Anne was chatting in the hall with another renter when he entered. “Oh, he’s a new one!” the tenant remarked. “Yeah,” Anne said. “They’re changing all the time.”
It seems totally inconceivable that Darwin was able to return to his home after being presumed dead. But he slipped seamlessly between the guest side and Anne’s side of the sprawling double house through a series of connecting stairs and corridors that had remained intact between them since they were built in 1924. When the story broke, the press made it sound as though he was hiding in a garret-like compartment behind a wardrobe. One publication cheekily titled the Darwins’ story “The Liar, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Not only did he live next door and sleep in the same bed as his wife (“king size,” he is quick to point out), but he also lived in the house intermittently for five years.
This is the part that captures my imagination and somehow endears John Darwin to me, in spite of his Machiavellian scheme. His duplicity encapsulates the joy of faking death: things are not as they seem, and the mundane facts of life might hold a secret, an alternate reality, right under our noses. It’s like training my gaze on the one tranquil slice of the Seaton Carew horizon line while neglecting to see the rest. Forget about the sons, and the wife, and the financial crimes for a moment and just look at the brains and the balls that faking death requires. It’s nothing short of magic.
When John was “dead,” he spent his days in much the same way as he does now: surfing the internet, tooling around the house making improvements, walking along the waterfront into Hartlepool to window-shop. The only problem was that police and detectives would often be inside the house when he was ready to come home. So he came up with a code for Anne to alert him to stay away that took him “fifteen seconds” to devise, he tells me as we walk along the ocean just across the street from nos. 3 and 4 the Cliff. Anne would signal to John that detectives were inside by hanging the parlor curtains straight down, and he would keep walking. But if he saw the curtains tied back in the window, it meant the coast was clear, and he could enter.
“Pretty devious!” I say as we gaze at the two homes, which look shabbier than they do in the photos that ran in every UK newspaper when Darwin returned.
“I would say clever ,” he counters. “Intelligent,” he sniffs. “The point is, you could see the code from a long way away.”
He recalls one day when he was out for his daily constitutional, in full disguise. Walking back home to the Cliff, he says, “My heart nearly stopped, because in front of me was my father and brother walking toward me.” This wasn’t the first time he had encountered people from his old life. He often passed former colleagues and acquaintances on the street. “I usually had my glasses on, so I’d look away, not make eye contact,” he explains as we sit in the café section of a box store called Adsa, the English answer to Wal-Mart. So what did he think when passing friends and family? “Damn good disguise!” he says.
But Darwin is not always so flip recounting his time as a ghost. “You were more or less a spectator,” he explains. Reflecting on his time camping in Silloth, he says, “You ended up being depressed because you don’t know what’s happening in the outside world. If you cross the street, you don’t even look. Cars are beeping their horns. You say ‘I’m already dead! What’s the difference?’ You get to such a stage where only one person in the world knows where you are. You want to trust that one person one hundred percent, but there’s always a doubt in your mind of whether she’s going to carry through with her part. You think, ‘Who else in the world cares?’ The banks do, because they want their money. You think about the children all the time,” he says, and then stops himself. “But they were more mature. They were not the same as children.”
The man likes to talk, so I imagine him fuming when forced to endure a stranger’s faulty explanation of the details of his “death” without jumping in and correcting it. But John did have the proper foresight not to give himself away by making the common mistake of checking in on himself posthumously, like the compulsive self-monitoring that led investigators directly to Patrick McDermott’s hideout in Puerto Vallarta. John followed reports on his whereabouts, but he was diligent enough to use software that pinged his IP address through several different countries.
John kept himself robust working outdoors most days. As Karl Fenwick (“You need a lot of aliases!”), he was the helpful handyman, whipping the Cliff houses into tip-top shape to be sold at the best price to pay back the insurance company “loan” that he and Anne had collected since his pseudocide. He made repairs to the interiors, gardened, and painted the exteriors of both homes. As the handyman, he was very attentive and friendly to his landlady, Anne. “We walked around town together!” Darwin explains. “I was the workman! She would move me from one room to another room to work on the decorating. She worked me to death when I was dead!” he puns.
Was it really that easy?
“I would tell her to go in number four and ask me, ‘Are you free tomorrow afternoon, because I need help at the hardware store?’ and make sure she asked in a loud voice. You were two neighbors being neighborly, and nobody thought anything about it. I’m not pulling a fast one! These things did happen,” he says, reading the skepticism on my face.
“Where is the best place to hide?” he suddenly asks me in a low voice.
“In plain sight?” I fill in the blank.
“Exactly!”
SINCE SO MANY DETECTIVES, reporters, and grieving friends and family were still coming around in the months following his disappearance, John had the idea to get a passport and take vacations abroad to evade his potential captors. It took almost six months for him to construct his identity from scratch and to gather all the necessary paperwork. “When I turned myself in, the police asked how I got the passport. I told them I went to the post office and asked how to get one. They expected me to say I got it down on the docks.”
The first thing he needed was a name. He found the name John Jones in the genealogy department of the Morpeth Library. Like him, Jones was born in 1950. He then took the train to neighboring Sunderland’s record office to retrieve Jones’s birth certificate. It was perfect: “John,” so he would never have to worry about responding accidentally if someone called his name, and the commonplace “Jones.” One needs only to provide a birth certificate in order to file for a passport. The next step was finding a landlord to verify his address. So he printed out one of his own tenancy agreements from when he was Mr. Average and backdated it. He signed it John Darwin.
