Robin Garbutt is serving life in prison for murdering his wife, but is he innocent? His supporters say so. They insist that evidence from the Horizon IT system and the Post Office which helped convict him of the killing of Diana in 2010 was flawed. Garbutt, they claim, is another victim of the Post Office scandal which saw hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted. Diana’s mother is sceptical and has said she believes her son-in-law is guilty. Garbutt, she said, was ‘jumping on the Horizon bandwagon’.
The jury saw through Garbutt’s story
It’s right to treat Garbutt’s appeal with scepticism. Every year, many men are convicted of murdering their partners. The most common culprit when a murder victim is female is a partner or ex-partner. There were 100 domestic homicides last year: seven in ten victims of domestic homicide were women. It seems likely that Diana is another statistic in this tragic catalogue of women whose lives were ended at the hands of their partner.
Police suspected Garbutt from the beginning. The 58-year-old claimed his wife had been murdered by an armed intruder while he was unlocking the safe, in readiness for opening the post office in the village of Melsonby in North Yorkshire. He claimed a masked man carrying a gun had come into his shop, told him: ‘I’ve got your wife’, and demanded cash. Garbutt told police he handed over £16,000 and, when the burglar had gone, went upstairs where he found his wife dead. He said at the time: ‘Di was my life and I am lost without her.’
Detectives didn’t believe him. The story didn’t quite ring true and, when they looked into it further, it appeared he had been stealing from the post office. They also discovered that all was not quite as it seemed within the happy marriage Garbutt claimed to have had. Diana had kissed and flirted with other men, had a profile on a dating website – and was unhappy with their sex life. This would not be the first time that a husband, overcome by jealousy, had killed his wife.
The jury also saw through Garbutt’s story. Now, 13 years into a minimum 20-year sentence – and following a failed appeal and three subsequent attempts to persuade the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to reopen the case – Garbutt is making another bid for freedom.
Former Post Office Minister Kevin Hollinrake is backing a fresh review of the case. ‘I can’t speculate whether Robin Garbutt is guilty or innocent, but I think we all want to make sure that people when they go through the justice system get a fair hearing,’ he told the BBC.
Garbutt is hoping that the public outcry that followed the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office could lead to his conviction being overturned. Horizon can be blamed for inflicting dreadful pain and trauma on countless individuals. Let’s hope it does not also bring about another dreadful miscarriage of justice by being the reason a murderer walks free.
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