'Canoe man took dead baby's name'

2:01am Wednesday 12th December 2007

'DROWNED' man John Darwin used the name of a dead baby to obtain a false passport, it has been claimed.

Mr Darwin, 57, walked into a London police station just over a week ago and declared "I think I am a missing person", five years after disappearing while on a canoeing trip off the coast of Seaton Carew, Teesside.

It led to allegations that Mr Darwin and his wife, Anne, had faked his death in order to benefit from life insurance policies and begin a new life in Panama.

On Monday, Mr Darwin appeared in court charged with two counts of deception, one of which relates to making an untrue statement to obtain a passport.

His wife, who was in Panama when the story broke, returned to the North-East on Sunday afternoon after being arrested when she got off a flight from the US, after it touched down in Manchester.

Like her husband, she too was charged with two offences of deception and appeared in the same court yesterday.

It has been alleged that Mr Darwin was able to move freely between England and Panama, as well as other areas of the world, because he used a fake passport.

In a dramatic twist, today's Daily Mirror newspaper claims that Mr Darwin used the name of a month-old Wearside boy, who died around the time Mr Darwin was born.

The newspaper claims that Mr Darwin scoured graveyards and records in North-East newspapers for a suitable candidate.

According to police sources, he eventually came across John Jones, a baby born five months before the birth of Mr Darwin.

Armed with the name, it is alleged, he was then able to get his hands on a copy of the child's birth certificate.

Sporting a long beard, it is alleged that, armed with that information, he was then able to get a passport.

The newspaper alleges that Mr Darwin was able to use the document to travel to Gibraltar and Spain in 2005 with a view to buying a boat, and then last year on trips to Panama and Costa Rica.

John Jones was born on March 27, 1950, according to the report, at the home of his grandmother. He died five weeks later from enteritis at Sunderland's Hospital for Infectious Diseases.

He was buried in Sunderland's main cemetery.

The baby's sister, Frieda Woods, 55, told the paper: "It's terrible to think that this man may have used my brother's name in his scheme.

"I feel terrible. It's such a shock. When I heard Darwin was using the name John Jones, I did think 'that's my brother's name'.

"But I never thought Darwin could have stolen it from him."

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