A post office owner has claimed the Horizon IT system used to wrongly jail postmasters was used to frame him for his wife’s murder.
The Horizon scandal saw more than 700 subpostmasters and subpostmistresses handed criminal convictions after faulty Fujitsu accounting software made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
Now Robin Garbutt, who is currently serving a life sentence for murdering his wife, is trying to appeal his conviction saying evidence relied on during the trial is faulty.
His wife Diana was bludgeoned to death in the couple’s flat above the post office in North Yorkshire on 23 March 2010. Garbutt has always maintained his innocence, insisting that a man wearing a balaclava and holding a gun forced him to hand over £16,000 in cash saying that he “had” his wife.
Garbutt claimed that he handed over the cash and ran upstairs to find his wife dead. The prosecution claimed that he may have staged the robbery to cover up losses reported on the Horizon accounting system.
Robin Garbutt arrives at Teesside Crown Court, Middlesbrough, for the start of his trial where he is accused of murdering his postmistress wife, Diana— (PA)
They claimed that Garbutt had killed his wife in the early hours of the morning, went on to open up the post office as usual and then called 999 about the robbery. The trial heard that a similar armed robbery had happened to the business a year previously.
A gun and balaclava were also found behind a pub, 30 minutes away from Garbutt’s post office, but this was thought not to be relevant by police.
According to The Guardian, the couple were having marriage troubles, with Diana having relationships with other men. There was also evidence of financial strain that was separate from the post office losses, with the couple in thousands of pounds of debt.
Agnes Gaylor, the mother of murdered postmistress Diana Garbutt, said Robin was trying to take advantage of the Horizon scandal to gain publicity— (PA)
Garbutt spoke to The Guardian from jail, saying that he had watched the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office that has sparked nationwide outrage at the treatment of the subpostmasters.
He said that while his case was different “the way the Post Office dealt with me was the same way that they dealt with the other people”.
He claimed that data from the Horizon IT system “was used in court to make me look bad” and that the system had “lots of problems”.
Applications to appeal his conviction have previously been rejected but Garbutt claims to have new financial records that dispute evidence presented by Post Office experts to the trial.
However, Diana’s mother, Agnes Gaylor, said that Garbutt was just “taking advantage” of the Horizon scandal to “gain publicity”.
