Anne Darwin felt so pressurised by playing the grieving widow that she considered drowning herself in the same stretch of sea where her husband faked his death, she claimed yesterday.

Speaking publicly about the couple’s elaborate fraud for the first time, Mrs Darwin also told Teesside Crown Court that at one stage in the months after her husband John’s disappearance, she wished he really had suffered a fatal accident in his canoe.

Mrs Darwin, 56, initially sat in the witness box to give her evidence yesterday but her words were so quiet that she had to stand to make herself heard, as she described begging her husband to abandon his insurance fraud scheme. She said that after buckling under the strain of telling the couple’s two sons that their father was dead, she left the family house in Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool, and crossed the road to the seafront.

“I sat on a bench looking at the sea and I wished that in fact John had drowned. But because that hadn’t happened I actually considered walking into the sea myself. I felt so desperate.”

Anne Darwin's performance of a lifetime

Trial for fraud and money-laundering revealed an elaborate five-year-long deceit that fooled many people

Multimedia

• The police tapes

• Pictures: the great canoe fraud

Background

• John Darwin's money-making schemes

• Canoe man and Bond boost Panama tourism

• Darwin wife: I wished he had drowned

Related Links

• Canoe husband Darwin cheated on his wife

• Wife's 'vital role' in canoe man fraud

She told the jury that it was only the thought of what it would do to her children, Mark and Anthony, that stopped her. “I didn’t have the courage to carry it out,” she said.

On the day John Darwin decided to fake his death in March 2002, she said, he asked her to meet him at North Gare, a section of coastline near Seaton Carew. “I said, ‘You can’t do this now. Anthony’s away on holiday, he’s proposing to his girlfriend’.”

Mrs Darwin sobbed as she said: “I pleaded with him, but it made no difference.” The former doctor’s receptionist broke down further as she was reminded of the moment, a day after Darwin’s disappearance, when she hugged her eldest son Mark and pretended that his father had died. “I had to make it look realistic,” she said.

She claimed that the emotions she felt as the search operation continued, were real. “I actually felt like a grieving widow. I had lost my husband,” she told the jury. “I couldn’t believe it was all happening. I felt as if I was on a slippery slope and I couldn’t get off.”

By that time, Darwin, now 57, had already telephoned his wife. His first call came the night of his “death”, inquiring about whether she had called the police. “I said I had, but I really wanted him to come home . . . there are police everywhere and I can’t carry on. He said I had to.”

The phone calls continued. Darwin told his wife he was living in a tent, had lost his money and was desperate to come home. A few weeks later she went to collect him from near Whitehaven, Cumbria. From then, Darwin lived between the couple’s home at No 3 The Cliff and the bedsits they owned next door at No 4. By 2003 he was venturing out as he attempted to establish a new identity as John Jones.

He took charge of claiming insurance and pension payouts. Mrs Darwin said he would stand behind her and write notes as she made phone calls, would type draft letters and even made a template of her signature. Asked by the defence barrister David Waters, QC, whether she loved her husband of 34 years, she replied: “At this moment in time, no.” She added: “I loved him at the time.”

Mrs Darwin earlier revealed that her husband had an extramarital affair some years after they wed. She told the jury: “I did consider leaving him, but I just couldn’t see a life without him. I didn’t know how I would cope on my own, so I forgave him.”

The couple emigrated to Panama in October 2007. “I thought this was a chance for a new beginning,” Mrs Darwin said. She told the court that after she arrived, Darwin announced his plan to go back to Britain, claim he had suffered amnesia, and pay back what they owed. The pretence of amnesia, which his wife said she had always doubted people would believe, fell apart soon after Darwin’s reappearance on December 1 and he was arrested. She flew to Britain and was arrested and charged with fraud and money-laundering, charges she denies on the basis of “marital coercion”. Her husband has pleaded guilty to fraud.

Mrs Darwin said she did not apply for bail because “at the time I had nowhere to go and no one to turn to”. Asked whether anything had changed in that respect, she said simply: “No.”

The trial continues.

Times Recommends

• Winnie the Pooh to appear in a new book
• Now that's what I call a track record
• 'I'm just so excited to be given sticks'