(AFP) – Dec 7, 2007

LONDON (AFP) — "Back-from-the-dead" Briton John Darwin was charged with fraud on Saturday, police said, a week after he resurfaced claiming amnesia after vanishing five years ago.

Cleveland Police in Kirkleatham, north-east England, where the 57-year-old has been questioned, made the decision hours before a deadline for them to either charge or release the man whose case has sparked worldwide interest.

Meanwhile his wife Anne Darwin, 55, said she went along with his faked death to escape huge debts, and lived with him in secret for years, in a confession carried in two British newspapers.

Prosecutors authorised detectives to charge John Darwin with "offences of obtaining a money transfer by deception and making an untrue statement... to procure a passport," Cleveland Police Detective Sergeant Iain Henderson told reporters.

Darwin was "fit and well" in custody and police would apply to court to continue to hold him, he said.

Henderson appealed for Anne Darwin to get in touch "at the earliest opportunity.

"Cleveland Police will be making enquiries to trace her and speak to her regarding the investigation," he said.

She is believed to be in Miami en route home from Panama, where she confessed she had been living for the past few months with her husband.

She said the couple got caught up in a tangle of lies which finally unravelled last week when he walked into a London police station.

"For three years, while virtually everyone close to us believed John was missing, presumed dead, he was actually at home with me," Anne Darwin said in the interview published in the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror tabloids.

"I know it seems too incredible to be true, but it is," she added.

Darwin was presumed dead after disappearing in an apparent canoeing accident in March 2002 near their home in Seaton Carew, north-eastern England.

But he reappeared last weekend, telling police officers that he could remember nothing of the last seven years, and believed himself to be a missing person.

His wife was tracked down to Panama City and initially claimed shock at his reappearance, before being confronted with a photograph of the couple from last year which had emerged.

Recounting how the extraordinary tale started, she said the couple had about 12 houses as rental investments and began to run up debts of tens of thousands of pounds.

Her husband told her faking his own death was the only way out -- and on March 22, 2002, he took his canoe out to sea and did not return, though the canoe washed up weeks later.

But she insisted she did not think his disappearance was fake, because they had not spoken about his plans for some time. "I really thought that he was dead," she said.

Then in February 2003, he returned, looking dishevelled.

He moved back in, hiding in the adjoining bedsit they owned when their grieving sons visited. When going outdoors he used a woolly hat, upturned collar, walking stick and limp to disguise himself.

He successfully applied for a passport in the name of John Jones.

At one point the couple travelled to Cyprus with a view to moving there, before turning to Panama City, where they bought an apartment for 97,000 dollars in April this year.

But when he had to return to Britain as his visa was running out, he told his wife he was going to re-emerge and claim amnesia.

"I didn't think he would get away with it, but he had had enough of being dead," she said.

But her husband's account differs according to regional newspaper The Northern Echo, which said he has told police she had cashed in his insurance policy before his return, well before her version.

Darwin's aunt Margaret Burns, 80, said Saturday of the case: "It's beyond satire. You couldn't make it up."

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