The mother who shot dead her policeman husband
An officer gunned down in cold blood. A killer who claimed she was the real victim. 20 years on, as the woman who pulled the trigger enjoys a new life, his family has been torn apart...
ON the walls of widow Patricia Galbraith’s home the photographs of her son still take pride of place. Here he is, all 6ft 6in of him, in his police uniform. This one was taken just after he had transferred to Scotland. Affixed to a wooden plaque below that is his Metropolitan Police badge.
She was 71 and had not long been a grandmother on the day, 20 years ago, when police knocked on her door and told her and her husband Ian their son, also Ian, had been shot dead. Not until a little later did she learn the one who fired the gun and was charged with his murder was her daughter-in-law Kim.
At 2am on Thursday, January 14, 1999, she had shot the 37-year-old with his own hunting rifle as he lay asleep in the marital bed. His body had jerked, she recalled later, then she had watched the blood spread from his head wound over the bedclothes.
Chillingly, she had asked her husband to show her how to fire the .270 rifle only hours earlier. Now, after hiding it under the bed and waiting until he was asleep, she had used it on him.
Then, after rousing their infant daughter in the next room, she attempted to torch the house. It was, she said, the only way she could see to escape her husband’s abuse.
Two decades have passed since that single shot rang out at Sandhole Cottage, Furnace, Argyll, precipitating one of the most extraordinary Scottish criminal cases in living memory. And, for Ian Galbraith’s mother, those 20 years have been defined by loss.
First she lost her son, then her husband – and, though her granddaughter Lauren is now a healthy young woman of 21, she feels she has lost her too. ‘I have a granddaughter I have not seen for years,’ says the 91-year-old forlornly. ‘I’ve been completely cut off there. She is 21 now and I don’t know what she is doing.’
Mrs Galbraith, who lives in Burnham-onCrouch, Essex, knows still less of what her daughter-in-law Kim is doing now, although she is painfully aware she is no longer serving her prison sentence.
That turned out to be just four years long. The ensuing 16 years of freedom, the Mail has discovered, have seen her remarry, bear two more children, resettle for a time overseas and, until recently, live with her new family in considerable style in a detached pile in rural Nottinghamshire.
FOR the killer, it seems, it is gains rather than losses which have most defined the period since she shot a defenceless man in his bed. ‘She never offered any apologies to the family,’ says retired NHS worker Mrs Galbraith now. ‘No, no, none whatsoever. Nothing.
‘It doesn’t get easier with the passage of time,’ she adds. ‘No, not really, no. I can never forgive her, no, never. Not with the passage of time. Good Lord, no.’
Although the pictures of her son are peppered throughout her home, the boxful of newspaper cuttings covering her son’s killing and her daughter-in-law’s trial are gone now, along with the cards and letters from well-wishers.
‘They were from people I didn’t know – genuine letters – it was very comforting at the time,’ says Mrs Galbraith. ‘But when I moved here I thought “what’s the point, really?”. I got rid of them. It’s just sadness, really.’
But she does keep a small, red diary with brief entries for the events triggered by that gunshot. She reads back: ‘The police called on Thursday 14 when it happened. It happened at two in the morning.
‘Then on the Friday she [Kim] was charged with murder, on the Radio 4 news. That was on the 15th. Police knocked on our door at seven in the morning. I answered the door – they said my son had been shot.
‘They did not say anything about murder at the time. That was a bit later. I couldn’t believe it. We had to go up and look through his belongings. It was dreadful.
‘How can you replace an only child? Of course you can’t.’
It was, of course, Kim Galbraith’s claims of domestic and sexual abuse by her husband which made the case such a cause celebre and all but removed the victim status from the deceased and transferred it to his slayer.
Those claims even absolved her (partially at least) of her doomed attempt to pull the wool over the police’s eyes.
As she admitted later, after firing the gun, she had daubed her nightie with blood, rubbed a condom against her thigh and set fire to her home before dialling 999.
Her story was that masked intruders had broken in, murdered her husband, raped her at knifepoint and set the cottage alight.
Not until it became clear this tissue of lies would not wash did she admit firing the gun – but only, she said, out of desperation to escape her husband’s clutches.
‘I couldn’t live with him any more,’ she said. ‘I was ill and broken after years of torment from him and couldn’t see any other way out.’
Even packing her bags and leaving while he was at work seemed an impossibility, she said, because he had told her that if she tried it he would find her and kill her.
The problem was Kim Galbraith could provide no proof or corroboration for her claims her husband was a monster. It certainly did not sound like the Ian his parents knew – and his first wife Julie testified that he was a gentle giant who did not have a violent bone in his body.
