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'I've been living a lie'
07/12/2007 20:14 - (SA)
Hartlepool - A court on Friday granted police more time to question a man whose disappearance for five years is being investigated as part of a fraud inquiry.
John Darwin was declared dead after an apparent canoe accident in 2002. His wife, Anne, collected insurance payments and was quoted in the British press as saying she later learned her husband was still alive. A British newspaper reported on Friday that he secretly tried to buy a yacht in Gibraltar in 2005.
On Wednesday night, Mrs Darwin, 55, left Panama, where the couple allegedly bought a flat, and has said she will return to Britain. Police said they urgently needed to speak to her.
"I have been living my life as a lie, constantly looking over my shoulder, realising something like this could happen at some stage," she was quoted as telling British newspapers. "I was never relaxed - always on edge and knowing the truth could come out at any time."
Anne Darwin says she kept the fact that her husband was still alive from their children for years. The couple's sons said on Thursday they appear to have been victims of a cruel hoax by their parents and wanted no further contact with them.
?What sort of mother am I??
"Who can blame them?" she was quoted as saying. "I lied to them, my own sons. What sort of mother am I?"
John Darwin, a former science teacher turned prison guard, was believed to have died in a canoe accident in the North Sea near their home in northeast England, in March 2002, and a coroner declared him officially dead. But Darwin, 57, appeared at a police station in London on Saturday, claiming to have suffered amnesia.
The Darwin case has attracted international media attention, and journalists lined up outside a magistrate's court in the small coastal town of Hartlepool on Friday when he arrived in a police convoy of three vehicles.
After a brief hearing, the court granted police 36 more hours to detain and question him.
The Daily Mirror reported on Friday that he had been travelling on a fake passport under the name John Jones, and that his wife transferred money from her bank account in November 2005 to help him buy a yacht in Gibraltar, but the sale fell through. The newspaper printed what it described as a bank statement showing Mrs Darwin's transfer and a copy of the initial yacht sale agreement with John Jones.
?Husband?s idea
In comments published in newspapers on Friday, Mrs Darwin was quoted as saying it was her husband's idea to move to Panama and that he was there when she arrived six weeks ago.
The couple were photographed there by a real estate agency for its website, she reportedly said.
An official at Panama's National Migration Department, who spoke anonymously because she was not authorised to speak publicly, said Anne Darwin left the country on Wednesday night - but did not say where she went.
Anne Darwin said she would return to Britain to face any police questions and speak to her sons, but officials were unable to say when she would return.
Investigators believe the husband and wife were communicating by telephone and applying for credit cards to fund a new life abroad, a police official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is under way.
Inquiries into the supposed death began several months ago when Mrs Darwin was overheard by an acquaintance speaking to her husband on the telephone, the official said.
Officers believe he was tipped off that an investigation was under way, the police official said.
Authorities are investigating whether Darwin had hidden in the US since 2002, after an appeal for information produced calls mainly from the US and Panama, the official told The AP.
- AP
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