On the afternoon of December 1, 2007, a man walked into a police station in London and told the officer behind the desk that he thought he might be a missing person. He gave his name as John Darwin. He said he couldn’t remember much—not where he’d been, not how he’d gotten to London, not what had happened to him since some point around the year 2000. He was fifty-seven years old, relatively healthy in appearance, and calm. The officers took down his details and began making inquiries.
Those inquiries produced an immediate and startling result. A man named John Darwin had been reported missing more than five years earlier, in March 2002, after going out in a canoe off the coast of northeast England and not coming back. A search had been mounted. His damaged canoe had been found. An inquest had been held. He had been declared legally dead. His wife Anne had collected life insurance of £250,000. And now here he was in a London police station, unharmed, with no apparent explanation for where he had been.
Within twenty-four hours, his sons—who had believed their father dead for five and a half years—were brought to the station for what was described as an emotional reunion. Within four days, a newspaper had published a photograph showing John Darwin standing beside his wife in Panama in July 2006, smiling, arm around her, apparently on a real estate tour—a year and a half before he walked into that police station claiming amnesia.