He also needed an official person to sign off on his identity. In the United Kingdom, the signature of a teacher or librarian suffices. So Darwin made it a point to cozy up to the local librarian, chatting each day about the weather and local goings-on, so that he could score her autograph and put all the pieces in place. Within six months, while still puttering around his properties as Karl Fenwick and still married to Anne, John had an official UK passport. After his return in 2007, lawmakers on the floor of Parliament referenced the ease with which he’d assumed a new identity as evidence of porous post-9/11 security.
Once Darwin had secured his John Jones passport, he began a series of monthlong trips to the States (unbeknownst to his wife) to visit women whom he had met online playing EverQuest, a role-playing game. The first woman he visited was Maria “with the raven-black hair,” an Italian beauty who lived in the Bronx. This was less than two years after 9/11, when suspicious bewhiskered men were routinely questioned by authorities. Cops in Times Square once stopped John after they saw a bearded man recording the area with a tiny video camera. He showed the cops his passport, and, as he explains, “because it was from the U.K., they accepted it. I wasn’t scared getting on planes.”
Since finances were his chief concern, I ask him how he afforded these trips. “The flight was only about ninety-nine pounds,” he says. And once he arrived, he stayed with his hostesses and enjoyed their hospitality. Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire , Darwin always relied on the kindness of strangers. And what does one tell one’s wife who is providing one’s cover and conspiring to collect insurance while one is on an American romp with various women?
“When Anne asked where I was staying in New York, I told her I hailed a taxi at the airport, and we got to talking, and he invited me to stay at his place!” A New York City cab driver inviting one of his charges for a sleepover might be the most unbelievable yarn of Darwin’s entire web of deception.
His real host, Maria, was unaware of John’s wife. He says she wanted to marry him.
“Didn’t you feel bad about misleading two women?”
“I was economical with the truth,” he says.
“But what about Anne?”
“She was in one of her moods most of the time. I’m not trying to justify it. I wanted somewhere to stay, and Maria offered to put me up.”
It’s funny, his candor about his conquests. He chronicles each and every dalliance in his memoir with Penthouse Forum detail. In person, he showcases his gusto at least once an hour, as he whips out his cell phone to brandish photos of the buxom foreign women with whom he corresponds online. While he is telling me all of this, I’m feeling an odd sense of rancor on Anne’s behalf. But more surprisingly, I’m also feeling a weird sense of protectiveness toward John. What if he was getting catfished? He once showed me a photo of an ass in a thong, with no face attached. Then and at times like this, I fear he is getting played, either by a bored internet troll or a woman who probably thinks he has more money than he does. I find myself wanting to give him a tutorial on Google image searches. But I didn’t. The ass without a face was a form of companionship in those days, so it seemed better left alone.
To my surprise, I found out later that the ass did indeed belong to a face. Darwin made headlines again a few months after I left England. The siren call of the thong was too much to resist, so he violated his probation—which required him to stay put in the United Kingdom—to travel to Ukraine to meet several prospects. While abroad, he emailed me daily installments, the first with the subject line reading simply “Urgent”:
UK newspapers photographed me with 3 girls near the russian border in an Ukrainian city called Sumy. fallout will be terminal because I have an international travel ban. Its the third time I have been abroad since July
I think I may be in prison over Christmas
But the rest of his travelogue lacked this urgent tone, and included commentary on his media coverage, his inevitable punishment, and the more lubricious details of his sex tour:
apparently it is in the UK papers today. Wonder if it has a pic of the 3 girls I was out with that night. They threatened to follow me around Ukraine, but I lost them in the Crimea and this is why they have printed the story. I am 63 and the total ages of the girls was just over 70)))
In spite of all the Olgas and Natashas he bragged of, and the international notches on his bedpost that he has recorded in his self-published book, he claimed that he would still get back together with Anne if she would have him. “It’s difficult for a woman to understand.” He’s got me there.
In the years between his 2002 disappearance and his move to Panama in 2007, John bounced back and forth between women in the United States, visiting ladies in Kansas and Oregon. But he also took vacations with his wife to sun-drenched destinations such as Greece, Cyprus, and Spain. In airports, Anne would go ahead of John Jones in case there was any trouble. But they never found any.
I thought back to my first meeting with Frank Ahearn. I was so excited to talk shop and impress him with my knowledge of death fakers. (My friends were growing weary of my niche expertise.) Frank and I had talked about Sam Israel, of course, and Marcus Schrenker. Frank said those guys were “morons and idiots,” but that Darwin was different. Unlike Israel and Schrenker, whose bad business ventures had already caught up with them, Darwin’s financial troubles didn’t offend the UK securities commission and angry investors. His crimes were smaller potatoes. “He was a regular guy,” Frank told me. “Nobody figured he had anything to hide, so nobody thought nothing of it. Schrenker and that Israel guy faked their deaths because they were afraid of going to jail. John Darwin and his wife tried to get out of a financial crime, but they’re a whole lot smarter.”
I passed along Frank’s compliments to John one brilliant afternoon. It’s a good thing I stuck around to see Seaton Carew in the sunshine. Those rumors of the place being considered a seaside resort town made a tad more sense.
“That’s his business,” Darwin said, looking down at his boots, with a small smile curling his lips. “But I do remember reading in the paper that Ahearn said he would give me a job.”
So what are John Darwin’s Rules for Disappearance? Over a plate of shiny fried fish and mushy peas, the Canoe Man relays a few cardinal rules:
“Keep near enough the truth,” he says. “Use your first name. That’s a must. A disguise is another must, initially. If you don’t change your appearance, it’s because you’re daft. You’ve got no brains. And it can’t be just one thing, it has to be a number of things. I grew a beard, I wore glasses. I never used to wear a hat, so I put on a hat. I wore a different sort of coat than I would normally wear. Then I had a walking stick, a stoop, and a limp. You would look like a vagrant if you were dirty, but I was clean. Changing me appearance was easy. If you can think logically, anything is easy.”
