Couple jailed for canoe death fraud
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John and Anne Darwin were each jailed for more than six years for carrying out a £250,000 con by faking his death in a canoeing accident.
The 56-year-old wife was convicted by a jury at Teesside Crown Court of six counts of fraud and nine of money laundering, while the husband admitted fraud at an earlier hearing.
Anne Darwin received six and a half years in jail. Her husband got six years and three months.
The couple tricked the police, insurance companies and even their two sons Mark, 32, and Anthony, 29, into believing he drowned in the North Sea in 2002 - only for Mr Darwin to turn up at a London police station last year. They were undone by a photograph of the grinning couple taken in Panama four years after he disappeared.
Mr Justice Wilkie said the "real victims" of the Darwins were their sons.
He told the couple: "Although the sums involved are not as high as some reported cases, the duration of the offending, its multi-faceted nature and in particular the grief inflicted over the years to those who in truth were the real victims, your own sons, whose lives you crushed, make this a case which merits a particularly severe sentence."
The couple stood with their hands clasped in front of them, separated by a burly security guard, as the sentences were handed down. They avoided eye contact with each other as they stood in the dock.
Their sons, who showed no emotion as Mrs Darwin was found guilty, had no direct view of their shamed parents from their position at the back of a crowded public gallery. It was the first time they had been in the same room as their father since his arrest in December last year.
After their evidence last week, they had been in court every day of their mother's trial.
Addressing the defendants, the judge said: "I accept you, John, were the driving force behind this deceit. You, Anne Darwin, perhaps initially unconvinced, played an instrumental rather than organising role. Nevertheless, you contributed to its success and played your part efficiently. In my judgment, you operated as a team, each contributing to the joint venture."
Earlier, Peter Makepeace, mitigating for Mr Darwin, said he hoped one day to be reconciled with his sons.
Mr Makepeace told the court: "He struggles to come to terms with what he has done to those boys.
"He continues to harbour the hope that a day will come when he can be reconciled with his sons.
"That may be as fantastical and unrealistic as the views he has held at times throughout his life."
He said that hope will sustain Darwin through his jail term and "through what is presumably to be a very lonely existence when he is released".
Mr Darwin is taking medication for depression in jail, where he is subject to abuse from fellow inmates because of his past career as a prison officer, Mr Makepeace said.
Mr Makepeace said his client was a "good father" until his disappearance.
He said: "It would seem that he was a man who was devoted to his family, hard-working and on the face of it an entirely decent man.
"He was very fortunate in having the support of a devoted wife and having the pride of two sons who were an extreme credit to their parents.
"For 51 years of his life, he was in all aspects, a law-abiding, decent man."
Mrs Darwin's barrister David Waters QC said she returned voluntarily to the UK when her husband was arrested, which saved the British authorities "a considerable amount of expense and delay".
He said she wanted to return all the cash.
There will be a compensation hearing at a date to be fixed to decide how the Darwins can pay back the £250,000 they defrauded.