In October 2007, the family home at number 3 The Cliff sold for £295,000. Anne moved to the Panama City apartment.
By November 2007, she had sold the property in England that had served as the base of the scheme and was living in Central America.
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## The Decision to Come Back
At some point in November or early December 2007, the Darwins made a decision. Anne bought John a flight to England. He left Panama on November 30.
The reasons for this decision are not established with certainty in the public record. Various accounts have suggested that the couple missed their sons—that the distance from Mark and Anthony was proving harder to bear than they had anticipated, and that this had something to do with the choice to end the concealment. John Darwin himself gave an account consistent with this in various interviews after his release. The couple had succeeded in establishing themselves in Panama, had the apartment and the estate, had the company and the aliases, and had—apparently—found that proximity to their sons mattered enough to them that they were willing to risk everything to be closer.
Whether this account is complete, or whether other pressures were also at work—the September 2007 police inquiry that had begun in England, the growing difficulty of maintaining the alias John Jones over time—is unclear from the available evidence. What is clear is that on December 1, 2007, at approximately 5:30 in the afternoon, John Darwin walked into West End Central Police Station in London.