In December 2000, the Darwins bought two adjacent terraced houses on a street called The Cliff in Seaton Carew. The houses were numbered 3 and 4. Number 3 was to be the family home. Number 4 was intended to be rented as bedsits, part of a property portfolio the couple were building as supplementary income. It was a reasonable plan on its face, and not an unusual one for a working couple approaching their fifties with some accumulated capital and some expectations about retirement. It was also, as it turned out, a plan they could not make work.
The debt accumulated quickly. The mortgage on the properties, combined with costs of renovation and preparation for rental, put pressure on their finances in a way they had not adequately anticipated. By early 2002—barely fourteen months after the purchase—John Darwin was in conversations with his wife about the debt problem. He had also begun, according to what later emerged, to consider an extreme solution.
He had taken out a life insurance policy in December 2001. The timing, in retrospect, was significant.
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## The Disappearance
The morning of March 21, 2002 was a Thursday, the spring equinox. John Darwin, then fifty-one years old, went to the foreshore at Seaton Carew and launched a canoe. He paddled out into the North Sea.
He did not come back.
Anne Darwin reported him missing that evening, after he failed to show up for his shift at Holme House Prison. The response was substantial. The coastguard and police launched what contemporaneous accounts described as one of the largest searches of the region’s coastline in memory. Five RNLI lifeboats were deployed. Two coastguard rescue teams combed the shore. A police aircraft with heat-seeking equipment made passes over the water. An RAF helicopter joined the search. Officers worked the coast from Seaton Carew north to Staithes, approximately thirty miles of coastline, in conditions that made the task—as one account put it—”a needle in a hundred haystacks.”