John Darwin disappearance case

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Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

DelVecchio, “The Rank Order Consistency of Personality Traits from Childhood to Old Age, a Quantitative Review of Longitudinal Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 126, no. 1 (2000): 3–25, http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-03445-001. 12. Telephone interview with author. 13. Ibid. 14. Tanith Carey, “Anne Darwin, ‘Canoe Widow’: Deceiving My Sons Was Unforgiveable,” The Guardian, October 10, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/canoe. 15. “500K (pounds) Recovered from Wife of Canoe Fraudster John Darwin,” Mirror, February 14, 2012, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/500k-recovered-wife-canoe-fraudster-684683. 16. Carey, “Anne Darwin.” 17. Email interview with author. 18. Damien Gale, “Kim Philby: I Got Away with Treachery Because I Was Upper Class,” The Guardian, April 4, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/04/kim-philbys-stasi-tape-reveals-secrets-of-his-success-as-cold-war-spy. 19.

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“The hubris is reflected in the idea that you could pull off a complex ruse like faking your death, and getting family members, law enforcement, and the state to believe it. Most of us fantasize but don’t go through with it because we have morals, and also are perhaps daunted by the logistics.”13 One of the more notorious death fakers was John Darwin, a British ex–prison officer who, after mountains of debt, “disappeared” in a kayak accident on March 21, 2002. His two sons thought their father had been swept out to sea, but his wife, Anne, knew the truth.14 She collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from insurance and pension funds and helped him hide.15 After four years of living in a tiny flat in Seaton Carew, County Durham, England, John stole the identity of a dead baby named John Jones, and the couple moved to South America.

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Anne went to jail for three and a half years, and later claimed that her husband had victimized her. He was a narcissistic, controlling, and manipulative man, she wrote in her 2016 memoir, Out of My Depth. But what was his excuse? “The second bit of compartmentalizing and rationalizing is, I think, what sustains somebody like death faker John Darwin, whose initial motivations were indeed financial, but kept it up for seven years,” said Greenwood. “He told himself the story that his family would be better off without him, and that while his children did think he was dead, they were adults living their own lives, so it’s not as if he abandoned them as babies.”17 At a secret trial held at MI5 headquarters in Mayfair, London, in November 1952, eleven years before the truth finally came out, Kim Philby convinced his interrogator that he wasn’t a Soviet agent partly by stuttering whenever he was asked a question.