Last updated at 09:32, Friday, 09 January 2009

The Cumbrian farmer convicted of brutally murdering his adoring wife so he could start a new life with his lover is attempting to clear his name from his prison cell.

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Wilson says: “There was evidence to prove that Jane knew about Kathy. The only thing we’re guilty of is keeping our private life private and lying to do so. Is that a crime?”

Robert Wilson, 41, is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife Jane, with a minimum term of 22 years, after he was found guilty on November 28.

The judge who presided over the case, Mr Justice David Clarke, described him as a cruel and calculating killer, guilty of the brutal murder of a wife who had loved and trusted him.

In his letter, Wilson strives to clear his name.

He declares: “I’m kind, I’m gentle, and I’ve never hurt a person in my life.”

During his trial the jury heard detailed evidence of his complex love life in the months before the death of his 53-year-old wife in 2007.

He was arrested in April last year after his dead wife’s adult children from a previous marriage discovered he had pursued a costly love affair with a woman he met in Spain.

Wilson was found with yet another woman, farm helper Michelle Dodd, who has now declared that she is standing by the farmer in the hope that she can prove his innocence and one day marry him.

From his cell in Durham jail, Wilson has now written a detailed 18-page letter, claiming that he has been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

The letter is a comprehensive and at times angry condemnation of the police, prosecution witnesses, and even his own defence team in court.

During his trial, the prosecution sought to prove his guilt despite lacking the one piece of evidence that is usually central to any murder inquiry – the victim’s body.

Because police had initially treated Jane Wilson’s death as a tragic accident, her body was released for a cremation five days after she died.

But the jury heard powerful evidence of how Wilson was a habitual liar who told colleagues he had cancer when he did not, and claimed he was working in France when he was seeing his lover in Spain.

His biggest lie, said prosecutors, was his claim that his wife died accidentally.

Wilson’s letter tries to demolish the prosecution case that he led a double life, secretly seeing the lover he met in Spain, Kathy McNeil, while pretending to be happily married to Jane. The jury heard that he killed his wife because he wanted to cash in her £400,000 life insurance and then start a new life with Mrs McNeil.

Wilson writes: “In the months, weeks and days before the accident, not one person said there was a problem between me and Jane.

“Everyone said we were a hard-working, loving couple. On the night of the accident, everybody said I was distraught and inconsolable... I never lied.”

To drive home his claim that he loved his wife, Wilson says he lavished around £175,000 on Mrs Wilson’s passion for horses and horse riding in the four years before she died at their Kirkandrews-on-Eden farm near Carlisle.

He suggests that he did not need the life insurance money, saying his assets clearly outstripped his debts.

Wilson devotes much of his letter to an attempt to prove that his wife had known about Kathy McNeil. He told police his wife had a low sex drive, and condoned his sleeping with other women – something refuted by at least one of Mrs Wilsons’ colleagues, who said the couple had had a good sex life.

Wilson adamantly rejects the claim – clearly accepted by the jury – that he had been smitten with Kathy McNeil, with whom he went on a £15,000 holiday to the Maldives.

He writes: “If I was totally obsessed with her why didn’t I spend Xmas with her [after his wife’s death] or New Year? What did I buy her for Xmas and why did I start seeing Michelle in the New Year?...

“They made a big thing about the will I’d been having made. I’d never seen it, hadn’t signed it, and it wasn’t what I wanted in it. But they said it was accurate.”

Wilson said Mrs McNeil’s sister had believed their relationship was casual.

Wilson then goes on to attack the work of his defence team during his trial, saying they should have arranged for a reconstruction of what happened in the barn on the night Mrs Wilson died.

He asks: “Why in a case like this did my defence not get a tractor driver and a cattle farmer with experience to give evidence on what might have happened that night?”

He attaches significance to evidence which he says was never explored properly in court: the discovery of one of his wife’s gloves, a Polo mint wrapper, and a stick she may have been holding.

He suggests that these items reveal the point at which his wife was run over, and suggest she may have been momentarily distracted as she tried to unwrap one of the sweets.

He says: “The thing that annoys me most is the material evidence – the glove, the stick, the Polo wrapper.

“Why was that not made known until it appeared at the trial? It had been known since the night of the accident. It clearly shows the point of impact and what Jane was doing.”

Wilson continues: “I didn’t realise until the jury went to the farm that with the lights on you are totally blinded. I always drove the tractor, so didn’t know this.

“Had I been able to have a defence reconstruction, as I requested, all this would have been clear to the jury.”

Wilson attempts to dismiss the expert evidence of Home Office pathologist Dr Alison Armour, saying her opinion was based purely on photos of the scene where ambulance crews found his wife’s body on the day she died.

Dr Armour concluded that the lack of blood at the scene suggested Jane Wilson was already dead when she was crushed beneath the tractor.

“Alison Armour’s opinion was, in her words, limited, so why was so much importance put on it?”

Towards the end of his letter, Wilson attempts to win sympathy, saying: “No one has ever asked me how I’m coping. No one knows what it feels like to be the person driving the tractor in the accident.

“How does anyone know what it’s like when you can’t blame anyone else? It haunts me no end and there’s nothing I or anyone can say to make it any easier, then to be accused of the worst crime possible.

“Accidents happen... if the police had done their job properly on the night of the accident then they’d have had all the proof they need that it was nothing but a tragic accident.”

Wilson also argues that his case had such a high local media profile that he should not have been tried in Carlisle. He also asks why his current lover – Michelle Dodd – was not called as a witness, adding: “What this trial has done is said that it is a crime to have life insurance, a crime to have a mistress, and a crime to lie to keep your life private...

“This was a trial full of ifs, buts, mights, could have beens, and people’s opinions. How can that be ‘beyond reasonable doubt’?”

Last week, Michelle Dodd said Wilson was convicted on the basis of his character and not on hard evidence, saying: “I believe he is innocent.”

Police maintained that Wilson was a consummate liar, whose ability to deceive helped him cover up his crime in the days after he killed Jane Wilson – at a time when he faced mounting debts. She died when he most needed her to, the court heard.

In the weeks after Jane Wilson died, he slept with both Mrs McNeil and Mrs Dodd, in his marital bed.

After the unanimous guilty verdict, Mrs Wilson’s first husband Kevin Kennedy contacted Cumbrian Newspapers, publishers of The Cumberland News, to say that she had dumped him because he had cheated on her. Jane would never have tolerated her husband sleeping with other women, he said.

First published at 05:21, Friday, 09 January 2009
Published by http://www.cumberlandnews.co.uk