In July 2006, John Darwin—travelling as John Jones—and Anne Darwin flew to Panama together. While there, they visited property agents looking at real estate. In one of those property offices, they were photographed by Mario Vilar, the head of a firm called Move To Panama. The photograph showed the couple standing together in the office, a posed shot of potential buyers with an estate agent, the kind of documentation that property firms routinely create of their interactions with prospective clients.
The photograph was uploaded to the firm’s website: movetopanama.com.
This is the photograph that would eventually, in the days after John Darwin’s return to the London police station, be found by a member of the public searching the internet and passed to the Daily Mirror and to Cleveland Police.
But that was still more than a year away.
The July 2006 trip was reconnaissance. The couple looked at property. They assessed the possibilities. They went back to England.
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## Building the Panama Life
In March 2007, the Darwins returned to Panama. On this trip, they moved from assessment to commitment. They formed a company called Jaguar Properties. They purchased an apartment in El Dorado, a district of Panama City. In May 2007, they went further: they bought a tropical estate in Escobal, near the Panama Canal, reportedly for £200,000. Reports described the property as sprawling, rural, suited to some kind of agricultural or eco-tourism venture—though Darwin himself would later dismiss some of the media characterizations of the scale and ambitions of this plan.