What can be established is that the decision, once made, was implemented with some care. He took out the life insurance policy in December 2001. He waited approximately three months before staging the disappearance. He went back, within a year, to live in the house next door. He obtained a false passport. He used aliases. He managed the administrative details of a family property business while officially dead. These are not the actions of someone who acted on impulse and then improvised desperately. They are the actions of someone who planned and then followed through.
The character question with Anne Darwin is different, and the jury’s decision is the most important data point we have about it.
Her defense was coercion. She claimed that John Darwin was a domineering, controlling partner who had imposed the scheme upon her. She said that her participation was not freely chosen. This is a defense that, if true, would have significant mitigating weight—forced participation in fraud is not the same as chosen participation, and the criminal law has long recognized degrees of culpability based on the extent to which a defendant’s conduct was constrained by another person’s control.
The jury rejected this defense. They had before them, among other things, the emails. The communications between John and Anne Darwin during the years of the scheme showed a relationship that did not look, in its correspondence, like one characterized by fear or compulsion. The emails were warm. They were, at times, flirtatious. They described a couple in ongoing communication about their plans, their properties, their future in Panama. They did not describe a woman writing carefully to avoid triggering her husband’s anger. They described, on their face, an equal partnership.