A LOVE affair between a man accused of killing his wife and a teaching assistant began with a walk in a park, Worcester Crown Court was told.

The relationship between Alan Evans and Amanda Chadwick progressed to secret meetings at hotels and to them having sex in each other’s marital beds.

The pair exchanged more than 2,000 text messages and a list of these was discovered by Evans’ wife Louise, said prosecutor Jonas Hankin QC. 

She confronted her husband, and a few days later the 32-year-old mother-of-three was found dead at the foot of the stairs at their home in Stoney Lane, Kidderminster.

The jury was told that Mrs Chadwick and Evans had resumed their sexual affair after his wife’s death until his arrest for her murder.

Evans, a 35-year-old welder, denies murdering his partner of 18 years by smothering her before pushing her down the stairs and delaying calling the emergency services.

Mrs Chadwick, a teaching assistant at a Kidderminster school, said her home was only five minutes walk away from the home of the Evans family.

She said she was now separated from her husband, Simon McHugh, with whom she had been with for 12 years and had two children. 

She admitted that she flirted with Evans in text messages.

She and her husband had been to the Evans house for coffee and she described Louise as “quiet, genuine and nice”. They had gone to the cinema together.

The couple’s relationship escalated from dog walks in the park, and from March 2012 they were having sex once a week often in hotel rooms until shortly before Mrs Evans’s death.

Mrs Chadwick said her marriage was at an end.

Evans told her that he was sleeping apart from his wife, but he desperately wanted to keep in touch with his three daughters.

When the affair was revealed and Evans said he was staying with his wife, Mrs Chadwick was so upset and angry that she told best friend Angela Bird that she was going to “screw Al and Louise over”. 

But in October last year she went to police and asked to alter her initial statement.

Cross-examined by Rudi Fortson QC, defending, she said that Evans would tell her that he loved her but also that he loved his wife.

They had talked about cohabiting but he had never promised to marry her. He never said he would leave his wife “at all costs” to be with Mrs Chadwick.

The trial continues.