An interesting proposition, because faking one’s death hardly seems logical. It actually seems like the ultimate whimsy.
So what else, Professor Canoe?
“Be vigilant.” Stick to the story and anticipate obstacles.
John’s experience violates one of the cardinal rules that Frank and Steve had hammered home: if you are going to disappear, you must be prepared to cut all ties. Anne was his wife, helpmate, financier, and accomplice. But filing an insurance claim puts the death faker in a catch-22, as one also needs a trusted co-conspirator. Darwin kept her on because, besides the fact that he loved her, he also needed her to collect the mortgage insurance on his behalf. And he knew that she was a safe bet: “Anne wouldn’t tell anybody because she was implicated in it. It was self-preservation on her part.”
Part of that protective instinct was to relocate to another country once they had sold off most of their property portfolio. “I couldn’t hide under the bed when visitors came,” John jokes. He researched options for the couple from his laptop while upstairs in the Cliff house. Choosing their safe haven became a process of elimination: “You’ve got to move abroad. You’ve got Spain and France close, but if we moved to France, people could use the Chunnel, fly over, take a taxi. My sons could have knocked on the door and, ‘Oh my God! It’s me dad!’ You’ve got to go farther afield so it isn’t in the range of a casual visit. So you choose the United States’ Spain,” he says, referring to Panama, a country that uses the dollar as its national currency and is increasingly popular with gringo retirees. Anne told colleagues, friends, and their sons that she wanted a complete change, to move somewhere free of association with her dead husband. That’s why she decided on Panama. Quite the exotic move for the woman who’d never tasted cheese until she was in her twenties. Darwin credits the Northeast’s provincialism as protection from nosy neighbors: “Panama is an obscure little country. Most people here can’t tell the difference between a monkey and a Frenchman!” So Panama was the plan. He’d encountered no trouble traveling abroad for the past few years. Why would Panama be any different?
They began looking at houses to buy on their first trip to the country in July 2006, which is when the infamous photo of the couple in the realtor’s office was snapped. They look happy and affectionate, and grin at the camera like satisfied pensioners. After John surrendered voluntarily in December 2007, claiming amnesia, a curious neighbor typed the search term “John Anne Panama” into Google, and the happy tableau turned up, the smoking gun proving that he had indeed faked his death. But even despite this irrefutable photo evidence posted online, John still believes firmly that the technologies of the twenty-first century assisted his disappearance rather than hurt it.
“The internet helps people disappear,” he explains. “You can find out what the culture’s like, what the climate’s like. I bounced my IP signal to change the address. The downside is if you don’t change your appearance, there are multiple TV sets all over the world. That’s why I changed my appearance so drastically.” Given his likeness in the realtor’s photo, perhaps he should have stayed in costume longer.
The first piece of property they purchased was a penthouse in Panama City for $90,000 in March 2007. The second was a five-hundred-acre plot of virgin jungle, which they picked up for $387,760 that same month. After John turned himself in, multiple newspapers reported that the two of them were planning on opening a bed-and-breakfast for kayakers. John says this rumor is false, and resents it. “We had around seven hundred thousand dollars in the bank, all from the sale of houses,” he says. “So why, with all that money in the bank, earning a high interest rate, would you then open a B and B?” Darwin doesn’t want you to get the idea that he was a petit bourgeois businessman. He wants to advance the image of himself as landed gentry. Really, he eventually planned on building a tropical courtyard house, hiring a gardener and a maid, throwing in a hundred head of cattle, and luxuriating in obscurity. But the couple never got the chance to build the hacienda of their dreams. Instead, they spent their time in Panama taking day trips to jungle spots and beaches, horseback riding and trekking. “It was like Pirates of the Caribbean ,” he says. “It was like a second honeymoon.”
Anne had sold the first Cliff house in April 2007, and the second in October. She went back and forth between Panama and England, settling their accounts, and John stayed. The couple had set themselves up in their retirement villa. But there was that unsettling fact of still owing money to the insurance company, and of their two sons still thinking their mother was a widow while she was riding horseback down the beach with their most sentient father. Now, with a healthy figure in the bank and a home established in Panama, the moment seemed opportune to make amends.
It was the end of November 2007, and the couple had crossed over to Costa Rica to renew their visas. On the way back, John asked Anne if she thought the time was right to turn himself in, which he claims had always been the plan. “As normal, she wouldn’t give me a straight answer,” John says. “I asked her if I should come back. She said, ‘It’s up to you.’ I told her if I left, she would be in Panama all alone. If she’d said no, I wouldn’t have gone. I wanted input. I’m not trying to pass the buck or anything. That’s just fact.”
John decided that it was time to face the music and turn himself in. I recalled what Steve Rambam had told me about investigating death fraud scams: that the odd fraudster will occasionally come clean due to a gnawing guilty conscience. When he named that obstacle as a consideration when one decides to fake death, it seemed ridiculous. Wouldn’t the hubris of the act and the rush of getting away with it stamp out the sentimental bathos of returning to the drudgery in an attempt to make good?
But maybe it isn’t hubris that is required to pull off a successful pseudocide. Maybe it’s actually humility. Staying dead in the long run means keeping a low profile, without any audience to receive the story of your clever caper. Relating the tale is totally off-limits. If, as Frank described when he told me about helping people disappear, you become a humble landscaper working off the books, you can be only that. You cannot also be the humble landscaper who was once a would-be entrepreneur but faked his death instead. Hubris might propel the plan but it is humility that sustains it. And that might be the tallest order of all.
