Postmaster serving life for wife’s murder ‘was convicted using Horizon evidence’

A former postmaster languishing behind bars for more than a decade for murdering his wife claims he was put there using evidence collected from the faulty Horizon IT system. 

Robin Garbutt, 57, has spent 12 years in prison after being convicted of killing his wife Diana, 40, upstairs at the post office they ran together in the North Yorkshire village of Melsonby in 2011. 

Campaigners fighting for his release insist he is yet another innocent victim of the Horizon scandal, which saw more than 700 postmasters and postmistresses wrongfully convicted. 

They say a key plank of the prosecution case was that Diana was about to discover his theft of thousands of pounds. But if that evidence – said to have been gathered using the defective system – disappears, so does his supposed motive for murdering her. 

In his summing up to the jury, which later convicted Garbutt by a majority of 10 to two a year later at Teesside Crown Court, judge Mr Justice Openshaw said: ‘It is the case for the prosecution that money was being stolen from the Post Office and that the theft was concealed by a series of false declarations as to the amount of money in the safe.’ 

Appeal documents, seen by The Telegraph, show that evidence drawing on the Horizon system was used to demonstrate a ‘pattern of fraud’. 

Garbutt’s supporters also claim some of the Post Office investigators who gave evidence against him have been involved in the unsafe convictions of other sub-postmasters for theft and fraud. 

He has taken his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission three times in the years since seeking a retrial. 

But his latest application was refused in November 2022 when the watchdog concluded ‘figures from the Horizon system were not essential to his conviction for murder’.  

Leading academic expert on miscarriages of justice Dr Michael Naughton, who founded Empowering the Innocent and has studied the case, told the newspaper: ‘The prosecution used the Horizon evidence to support its claim that the motive for the murder was that Robin Garbutt was stealing money from the Post Office side of the business and he needed to kill his wife to cover it up. 

‘Horizon was used to show he was defrauding the Post Office. 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.’ 

Garbutt phoned 999 on March 23, 2010, after apparently discovering Diana’s bloodied body in the post office’s living quarters. She was killed by three heavy blows to the head with a rusty iron bar. 

He claims the same balaclava-clad intruder who held him up and forced him to hand over £16,000 from the safe moments earlier was responsible. 

Edward Abel Smith, an author writing a book about the case, told the Telegraph: ‘They used Horizon data to build a picture which showed Robin had been stealing from the Post Office for some time and was now using the robbery to cover up the missing money.’ 

Despite the brutality of the murder, there was no forensic evidence tying Garbutt to the crime scene. No blood spatter was found on his clothes and none of his DNA was recovered from either the pillowcase or the iron bar which was found on top of a wall across the road two days later. 

Evidence relating to Diana’s time of death is also hugely contested. 

Jurors were told she died between 2.30am and 4.30am – long before the post office’s central locking system allowed the safe to be opened, at 8.30am.  

The assertion seemingly blew a huge hole in Garbutt’s claims of a robbery gone wrong. 

But the expert instructed by his legal team subsequently concluded the time of death may have been much later than 4.30am – possibly even after 6.45am. 

The revelation indicates it would have been almost impossible for Garbutt to have carried out the murder because the till roll shows a stream of customers from 5.15am through to around 8.30am that morning.  

Many of those gave evidence at the trial and all recalled Garbutt seeming his normal self. 

In a statement refusing to refer Garbutt’s case for retrial, the CCRC said in November 2022: ‘Much of Mr Garbutt’s application to the CCRC focused on the Post Office Horizon scandal, which has led to a number of fraud and theft convictions of former Post Office workers being overturned, 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.  

‘Other issues concerning scientific evidence were also considered, and the CCRC has now made a final decision not to refer his case for an appeal.’ 

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