TWENTY years on, the policeman’s mother still bridles with fury over her former daughter-in-law’s allegations. ‘There was absolutely no evidence whatever to support the claims she made,’ she says. ‘His first wife was up at the trial and said she could not have been married to a nicer gentleman.’
The biggest tragedy, she believes, is this monstrous portrait of Ian Galbraith is the one his daughter will have been encouraged to accept as the truth. On the only occasion she has seen her grandmother since her father’s death, she did not ask about him.
It was during Mr Galbraith’s time as a constable in the Metropolitan Police that the couple met.
According to Kim Galbraith, he had stopped her in London for a minor traffic offence and offered not to write it up if she had a drink with him. She said she agreed.
But within weeks of their relationship beginning, she said, he held a knife to her throat. And, after they were married, she said she began to fear his coming home. ‘I quickly learned if he had had a
bad day at work I would feel the effects later that night,’ she told the Mail in 2003.
‘He regularly told me he would track me down and kill me if I ever left him and, incredible as it may seem, I began to believe it.’
Moving to Argyll was his idea, she said. ‘I wasn’t very happy at the idea but I agreed anyway. Now when I look back, I realise that is when the violence escalated.’
The oppression she said she suffered there was what would now be called coercive control – an offence under the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Bill passed last year.
She claimed her husband picked her friends for her, told her when to go to bed and forbade her from going shopping on her own.
She further alleged that, after the birth of their daughter, Mr Galbraith raped her at gunpoint and, on another occasion, ordered her to take part in a sex session with a prostitute.
Attempts by police to track down the prostitute after Mr Galbraith’s death failed.
But Nazi paraphernalia, including a photo album dedicated to Adolf Hitler, was found in the house along with a pornographic video. All of it was said to belong to the man who was no longer alive to defend himself.
The scene was set, then, for a sensational murder trial in which Kim Galbraith was represented by defence counsel of the moment, Donald Findlay, QC.
His closing speech, in which he held the hand of the killer in the dock as he pleaded with jurors not to convict her of murder, had some of them in tears.
Yet they convicted her of murder by majority verdict in June 1999 and Lord Osborne had no option but to send her to prison for life.
The case troubled the judge, however, and in his report on the case to the then Scottish Executive, he said he felt she should have been convicted of the lesser charge of culpable homicide.
Galbraith promptly appealed and this time a verdict of culpable homicide was returned. Her life sentence was reduced to ten years, later cut to eight for the sake of her daughter.
In the event, she was free by early 2003, just over four years after putting a bullet into the back of her sleeping husband’s head.
‘No one knows more than me the seriousness of what I did,’ she said on her release. ‘I am full of remorse and guilt but I was not myself at the time.’
The guilt does not appear to have proved a barrier to a fulfilled family life. Within weeks of her release from prison she was seeing IT consultant Josh John and, in June 2006, they were married in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Two sons soon followed.
The family lived for several years in Malaysia, where Mr John has family ties. Until recently the family lived in a large detached home with a sweeping drive in the heart of the upmarket village of Whatton, in Nottinghamshire. They were known to neighbours there as evangelical Christians.
One Whatton resident said: ‘They moved out a few weeks ago. They invited us to a party and the people there were evangelicals, very happy clappy. Someone got a guitar out and they all sang Kum ba Yah.’
LAUREN, who was looked after by her mother’s stepfather Sidney Scarsbrook during the years her mother was in prison, has now completed school and university. Significantly, she has taken her mother’s new married name and the two appear to be close.
It is all a remarkably settled picture considering that, 20 years ago, Kim Galbraith was facing a life sentence.
But, in the sheltered home occupied by her dead husband’s mother there is little respite from the anguish.
She says that Mr Scarsbrook arranged for her granddaughter to visit her in Burnham-on-Crouch but the meeting was brief and has not been repeated.
‘I saw her about three years ago, briefly,’ she says. ‘She came here. We chatted but she never inquired about her father – never wanted to know about him, never wanted to know about the fact he was buried here. She had no interest whatsoever.
‘It really depends on what propaganda she’s been fed.
‘I said to her, “you don’t have to be in contact if you don’t want to but I’d just like to know you are still alive”, but I haven’t heard a thing since.’
Since her husband died of dementia two years after their diamond wedding anniversary Mrs Galbraith spends much of her days keeping her mind sharp with crosswords and trying to stay active.
But inevitably the memories crowd in.
She says: ‘I go on trips. I was up in Scotland last year actually and saw where it happened. It was very sad. I passed the place on the way to Oban. ‘It was just coincidence. ‘I felt very sad. It’s a beautiful country. I can’t understand it – somebody who has got everything, to do that...’
Dignified, resilient, but alone, Mrs Galbraith has spent 20 years trying to make sense of what her daughter-in-law did to her son. Still no sense will come.