Two British men have told a court of the heartache and betrayal they felt when they realised their mother had for years lied about their father's "death" in a canoeing accident.
The men appeared in British court yesterday to give testimony in the case against their mother, who is accused of fraud stemming from an alleged conspiracy with her husband to claim a life insurance payout.
For four years, Mark and Anthony Darwin, aged 32 and 29, believed their father John had died after apparently vanishing during a canoeing trip off the north-east coast of England in 2002.
Today, their mother Anne - who has not seen her sons since her arrest in December -- wept as her sons told how she had "betrayed" them by playing the grieving widow when she knew their father was alive.
It is alleged Anne and John Darwin staged his disappearance to try to escape a financial crisis by defrauding insurance companies of £250,000 ($NZ658,000).
Mark Darwin said he only realised what had happened when he saw a digitally dated photo of his parents together in Panama taken four years after his father apparently vanished while on a canoeing trip.
"I couldn't believe the fact that she knew he was alive all this time and I had been lied to for God knows how long," he told Teesside Crown Court in north-east England.
He said he felt extremely angry towards his mother when the picture was published in the press last year.
Mark Darwin also told of how his mother had wept as she told him of his father's disappearance.
"She flung her arms around me, she said: 'He's gone, I think. I have lost him,"' he said.
"She wouldn't stop crying for ages." Asked how he felt when he found out what had happened, Anthony Darwin scratched his head and said: "Upset, betrayed, I don't know." Anne dabbed her eyes and blew her nose as her son Mark spoke.
She denies six charges of fraud and nine of money laundering, alleging "marital coercion" -- in other words, that her husband pressured her to go along with the plan.
But prosecutor Andrew Robertson told the court: "It was a totally equal criminal partnership." The case continues tomorrow.
The ruse began to unravel in December, when John Darwin walked into a West End police station in London, claiming he was suffering from amnesia.
But it later emerged that the couple had been living a secret life together in Panama, even buying property there.
