He told the officer at the desk: “I think I am a missing person.”
He said his name was John Darwin. He said he couldn’t remember the previous five years. He said he had only recently become aware of who he was and where he had come from. He was, in other words, presenting exactly the story that would make his return to official existence most straightforwardly manageable: a man who had, through some unexplained process, been missing and had now found his way back to consciousness of himself.
John O’Connor, a former Metropolitan Police officer who commented on the case in the immediate aftermath for ABC News, called the amnesia claim “probably a last attempt to fool the authorities.” He noted that it was easy to turn up at a police station and claim not to remember anything—the burden would fall on investigators to disprove the claim, and in the immediate term, a man claiming memory loss could not be charged with having chosen to disappear.
The claim might have held longer if things had moved more slowly. They did not.
—
## Two Days After
On December 2, 2007, the day after John Darwin walked into the police station, Mark and Anthony Darwin were brought to the station for what the authorities described as an “emotional reunion” with their father. The sons, who had spent five and a half years believing him dead, found themselves in the same room with him.
Darwin and his wife—Anne had not yet been arrested; she was still in Panama—apparently coordinated a performance. When they were brought together at the police station, they feigned surprise at seeing each other, as if two people who hadn’t known each other’s whereabouts were unexpectedly reunited. The sons saw this and took it at face value.