He attended St Francis Xavier's Grammar School, Hartlepool and De La Salle College, Salford, where he studied biology and chemistry.
[14] During the years that Darwin was presumed dead, he lived for some time in a bedsit next door to the family home; he then secretly moved back in with his wife Anne in February 2003.
By November, Darwin was back in the UK and flew from Newcastle to Gibraltar, and then travelled to El Puerto de Santa María to view a £45,000, forty-two-foot (13 m) catamaran that he was considering buying from boat dealer Robert Hopkin.
In March 2007, the couple returned to Panama and formed a company called Jaguar Properties in order to buy a two-bedroom apartment in El Dorado for £50,000.
Knowing that his "John Jones" alias would not pass this level of scrutiny, Darwin decided to return to the UK under his real name and fake amnesia.
[24] On 1 December 2007, Darwin walked into the West End Central police station in London, claiming to have no memory of the past five years.
[25] The UK police by that time had already suspected that Darwin might not have been dead since Anne, despite portraying herself as a broken-hearted widow, took foreign holidays, planned to sell the family home in Hartlepool to move to Panama and transferred large sums of money abroad.
[26] A police financial investigation had already begun three months prior to Darwin's reappearance, following a tip from one of Anne's colleagues connecting her claim on her husband's life insurance and her subsequent emigration to Panama.
A police investigation discovered that Darwin had been using a false passport by the name of "John Jones", an identity that had belonged to a baby from Sunderland who had died in 1950.
Darwin's two sons initially expressed elation at the return of their father,[31] but as the story unfolded, they issued a joint statement stating they felt they had been victims of a scam and implying that they wished to have no further contact with their parents.
[38] On 13 March, John Darwin admitted seven charges of obtaining cash by deception and a passport offence at Leeds Crown Court.
John Darwin faced an additional charge relating to his fake passport and was sentenced to six years and three months in prison.
[46] On 14 February 2012, the CPS announced that the entire £501,641.39 in life insurance and pension payouts received by Anne Darwin had been recovered, partly from the sale of two properties in Panama.
Kingsley Hyland, head of the North East CPS Complex Casework Unit, said: "It is important that fraudsters see that not only will we prosecute them wherever possible, but we will also make every effort to retrieve their ill-gotten gains to return them to those they have defrauded.
[50] In fiction, it inspired a 2009 novel by Adrian Gere called Return from the Dead,[51] and a 2010 storyline in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street saw the character Joe McIntyre (Reece Dinsdale) attempt the same thing but ultimately drown for real.
Audience members were given an image sheet of twenty people, twelve of whom were running to be leader, and asked to name the person and mark if they thought they were a leadership candidate.
[53] In October 2021, Wondery released a podcast exploring the disappearance of John Darwin as part of their British Scandal series.
[54] The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, a dramatisation written by Chris Lang without any cooperation from the Darwin family, and with Eddie Marsan and Monica Dolan in the title roles, was shown on ITV in April 2022.
[39][55] In September 2023, he was mentioned on the show Saving Lives at Sea that airs on BBC iPlayer as they talked with members of the Hartlepool lifeboat station.