If John Darwin felt invincible, he had reason to. Through his death at sea, he had been reborn into a swashbuckling international man of mystery. And his relationship with his wife had grown stronger than ever trekking around the backwaters of an exotic land. So much for Mr. and Mrs. Average. The Darwins were living the dream. John had successfully faked his death, refinanced his problematic mortgages, and reorganized his mundane life to a shape that better suited him. He had flouted immigration and customs, and was leveraging a financial system that had screwed him to underwrite his adventures. So why wouldn’t he be able to make good on his “loan” with the insurance company and repair his relationship with their mourning sons?
He didn’t realize that circumstances wouldn’t quite jell the way he had dreamed. John had expected to do some time and pay a fine, sure, but he didn’t know that returning would cost him everything: all of his worldly possessions, not to mention a relationship with one of his sons and his marriage.
Anne stayed behind in Panama while John flew back to England. Once he cleared customs at London’s Heathrow Airport, he ripped apart the John Jones passport page by page and scattered the evidence in different trash cans. Walking toward a police station in central London, he had mixed feelings: “I wanted to see the two lads again, but wondered if I was making a big mistake.” He wandered into the station, saying that he’d lost his wife while shopping at Harrods department store. He also couldn’t account for the events of that afternoon, that week—and really nothing prior to the year 2000. He had no identification on his person, just a few pound notes that Anne had given him from her last stay in the United Kingdom.
So how does posing as an amnesiac missing person square with paying back insurance money obtained fraudulently? “The amnesia bit was rigged to get a foot in the door into my sons’ houses without putting them under suspicion as part of the crime. I know the police. If I had personally contacted my sons, they would accuse them of concocting a story,” John explains as we walk along a busy highway in the late-afternoon sun. “I knew that’s what would happen; that’s why I did it the way I did. It was done for a reason,” he says, bitter at how the British press made his story sound like a careless lark.
The police summoned his sons that night when they genuinely believed their father might be an amnesiac. I asked him what it was like seeing them for the first time in years, even when he was often just on the other side of a wall, unbeknownst to his grieving children.
“It was very emotional. They came to the station. They saw me in an office. It was very emotional,” he says, his eyes cast down at the sidewalk as we trudge back to Seaton Carew. “I’ll say in my defense, it’s complicated.”
For a few days, doctors and investigators examined the befuddled man who drifted in off the street. Trying to verify his lack of memory, they asked him what 7/7 (the day of the 2005 terrorist bus bombings in London) signified. He said 14. And 9/11? He told them 20.
I ask him if it was hard keeping up the act during his interrogation.
“It was second nature. I knew what they were going to ask me before they asked it.”
But John didn’t anticipate how things would shake out for him. As he imagined it, he would spend a few days with his sons and then be assigned to a community care officer, like a social worker in the United States. He knew this procedure from his time as a prison guard. According to his plan, after a day or two with his sons, a lightbulb would flash on in his head with the memory that Anne might have claimed some insurance money, and that they would pay it back. Darwin expected to go to prison but didn’t imagine Anne would get charged.
The community care officer was appointed but never showed up, and the police realized that Anne had already received a hefty sum from the commercial mortgage payouts and John’s teaching and prison guard pensions, totaling around £400,000 altogether. John said the police froze Anne’s HSBC bank accounts, which, though opened in Panama, were under the jurisdiction of the British bank. John was arrested for fraud. The press got hold of the tale, and the “Canoe Man” emerged as the story of the year. Anne came back from Panama and turned herself in nine days after John had ambled into the Oxford Circus police station. Reporters were already on planes to Panama. Using the Proceeds of Crime Act, typically reserved for organized crime and terrorist organizations such as the Irish Republican Army, the court seized all of the Darwins’ money and possessions. Eventually the couple would give up everything in exchange for shorter prison sentences. In the judgment of the Darwins’ appeal, from March 27, 2009, the High Court judges Stephen Irwin and Wyn Williams wrote, “Anne and John Darwin are a married couple of previous good character. Together they set up a fraudulent conspiracy. The deception worked. . . . Their return was not the consequence of remorse or a sense of guilt. What they were trying to do was to make up for the impact on themselves of the consequences of their own criminal activities.”
THE SUBJECT OF JOHN Darwin is a charged one around Seaton Carew and Hartlepool. I met up with musician JB at the Seaton Carew Social Club on a Saturday night to get the local read on Darwin. The front room was filled with older couples playing bingo under fluorescent lights, while in the back bar, men watched the Sunderland-versus-Arsenal soccer match. A rock band played covers upstairs. You can’t smoke inside anymore, but the place still contains the heavy smells of decades of butts, stale beer, and disinfectant. I settled into a booth with JB and a couple of pints and asked him about Darwin.
“The irony about his faked death is that it turned him into a celebrity,” he said. “He has two rooms named after him at the Staincliffe! People who have gone to jail for fraud wouldn’t be too amused. I got heavily fined for fraud in the nineties, but I didn’t become a celebrity. It cost me me marriage,” JB said. One can understand the resentment. When I stepped outside for a smoke, I asked a middle-aged couple for a light, and they asked where I was from. We got to talking, and they were impressed that I had kept such close company with the Canoe Man all week. The woman was clearly tipsy but offered a drunken poetic insight: “When you meet people and really spend time with them, you realize they are good and bad, just like anyone.”
