Died before his exoneration
Julian Wilson’s conviction for false accounting was overturned in April 2021, but he never lived to see it.
Gary Thomas was the lead investigator in his case and attended he and his wife, Karen’s, home in September 2008 days after Mr Wilson had been suspended following the discovery of a shortfall totalling £27,911.
However, despite interviewing Mr Wilson, Mr Thomas did not include any of the problems the subpostmaster had reported having with the Horizon system when writing up a report.
Instead he wrote: “There did not appear to be any further failings in security, procedures or product integrity that directly affect this case.”
Years later, Mr Thomas also told a colleague he was “pleased” to have his hands on electronic documents relating to Mr Wilson’s case because he wanted to prove there was no “case for the justice of thieving sub-posters” and that they “were all crooks”.
In a witness statement submitted to the inquiry in 2022, Mrs Wilson described how the couple were married for 31 years before Mr Wilson died of cancer in August 2016 – five years before his conviction was overturned.
Julian Wilson became subpostmaster of the Astwood Bank Post Office, in Redditch, in 2002 but was suspended in 2008.
Mrs Wilson, a former police officer, said in her statement that her husband “always knew the Horizon system was wrong”.
He was ordered to do 200 hours of community service as part of his sentence – which saw him clean graves with fellow convicted criminals.
Mr Wilson was also ordered to pay £33,000 to cover the cost of the shortfall and a further £3,500 for the Post Office’s prosecution costs.
Her husband eventually died of bowel cancer aged 67 in August 2016.
Mrs Wilson concluded her statement with: “In January 2016 when he got the diagnosis, I said we had been fighting cancer since 2008.
“I was angry Julian and my parents did not get the chance to see his name cleared.”
When questioned on the report he wrote about Mr Wilson’s case, during the inquiry, Mr Thomas agreed that saying there did not appear to be any “security, procedures or product integrity” that affected the case was not a “fair reflection” given what Mr Wilson had said in his interview.
He described the email he sent to a colleague which branded sub-postmasters as “crooks” as “absolutely disgraceful” and said he was “embarrassed”