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## The Bedsit Tenants
One of the underexplored aspects of the Darwin case is the position of the tenants who occupied the bedsits in number 4 The Cliff during the years of the scheme.
Number 4 was the property John Darwin used as his hideout, at least during the period when the hidden passageway between the two houses was in operation. But it was also a rental property, being operated as bedsits—which means that other people were living there, or at minimum passing through, during at least some of the period when Darwin was also present.
How these tenants intersected with Darwin’s concealment—whether they were aware of the man who was sometimes present in the house, whether any of them had suspicions they never voiced, whether the hidden door was known to anyone in the building beyond Darwin and his wife—is not established in the available public record. If any tenant encountered John Darwin during the years of the scheme, either through direct contact or through hearing him in the property, that information has not appeared in public accounts.
The property management of bedsits in a house where the owner is ostensibly a widow and the officially dead husband is living in a room behind a false wall required some management of exposure. One possible answer is simply that the tenants occupied parts of the property that were separated enough from the Darwin habitation zone that there was limited interaction. Another is that any encounters were managed in ways that did not produce a memorable enough event to be reported to police or press. A third is that some tenants did notice something and chose, for their own reasons, not to report it or make it public.