Rumors about Darwin are rampant. That’s what happens when your town becomes known as “Seaton Canoe.” “I heard he knew the person whose identity he stole. It was a person he knew in a coal mining village who did something he didn’t like,” JB said ominously. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that the truth of John Jones is far more prosaic. I’ll bet John Darwin would prefer this strongman version anyway.
“He was a prison officer. That’s where he got the idea for the crime,” a white-haired patron offered. JB thought that there were also positive feelings about Darwin around town: “A lot of people I know think he got one over on the system, and they like it. You’ve seen the news. The government is ripping people off and getting away with it, and profiting off it. In a nation where an ordinary guy like that carries out an act of fraud, they think he got one back on the system.”
Over breakfast the next morning, my mustachioed innkeeper echoed JB’s sentiments: “That’s a funny thing what he did, innit? The nerves to do it! I think he got overpunished. He didn’t hurt anybody, he just fiddled away some money. You look on the news, and you see MPs doing that. The big insurance companies just wanted to make an example of him.”
I am all for getting one back at the system. One day at lunch, I told Darwin of my own debt, the six-figure student loan that not even bankruptcy can absolve. “I’ll show you a place where you can buy a canoe,” he quipped, and we laughed. I reveled in the idea, and when JB framed Darwin’s faked death as a justified act of terrorism against an unjust system, I was tempted. But would it be worth the personal price?
John’s return from the dead in 2007 set off a media feeding frenzy in the sleepy seaside town. Every hotel and bed-and-breakfast in the area was booked with reporters who stalked the Darwins until their trials ended. John was sentenced to six years and three months because he pled guilty. He served three years of his term. Anne pled not guilty (“because she’s daft and listened to her solicitors,” according to her ex-husband) and got six years and six months. Now John would be not the guard holding the keys but the crook locked up inside. He recalled his first day in Durham Prison, a stone building from the eighteen hundreds with “green slime on the walls.”
“The first day I went out on exercise with the other prisoners, a group of inmates walked by. One of them called out, ‘Hey, boss, do you remember me?’ ” Prisoners call guards “boss” in the United Kingdom, or “screw”: one Victorian punishment was to set an inmate to run on a treadmill, which guards would turn up, or screw, forcing the prisoner to run faster and faster. “The guards were going crackers!” John remembered. “They shouted, ‘He’s not a boss, he’s a prisoner!’ ” But John said he always felt more at ease with prisoners, although the Hull Daily Mail reported that Darwin was attacked by another inmate who recognized him from his time as a prison guard. This happened just days after Darwin was transferred to Everthorpe Prison in East Yorkshire. “I was never friendly with the other prison officers. Their idea of fun was getting blind drunk and ordering a curry. I didn’t drink, I didn’t swear, I didn’t gamble. I’m quite well educated. As a prisoner, they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.” John described his sentence as not so bad. Because he was a former corrections officer, he got his own cell. He wasn’t lonely, because if he “wanted to have a sensible conversation, I just looked in the mirror and started talking.” He spent a good deal of his sentence writing his memoir.
But it was in prison that John and Anne’s relationship ultimately dissolved. If the Panamanian plot rekindled their marriage, serving time and becoming the press’s pet pariahs broke them. It seems to me that Anne got it worse in the papers than John did, but he disagrees. While we are used to fathers bowing out on their responsibilities, Anne, as a mother who deceived her children, got painted wickedly. Headlines such as “Canoe Wife Is Guilty of Heartless Betrayal” and “Canoe Wife Disowned by Sons” were splashed daily across the tabloids. Between the relentless dissection of their lives and serving hard time, their thirty-five-year marriage ended in 2011.
While John was in hiding at the Cliff, Mark and Anthony often visited Anne for weekends. I don’t broach this subject directly until our last day together. Darwin has been most criticized over this point—the one aspect of his caper that seems to get to him despite the constant justifications. If you knew your distressed children were on the other side of the wall, how could you not break through and embrace them?
“Let me put it this way,” he explains. “You’re on a slippery slope. You’re at the top of the steepest ski jump in Wyoming. You can’t just put the brakes on and stop. But it’s very emotional.”
John’s boasting usually eclipses his subdued murmurings about the emotional tax, but there was no denying the sadness in his eyes. I think that, like so many of the men who fake their own deaths, he has found a way to compartmentalize the pain and make up for it in adventure and women. I wonder whether it is easier for a father to listen to his sons’ voices and not respond than it would be for a mother.
As a middle-aged, middle-class heterosexual white man with a family, John represents the person most likely to fake his death. Indeed, an uncanny number of them are named John. I’d noticed this disproportion in the demographics, and I wondered if there was anything to it. Frank told me that the majority of his disappearing clients were men, and J. J. Luna, author of How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life , told me that “far more men than women!” seek his “invisibility” services. In the 1996 guidebook How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found , disappearance enthusiast Doug Richmond writes, “To a man of a certain age, there’s a bit of magic in the very thought of cutting all ties, of getting away from it all, of changing names and jobs and women and living happily ever after in a more salubrious clime!”
But why do these seemingly privileged men, who enjoy every perk that DNA has to offer, feel so hemmed in that they must go off the radar entirely? Perhaps it’s because although men still outearn women, they then entangle themselves in financial trouble trying to enhance their fortunes. Maybe they shrug off because they feel less responsibility to see their children grow and flourish. Women shoulder the burdens of family and community—they take care of dying parents, snotty kids, shut-in neighbors—anyone before themselves. Though that might be relying too heavily on conventional wisdom about gender roles, the numbers speak for themselves: faking death seems to be a heavily male phenomenon. After combing through the stories and examining the traits that men like John share, I noticed that they all seemed to feel emasculated, made impotent, by their mundane lives. So, not earning enough money, they invest in a harebrained scheme. Underwhelmed with their monogamous sex lives, they take up with other women. Faking death seems to be not only a way out but also, counterintuitively, a way to be brave.
