The photograph was there. The person who found it recognized what they were looking at: a supposedly dead man, standing next to his supposedly grieving wife, in the country they’d been planning to move to together. They contacted the Daily Mirror and Cleveland Police simultaneously, or in rapid succession.
The Mirror published the image on December 5 under the headline “Canoe’s This in Panama?”—a tabloid pun on the spelling of the word “canoe” and the question of who was in the image. The headline captured the editorial sensibility of a paper that knew it had a significant story and knew how to present it for maximum impact.
The journey from a routine estate agent’s photo to a front-page splash that demolished a man’s amnesia claim took eighteen months. During those eighteen months, the image had been sitting on a publicly accessible website, available to anyone who happened to search for it, never seen by anyone who knew its significance until the circumstances arose that made someone look.
This is the specific kind of vulnerability that the internet age created for people attempting the kind of long-term identity concealment the Darwins were running. Before the widespread digitization of photographic records and the indexing of those records by search engines, a photograph posted at an estate agent’s office in Panama City would have been essentially inaccessible to anyone in northeast England who wasn’t physically in that office. By 2007, it was accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a reason to look.