EX-POLICEMAN 'THREATENED TO KILL GIRLFRIEND'
A FORMER police officer who threatened to stab his girlfriend to death after she cheated on him was given a two-month suspended sentence on Monday.Mark McManus, aged 37, of Somerset Way, in Woolston, made 18 calls and sent text messages from his mobile phone saying he would kill Andrea Cannon and a man she was having an affair with on July 24 this year.
Warrington Magistrates' Court heard on Monday how McManus, who resigned from his role with Warrington CID when the case began and cried throughout the hearing, discovered his partner of five years had been seeing a work colleague last Christmas.
He admitted one charge of harassment.
John Shipley, prosecuting, said McManus threw Miss Cannon out of their Woolston home where they lived with her three children on December 27.
He had been drinking and as she left he threw stones at her car, causing a crack in the windscreen and smashing the nearside front window.
Miss Cannon told police this summer that their relationship had been deteriorating for six months and on July 19 she told McManus she was leaving for her parents' address in Liverpool.
On July 23 she returned to the home in Woolston to find her belongings strewn around the garden and McManus snatched her phone.
On July 24, McManus made numerous calls to her work, the Mercedes dealership on Farrell Street, arranging to collect keys and return her phone.
That night she went to her parents' house where she found McManus had called her father and been abusive to him.
At 10pm he called demanding to know where she had been earlier that evening, threatening her and her partner and writing in a text message "I am going to kill him, you know I will." When arrested, McManus admitted making the threats but said he did not mean to carry them out.
John Banasko, defending, said his client had not been able to come to terms with his partner's affair and had been traumatised by the death of his mother on June 19.
He said: "Mr McManus I think would probably say he still loved her (Miss Cannon).
I hope the court can bear in mind the emotional difficulties he had at this point in time.
"I suppose you could say he just lost it'." In addition to his sentence, he was ordered to pay £100 costs and obey a restraining order preventing him from visiting Farrell Street, where she works, Hatton Hill Road in Litherland, Wigan, and contacting her or Owen and Ross Cannon.
