Anne Darwin insisted she did not know he had gone ahead with the scam until he turned up on her doorstep 11 months after he went missing after canoeing. She claimed he threatened to say she was involved from the start if she reported him to the authorities.

"We had a lot of debt, in the tens of thousands. He said there was only one way out of the situation and that was to fake his death," she said.

John Darwin, who walked into a London police station on December 1st, claiming not to remember anything about the past five years, was questioned on suspicion of fraud. The couple's sons, who have both left their jobs recently, issued a joint statement in which they said they had been the victims of a "large scam". "In the short space of time following our dad's appearance on Saturday, we have gone through a rollercoaster of emotion," they said.