LONDON, July 16, 2008 (AFP) - A Briton who came back from the dead after a staged canoe accident ignored his wife's pleas for him to confess to officials what had happened, a court trying her on fraud charges was told Wednesday.

Prosecutors allege that Anne Darwin, 56, helped her husband John engineer his disappearance in a bid to escape a financial crisis by defrauding insurance companies of 250,000 pounds (327,000 euros, 510,000 dollars).

Jurors at Teesside Crown Court, northeast England, were read transcripts of Anne Darwin's police interviews in which she said her husband had thought he would only need to be away for a few months after his disappearance in 2002.

In the end, after begging to be allowed back, he moved into a bedsit next to the family home the following year, but nobody knew, except his wife.

'John was very manipulative. From the day he came home, I tried to persuade him to come clean,' she told police. 'He couldn't, he wouldn't and, if I tried, he would say I was in it from the start.'

She added in the police statement: 'I knew it was stupid but, once I set out along the road, it was difficult to turn back.'

Anne Darwin denies six charges of fraud and nine of money laundering, alleging 'marital coercion' -- that her husband pressured her to go along with the plan.