The Murderer Who Called Me His Friend
Have I Befriended a Murderer?
While researching a book, Edward Abel Smith stumbled on the case of Robin Garbutt, convicted of beating his wife Diana to death in their post office flat in 2010. Garbutt's family ran a website insisting he was innocent, and soon Smith was exchanging letters, then weekly prison phone calls, with the man himself. What began as curiosity about how a killer thinks became a genuine, unsettling friendship — and a question Smith can't answer: is he being played?
But underneath the warmth of the visit was a thought I couldn't quite shake: that this was precisely how a guilty man would want to come across.