'Death plot' canoe man seeks reunion with wife

John Darwin, the "back-from-the-dead canoeist", begged his wife Anne to take him back as he was brought before a court over his five-year odyssey.

The couple face jail and financial ruin after it emerged that they will be sued by two insurers for more than £150,000, which Mrs Darwin claimed in life insurance payments following her husband's fake drowning in the North Sea in 2002.

As Darwin, 57, waited to appear before Hartlepool magistrates' court yesterday on deception charges, he told his solicitor John Nixon how much he missed his 55-year-old wife.

Neighbours at the couple's hideaway in Panama had suggested that Mrs Darwin was seeing "another man", causing her husband to return to the UK and hand himself in to the police.

But Mr Nixon, who spoke to Darwin, a former prison officer, in a cell, said: "He is desperate to see his wife, to be reunited with her.

"He is anxious to know about her wellbeing. It is their wedding anniversary in ten days.

"They are going to spend their wedding day apart and he is anxious for everything to be resolved."

Mrs Darwin, who was arrested on Sunday after returning from Panama, was also charged with two counts of deception by Cleveland Police.

Detectives have released a photograph of Darwin with a long greying beard, and made a global appeal for sightings of him during his missing years.

The picture was taken from a fake passport in the name of John Jones which Darwin is believed to have obtained in late 2003.

Police said the couple's two sons Mark, 31, and Anthony, 29, had been "duped" by their parents in a cruel betrayal and were not suspects.

Soon after Darwin vanished his wife cashed in a £25,000 life insurance policy from Unat Direct Insurance Management Ltd and also received £130,000 from a Norwich Union policy designed to pay off a mortgage in the event of death.

Both companies declined to comment but sources told The Daily Telegraph that they would try to recover the money.

That can be done through the civil courts at the same time as criminal proceedings and regardless of whether the Darwins are convicted of any offence.

"If someone is supposed to be dead and then they turn up alive that's grounds for reasonable suspicion of fraudulent activity," a source said.

None of Darwin's relatives was present for his four-minute hearing yesterday and his address was given as "no fixed abode".

He was charged with obtaining £25,000 from Unat Direct Insurance Management Ltd on May 16, 2003, by "falsely representing you had been killed in an accident" and making an untrue statement to obtain a passport in October 2003.

Mr Nixon said his client would not be entering a plea at this stage and made no application for bail.

Darwin was remanded in custody to Durham Prison and will appear before the same court via a video link on Friday.