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THE jury in the Anne Darwin trial has been told how she "lied persistently" throughout her hours of police interrogation.

Mrs Darwin was arrested after her flight from Atlanta touched down at Manchester Airport on December 9 last year.

Over the next six weeks, the mother-of-two was questioned a total of seven times about an alleged £250,000 fraud.

The suspected crimes came to light when a photograph of her with her supposedly dead husband emerged.

It showed the smiling couple in Panama in the summer of 2006 - more than four years after John Darwin vanished.

Mrs Darwin, a former doctors' receptionist, was quizzed about the cashing in of insurance and pension policies.

The Cleveland Police investigation was gathering pace and more and more evidence was emerging by the day.

But each time fresh information was put to Mrs Darwin, she changed her story to fit the circumstances, the jury heard.

When her husband initially turned up in London on December 1, she said she was shocked, but delighted by the news.

When the now-infamous photograph of them together in Panama was published, she apparently changed her account.

She is said to have claimed her husband returned to their home a year after his accident at sea when she thought he had died.

But evidence was then uncovered of him taking out library membership in Seaton Carew just a month after his faked death.

Mrs Darwin is said to have then began using the defence of "marital coercion" - that she was forced against her will to go along with the fraud.

Andrew Robertson, QC, prosecuting, told the jury that Mrs Darwin was able to lie and "turn on the tears" to minimise her involvement.

He said she stuck to her original story that her husband turned up out of the blue - even though police had evidence to shatter the lie.

Mr Robertson said the Panama photograph "destroyed that story" and suggested Mrs Darwin should have told the truth then.

"You might have thought, members of the jury, that at that stage, particularly if it was true that this had all happened against her will, that she would have come clean.

"But what she decided to do was accommodate that photograph in an amended version of the lie. She still told the lie, but changed it so the photograph would fit in.

"She insisted that she had genuinely believed that he had drowned, and had continued to believe he was dead when she genuinely began making claims on the insurance companies.

"She would have the police believe that at that stage she had been behaving perfectly honestly.

"She now admits that that's a total lie, but this was her first attempt - when she is caught out by that photograph - to play down her own responsibility.

"But then, because of the photograph, she said that, after she had begun to honestly make these claims, he had suddenly turned up out of the blue on her doorstep in February 2003.

"This was a version she persisted in throughout seven interviews with Cleveland Police. They lasted some four-and-a-half hours in December last year."

During interviews in January, the library card evidence was put to Mrs Darwin which proved her husband was back at home by April 22 at the latest - a month after he vanished.

The jury was told that Mrs Darwin "stuck to her guns" and maintained her story, but in the next interview accepted for the first time that she knew about the plot from the start.

In what appears to have been the breakthrough interview on January 8, Mrs Darwin admitted picking up her husband on the night he supposedly drowned and driving him away.

The jury has already heard that he says he spent several weeks living under canvas in the Lake District before returning to Seaton Carew when the fuss died down.

In her interview, Mrs Darwin admitted she took him to Durham railway station so he could get away from the area, and that she was to make claims on his insurance policies.

She was asked: "So, as part of the grand plan, was that left for you to do?"

She replied: "Yes."

The police officer asked her: "That was your role in all this?"

She replied: "Yes."

The jury heard that Mrs Darwin had earlier told police she wanted to bring an end to the scam - but was stopped from doing so by her husband.

In an interview on December 10, she claimed Mr Darwin returned 11 months after his disappearance after she had started making genuine claims on the policies.

"Initially, the insurance claims were made when I truly and honestly believed that John had died," she said.

"A long time had elapsed since his disappearance and I started to make claims I thought I was entitled to make.

"I honestly can't remember when exactly I started making the claims because so much was going on."

Mr Darwin returned to their home at The Cliff, Seaton Carew, around February 2003, she told the police, and expected the claims to be sorted.

She went on: "I told him you have to tell people you are back' but he would not let me do it. I told him I didn't like to lie."

Mr Robertson told the jury: "This was all lies, in our submission, to the police... this is nonsense, on her own account now."

10:09am Thursday 17th July 2008

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