Canoe couple - the full story

Jul 23 2008 By Tom Wilkinson

Hartlepool couple John and Anne Darwin have each been 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 on Wednesday, 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."