The crime: It all started when John Darwin walked into a police station and said: �I think I�m a missing person.�
IT ALL started when John Darwin walked into a police station and said: "I think I'm a missing person."
The problem for the 57-year-old was that it didn't come as a complete surprise to detectives, who had been investigating the possibility that he was alive for months.
They had been tipped off by someone close to his wife, Anne Darwin, that she was acting oddly - taking foreign holidays, engaging in whispered phone calls at work, and talking of plans to sell up and move to Panama.
Financial investigators were also looking into the 56-year-old's finances - particularly the large sums of money she was transferring abroad.
Police had been following a paper trail and were on the verge of launching an overseas investigation into the couple when John Darwin came back from the dead.
It was March 2002 when, facing bankruptcy and having come up with a plot with his wife, the former schoolteacher and prison officer paddled out to sea near his home in Seaton Carew, abandoned his boat and went into hiding.
His wife, a doctor's receptionist, raised the alarm after driving him in secret to Durham railway station. A huge rescue operation failed to find him. The shattered remains of his canoe were found washed up near Seaton Carew beach on May 7.
John Darwin is thought to have spent weeks in the Lake District before returning home, where his wife kept him hidden inside the house for almost four years.
When visitors called he used a secret door to sneak into an adjoining bedsit which the couple owned.
He grew a full beard as part of a disguise and used the name of a dead child - John Jones - to apply for a new passport and library card.
He was so confident that he had got away with faking his death that he wrote to the council under his fake identity to protest against a neighbour's planning application.
John Darwin also travelled to Gibraltar to buy a yacht and was reported to have enjoyed a transatlantic fling with an American penpal.
In the summer of 2006 the bedsit house next to the couple's home was sold in the name of their son, Mark, after ownership was transferred.
In the spring the couple paid £200,000 for a tropical estate in Panama. At the end of last October the Darwin family home was sold for £295,000, bringing the total from the sale of both houses to £450,000.
Cleveland Police had reopened the case, after a female colleague of Anne Darwin in Durham reported overhearing her on the phone to her "dead" husband.
After his death was made "official", his wife claimed a £137,000 Norwich Union mortgage insurance policy as well as her husband's £25,000 life insurance policy, £25,000 teacher's pension, £58,000 prison service pension and £4000 from the Department of Work and Pensions.
The couple planned to start a new life in Panama but the plot unravelled when John Darwin walked into a London police station last December. It is believed he gave himself up after the couple had a row, although there are other theories, including the desire to see his sons again.
One suggests that he was forced to return to the UK because of planned changes which would have prevented him from continuing to live in Panama with a tourist visa.
At first his sons were pleased at his return. His father, aged 91 at the time, said he always knew his son was alive and that he might have been suffering from amnesia; his wife, who was in Panama, expressed profound shock.
The couple's deceit was exposed after a picture of them in Panama in 2006 was published by a newspaper.
Detective inspector Andy Greenwood, who led the investigation, said it was obvious they were working as a team. "I would say that it was a team operation though the face of that team was Mrs Darwin," he said.
