Robin Garbutt is either a cold-blooded killer, rightly languishing in prison for beating his wife to death and then concocting a robbery at their post office to cover it up.
Or else he is the victim of the greatest miscarriage of justice yet committed by the post office’s flawed Horizon IT system.
Garbutt, 57, has spent the last 12 years in prison after being convicted in 2011 of murdering his wife Diana, 40, in their home above the post office they ran together in the pretty North Yorkshire village of Melsonby.
He protests his innocence, claiming that the Post Office provided evidence against him – based on the Horizon IT system – to show that he stole money to finance an extravagant lifestyle.
Without the Post Office’s analysis of the Horizon evidence, Garbutt’s supporters argue, much of the motive for the murder – and how it was staged – also disappears.
Garbutt has taken his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) three times in an attempt to force a retrial.
They have made the decision three times, most recently in November last year, when the CCRC concluded that “figures from the Horizon system were not essential to his murder conviction”.
But the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office has lit a new fire under the Horizon scandal and given Garbutt, his lawyers and supporters renewed hope that his conviction could yet be overturned.
The Crown case (Sir Keir Starmer was then Director of Public Prosecutions, while the village is in Rishi Sunak’s constituency) concerned Garbutt’s murder of his postmistress wife in March 2010 over suspicions that she was a had an affair and feared. that his theft of thousands of pounds of post office money was about to be discovered.
Post Office investigators, who are believed to have been involved in the unsafe convictions of sub-postmasters for fraud and theft, have given evidence against Garbutt.
Mr Justice Openshaw, summing up for the jury at the time, said: “It is the case for the prosecution that money was stolen from the Post Office and that the theft was concealed by a series of false statements as to the amount of money in the safe.”
Appeal documents, seen by The Telegraph, show Horizon data was used to demonstrate a “pattern of fraud”.
Garbutt’s claim that he was robbed at gunpoint and that his wife was beaten to death by a second assailant was rejected by a jury by a 10-2 majority.
‘Evidence that led to conviction is no longer reliable’
But Dr. Michael Naughton, a law scholar at the University of Bristol who runs the campaign website CCRC Watch and has studied the case, said: “The prosecution used the Horizon evidence to support his claim that the motive for the murder was Robin Garbutt stealing money. from the post office side of the business and he had to kill his wife to cover it up.
“Horizon was used to show that he was defrauding the post office. “I don’t know whether or not Robin Garbutt murdered his wife, but I do know that the evidence that led to his conviction is no longer reliable and every aspect has been discredited.”
Mark Stilborn, Garbutt’s brother-in-law, said on Friday: “The prosecutor said there was a deficit that gave him a motive to organize the robbery. They said Diana was doing the bills and she found out and that’s why he killed her.”
But in light of the Horizon scandal, he said the evidence provided by Post Office investigators may never have been presented to the jury — or at least might have been vigorously challenged — eliminating a key motive for the killing.
“I am 100 percent certain that Robin is innocent,” Mr. Stilborn said. “Anyone who knows Robin knows he is innocent. Robin is the nicest person you will ever meet.”
Edward Abel Smith, an author who is writing a book about the case, said: “They used Horizon data to create a photo that showed Robin had been stealing from the post office for some time and was now using the heist to get the missing money to cover up. ”
Campaigners point out that there is no forensic evidence linking Garbutt to the murder weapon – an iron bar found by police on a nearby wall two days after the murder. Evidence about the time of death is also hotly disputed.
The prosecution alleged that Diana was murdered in the middle of the night – instead of at 8:30 am at the time of the robbery – and that her husband then opened the post office as normal and served dozens of customers. But the forensic report giving the time of death is now hotly disputed, with not a single customer served that morning noticing anything strange about his behavior.
For now, Garbutt remains in prison and continues to protest his innocence. He was sentenced to life in prison and had to serve a minimum of 20 years in prison. “He delivered three vicious blows, crushing her skull and causing her instant death, as was clearly his intention,” the judge said, adding: “This was a brutal, planned, cold-blooded murder of his wife while she was in bed was sleeping. ”
Outside court, Agnes Gaylor, Diana’s mother, refused to talk about her son-in-law. “I’m not thinking about Robin right now. After today I won’t let Robin get into my head anymore,” she said at the time.
A November 2022 statement from the CCRC on its refusal to refer the case said: “Much of Mr Garbutt’s application to the CCRC focused on the Post Office Horizon scandal, which led to several convictions for fraud and theft of former post office employees have been quashed. many after referral by the CCRC. The CCRC decided that this argument could not assist Mr Garbutt as figures from the Horizon system were not essential to his conviction for murder.”
But the CCRC itself is under fire. Appeals against the convictions of the hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongfully prosecuted by the Post Office have been slow to process, while the case of Andy Malkinson, wrongly convicted and jailed for rape, has prompted the government to launch an investigation to the handling of his case. by the police, the CPS and the CCRC.
In the summer, Garbutt wrote an open letter to the chairman of the CCRC from his current home in HM Prison Wealstun. “The horror scene” of finding his wife’s bloodied body “will remain with me forever,” he wrote, adding: “By not presenting my case to the Court of Appeal you are doing myself, my poor woman and the safety of others. there’s a killer on the loose. And as long as I’m in prison, that won’t change.”
He may or may not be a victim of the Horizon scandal, but campaigners say only a new trial will reveal the truth.