A JURY, at the trial of a building worker accused of murdering his wife, failed to reach a verdict yesterday.

Mum-of-five Maureen Troth, aged 57, died from a single stab wound through the heart after she left her husband Terence and went to live with her sister.

Troth, of Foxwalks Avenue, Rock Hill, Bromsgrove, told the jury at Hereford Crown Court he was distraught when his 38-year marriage ended and stabbed his wife accidentally in a doorstep argument.

The jury of seven men and five women was sent home by Judge Frank Chapman following 90 minutes of deliberation. They will return to court today to try to reach a verdict.

Troth denies murder, but the jury has the option of convicting him of manslaughter instead.

The victim wrote a will after an alleged threatening phone call from the defendant seven hours before she died. She left everything to her children and recorded in her diary that her husband warned in the call: "You are dead."

Prosecutor Rex Tedd QC said Troth lay in wait for his wife outside her sister's address in Hinton Fields, Catshill, Bromgrove, on Monday, February 18.

After the 7am stabbing, he called at Bromsgrove police station to give himself up. But it was shut. Instead he rang 999 and confessed: "I've just stabbed my wife, she provoked me."

In his final speech to the jury, Mr Tedd asked them to reject manslaughter. They could be sure Troth was the killer, that he intended to seriously hurt her and that she did nothing to make him lose his self control.

Rachel Brand QC, defending, said it was a sad case of a husband who had gone to pieces and was genuinely in pain over the only woman he had ever loved.

His world fell apart after she left him through boredom six weeks before the tragedy.

Miss Brand said he may have taken the knife to frighten his wife or to mutilate himself in front of her. Someone determined to kill would have inflicted more than one wound.

Troth had gone round to the house while his mind was in turmoil and had accidentally knifed his wife during a tussle.

"It was a spontaneous event which arose from the emotion of the moment," said Miss Brand.

The trial continues.