A new form of Darwinian low life - or the origin of specious?

Prison officers were angry this week when ex-prison officer John Darwin flouted rule 39 by smuggling his memoires out of Everthorpe prison. The fifty-nine year old conman faked his own death in a ‘canoeing accident’ in 2002, which lead to £150,000 being wasted by the emergency services in searching for him. He conned £250,000 out of an insurance company and ‘disappeared’ to Panama. The most dreadful aspect of this case was the way Darwin and his wife Anne (an ex-convent school girl) callously conned their grieving sons into thinking he was dead.
Now this rogue is hoping to make £1 million from the book of his escapades.
Darwin was able to smuggle his manuscript out of jail by using a bogus legal firm set up by a fellow conman he met in Durham Jail.
Darwin would have known that under rule 39 prison officers are not allowed to open correspondence between prisoners and their legal advisers, unless there are ‘special circumstances’.
Rule 39 needs to be reviewed if people like Darwin can blatantly abuse the system for profit, and other suspect activities.
It is left to be seen which publication agrees to pay the £1m this slippery individual is demanding for his ‘memoires’.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6799663.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/aug/17/canoe-man-john-darwin-memoir
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2591154/Canoe-Mans-1m-jail-plot-to-sell-his-story.html