A year on . . . canoe believe it?

WITH three decades of police service and hundreds of major inquiries behind him, Tony Hutchinson thought he had seen it all.

The most senior detective in Cleveland Police had just months left in the job before retirement and was, effectively, winding down.

He had worked on more than 60 homicide inquiries in 30 years, and been the senior investigating officer in about 40 of those.

Yet nothing could have prepared Detective Superintendent Hutchinson for the whirlwind he was to be caught up in last December.

A man who was presumed to have drowned at sea in a kayaking accident off Hartlepool fiveand- a-half years earlier had suddenly reappeared.

John Darwin’s introduction to a desk sergeant at a London police station is now the stuff of legend: “I think I’m a missing person.”

He went on to give a far-fetched account of his missing years and memory loss before being reunited with his astonished sons.

The grown-up boys called their mother – who had emigrated to Panama only weeks earlier – to tell them their father was alive.

She was said to be thrilled at the news, but revealed she had no immediate plans to give up her new life and return to the UK.

Mr Hutchinson expected media interest in the story of the backfrom- the-dead canoeist – but the sheer scale of it shocked him.

The tale took an astonishing twist when a photograph emerged of Darwin and his wife, Anne, in Panama when he was meant to be dead.

“The story became front-page news for a week,” recalls Mr Hutchinson. “It was the lead item on the television news for a week as well.

“It was only knocked off the top slot on the Friday when the jockey, Kieren Fallon, was cleared of race-fixing allegations.

“It was a huge global story, but we never appreciated just how big it was going to be. I guess something like this doesn’t come along every day.

“The story simply captured the imagination of the public and they just couldn’t get enough of it.

“People were talking about it the length and breadth of the country, and it was a major story beyond the UK too.

“I remember getting a text from someone saying they woke up in their hotel room in Bahrain and saw it on the TV.

“I was getting emails and text messages from people I knew in Australia and America . . . it was just unbelievable.”

Mr Hutchinson looks back on his last job as head of the force’s murder investigation team with a smile on his face.

More used to having to deal with killers and the devastated families of victims, as well as complex inquiries, this was different.

“The nature of it was such that we were not dealing with someone’s loss, so that was a bonus as my last major inquiry,” he says.

“And the inquiry itself was different from a police point of view, because the media was discovering stuff even before we were.

“It wasn’t a difficult investigation, it was really just a case of following the evidence and there was a huge amount of help from the media. It was a tabloid headline- writer’s dream . . . some of them will be remembered for a long time to come.

“When the photo of John and Anne emerged, the headline they used was ‘Canoe’s this in Panama?’.

When the secret door in the house was discovered, it was ‘The liar, the witch and the wardrobe’.

“One of the funniest things was the sign in Seaton Carew that was changed to ‘Seaton Canoe – twinned with Panama’.”

For Mr Hutchinson – the media face of the investigation – the story is still talked about wherever he goes in the country.

He now works in investigative training and is still heavily involved in dealing with honourbased violence and forced marriage.

Last year, he set up the first dedicated helpline in the country on Teesside called Choice, which this week will be introduced in Durham and Northumbria.

Last year’s Woman of the Year, Jasvinder Sanghera, who set up forced marriage refuge, Karma Nirvana, is also working with him.

Mr Hutchinson is hoping to develop an office in the North-East as his life after the Darwins continues to evolve.