A pensioner has told a jury that the 'saddest words he had ever heard' were when his cancer-stricken wife asked him to kill her.

Graham Mansfield, 73, was found lying in a pool of blood in his kitchen on the morning of March 24 last year, while the body of his wife, Dyanne, 71, was slumped in a chair at the bottom of their back garden.

Mansfield told a 999 call operator he had slit the throat of his wife of more than 40 years at about 9pm the previous night at their home on Canterbury Road in Hale and then cut his own throat.

The retired baggage handler at Manchester Airport is on trial at Manchester Crown Court accused of her murder.

Giving evidence on Wednesday, he said the couple married in Las Vegas in September 1980.

He said: “It was wonderful. The best thing that had happened to me. You don’t want to speak for someone else, Dyanne is not here, but she felt that way.

“We were very fortunate. We both liked doing the same things – cycling, gardening, walking, playing badminton.”

He said his wife, a retired import/export clerk, was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1999 which led to the removal of a kidney in 2004.

Years of uninterrupted good health followed, he said, as they later enjoyed an active retirement together.

He said 2020 was the 'start of another fantastic year' with three holidays booked and a 40th wedding anniversary trip planned to the United States.

But ahead of the Covid-19 lockdown his wife developed a 'tickly cough'.

In September that year, a doctor told her a scan had showed she had lung cancer and it had spread to her lymph nodes.

Mansfield said: “That was basically when our nightmare began.”

A week later they were told the cancer had reached Stage 4.

He said: “We knew there was no Stage 5. There were tears in our eyes. I was inconsolable.”

Mansfield said the couple were 'shell-shocked' when they were told in October that she had two years at most to live.

He told the court: “Dyanne said to me ‘Graham, this is the best I am ever going to be now. When things get bad for me, will you kill me?’

“It was the saddest words I had ever heard.

“I said ‘Dyanne, I will. On one condition. That I go with you’.

“She said ‘there is nothing wrong with you, there is no reason’. I said ‘Dyanne, I can’t live without you’.”

His barrister, Richard Orme, asked Mansfield: “Were you intending to keep that promise?”

He replied: “Yes, most definitely, because Dyanne was the most important, precious thing in the world and without her there was nothing.”

Mansfield denies murder and an alternative count of manslaughter.

The trial continues.