Have I Befriended a Murderer?

Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times. Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today. Edward Abel Smith | Longreads | November 3, 2026 | 5,962 words (21 minutes) On a sunny Saturday morning earlier this year, I was driving my two daughters to the playground through patchy phone signal when a voicemail notification appeared. Pressing play impatiently, an upbeat voice with a north of England accent bellowed through the car’s loudspeaker: “Hi Ed. I’ve just been flicking through The Times, and I’ve seen you’ve been chosen as their book of the week. Bloody well done, my friend! I am super proud.” I was stunned. My book, A Hateful Decision, about Churchill’s attack on the French navy during the Second World War, had just been published. Being named The Times Book of the Week was, without question, the highlight of my writing career. But the way this news was delivered felt profoundly weird. The man who had congratulated me—referring to me as his “friend” with such sincerity—was Robin Garbutt, and he’d called from Wealstun Prison, where he was, and still is, serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife, Diana. She was killed in her bed, beaten so brutally that her face was barely recognizable by the time the police got there. In 2021, I was researching a possible sequel to my first book, a biography of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. While at the National Archives in West London, partly through a filing error and partly through my own boredom, I found myself looking at recent criminal case files rather than the wartime naval intelligence records I had come for. One caught my eye immediately: Diana Garbutt, a woman murdered in the flat above the post office she ran with her husband Robin in the North Yorkshire village of Melsonby. The only available document for her murder was the judge’s summing up, and it was damning. Robin had called the emergency services on the morning of March 23, 2010, saying their post office had been robbed at gunpoint. After the perpetrators left, he claimed he had run upstairs to find Diana dead. But no one in the village had seen any evidence of the robbery, even though it was a busy morning. The paramedics who first attended Diana noted that she had rigor mortis—a sign she had died many hours before Robin claimed the robbery took place. It appeared Robin had invented the robbery to cover his own murderous tracks. The descriptions of the wounds she had sustained in her final moments of life were horrific. As I read on, I felt nothing but contempt for her husband. The judge made it clear to the jury that he believed Robin to be a killer. Ten of the 12 jurors agreed, and Robin was found guilty by a majority verdict. When I got home from the archives, I looked up the case online, curious to know what had become of Robin. There was a strange sense of relief to learn he was still behind bars. But as I scanned through the search results, something made me double-take: a website dedicated to Robin Garbutt. What kind of convicted murderer has his own website? It turned out his family had set one up, maintaining throughout that he was innocent of killing his wife. I was, of course, skeptical; a lot of people in prison claim they should never have been convicted. But what struck me about Robin’s website was the list of supporters: family, childhood friends, and a remarkable number of Melsonby residents, a village of fewer than 800 people. Getting in touch with Robin was surprisingly straightforward. The “contact us” section of his website directed me to his friend Jane Metcalfe—a proud woman from the same part of the country as Robin, and someone who would rather use ten words when one would suffice. She was desperate for more media attention for the case. A new author was hardly what she had in mind, but she graciously stuck with me, suggesting I write to Robin directly. We started to exchange letters through a system called eMates. I would type a letter to Robin, which would be printed and delivered to his cell. For an extra 26 pence, I could include a response sheet, on which he would write a reply by hand. Over the next six months of writing to each other, Robin would instruct Jane to send me documents from his case. I started to build up my own archive of police reports, trial transcripts, and witness statements, all arriving in hard copy through the post. Thanks to years of reading and watching fictional detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple, a surprising amount of the prosecution documents made sense to me. But there was one element I still couldn’t understand: What type of person could murder their wife in such a merciless way? For someone painted as so gentle by those who knew him, it just did not add up. Perhaps he was a psychopath? That possibility scared me the most. At the same time, I was desperate to find out more—to the point I thought I might scrap Ian Fleming and write a book about the murder instead. When I broached the topic with Robin in one of my many letters to him, he suggested we should meet. I jumped at the chance, due to curiosity as much as anything else. As far as I was aware, I had never met a convicted murderer. I had certainly never set foot in a prison. As a director in a large corporation, it was a far cry from the air-conditioned London offices I was used to. But there was one element I still couldn’t understand: What type of person could murder their wife in such a merciless way? Jane was instrumental in the coordination, kindly collecting me from York Station, where she brushed aside my outstretched hand in favor of a warm bear hug. The half-hour drive to Wealstun Prison was conducted at such speed I was no longer frightened by the prospect of entering a high-security prison so much as making it there in one piece. Jane did not look at the road nearly as much as I would have liked, either, but in fairness maybe she did not need to—she had made this journey so many times before.

Her red Ford Fiesta told its own story: a flyer tucked in the windscreen declaring Robin’s conviction the country’s worst miscarriage of justice, the back seat buried under the paperwork of his various appeals.

By the time we pulled up outside the prison, I had been given the full case for Robin’s innocence at considerable volume. Then Jane drove off and left me alone in front of a great fence that seemed to swallow the sky.

Visiting a prison for the first time is not unlike catching a flight.

Eventually, I was shown into the visiting room—a vast, gymnasium-sized space of plastic chairs and laminate tables, with a small canteen in one corner and a children’s play area in the other.

I bought two cheese toasties and two coffees and sat down to wait.

“If you write a book about me,” he said, “it’s important that you feel you can ask me anything, even if it might seem really insensitive. You need to make up your own mind about who you think killed Diana. I’ll tell you the facts. Anything you want to know, I will tell you.

But I won’t try to persuade you either way.” It was a disarming thing to say.

There was an uneasy feeling that I was being played.

I wrote in my notebook on the train back to London, “Can I imagine R standing over his wife’s bed with a metal pole, brutally beating her to death while she slept?” After my first visit, Robin began calling me.

He had only been at Wealstun for a few months when we first made contact. Before that, he had spent over a decade at HMP Frankland, one of Britain’s highest-security prisons, nicknamed “Monster Mansion.” Wealstun brought an important change: a telephone in his cell, rather than a queue for the communal phones.

For Robin, it meant a small measure of privacy. For me, it meant he could call any day. If I missed a call, he couldn’t try again for another hour, and I had no way of calling him back.