Constable ‘strangled lover after she considered revealing affair to his wife’

A police officer strangled his lover to death after she thought about telling his wife about their affair, a court has heard.

Dorset Police’s Timothy Brehmer, of Hordle, Hampshire, denies murdering Claire Parry, a 41-year-old nurse, in the car park of the Horns Inn pub.

Salisbury Crown Court heard that the constable, also 41, and Parry had been having an affair for more than 10 years.

However, she became convinced he was having other affairs and had lied to her about their relationship, and she had written a note addressed to Brehmer’s wife about the relationship, the court heard.

Jurors were told that Parry believed her marriage to Andrew Parry, another Dorset Police officer, was going to end, as well as her relationship with Brehmer.

She had carried out research on Facebook that convinced her Brehmer was involved in at least two other affairs, and had made contact with a police officer called Kate Rhodes who said she had an affair with the defendant in 2011, the court heard.

This, said prosecutor Richard Smith QC, made Parry see Brehmer in “a very different light”, and to believe he a “womaniser”.

She was thinking he “was perhaps not the man she thought he was at all, and not a man who was likely to set up with her”, Smith said.

A note addressed to Brehmer’s wife Martha, found on Parry’s phone, said: “Dear Martha, what I am going to say is likely to come as no surprise to you.

“I am figuring you have always suspected but tried to ignore, there is no easy way to say it but, put simply, your husband is a man w****.

“Myself and others have fallen victim to his words and charms, his promises of being in a loveless marriage to only staying for the sake of your children.

“He sucked me in years ago and made me believe he and I had a future until he realised you were pregnant.

“He didn’t tell me about you at first, that he was married, and when I found out he told me he was going to leave.

“I have since realised I was not the only one he has weaved this story to, there are at least two more.

“He tells us that we are special, that he has fallen in love with us.”

Martha is also a police officer.

Smith said Brehmer and Parry met in a car outside the Horns Inn, West Parley, Dorset, on 9 May.

He strangled her with enough force to break her neck after an argument, the court heard. She died in hospital the next day.

Brehmer has admitted causing her death but not her murder, and says he had not meant to strangle her but “was simply robustly trying to get her out of the car”.

The constable was seconded to the National Police Air Service.

The trial continues.

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