THE heartbroken father of a mother stabbed to death by her policeman husband said last night he could never forgive him.

Ron Phillips described PC Graham Jones - better known as Ivor - as a control freak and said he had condemned his bubbly, extrovert daughter, Maria, to a death sentence.

The killer was jailed for eight years yesterday.

Jones, 40, used a knife his wife kept under her bed to protect herself from him to stab her in an attack carried out at their home in Ingleby Barwick, near Stockton.

Teesside Crown Court heard yesterday that the depressive Jones had suffered cruel sexual taunts from his hairdresser wife, whose "blatant infidelity" with another man - along with other factors - had driven him to despair.

Jones told her: "If I cannot have you, I will kill you."

Following the killing, on December 2, the policeman - who had pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility - washed the knife and replaced it under his 36-year-old wife's pillow.

Franz Muller, prosecuting, suggested that this was intended to create a false picture of what had happened in a bid to fool police.

He said: "This was an experienced police officer well familiar with the defences to murder whose explanation to police of events that night was, in our submission, far from candid."

Mr Muller described how Jones, a Cleveland Police officer for nearly 20 years, had discovered his wife was having an affair with a 21-year-old known only as Tom, in the months leading up to the killing.

She met him in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, where her family were from.

Jones had telephoned the other man to persuade him to end the affair, but when Mrs Jones found out she told him: "You might have ruined one affair, but I am going to stay in the house with the kids and have lover after lover.

"How are you going to feel about that?"

Jones, who sobbed as details of the killing were read out in court, told police officers on his arrest that the attack on his wife had "been like a dream" and said he initially grabbed his wife by the throat after she rejected his pleas to give the marriage one more chance.

Aidan Marron, for Jones, said his wife had paraded details of her affair in front of him and boasted about her sexual exploits.

He said: "One cannot overstate the pain and anxiety he feels and the remorse for what he has done.

"If there was ever a clear case of tragedy visiting a family, this is it."