John Darwin fought the Google, and the Google won.

John Darwin has to be one of the most stupid people ever to attempt to fake his own death. Indeed, the fact he’s still alive is the only thing precluding his receiving a Darwin award for lifetime achievement.

In 2002, after trouble with debt, his canoe was found empty, floating in the sea off Hartlepool. He was declared dead by a coroner in 2003, and his wife received his life-insurance payout. £25,000 and the paying off of their £130,000 mortgage.

His wife, Anne, claims she was not in on the scheme until he turned up on their doorstep, cunningly disguised with a shabby beard. He then moved back in with his wife for a time, before moving next-door into another property they owned. Amazingly, no-one seemed to notice. Perhaps because of further ingenious tactics: “When he went out he would disguise himself sometimes by taking a walking stick and walking with a limp. When it was cold, he would put on a wooly hat and pull his collar upwards.“.

It seems they had quite a lot of property. “The debt had been building up for some time. He kept applying for credit cards and he used to always get me to co-sign the applications but I never ever used the cards. It was our rented properties that caused us the problems. At that time we had about 12 houses scattered around County Durham. They were rental investments but people were slow in paying us.”. Strangely, the idea of selling one of their houses (at a time when house prices were soaring, no less) to cover what was only a few tens of thousands of debt does not seem to have occurred to them.

He created a new identity for himself, imaginatively called “John Jones”, and got his hands on a fake passport through the ruse of applying for one as normal, using his home address. From hereon, he would pop in and out of the country in a search to find a new place to live for he and his wife. Eventually he found such a place, and only 7 weeks ago his wife emigrated to Panama, to start a new life.

OK, your entire plan so far seems to have been calculated to get get yourself caught, and yet in spite of that you’ve managed to get away with it. You’ve got the money, and a new life. What to do next?

A week ago, John Darwin catches a flight back to England, walks into a police station, and claims he has amnesia and doesn’t remember anything of the last five years. He is promptly arrested. It turns out the police were never entirely happy about the whole vanishing thing, and had received some not particularly actionable, but intriguing rumours a few months earlier.

Then this lady, who saw the story on the news, typed “John Anne Panama” into Google, and came up with a picture of them there in 2006, all smiley and not dead, on the website of the “Move to Panama” website. (sadly it’s been taken down now. But wait, what is this in Google’s cache? Though it probably won’t be there for long.) She notified the police, who were dumbfounded.

Anne is contacted by the media, and goes through the routine of being amazed and overjoyed. Their children, who knew nothing about the whole business and thought their dad was dead, are genuinely amazed and overjoyed. And confused, one would imagine. The police have a few words with Anne’s neighbours in Panama, who identify John instantly. Perhaps not caring to discover what cells are like in Panama, Anne Darwin has returned to Britain to find out what they’re like here.

From the start, the whole business sounds utterly unnecessary. They owned twelve properties. Surely they were not so heavily leveraged that they couldn’t have paid their debts off by selling some, given that house prices were rising so fast? John Darwin. You and your wife are extremely stupid and greedy. Only the obliviousness of your neighbours, and the ineptness of the passport office ever let you pretend otherwise. You’re going to prison, and your children are disgusted with your antics.

The power that the internet, and Google in particular, has now for the finding of increasingly disparate information is incredible. Of course, in this case it helped that they were stupid enough to let themselves be photographed and gave their real names. When face recognition technology becomes commonplace, I wonder how many pictures of myself I’ll be able to google up at a moments notice?

It will make a fine TV movie. I wonder if Google would be wiiling to give me funding for it?

Afterthought: There is some suggestion that John Darwin chose to hand himself in in order to drop his wife into legal jeopardy, after she objected to his engaging in constant cybersex with a variety of internet acquaintances. If so, that just makes this entire business even more idiotic than I already thought it was.

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