A modern mystery

"I knew the day that John had gone missing that he had gone missing. And that he'd planned it ... He'd asked me to pick him up in the car park ... " This is Anne Darwin confessing to police that she had helped her husband plan his death. What struck me was that she doesn't sound very sure, does she? The statement is repetitive, and there's a hedgy verbosity, as if she doesn't want to commit herself because she hasn't decided how much she will admit to.

Even though I don't think scamming an insurance company is the worst thing a couple could do, and even though I think they both received incredibly long sentences, all things considered, and even though I am not a judgmental person - about criminality, anyway - I did allow myself this (quite long) thought: Love, you have had five years to think about this. You had time to make a labyrinth of your house, to rebuild your marriage after the inevitable changes wrought by his disguise-beard, you got your act together to claim and disperse the insurance money, to accept flowers, to fake mourning, to dance an intricate tarantella of deceit in front of everybody you have ever met, to get to Panama, to meet a reputable Panamanian estate agent, to figure out how to upload photos on to the internet . . . You worked out all these things and yet when you started making a statement to police, the one statement that would be recorded and pored over by more professional lie detectors than any other you've ever uttered, you hadn't worked out exactly what you were going to say? What is that about

It's almost impossible, in a crime perpetrated by a couple, to avoid the temptation to cast them in their different roles: she was the brains, and he was the muscle. Or he was the psycho and she was his victim. Or she was unhinged and he was browbeaten. You get the picture. You hear these narratives about every criminal duo from Bonnie and Clyde to Fred and Rosemary West, and yet this does not equip us at all to deal with two people who were equally, inexplicably engaged in devoting a vast portion of their time and energy into defrauding an insurance company out of not that much money.

Now, £250,000 would be a lot of money if it was in my trousers. But if you set it against never seeing your sons again or your friends, never being able to cash in on any of the foundations on which you have built the past four decades? Come on, even if you were on a pretty low wage, £250K to go underground and creep around corridors would not be an enormously good deal.

Besides, Darwin was not on a low wage, or if he occasionally was, he certainly hadn't reconciled himself to that. He had, before he reached the scamster section of his portfolio career, been a teacher, a property developer, a prison officer and a bungler. He had bought houses on a credit card - here's a man who will be glad to have been put away before the recession hit - and tried to make a living from making garden gnomes and breeding snails. When he and his wife were looking for a property in Panama, it was partly to start a holiday centre for canoeists. With that command of dramatic irony, a career in scriptwriting Family Affairs can only have been round the corner. Never mind his time, how can he have put such a low price on his experience?

So, to recap - there's a woman who seems to have thought about absolutely everything, to the finest degree, apart from what she is prepared to admit to the police, at the point when all her forward planning might actually matter. And a man who is prepared to throw away absolutely everything - fatherhood, fellowship, expertise, ambition, possibilities it would be impossible to put a price on - for less than their house was worth. No sense of reason or proportion moors these two - all that holds them together, apparently, is their relationship. Aha! But with her back to the wall, Anne insists that she did everything as the victim of tremendous emotional bullying, which would be really sad except it's manifestly untrue. That chick capering about Panama with her big ironic canoeing dreams was not the victim of an emotional bully. Even if that were a legal defence, which I don't believe it is.

The weird thing is, whatever else may or may not have gone wrong with this marriage - trust issues and all that - they appear to have had a very good sex life, by which I mean that they actually had a sex life, having been together since their late teens. John Darwin, from his Panama hideaway, was sending emails like this one: "Well you sexy beast. I am standing on the balcony in the nudy, typing this to you. Just hope the mosquitoes or other bugs don't bite, or at least not in a certain place. Don't want it all lumpy lol."

I've got to say, if he wants advice on sexy emailing, my advice would be to really strip back extraneous detail, like "or other bugs ..."

But never mind all that. This flame of undying passion is the only thing that comes even part way to explaining their callous behaviour towards their sons. Maybe the offspring never truly interceded into this marriage. Maybe the kids were always supplementary to the main event. Maybe you other people, instead of complaining about how your parents bicker the whole time, should be pleased. At least it puts you right in the centre of their lives, and they won't be screwing you over for an insurance claim somewhere down the line.

But let's suppose they are both mad, or possessed by greed. There is yet more inexplicability to come. Detective Inspector Andy Greenwood admitted that the "story was bigger than the crime", and yet said the force was "obviously really pleased" with the sentences, which were swingeing. John Darwin got six years and three months; Anne, six and a half years. James Taylor, who raped a baby of 13 months and filmed himself on his phone, was given five years; Simon Snow, who killed a 23-year-old in a drink-driving incident, got 12 months. I could carry on all day; it would be slightly misleading, since these cases have only stayed in the news because the sentences were appealed for undue leniency. But still, new rape sentencing guidelines seek to differentiate between violated adults and children by advocating a minimum of five years to child rapists. In other words, you get six years for pretending to be dead, but five years is at the top end of rape sentencing and judges have to be badgered into it.

"Theirs is not a victimless crime," said Greenwood. "You have to take into account the other aspects of the story. How could they put their sons through the turmoil?" Come on. This is back to front, and Greenwood knows it. "Turmoil" my monkey! Look up turmoil in the Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents, pal - you will not find it.

We come back to the story - the story was bigger than the crime. The idea was bigger than the cash. The deception was far greater than any of it was worth. It is totally nuts, in other words, a totally nutty foray into profitless criminality.

It is the kind of scam you would make up in a pub, when you were drunk, from whose inevitable pitfalls you would be saved by your ginormous hangover.

I think this is a middle-aged crime. The young would be too chary of surveillance, and too alive to the larger prizes they could claim, putting this much effort to better use in a million other crimes that are simply better. But that doesn't help that much, does it? There is still a whole host of middle-aged people not committing fraud on this scale, or indeed, at all.

In the end, we are left looking at a couple who are really, really strange.