Mrs Geraldine Diver told a neighbour she was separating from her husband weeks before she was found strangled in the family car, a murder trial jury was told yesterday.
The neighbour, Mrs Eileen Kenny, of Kilnamanagh Road, Walkinstown, Dublin, also said that when she spoke to Mr John Diver on the night his wife's body was found, he told her: "When two people have lived together a long time, and one doesn't love the other, it doesn't mean they have to separate."
She was replying to Mr Edward Comyn SC, prosecuting, in the Central Criminal Court trial of Mr Diver, a 60-year-old retired hospital clerk, who denies the murder of his wife Geraldine, then aged 42. She was found strangled in her car outside Buckley's builders providers in Robin hood Road, Clondalkin, on December 2nd, 1996.
The couple had lived with their two children at Kilnamanagh Road.
Mrs Kenny was asked by gardai to go to the house on the night Mrs Diver's body was discovered. She found Mr Diver standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee.
He offered Mrs Kenny something to drink. When he opened the fridge she saw a bottle of wine, half full. He seemed "emotional and upset", she said.
When gardai had left the house to bring Mr Diver's brother, Edward, to St James's Hospital to identify Mrs Diver's body, Mrs Kenny again spoke to Mr Diver. "He was, as I say, very upset, and he mentioned that he had been in the British army and he'd been in the Medical Corps and he did not kill anybody," she told Mr Comyn.
Under cross-examination, she agreed with the defence that her better recollection was that he said he "never killed anybody".
She did not think Mr Diver was drunk that night. She agreed she was recorded in a statement to gardai as saying he was "very intoxicated". She told Mr Brendan Grehan, defending: "My impression was that John Diver may have had some wine taken, but certainly wasn't drunk."
Mr Justice Smith then told the jury there was a matter he had to inquire into in its absence, but he hoped the trial would resume today.