An ex-police officer has been cleared of murder after strangling his long-term lover who had just revealed their affair to his wife. Timothy Brehmer, 41, was found not guilty of murdering Claire Parry, also 41, in a pub car park on 9 May, but had previously admitted to manslaughter. Brehmer, a former constable with Dorset police, said the mother of two accidentally suffered a fatal injury as he “robustly” tried to get her out of his car, minutes after she had sent a text message from his phone to his wife saying: “I am cheating on you.” He told the jury during the trial at Salisbury crown court: “I absolutely did not want to kill her or cause serious bodily harm. I didn’t intend to kill her.” Jo Martin QC, defending, said Brehmer was remorseful for his actions and told her after being acquitted of murder: “It doesn’t change anything. I am still responsible for Claire’s death.” The pair had been having an affair for more than 10 years, with their relationship described by Brehmer as “a little bubble of niceness”. On the run up to her death, Parry had carried out research into Brehmer using a fake profile on Facebook and become convinced he had had at least two other affairs, said Richard Smith QC, prosecuting. Parry, a nurse, was in contact with a police officer called Kate Rhodes, who told her she had an affair with Brehmer in late 2011, and this made her see him “in a very different light”, the court heard. In an unsent note on her phone written two days before her death, addressed to Brehmer’s wife Martha, a police detective, Parry had written: “… your husband is a man whore … Myself and others have fallen victim to his words and charms. “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.” Brehmer said in evidence that he and Parry would go months without seeing each other, and just prior to Parry’s death in May they rarely met because of the Covid-19 lockdown, only communicating via mobile phone messages. He revealed he had planned to kill himself because of the consequences to his family of their affair being revealed. Brehmer told the court that when Parry got into his car outside the Horns Inn in West Parley, Dorset, she was angry and asked for his phone so she could look through his social media apps. “She was so angry, I do not know if she was jealous of my ‘perfect life’, as she called it,” he said. Brehmer, of Hordle, Hampshire, said that at one point he stabbed his arm three times with a penknife but Parry “did not care”. He said he demanded she get out of his car but she refused, so he tried to push her out and his arm “must have slipped up in all the melee”. The court was told that moments later he told a passerby: “I’m never going to see my son again, I’m going to prison for a very long time.” A postmortem examination concluded that Parry, from Bournemouth, had died from a brain injury caused by compression of the neck. At the time of the incident, Brehmer was seconded to the National Police Air Service based at Bournemouth airport. He has since been sacked by Dorset police. Brehmer will be sentenced at Salisbury crown court on Wednesday.