Video: Shopkeeper gets life for brutal murder of his unfaithful wife

Robin Garbutt struck his wife Diana, 40, three times with an iron bar, smashing her skull in a bedroom above the post office and shop they ran in Melsonby, near Richmond, on March 23 last year.

The 45-year-old shook his head slightly but otherwise appeared emotionless as a jury at Teesside Crown Court yesterday found him guilty of her murder by a 10-2 majority after deliberating for more than 12 hours over three days.

One of his sisters sobbed in the public gallery.

Ordering him to serve a minimum of 20 years in prison, trial judge Mr Justice Openshaw said Garbutt had stuck to the same “ludicrous story” from beginning to end that she had been killed by an armed robber.

He said Garbutt had not shown the slightest regret or remorse. “He has always accompanied his lies with sanctimonious protests of his love for her. By their verdict the jury has exposed this as pure humbug. This was a brutal, planned, cold blooded murder of his wife as she lay asleep in bed.”

The four-week trial heard Mrs Garbutt had been increasingly unfaithful to her husband and would regularly go on internet dating sites late at night.

The judge said it was plain from the evidence that “there were tensions in this marriage not apparent to their friends in the village”.

Despite Garbutt’s denials it emerged the shop was trading at a loss and the couple had extensive debts “only keeping afloat by unexplained injections of cash” made by Garbutt personally.

The judge said he was satisfied that cash came from Garbutt stealing from the post office safe and the motive for the murder was his fear of exposure.

It was Garbutt who was running the business and he did not accept that Mrs Garbutt would have gone along with the fraud had she found the safe empty.

He said Garbutt’s evidence that his wife had counted the money in the safe in the week leading to her death in an “attempt to implicate her” was one of his more unattractive lies.

A crisis was looming because they were due to go on holiday to America and a relief postmistress was coming in who would count the money in the safe “which had not been independently checked for a couple of years”.

She would have found there was nothing like the £16,000 there recorded by Garbutt. He knew he would be exposed, face prosecution, imprisonment and disgrace.

The judge said it might have been significant that Mrs Garbutt had taken the business books upstairs on the night before her death to prepare the accounts at the end of the tax year “but I must avoid straying into speculation”.

Garbutt waited until his wife was asleep “and in the early hours of the morning crept silently into her bedroom”, said Mr Justice Openshaw. “There was no struggle, she never awoke. He struck three savage blows with the bar smashing her skull.”

The shopkeeper then dumped the bar on the wall of a garage across the road and as his wife’s body lay in bed developing rigor mortis “he acted a charade, feigning cheerfulness in an attempt to deceive customers”.

At 8.35am he locked the shop before making a 999 call pretending he had been robbed and his wife murdered by the intruder.

North Yorkshire Police said it would carry out a review to see where lessons could be learned after Garbutt’s defence team likened its investigation to a “comedy of errors”.

A police officer’s DNA was found on the murder weapon and a clump of hair found on Mrs Garbutt’s blood-spattered pillow was lost before it could be analysed.