Dorset Police officer Timothy Brehmer cleared of murdering lover but faces jail for manslaughter

• Video report by ITV News Correspondent Martha Fairlie

A married police officer has been acquitted of murdering his long-term lover after she revealed their affair to his wife.

A jury took two hours and 50 minutes to find Timothy Brehmer, 41, not guilty of murdering mother-of-two Claire Parry.

Brehmer had previously admitted the manslaughter of the married nurse who he had been having an affair with for more than 10 years.

The police officer, who served with Dorset Police, will be sentenced at Salisbury Crown Court by Mr Justice Jacobs later on Tuesday.

Mrs Parry died during a "kerfuffle" in his car at a car park of the Horns Inn in West Parley, Dorset, on May 9 this year.

Bodycam footage shows the moment of Brehmer's arrest

The court heard that while the pair were in the car, Mrs Parry had taken the Brehmer’s phone and sent a message to his wife saying: “I am cheating on you.”

Minutes later Mrs Parry suffered fatal injuries at Brehmer’s hands - the 41-year-old is strangled the mother of two after she sent a text message on the defendant’s phone to his wife revealing the affair.

Mrs Parry, a nurse and mother of two who was also married to a police officer, had become enraged with Brehmer after she found out he was in a relationship with fellow police officer Kate Rhodes at the same time he was seeing her.

Brehmer claimed she accidentally suffered the fatal injury while he was trying to push her out of the vehicle so he could drive away.

He told the court he had planned to go and kill himself because of the consequences to his family of their affair being revealed.

The trial heard that in the days before her death, Mrs Parry had started to believe her marriage to Andrew Parry, also a Dorset Police officer, was coming to an end as well as her relationship with the defendant.

She had carried out research using an alias on Facebook into Brehmer and became convinced he had had at least two other affairs.

Mrs Parry 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”.

Giving evidence at Salisbury Crown Court, Ms Rhodes, a detective constable, said Brehmer used "grooming" techniques to exert "coercive and controlling behaviour" over women.

She said: "Tim had some sort of hold over me, that’s the only way I can describe it."

She said that she had a short relationship with him in the autumn of 2011, but broke it off when she found out he was married.

In court, Brehmer admitted that he was a "well-practised liar" and described himself as a "devious bastard".

The father-of-one also said that his affair was a "little bubble of niceness" and added: "We didn’t have to worry about the domestic things at home. You could be all of your good things, not your bad things, none of your vulnerabilities.

"It was a suspended state of your best self. It was an affair, that’s what you have an affair for."