And on at least one occasion—in March 2006—the person living next door to Anne Darwin submitted a formal planning objection to the local authority about a neighbour’s building work. The objection was submitted under a false name. The idea that a dead man might have strong feelings about a neighbour’s extension is its own kind of detail.
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## Thinking About Panama
By 2004, the Darwins had begun thinking seriously about what came next. The arrangement of the two houses in Seaton Carew—with John concealed in number 4, passing through the hidden door into number 3, while Anne maintained the public performance of his widow—was not a permanent solution. It was workable in the short term but exposed them to increasing risk as time passed. Every day John continued to move around Seaton Carew was another day he might be recognized. Every bedsit tenant who passed through number 4 was a potential witness.
The couple had financial resources—the insurance money, the pension payments, the rental income from the properties. They had, in John’s fraudulent passport, a mechanism for travel. What they needed was a destination.
Panama presented itself for several reasons. It was far enough away from northeast England to put physical distance between them and anyone who might recognize them. It had, at the time, a reputation for accessible land purchases and relatively straightforward procedures for foreign buyers wanting to acquire property. The US dollar was (and is) widely used, minimizing currency complications. And, significantly, Panama had no extradition treaty with the United Kingdom—a detail that may or may not have been part of the Darwins’ calculations, but that Detective Inspector Andy Greenwood of Cleveland Police would later explicitly mention as a source of concern once the scheme began to unravel.