Resentment, anger or a feeling he had nothing left to offer may have led Mr John Diver to murder his wife after she began having an affair, a prosecution lawyer alleged yesterday.
Motive was not necessary to prove murder, Mr Edward Comyn SC told the jury as the trial re-opened, "but in this case, the prosecution say there was motive, there was opportunity".
There would also be evidence of a phone call "that perhaps would infer a pre-arranged meeting" between Mr Diver and his wife, Geraldine, on the night she was killed, the prosecution lawyer said.
Mother-of-two Mrs Geraldine Diver (42) was found strangled in her car at Robinhood Road, Clondalkin, in Dublin on December 2nd 1996. She lived with the accused, now aged 60, at Kilnamanagh Road, Walkinstown, Dublin.
When he was re-arraigned in the Central Criminal Court yesterday, Mr Diver pleaded not guilty to murder. The jury heard he met Geraldine Grimes when they both worked in the Coombe Hospital in the 1970s. He was some 14 years her senior. They married in 1976 and had two children.
In 1995, Mr Diver took a redundancy payment and retired while his wife continued working. Mr Comyn said some months before the killing, Mrs Diver began to stay out late and stay away for weekends. She had "formed a liaison" with a younger man working in a local shop.
Mrs Diver had apparently decided to leave her husband, Mr Comyn said. While motive was the stuff of detective novels and not a necessary ingredient in the crime of murder, Mrs Diver's husband had the motive to kill her, he said.
The prosecution would call the evidence of a neighbour of the Divers, Mr Comyn said, who would testify that at around 9.25 p.m, "he saw Geraldine Diver in the car and he saw her husband, the accused, sitting in the back seat behind her". She had left her workplace at the Coombe hospital at around 9.20 p.m.
At 9.55 p.m., a lorry driver saw Mrs Diver in her car on the Robinhood Road. "If you accept that she was dead at that stage, then here you have the accused man in the back of the car within something like a half an hour from that time," Mr Comyn said.
The trial before Mr Justice Patrick Smith continues.