John Darwin paddled a canoe into the North Sea off Seaton Carew, a faded resort town on England's northeast coast, on March 21, 2002, and did not come back. Helicopters and lifeboats swept the water. Searchers recovered his double-ended paddle. No body. In April 2003 a coroner recorded an open verdict and a death certificate was issued, and Anne Darwin, the widow, went on to collect roughly £250,000, about $500,000 at the time, from life insurance policies and pension schemes. For most of the next five years, the dead man lived next door.

He got in and out through a hole behind a wardrobe.

The drowning was staged, the grief was performed, and every payout that followed was fraud. Darwin was 51 when he disappeared, a prison officer at Holme House who had spent 18 years as a teacher before that. He and Anne, a doctor's receptionist, had sunk themselves in debt on a portfolio of rental properties, and by early 2002 he was talking about a way out. The way out was the canoe.

The tenant at number 4.

The Darwins owned two adjoining Victorian houses on the seafront, numbers 3 and 4 The Cliff. The family lived in one. The other was carved into bedsits for tenants. After his death, John moved into one of those bedsits, a few feet from his own front door, and passed between the two buildings through a connecting doorway concealed behind a wardrobe with a false back in the master bedroom. By February 2003 he was back inside the family home itself, hiding when anyone called. He later obtained a passport in the name of John Jones, an identity built on a Sunderland infant who died in 1950.

Anne handled the paperwork side of being a widow. She filed the claims, took the payments, and told their two adult sons, Mark and Anthony, that their father was gone. The sons grieved for more than five years. Their mother let them.

Smiling for the estate agent.

With the money banked, the Darwins went shopping abroad. On July 14, 2006, the couple flew to Panama, where they posed for a photograph with Mario Vilar, who ran a relocation agency called Move to Panama. Vilar put the picture on his company's website. John and Anne, side by side, grinning next to their agent. In May 2007 they spent about £200,000 on a tropical property at Escobal, in Colón province near the Panama Canal, and Anne moved out there for good.

Then, on December 1, 2007, John Darwin flew back to Britain, walked into West End Central police station in London, and told officers, "I think I am a missing person." He said his memory stopped in 2000. He could still recite his name, address, and date of birth. The story ran everywhere as a Christmas miracle, and his sons, then 31 and 29, announced their joy at getting their father back.

It took a member of the public, not a detective, to end it. Someone typed "John," "Anne," and "Panama" into Google Images and found Vilar's 2006 website photo of the happy couple, taken four years after the drowning. The Daily Mirror published it. Police arrested Darwin on suspicion of fraud on December 5, 2007, four days into his resurrection.

In Panama, reporters put the photograph in front of Anne, and she folded on the spot. "My sons will never forgive me. They knew nothing. They thought John was dead. Now, they are going to hate me," she said. She was arrested when her flight landed at Manchester Airport days later. Mark and Anthony, who had mourned a living man since 2002, issued a statement through police describing their "angry and confused state of mind" and asked, "How could our mam continue to let us believe our dad had died when he was very much alive?" They wanted no further contact with either parent.

Four hours.

John Darwin pleaded guilty to seven charges of obtaining cash by deception and a passport offense. Anne did not. At Teesside Crown Court in July 2008 she denied 15 charges and ran a defense of marital coercion, arguing her domineering husband had forced her into all of it: the claims, the letters, the five years of playing widow to her own children. The jury deliberated for four hours and convicted her on every count, six of fraud and nine of money laundering.

On July 23, 2008, Mr Justice Wilkie sentenced John Darwin to six years and three months, and Anne Darwin to six years and six months. The judge said their sons had been left "crushed" by the deception and identified John as its "driving force."

The bill.

The money came back the hard way. At a confiscation hearing in November 2009, Anne Darwin agreed to pay £591,838.25, made up of £363,700.01 in compensation to the defrauded companies and £228,138.24 under the Proceeds of Crime Act. John Darwin declared he had no assets at all. The court ordered him to pay £1.

He left prison in January 2011. Anne followed in March. Then, in 2014, investigators learned that lump sums from his prison service and teaching pensions were about to land. The £1 order against him was raised to £40,121, and a further £40,000 was seized from the payouts.