A JEALOUS husband stabbed his wife to death in a frenzied attack in a park after she met another man on Facebook, a court heard.

"Possessive and controlling" Brian Oliver, aged 40, stabbed his estranged wife Joanne Oliver 15 times in a "brutal act of violence" when she refused to reconcile their relationship, a trial at Manchester Crown Court heard.

Leaving his wife in a pool of blood on a remote path, he tried to slash his own throat and wrists before running away and then confessing to what he had done to some passing workmen.

Oliver denies murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Graham Wood QC, opening the prosecution, told the jury: "The Crown will say there is an almost irresistible inference from the frenzy of the attack that the defendant was intent on killing his wife, even if he had suicidal ideas.

"It may well be that the defendant did not want to carry on living if his wife was seeing another man, but it is a matter of common sense that a suicidal person is capable of killing others as well as himself."

The court heard that the couple had arranged to meet at Heaton Park, in Prestwich, on September 24 last year.

Joanne Oliver, 32, had been with the defendant for 14 years and they had been married for 10 years, living together in Duke Street, Radcliffe.

Mr Wood said that in the last couple of years it had not been a happy marriage, that they had been going through the process of breaking up for some time and that at the time of the killing they were living apart.

He received a community sentence when convicted of assaulting Joanne Oliver last August after he pushed her against a tumble drier, grabbed her by the throat and slapped her across the face.