THE wife of John Darwin told a court yesterday that she no longer loved her back-from-the-dead husband and wished he really had drowned.
Anne Darwin said her husband had dominated her since they married in 1973, even after he was officially declared dead in a staged canoe accident in the North Sea in 2002.
Mrs Darwin told Teesside Crown Court she had considered suicide when she was
struggling to cope with the pressure of keeping up the deception.
David Waters, QC, defending, asked if she still loved her husband. She replied: "At this moment in time, no."
But at the time of the deceptions she said she did love him – despite her revealing earlier that her husband had an affair some years after they married.
"I did consider leaving him but I just couldn't see a life without him," she said. "I didn't know how I would cope on my own so I forgave him."
On Wednesday, e-mails read out in court revealed she begged Darwin not to leave her in Panama when he announced he would return to London and hand himself in to the police.
Asked yesterday why she did not walk away from the marriage when Darwin planned to fake his own death and cash in insurance policies and pensions, she said: "Because it was difficult to live with him at times; it would be even more difficult without him."
She wept as she recalled how she pleaded with him not to carry out the scam to stage a canoe accident in the North Sea off Hartlepool.
When Mr Waters asked her specifically about dishonestly obtaining £2,000 from a pension scheme she blamed her husband for this and all other deceptions in the £250,000 fraud.
The court heard Darwin, 57, has admitted making the fraudulent claims to clear the family debts and start a new life under the assumed name of John Jones.
Mrs Darwin denies six counts of deception and nine of money laundering, claiming the defence of marital coercion, meaning he forced her to break the law against her will.
The former doctor's receptionist said her husband insensitively left her moments before she underwent an emergency Caesarean when she was in labour with their son Mark.
He spoke to her like she was one of his pupils, and made her feel inadequate and believed she was intellectually inferior.
She said: "If there was something he wanted me to do, he would ask me initially to do it and, if I didn't do it, he would just go on and on at me until I did.
"All the major decisions were made by John. Superficially we would discuss things because my thoughts never seemed to carry any weight. Whatever John wanted to do, he did in the end.
"He had that power to make me feel insignificant."
Mr Waters asked her about prosecution claims that she was playing the "grieving widow".
She replied: "I honestly felt like a grieving widow. I had lost my husband, not in the sense he was lost, but he had left me.
"I felt desperate, I felt ashamed about what was happening. The emotions I showed were genuine emotions."
She told the jury of one occasion when things had become too much. "I ran out of the house and I crossed the road to the sea and I sat on the beach looking at the sea," she said. "I wished that John had drowned at sea."
The couple planned a new life in Panama but last November Darwin flew back to the UK to hand himself in to police, claiming he was suffering from amnesia.
"I really thought it was going to be a difficult story for anyone to believe," Mrs Darwin said.
"He said he couldn't think of anything better."
The case continues.
The full article contains 648 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