In the rare cases that women do get caught faking their deaths, violence is sometimes a motivating factor, just as Frank had said. In the summer of 2015 a twenty-nine-year-old Pennsylvania woman feigned a fatal seizure while her abusive boyfriend whaled on her. Thinking he’d killed her, he called 911 to report her unconscious. Once safely with the paramedics, the woman admitted to faking her death to save her life.
Not that the circumstances are always tragic. To avoid jail time for shoplifting $2,500 from Macy’s, Sarah C. Moretti of Nashville procured a fake death certificate stating she had overdosed. These two cases straddle the margins of life-threatening urgency and small-potatoes crime. Neither assumed the white collar mantle of Israel or Schrenker, or attempted an insurance fraud like Darwin.
Since John is a man who faked his own death, and since he has a lot of theories about women, I ask him why more men than women do the deed.
“Women don’t have the gonads to do it. I’ve done the research. They don’t seem to have them! Anatomically.” He pauses. “I’m just trying to be funny. Men are normally more reckless, more adventurous than women. Women are more cautious and careful and think things through,” Darwin opines. Or maybe women fake their deaths just as much as men. They just don’t get caught.
While John routinely boasts of his relationships with various women one-third his age, he still holds a tender place for Anne. He resents the fact that she was the one to file for divorce. “She hasn’t written or spoken to me since November 2010, when she said it was all over.” She wanted the divorce on her own terms. “So much for the little woman who’s under my thumb,” he says.
“Do you think that’s the way it’s been portrayed?” I ask.
“Yes. When she talked to the papers, she said she was under my control. You’ve seen the photo of her on horseback in Costa Rica! Let’s face it, she didn’t look like my hand was up her back pulling the strings to make her smile. The other thing is that she had all the money from all the houses. I’m in Panama with a passport in the name of John Jones; no money at all except for what she’s giving me. If she didn’t like me that much, what’s to stop her from going to Australia and taking all the money?”
It’s hard to have it both ways: the cool strategist and the vulnerable husband.
John has another theory as to why Anne divorced him in prison.
“She befriended Tracie Andrews,” a woman who’d been incarcerated for having stabbed her fiancé forty-two times in 1996. “I said to my son, ‘I hear your mother’s got a new friend. Are you inviting her to carve the turkey?’ ” He laughs to himself.
The tabloid press, of course, had a field day with this story.
“So the reason she wanted to divorce you was because she became a lesbian?” I ask. It seems totally ridiculous. She gets imprisoned because of her part in the plan he concocted, but she divorces him because she’s suddenly gone sapphic?
“It seems funny that once she met Tracie Andrews, everything changed. She stopped writing, she wouldn’t accept my calls. The reason she wanted the divorce was because of”—he mimes a stabbing motion and mouths the high-pitched background music to the shower stabbing scene in Psycho : “Eee! Eee! Eee! ”—“but she’s always been peculiar. If she came back tomorrow, I’m daft enough to say, ‘Okay, I’ll marry you.’ ” He then takes out his phone and pulls up a photo of a scantily clad woman. “She’s thirty-eight years younger than me. But if Anne came back, I would still marry her.”
TABLOIDS HAD REPORTED THAT Anne works at a charity thrift shop in York, a university town, and I intended to ask her a few questions. John was not thrilled when I mentioned it. He opposed my visit because he said it would make things tense between him and Mark, the son who still speaks to him; he does not want John talking to reporters; and surely Anne would let Mark know I’d been sniffing around. But it would be insane to come this far and not try to find Anne. If I couldn’t speak to her, I wanted to at least see where she lived.
This is a woman who allowed her sons to think their father was dead for nearly six years, going so far as to throw petals out to sea and keep a single rose on his pillow, which I imagined John removed each night before resting his head. She profited from his pseudocide. But a part of me sympathizes with Anne. After all, John said that his wife really had no idea how many properties they owned at any given time. So maybe she’s the woman who decided to stand by her man and bail him out, and ended up going to jail for him. Or have I fallen for the narrative that John claims is utterly false: that she was under his control?
I took the train on a classically drizzly English morning. Having come from Seaton Carew, stepping onto the platform of the York station felt like entering a thriving metropolis. It’s a postcard-perfect university town, with art galleries, a Ferris wheel along the riverbank, specialty cheese shops, and ethnic restaurants enclosed within the ruins of a Roman wall. There’s even a Topshop. When I saw it, I knew instantly that Anne had moved up in the world. Walking over a bridge and through the crowded, curving streets, I had the naive hope that I might spot her. According to the tabloids, Tracie Andrews gave Anne a makeover before she was released from jail, dyeing her white hair a fetching shade of chestnut brown. I searched the face of every woman of a certain age.
The charity shop where she is supposed to work is on a street lined with cobblestones. I walked up and down the block four times before finally crossing the threshold of the shop, hoping she was scheduled. It seemed like a cozy place to work, full of the residue of well-loved things: scuffed handbags, board games missing pieces, junk jewelry, printed blouses, teacups, paperback romances. A teenager who looked like he should have been in school was working the register that day. I lingered by the mismatched china plates to eavesdrop on people in the back office. I ran my fingers over a cow-shaped saucer as I glanced over my left shoulder to see if Anne was there. I felt a mild nausea. It was a bit like stalking a celebrity. She wasn’t there. I left a note and my card with the young man and went to the café down the block to wait with a mint tea. It rained softly on the window, and the whole town felt like a pleasantly drowsy afternoon nap. Anne never showed up. Still, I couldn’t help but picture her peaceful here. This seems like a place where one could find a life of contentment, walking in the manicured parks and popping into bookshops, a few hours but worlds away from Seaton Carew.
