It was one of the most controversial missing persons inquiries in British history that earned the husband and wife fraudsters worldwide notoriety.
Twenty years ago, John Darwin faked his own disappearance in a kayak off the north east English coast sparking a massive but ultimately unsuccessful search and rescue mission.
Presumed dead and the search called off, John was actually hold up in a bedsit waiting to claim insurance, benefits and pension to pay off rumoured £700,000 debts in a devious scam.
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But that was just the beginning of the web of deceit spun by John and wife Anne - even conning their own sons Anthony and Mark.
The Chronicle reports John got himself a passport using someone else's name and went to Panama, where Anne later joined him.
While it's her husband who will go down in history as the infamous 'canoe man,' Anne Darwin will see her shocking past brought back into the spotlight thanks to new ITV drama The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe.
The scam was finally rumbled when John walked into a London police station and told officers he didn't know where he'd been for the last five years. However, after an investigation was launched, the lie was exposed when a photo of John and Anne posing in a Panama real estate office surfaced.
In 2008, John Darwin was jailed for six years and three months after admitting eight deception charges, wife Anne was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail for fraud and money-laundering.
What happened to Anne Darwin?
Whilst in prison, Anne told John she wanted to separate, a move he was apparently he was left furious over. When she left prison in 2011, it's claimed John sent Anne a photograph of herself which had a copyright brand on it, seemingly implying she was his property. When they eventually divorced, John cited 'unreasonable behaviour,' as the reason.
Anne went onto write a book about what happened, called Out of My Depth, with proceeds going to the RSPCA. Anne maintains to this day that she was coerced into the 'fake death,' scam by John.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2016, Anne explained: “John could also be persuasive. He told me, ‘I’ll only need to vanish for a couple of weeks and we’ll have the money.’ It got out of control.
“The deeper you get into these situations, the harder it is to get out. If I had any inkling it would have lasted more than few a weeks, there’s no way I could have gone along with it and put myself through years of torture. But once it was done, and he got me to lie that he’d disappeared, I couldn’t get out of it.”
According to a report in the Daily Mail, as of earlier this year, Anne was living in a village not far from Middlesbrough.
