The passageway itself—the coffin-shaped doorway, the hardboard fake cupboard back, the breeze-block infill, the carpet on the concrete floor—was a piece of infrastructure that the scheme required and that survived as evidence after the scheme collapsed. It existed because John Darwin needed to move between two adjacent properties without being seen doing so. It was built, according to Anne’s account to the News of the World, approximately eleven months after Darwin’s disappearance—suggesting that he returned to the vicinity, or at least to contact with Anne, within about a year of the staged canoe accident.
The houses in Seaton Carew are not, as far as the public record establishes, remarkable from the outside. They are part of a terrace of similar properties on a residential street. There is nothing about them that would distinguish them from their neighbours. The secret was inside, behind the skirting boards and the false back of a bedroom cupboard, and it was indistinguishable from ordinary domestic construction until you knew what to look for.
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## The Media and the Case
The John Darwin case became an international story within days of the return to the police station. The combination of elements was inherently compelling: the faked death, the five and a half years of concealment, the apparently grieving widow who had known throughout, the sons who had not known, the photograph in Panama, the amnesia claim that collapsed within four days. The case was not especially large as fraud cases go—the financial amounts, as the Court of Appeal noted, were lower than in some comparable cases—but it was almost perfectly constructed, from a journalistic perspective, as a human interest story.