MORE than £500,000 has been recovered from the wife of back-from-the- dead canoeist John Darwin, it has emerged.

John Darwin, from Seaton Carew, Teesside, drew worldwide publicity when he walked into a police station claiming to suffer from amnesia.

In reality, Mr Darwin, 61, had faked his own death so his wife Anne, 60, could claim thousands of pounds from insurance policies and pension schemes.

Anne Darwin claimed on his life insurance while he lived in secret compartments in their Teesside home and the pair ended up in South America.

But their scam was exposed when a photo of the couple was found online.

Now prosecutors have clawed back more than half a million pounds in assets from Anne, who is longer with the trickster.

Kingsley Hyland, head of the CPS’s North East complex casework unit, said: “It is important that fraudsters see that not only will we prosecute them wherever possible, but we will also make every effort to retrieve their ill-gotten gains to return them to those they have defrauded.” The crooked couple embarked on a new life in Panama after Mr Darwin faked his death in March 2002 by apparently vanishing off the coast in a supposed canoeing accident.

He turned up at a police station in November 2007, claiming he was a missing person with amnesia, but the ruse fell to pieces when a photo taken in Panama of the couple turned up on the internet.

During the trial at Teesside Crown Court in 2008 the jury heard they tricked police, a coroner, financial institutions and even sons Mark and Anthony into believing the ex-prison officer was dead.

Mr Darwin obtained a passport in the name of a dead Sunderland baby and lived secretly with his wife while they plotted their new life abroad. He then travelled to Panama where they bought a flat and planned to set up an ecology tourism business together.

However, weeks after his wife sold off their UK properties and joined him in the Central American nation in late 2007, he walked into a police station in London and said he had amnesia.

During the trial, Mrs Darwin claimed she was forced into the scam by her husband, but she was jailed for six-and-a-half years for her part in the swindle. Her husband was sent to prison for six years and three months.

A confiscation hearing in 2009 was told that the Darwins benefited to the sum of £679,194.62 from the fraud, but at that time their realisable assets amounted to just under £592,000.

The Crown Prosecution Service said yesterday it has recovered a total of £501,641.39 from the assets that Mrs Darwin held as a result of the scam.

The assets seized are an apartment in Panama City worth £35,648.35, land near Lake Gatun in Panama worth £155,414.47, three bank accounts in Panama containing £152,828.13, two UK bank accounts containing £157,720.91 and bank interest totalling £29.53.

This figure is lower because the value of property she owned in Panama has fallen as a result of the global economic crisis.

The money will now be repaid to the insurance companies and pension funds that were defrauded.

Mr Hyland added: “It has taken some time to sell the property in Panama, but we are extremely pleased to have got through the very complex process of recovering this money from overseas.”

Mr Darwin now lives in Seaton Carew but his wife is believed to be in Leeds, close to Askham Grange open prison where she served her sentence.