BACK IN THE SEASIDE town, I meet John at his bungalow before having dinner at his local radio DJ friend’s home in Hartlepool. “I hate the place,” he says about his current residence. It’s a bit damp and the ceilings hang low, but it’s quaint. “It’s a big shock coming from a house with seven bedrooms!” he says, remembering again his home at the Cliff. It doesn’t seem polite to point out that his last residence was actually prison.
His home is a classic bachelor pad: dirty dishes in the sink, a hodgepodge of vinyl sofas and armchairs, computer cords and electrical wires strung across the floor, laminated photos printed from the internet taped up on the wall. A photo calendar of his grandson is displayed prominently. He has rigged a projection screen to occupy one of his living room walls, on which he watches pirated movies throughout the night. Darwin needs only four hours of sleep to feel refreshed. He pulls out his laptop and shows me a live countdown clock ticking down the seconds until his probation ends. Then he opens a painstaking PowerPoint he made when he was dead to sell nos. 3 and 4 the Cliff, complete with clip-art seagulls flapping perpetually in the breeze. The photos show a handsome middle-class home and the back garden he designed. He looks proud as he shows me what good work he did to the houses, the bourgeois life he achieved.
I ask him how he feels at the moment, living here and waiting out his probation.
“Like a tiger on a leash,” he says. “But I could disappear tomorrow if I wanted to.”
“But do you even have a passport, and wouldn’t it get flagged at the airport?” I ask.
“There’s more than one way to leave the country.”
John has always managed to get things done by his own accord, to which he credits his charm. “I’ve found that whatever country I’m in, I must look like little boy lost. People want to be friendly and help.” He describes flirting with the clerk who did his paperwork for his ID when he got out of jail. And he projects this confidence into the next phase of his life, after the liminal moment of his probation ending: “I’m sticking it out here until March, and then I’m off. I’ve already booked my plane ticket. I’ve got offers in the States. Wherever I go, I seem to fall on my feet.”
His local radio DJ friend, a barrel-chested real-life Alan Partridge, picks us up in a black sports car and ferries us to his modern home on a cul-de-sac in Hartlepool. His girlfriend serves a delicious meal from her native Thailand. John asks the wife if she has a sister no fewer than three times. The bathroom is wallpapered with framed photos of the local radio DJ with reality-TV stars from Big Brother , contestants in singing competitions, provincial politicians. It’s better to eat in, the DJ friend says. When John goes out, he often gets bothered by fans wanting his autograph. The other guest is a quiet but affable guy in local soccer promotions. He and John get into a heated debate about reopening the mines. John tells us it would be impossible because the tunnels have been flooded, and does a science teacher demo with his cutlery to illustrate why. They both agree that things in the Northeast went to hell after the mines lost their subsidies and closed. But the soccer promo man makes a good point: “I wouldn’t want my kids going down the pit.”
John recounts a memory from when he was young. He was playing outside, and saw two children roughly his own age walking home from a day at the mines. They were stained black from head to heel from the coal they had sorted all day. Their faces were covered in soot, and he could see only the whites of their eyes. It’s an image that has lingered with him for almost sixty years, maybe because they are an example of what he has refused to be.
And who can blame him? For a man of John’s generation, to struggle against such a rigid class system is to rebel. Having been born into the shambles of postwar England, to reject his working-class station is to dismantle the norms with which he grew up. But there are more pernicious ways in which class aspiration can wear you down, when striving alienates you from your peers and severs you from the middle class you seek to join. The Darwins’ story was made into a BBC Four TV movie, which aired to healthy ratings in 2010. It also inspired the 2009 novel Return from the Dead and a plotline on the popular British soap opera Coronation Street and again in 2015 on EastEnders . Can it be that people relate to the pressures that propelled his pseudocide? After all, when your own father tells the tabloids that you have always had aspirations above your station, it becomes apparent just how immutable “stations,” for some, remain.
For our last day together, John and I meet on a crisp morning. John asks if our Thai hostess had given me any cooking tips. He notes that I ate so much, my plane back to New York would likely not go aloft the next day. He says he doesn’t like tattoos and then asks me about mine. If I didn’t know better, I would say that John is attempting the misguided flirtation technique of “negging,” where men lob insults at women with the intent of making them feel insecure. But maybe he is just weary of my questions by now. We walk along the waterfront to Hartlepool, retracing the journey along the front he often traveled when he was dead. I ask him what he considers to be common misperceptions of his story.
“Only the stupid people believe the police were onto me. If they were looking for me, why would they wait six years? Why didn’t they just phone Panama?” And he never collected the £1 million the newspapers cited; it was really only about £260,000.
It must be an extraordinary thing, leading multiple lives: one as Mr. Average, one as the bearded ornithologist camping on the beach, one as Karl Fenwick, one as John Jones, and now one as the Canoe Man.
“So why did you decide to move back to Seaton Carew?” I ask him.
“Because I live here!” he answers.
Despite how much he complains about the crap English weather and conservative attitudes toward May-December relationships, for John, for now, this is home.
