The chilling story of a "psychopath" husband who murdered his wife and used her savings to travel the world for nearly three years has been told in a new documentary. Jamie Starbuck killed his wife Debbie, dismembered her body and burnt it in bin in his back garden in Basford in 2010.
He then dumped her remains in woodland and set off on his travels across Europe, Asia and Central America. Then aged 36, Starbuck pretended his wife was travelling with him in emails he sent to family and friends, keeping up the cruel charade for years, before family became suspicious and went to police.
Starbuck was arrested at Heathrow Airport on a return flight from Peru. On his iPad he had confessed his wife's murder in a letter addressed to her. It read: "I planned for it to be quick and never expected you to be so...durable".
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Prosecutor Timothy Spencer KC had said in court: "She must have fought for her life". Debbie, 44, a self-employed proof reader. was last seen alive six days after their wedding on April 27, 2010. She had met her husband just nine months earlier on a dating website.
Retired Judge Michael Stokes, who sentenced Starbuck at Nottingham Crown Court, and who has spoken of his memories of the case in the documentary, had sentenced him to a minimum of 30 years. He told Starbuck: "This was a cruel deception by you solely to get control of her assets. Her dying must have been brutal and horrific".
Starbuck wrote a blog of his travels, which is still online, about his ramblings and thoughts of his travels to 70 countries documented online until he decided to return home to face the music.
His last post read: "I'm sat on a bus heading for Lima. It's 90 minutes of noise, random potholes and insufferable heat. I'm going through this one more time before I go home. I am literally leaving paradise to face my destiny in England.
"I left the UK a long time ago in search of...well, in all honesty I was running away. From life and responsibility; justice and my past. I didn't acknowledge it at the time but apparently I was looking for somewhere to call home. Somewhere I could imagine living for ever, where I could be ethical and free, where I wouldn't be judged or condemned for the sometimes bafflingly bizarre decisions I make; where I'd be accepted".
The bizarre and chilling Starbuck case features on What the killer did next - Crime + Investigation Play. It shows interviews with Judge Stokes, Nottinghamshire Live's Legal Affairs Correspondent Rebecca Sherdley, who covered the case, and Nick Holmes, a former chief superintendent at Nottinghamshire Police.
Mr Holmes told how the investigation began: "A man called Nottinghamshire Police and he was concerned for his friend Debbie Starbuck. He'd not heard from her since she was married nearly two years previously and it was unsual for him not to have heard from her".
He went on to say: "When we read his blog, it is almost like a period of intraspection trying to find himself. He calls himself a 'misthanthorp'e initially, who is somebody who dislikes other people, yet almost as if he is trying to revise his own character, which is interesting, because he is clearly a psychopath where he has no regard for anybody else and no moral compass".
Judge Stokes recalled police had a very difficult job. "They were both adults," he said of the Starbucks. "They had no responsibilites in the UK. They were free to live their lives as they felt like".
Debbie had inherited £150,000 from her late mother's estate some years before she met Jamie Starbuck. When police checked her back account, they saw that the significant amount of money that she had had actually been transferred into her husband's account.
A neighbour has spoken anonymously on the programme about events in the garden next door, and "there were quite a lot of police outside, forensics on the back garden, a white tent, and like a big machine that they kept going up and down with to look under the bricks."
Tim Grant, Professor of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, said Nottinghamshire Police came to them about Debbie Starbuck's emails, which had been sent from her honeymoon, back to her family. "Because the family raised concerns that it didn't sound like her," he said. "That something was wrong".
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