A WEALTHY businessman has been jailed for seven years for killing his estranged partner after a judge said he had never accepted their relationship was over.

Sentencing John Butler at Leeds Crown Court today, Mr Justice Edis said he had gone “unannounced and unwanted” to the flat in Cherry Lea Court, Rawdon, where Pauline Butler, the mother of his three sons, was then living.

They argued and in an explosion of rage he had stabbed her. “You killed her with a kitchen knife in the home to which she had gone when she decided she could no longer live with you in what had been the family home.”

“She no longer wanted to be with you and she wanted to live her own life in her own home. You proved unable to accept that and ignored her repeated statements of her wish to be without you.”

He said in his view Butler had at some point formed the intention to kill her but his responsibility was reduced by his loss of control.

That loss was partly through fear that she would grab the knife, partly her contemptuous language and expressions of hatred and the “straw which broke the camel’s back” was her threatening to stop their joint trips with their granddaughter.

Butler, 62, the boss of Kettley’s Furniture Centre in Yeadon, was unanimously cleared by the jury at Leeds Crown Court yesterday of murdering her but convicted of her manslaughter which he had previously admitted.

The firm featured on the BBC’s The Fixer series in 2012 when Alex Polizzi gave makeover advice about updating the business.

Although the couple had never married Pauline changed her name to Butler and everybody believed they were wed.

She had moved out of the family home in Larkfield Road, Rawdon, about five weeks before her death following family problems.

The judge said the couple had increasingly been living separate lives under the same roof before that.

“You spent many nights in the pub and then in your den drinking too much. She was home, lonely and frustrated with what her life had become.

“She unfairly in many ways came to despise you as a weak father, a drunk and said frequently she deserved better than you.”

After she took the decision to leave Butler regularly visited ignoring her requests he ring first, no doubt still hoping for a reconciliation.

Butler told the jury he “turned into a monster” stabbing her in an explosion of rage. He said he had called at her flat on the morning of April 14 to see to a microwave but she was angry to see him and it was when she said their weekly trips to see their grandchild would have to end that he reacted.