The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe: The unbelievable true story behind the upcoming ITV drama - David Leigh (Paperback) 06-01-2022

*Soon to be an ITV true crime drama* With his small buy-to-let housing empire crumbling around him and creditors quickly closing in, John Darwin decided the only way to avoid the humiliation of bankruptcy was to fake his own death and disappear. In his now infamous red canoe, John paddled out into the North Sea, off the coast of bucket-and-spade town Seaton Carew, and vanished. With the help of his wife Anne, he was not to be seen again in public for years. He was assumed dead, lost at sea. But unbeknown to his family and friends, and under the noses of the police looking for him, he had brazenly moved into a bedsit in the adjoining house the couple owned next door. And there he would lie low as the two grown-up sons he so cruelly deceived visited to comfort their 'grieving' widowed mother. After almost six years, when John made a miraculous comeback from the dead, former Fleet Street journalist David Leigh tracked Anne down at the couple's new home in Panama - the Central American country in which she and her husband had planned to start a secret new life together with the insurance money claimed from John's 'death'. Why had John decided to resurface, with a strange tale of amnesia, after so much time and when it seemed as if he had pulled off his astonishing deception? The runaway train of revelation and guilt which followed ultimately led the seemingly most ordinary of couples from a modest town in the north east of England to be the subjects of one of the most outrageous and audacious fraud cases of the century. The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of this unbelievable true story. Written by the journalist and with the police officer closest to the case, this book offers an unprecedented insight into an unbelievable story that gripped the nation, and into the inscrutable minds of 'Canoe Man' John Darwin and his long-suffering partner-in-crime. *Perfect for fans of ITV true crime dramas such as Quiz, Des, Manhunt and The P