Robin Garbutt, the postmaster who lived above the village shop with his wife, Diana, was a popular figure in Melsonby, North Yorkshire. The last time I saw him, I was six years old, bouncing on the trampoline in my grandparents’ garden. Robin had travelled to visit the village where he’d grown up to see his mother, and had stopped by to ask my grandfather for tips on growing vegetables. A few weeks later, his face was plastered across the newspapers: Garbutt had been arrested for killing his wife.
A year later, in 2011, Garbutt was convicted of murder: sentenced to life in prison, the 58-year-old remains behind bars. But is he guilty? Garbutt has always maintained his innocence and says that the Post Office’s faulty Horizon computer system was used to frame him. The family of his wife aren’t convinced: Diana’s mother says it was ‘obvious to anyone that Robin is taking advantage of the Horizon scandal to gain publicity’.
What is not in doubt is that, on the morning of 23 March 2010, Mrs Garbutt was bludgeoned three times over the head with a metal bar as she slept in the couple’s bedroom. Garbutt says an armed robber demanded he hand over cash, claiming they had his wife captive. He told police that, when the burglar fled, he rushed upstairs to find his wife lying face down on the bed. She was dead. After Robin called 999, he was initially considered a significant witness by the police. The Post Office had been robbed the previous year and the perpetrators had left with £10,000 but had never been caught. But within weeks of Garbutt’s murder, police had discounted the theory of a robbery. Instead, Robin became the prime suspect.
When the case came to trial at Teesside Crown Court, the jury delivered a majority verdict of 10-2 to find him guilty. The prosecution relied on the testimony of the Post Office, then considered a highly-respected institution, to suggest that Robin had been stealing from the Melsonby branch for months and may have used the robbery to cover up for his crime. The Post Office’s internal investigator who spoke at the trial described a pattern of suspicious cash declarations. ‘I have seen (this) replicated across many Post Office Limited fraud cases in the past,’ he said. With hindsight, and following the emergence of the Horizon Post Office scandal, might there have been a different explanation for this pattern of irregularities?
There are other unsettling elements in the case. Conflicting accounts emerged about when Mrs Garbutt had died. It was also suggested that there were no sightings of the burglars in the village, but a car was witnessed driving erratically around Melsonby on the day of the murder. A clump of hair, not appearing to match either Robin’s or Diana’s, was photographed at the crime scene. The murder weapon, a rusty metal bar, found on a wall nearby, had Diana’s DNA and the DNA of an unknown person, later matched to a police investigator, but not Robin’s.
There are other unsettling elements in the case
Robin’s lawyers want a retrial; yet for now, he remains locked up after. Whether or not the evidence presented by the Horizon system secured the guilty verdict, only the jury will know. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has previously said there was ‘no possibility’ judges would overturn his conviction as ‘figures from the Horizon system were not essential to his conviction for murder.’
But the allegations that Robin had been on the fiddle would hardly have helped convince a jury of his innocence. As the University of Bristol academic Dr Michael Naughton of CCRC Watch said: ‘I don’t know if Robin Garbutt did or did not kill his wife, but I do know that the evidence that led to his conviction is no longer reliable and every aspect has been discredited.’
Was Robin given a fair and just trial? What is certainly clear is that clouds of doubt linger over the case and, in the light of the Horizon scandal, there are unanswered questions about what unfolded on that fateful night. Only Robin, and perhaps the alleged burglar, knows the truth.
Comments