When John Darwin walks into a shop in London, it causes an instant stir. After all, John Darwin has been dead for five years. He claims to have amnesia, but everyone – from the police and the media to his insurance company – suspects he is lying. No one can prove a thing, until a young woman at home with her baby thinks of something everyone else has missed.
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Investigative journalist David Leigh and retired Detective Superintendent Tony Hutchinson wrote The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe: The astonishing true story of Anne Darwin and ‘Canoe Man’ John and their jaw-dropping deception. It became the basis for a four-part ITV drama of the same name, along with a documentary – The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe: The Real Story. David Leigh also worked with Anne Darwin to write her book, Out of My Depth.
The Darwins’ case is given another book-length treatment in Tammy Cohen’s Up The Creek Without a Paddle. This script also relied on contemporary news reporting in a range of outlets including The Times, The Independent, the BBC, the Mirror, The Sun, the Mail and The Standard.
For more on the origins of context collapse, see this post from danah boyd; recent research includes From context adaptation to context restoration: strategies, motivations, and decision rules of managing context collapse on WeChat by Pengxiang Li, Hichang Cho, Cuihua Shen and Hangchen Kong.
