Canoe conman John Darwin’s Filipino wife has posted a series of cringey pictures to mark the couple’s ninth wedding anniversary.
The images show Darwin, 73 and his second wife Mercy Mae Darwin staring romantically into each other’s eyes while in another he is holding a bouquet of flowers and touching noses with her with the words ‘Happy Anniversary’ written.
The gushing pictures were posted on social media by Mercy, who is 23 years his junior. Another showed the couple standing in front of a church on what appears to be their wedding day while one shows their wedding rings, with their names written inside them, lying side by side.
This is not the first time the notorious fraudster, who faked his own death to cash in on his life insurance policy, has made an appearance on Mercy’s social media pages as she increasingly uses his controversial background to boost her own profile.
Mercy, 50 describes herself as a ‘digital creator’ and lives with Darwin in her hometown of Antipolo, about an hour’s drive from Manila where they own a £30,000 three-storey house with grilled windows in the relatively affluent gated community of Louiseville.
Darwin made a new life in the Philippines with mother-of-three Mercy after his release from prison in 2011 over his £679,000 life insurance scam.
He initially met Mercy online before moving to the country to set up a new life with her.
Since then, he has featured prominently in a number of her social media posts which have generated thousands of likes and followers.
Last year, he was filmed performing cringey dance moves to celebrate Mercy’s 50th birthday in a Manila restaurant.
One vlog showed denim hotpants-clad Mercy, serenading father-of-two John and dancing around him in what appears to be the living room of their home in the Philippines.
Another featured the couple with a rubber bottle pressed between their heads as they laugh and smile while a jolly tune plays in the background.
Darwin was a prison offer who was heavily in debt when he staged an accident and faked his own drowning in the sea near Hartlepool in 2002 to get his hands on a life insurance payout.
His ex-wife Anne lied to their two sons and said Darwin was dead while he hid in a bedsit next door and listened through a partition in the wall as Anne’s two sons comforted their bereaved mother.
The couple later moved to Panama and bought property with the cash. But they also hit a hitch when it turned out he would need to pass strict identity checks to obtain a visa in Panama, leading Darwin to return to the UK.
He famously turned up at West End Central police station in London in December 2007 claiming to be suffering from amnesia.
But once in England, the scam began to unravel. Police discovered that John had faked his own death by paddling out into the North Sea in his canoe and then disappearing.
He was declared missing when he failed to turn up at his prison job and – as his body was never found but the wreckage of his canoe did turn up – he was presumed dead.
The truth was that for years John had been hiding out in a rented property next door to the family home in Seaton Carew, County Durham before the couple fled to Central America.
He and Anne were nailed by a photo showing them together in Panama.
They were both jailed for six years for fraud in 2008 as the extent of their deception shocked the world. They later divorced.
Speaking to MailOnline in 2022, Mercy Mae Darwin said: ‘My husband is happy and healthy and I’m looking after him. We don’t want his past life all dredged up again on TV and in newspapers. ‘I know what he did, he knows, and he paid penalty for that, he doesn’t need to be reminded.’
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Vivek Chaudhary
