news.com.au

THE wife of the canoeist who came back from the dead has admitted she had banked insurance payouts on her husband’s life.

John Darwin’s wife, Anne, emigrated to Panama City just six weeks ago after the sale of two family properties.

She said she had claimed the insurance “in good faith when I believed I had lost my husband”.

Mr Darwin, 57, walked into a London police station at the weekend five years after disappearing in an apparent accident at sea.

He said he was suffering amnesia and remembers nothing of the past five years.

Equally puzzling is his wife’s sudden departure, in September, from their seven-bedroom home.

“She left the house full of furniture. She left everything. It took them 15 skips to get the rubbish out,” a neighbour said.

It normally takes seven years for a missing person to be declared dead unless there are “compelling circumstances”.

But in an unusual move, an inquest was held on Mr Darwin in April 2003 because the family were “in a state of limbo and could not move on with their lives financially.”

Even members of Mr Darwin’s own family are questioning his claim to have lost his memory, with his 80-year-old aunt, Margaret Burns, saying: “To be honest, I don’t believe he ever got wet.”

Mr Darwin, a former teacher and prison officer, is preparing to be interviewed by detectives who want to know how he has survived in anony

But Mrs Darwin was adamant her husband would never fake his own death.

“John just wouldn’t have done that,” she told the UK’s Daily Mail who tracked her down in Panama.
Asked if she knew all along he was alive, she replied: “No, I did not. I’m as amazed as anyone.”

She said she accepted that the life insurance payouts might have to be given back, saying: “If that happens, of course it won’t be easy, but I’ll deal with it.

“It is not the money I ever wanted - it was having my husband back.”

The mother of two said she had spoken three times on the telephone to her husband. But she added that she had no immediate plans to return to Britain.

“People can think what they want. I know the truth.”

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