We walk around Hartlepool for most of the afternoon and then loop back to the Cliff, in front of his former houses, which are now in a state of disrepair. It’s hard for John to see them this way. “They’ve gotten grottified,” he says. The new owners have hung a stained-glass sailboat decoration on the front door. John does not approve: “It’s tat, cheap, common,” he says. I ask him about his plans for the future. He’d like to leave the damp fog of England. He knows he will marry again. (He did, in 2015, to a Filipina woman, Mercy May Avila, in her thirties.) “I’m nearly sixty-three, but I forget how old I am. I’ve got about twenty years left. I’m not going to sit around the house moping, I’m not going to live the life of a hermit. One son won’t talk to me, but I’m not bothered.”
“Do you think he’s being unreasonable?” I ask.
“Put it this way, he changed his surname from Darwin. What name would be the biggest slap in the face?”
“Stephenson,” I say, giving Anne’s maiden name. He’s surprised I know.
“That’s the biggest slap in the face, which is to basically say he agrees with the Stephensons’ side, which is: I’m scum.”
“Do you feel angry about that?” I ask, though the answer is written on his face.
“It’s his choice. He’s an adult. When all of this happened, he was an adult.”
We are accustomed to the narrative of bad behavior, apology, and redemption. I suspect that if John Darwin had been a Silicon Valley striver and paddled off into the San Francisco Bay, he would have given a teary jailhouse interview with Diane Sawyer, and all would be absolved. I want him to say it. I want him to say he’s sorry. So I set him up. I decide I will help him make the apology.
“Do you have regrets?” I ask.
“I’m not a demon! I came back to see me sons! Of course you’ve got regrets. I would have done many things differently. There are people I would have avoided like the plague. For one thing, don’t do the crime.” He pauses. “And if you do, don’t come back. It’s easy to fake your own death. It’s damn difficult to come back.”
“If you could go back and give your twenty-year-old self life advice, what would you tell him?” I press.
I’m ready for it: money isn’t everything, family first, savor each moment, cherish your health, be grateful for what you have because you don’t know when you’ll lose it—the usual platitudes.
“I would have told myself how to make a lot of money.”
I am shocked at first. What about the kids? What about Anne? But then, after thinking about it, I’m not shocked. You do need money. It’s just that no one wants to talk about it. As Darwin said on our first day together, “Money isn’t everything, but it’s ninety-nine-point-nine percent of everything.” I think he’s right. Money and debt are what propelled me toward my fascination with death fraud and put me here with Darwin in the first place. When you have money, and especially when you come from money, it’s easy to say that money isn’t everything. Because money is just a fact of life.
But money is security, and security is a prerequisite to happiness. Money doesn’t solve every problem, but it solves many problems. To negate the import of money is something that rich people do to feel better about themselves. I thought of a guy I dated for five minutes who had a trust fund. “I hate money,” he said once. “Now, that is some shit only rich people say,” I thought. Growing up with a single mom and always feeling on the precipice of ruin, I never had any big philosophical ideas about money, loving it or hating it. But I’ve always had a visceral instinct that I needed it, needed to make my own, and would always need to squirrel it away. So when that guy said he hated money as he enjoyed the home that money bought, the education it afforded, and all the questions he’d never have to ask, I just stayed quiet. I felt I had no claim on how to talk about money—and my craving for it—without sounding gauche or naive.
Maybe John’s desire to accumulate didn’t necessarily grow out of greed but rather out of a desire for stability. Greed is easy to see in others when you have enough. But when your origins are more humble, the goalpost of “enough” moves constantly. If John had socked away some savings, or had a fat inheritance in the works, he might not have turned to creative banking and put down payments on credit cards. Maybe, with a little more, he would not have felt so compelled to make risky wagers to get more. Maybe, comfortably enjoying bourgeois life, he would have felt as if he belonged rather than always feeling like an impostor. Money means membership. Money means safety. Money means never having to descend into the coal pits.
John left a trail of destruction in his wake. He hurt people, namely his family, and, like the 9/11 fraudsters, made fools of first responders and the loved ones who mourned him. But when you fake your death, you must go all the way. To turn around now and repent for the sins of abandonment and unburdening is to betray yourself, the choice you made when you realized you were worth more dead than alive. To admit wrongdoing would be to contradict not only the bold act of resistance but also the outlaw image of the Canoe Man. Before faking his death, when he attempted his minor business plans such as breeding snails and crafting garden gnomes, John Darwin was pure potential: an intelligent guy who had yet to fulfill his aptitude. In faking his death, he crystallized that capacity into something real.
What is clear to me about John’s position now, back from the dead, is that he has to cling to his story. And whether the cost-benefit analysis of such a trade-off reveals John to be on the wrong side of the balance sheet is hard to tell. It seems like he has made the best out of the bad situation he created. Whether that is optimism or opportunism is harder to decipher.
“It’s going to wee down,” he says, pointing up to the black clouds rolling in from the west. The forecast predicted gale force winds and hail. “We better get inside before it begins.”
He holds open the mahogany door for me as we enter the Staincliffe, in all its Victorian majesty: heavy wooden banisters, burgundy-colored drapes, floral-printed Oriental rugs. He points to the engraving on the door to a large banquet hall. It reads “Darwin Room.”
A freckly teenage girl is sitting at the small reception desk. She will be visiting New York for the first time in October and asks me for some recommendations. We chat for a few minutes. She is lovely. Before we go into the Canoe Bar, John leans in and asks her, “Who is that room named after?”
She looks around, a little embarrassed by the peculiar yet obvious question, but answers anyway.
“You,” she says.
He smiles, and we sit down to lunch.