‘Canoe Man’ writes a memoir

John Darwin, the so-called 'Canoe Man' who faked his own death at sea in order to escape debt, has written a memoir, which he smuggled out of jail in defiance of prison rules.

In December 2007, five years after he 'disappeared' near his home in Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool, Darwin walked into a police station in London where he at first claimed to have lost his memory. However, his story soon fell apart and it emerged in court that he had committed his insurance fraud with the complicity of his wife Anne. Darwin, it was revealed, first lived in a bedsit next to his old home and, after he obtained a passport in a different name, began travelling overseas. The couple had planned a new life together in Panama with the insurance payout for his death.

Now, in his hand-written memoir complete with sketched cover design, Darwin claims he only considered the scam as an alternative to actually committing suicide. He had planned to kill himself because he saw "no way out" of a spiral of debt after he overextended himself financially with his "mini rental empire" of ten houses. But, he claims, he couldn't bear to hurt his wife and so settled on doing a 'Reggie Perrin'.

The Darwins' sons, Mark and Anthony disowned them after it emerged they had wrongly thought their father dead for five years. In the transcript, Darwin provides his justification for not telling them: he didn’t want them to be accomplices to his crime.

The Sun's publication of the memoirs has provoked anger over the methods Darwin used to smuggle his notes out, against prison rules. An accomplice whom he had met in jail and who was subsequently released, Alan Caramanica, set up a bogus legal firm and the text was sent out in letters - prison authorities are not allowed to open correspondence between a prisoner and his legal team.

Darwin told Caramanica that he hoped to make £1m from publication and excerpts have appeared in the Sun newspaper, which is at pains to point out that it has not paid anything to Darwin. The newspaper does not say if it made any payment to Caramanica. ·