Canoe couple - the full story
Jul 23 2008 By Tom Wilkinson
’BORING’ DARWIN WAS OBSESSED WITH MONEY
For a former teacher and a prison officer on £22,000 a year, John Darwin loved a flash motor.
He told friends he was making good money from property dealing, and that allowed him to run his £48,000 Range Rover, complete with personalised number plate.
Fellow warders at Home House Prison, Teesside, described him as obsessed with money, introverted and “boring“.
One ex-colleague said: “He always spoke about his property developing and the rental properties he used to have, but never said much more.
“He was more concerned about his activities outside work than he was with his actual job.
“He had a lot of stuff going on outside.”
Among his plans to make his fortune were snail breeding, making garden gnomes, running market stalls, writing computer games and
also dabbling on the stock market.
All in all, the former science teacher made an unlikely prison officer, and his dull chat made him unpopular with colleagues and cons alike.
For the police, John Darwin was a liar - faking deafness to give him time to concoct a new story.
“When you speak to Mr Darwin he would attempt to fake some sort of deafness to give him some thinking time,” a police source said.
“He has never shown one ounce of remorse. You get so many different accounts from John Darwin that you don’t really know which one is correct.”
One Blackhall Colliery resident, who knew Darwin’s family, said he was always full of himself, yet had no sense of humour.
Darwin bragged about owning a dozen properties across Co Durham, from which he told people he earned decent rental income.
He told anyone who would listen that he was on his way to becoming a millionaire.
The buyers of his former family home in the village of Witton Gilbert reported there were 18 phone lines when they moved in - prompting speculation that Darwin played the stock market on a bank of computers.
The Darwins then bought adjoining properties on the seafront at Seaton Carew, living in one and running the other as bedsits.
But his financial acumen was not as finely-tuned as he professed, and mounting debts led him to stage his own death.
It emerged during Anne Darwin’s trial that the couple were tens of thousand of pounds in the red when John disappeared and on the verge of bankruptcy.
During her trial Mrs Darwin agreed with her son Mark’s description of John Darwin as an entrepreneur.
“He thought that, by the time he retired, he would be a millionaire,” she said.
“He would come out with all sorts of different schemes to make money.”
Describing the hours her husband spent playing an internet role-playing game, she said: “It was like a virtual world which was played
over the internet.
“The people who played it became characters in this world and they had money to buy and sell things and they used to cast spells on
each other.”
The prison officer who used to work with Darwin said: “I know he had properties in Annfield Plain and up near Stanley, some down near where he lived, and he had just bought that place in Seaton Carew.
“He had plans to develop it into all sorts of stuff - self-contained flats was one plan - and it was not long after that he went missing.
“He was always on the look-out to make a few bob.
“When he disappeared, it was disbelief more than anything else.
“There was a little bit of tongue-in-cheek suspicion because it just didn’t seem right.
“No-one had ever heard of him being a keen canoeist or anything like that.
“One or two of the lads said they had seen him in the local area after he disappeared and reported the sightings, but nothing came of it.
“One lad said he pulled up at some traffic lights and saw him in the next car.”
Another prison officer recalled: “Prison officers were paired off when they had tasks to do. Anyone who got put with him would have
to work with him for about four hours and he would bore their socks off.”
This officer did not think Darwin obtained his passport through criminal contacts he made in prison - because he bored the inmates too
much to befriend any of them.
Darwin’s canoeing antics first came to the notice of the media when he was 17.
His mother Jenny, a local councillor, complained about him getting covered in sewage while kayaking in the sea, and the story was
covered in the local press.
With typical humour, his aunt, Margaret Burns, said later: “Anyway, he’s bettered that now.”
A former schoolmate said Darwin did not stand out from the crowd - and was never in trouble with the authorities.
He attended St Francis Grammar School in Hartlepool, which was run by Xaverian Brothers.
Darwin’s nickname was Dinky - because of his short stature as a teenager.
A former classmate, now 58, said: “He was never at the forefront of anything, be it mischief or revelry. I cannot ever remember him
being in trouble.
“From what I can recall, he was not in the slightest bit outspoken or opinionated - very much a shrinking violet.”
