Hours after tragically discovering his wife's body in her darkened bedroom, Nic Gilbert found himself locked up in a police station charged with murder.
Erin Mullavey, 42, was stabbed to death late at night on Easter Sunday 2023 in her western Sydney apartment.
Her killer, Mr Gilbert's childhood friend Morten Birkegaard Jensen, had fled to a friend's place after changing his clothes.
Mr Gilbert arrived home after 11pm.
He found his wife lying on her back on the bed, blood around her mouth.
"I can never forget the way her lips looked," he wrote in a police statement released during Jensen's NSW Supreme Court murder trial.
"She looked like she died angry."
He called triple zero and tried to resuscitate his wife before police arrived.
Taken to the police station, he was accused of murder as officers bagged his hands to preserve DNA.
"I was very upset when they told me that I was under arrest for Erin's murder," he wrote.
"I did not kill her and would never to something like this to her. She was the love of my life."
Mr Gilbert was let go and Jensen was arrested for the killing four months later.
At a judge-alone trial earlier in February, the
The key issue in the trial is whether Jensen knew what he was doing or he stabbed the nurse in a state of psychosis.
He went to Ms Mullavey's home after a woman he knew - who cannot be legally named - said she had been threatened during a dispute about designer bags.
The couple had accused the woman of stealing the bags.
"I want the bags back or it's your life," one of their texts reads.
Speaking to a forensic psychiatrist in September 2024, Jensen said he did not believe Ms Mullavey had cursed him to the same extent as before.
"What the f***, how could I do this, I feel bad," he said.
Court documents reveal Jensen was a heavy drug user.
"I am not 100 per cent sure what kind of drugs Morten uses but I think he had been through them all," his father Leif Birkegaard Jensen wrote in a statement to police.
Jensen was also an avid collector of knives, having about 20 including samurai swords, at his home at the time of the killing.
The trial will resume in March.
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