Accused weeps as neighbour describes body find

Pauline Dye, who lives next door to Melsonby Post Office near Richmond, told Teesside Crown Court she had been taken to the upstairs bedroom by Robin Garbutt after he knocked on her door saying his wife Diana had been “attacked or hurt” on the morning of March 23 last year.

Once there she saw Mrs Garbutt lying face down on the bed with her head on a heavily bloodstained pillow and what appeared to be matted blood on the back of her head.

“I just stood and looked. I didn’t know what to do,” she told the jury as Garbutt wiped tears from his eyes across the court.

She touched Mrs Garbutt on the leg “because Robin said ‘she’s warm’”. Mrs Dye said she rubbed the leg and it felt “slightly warm”.

“I thought we should keep her warm because I didn’t know what else to do. I lifted the corner of the duvet up and tried to put it over her but Di was too far on that side of the bed to move it.”

She said it was at that point Garbutt said: “Where are they, where are they? They should be here by now” and she realised the emergency services were on the way.

She thought the phone had rung and Garbutt began talking on it. Later under cross-examination by Jamie Hill QC, defending Garbutt, she was told it had in fact been off the hook with the operator on the other end since he had rung 999.

Mrs Dye said the person on the other end of the line was obviously asking about a pulse and they were told to turn her over.

She went round the other side of the bed but could not do it.

Trial judge Mr Justice Openshaw asked her if that was because she was not strong enough or “because of the scene that presented itself”. The witness replied it was lack of strength.

She said they were both scared what they would see and Robin Garbutt kept saying: “What about her face, what about her face?”

But he suddenly flipped his wife over and climbed across his wife as he tried to find a pulse in her neck.

She told David Hatton QC, prosecuting: “She was all blue, right across the chest.”

Mrs Dye told the court she took hold of Mrs Garbutt’s hand to see if she could find a pulse and it felt “coldish”.

The hand was not flexible and as she was holding it the fingers which were bowed, spread a bit and she could see blood between them. It was then the emergency services arrived.

Garbutt, 45, denies murdering his wife Diana, 40. He told police he was robbed at gunpoint and then found his wife injured upstairs.

The prosecution say the robbery was a sham and that he was his wife’s killer under increasing pressure from debts and her infidelity.

Earlier Mrs Dye told the jury that she had only briefly returned to the house from hanging out washing in the yard shared with the post office when Garbutt knocked and then told her about his wife. She told Mr Hatton she had seen nobody at the back door of the post office or anything suspicious.

Under cross-examination she agreed she regarded the Garbutts as a happy couple. She agreed at one stage she was left alone in the bedroom with the body after paramedics and police left.

Michael Whittaker, advanced emergency medical technician with Yorkshire ambulance, said he and a colleague could see when they arrived that Mrs Garbutt’s skin was “very mottled and appeared to have what we would describe as post mortem staining”.

“To me personally I assumed the lady had been dead for quite some time.”

The trial continues.