A senior police officer has admitted that mistakes were made in the case of a woman who was killed by her mentally-ill husband.

It is almost a year since Susan Goswell was found slumped on the lounge floor of her home in West Chiltington.

She had been repeatedly stabbed and bludgeoned to death.

Her husband’s body was found in a car which crashed into a tree just yards from the couple’s home.

Police believe that Roger Goswell, 66, killed his wife of 46 years after learning that she had not been a virgin when they married and then took his own life.

During the second day of the inquest at Chichester into the couple’s deaths, Detective Superintendent Graham Bartlett said errors had been made in the way Sussex Police had documented calls about Mr Goswell’s repeated threats to kill his wife.

Less than a month before she was killed, Susan Goswell’s son Joseph called police to alert them of aggressive threats made to her by her husband.

The inquest was told that Mrs Goswell, 63, was fearful of contacting the police about her husband’s violent and graphic threats because she did not want to anger him further.

But on the three occasions when she did dare to call the police switchboard, the calls were not tagged as domestic violence.

Det Supt Bartlett said that lessons had been learned from the incident and that the call handlers and supervisors had since received additional training in dealing with domestic violence calls.

An internal review of force procedures was also launched and overseen by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the police watchdog.

Mr Goswell was admitted to St Richard's Hospital in Chichester last November after he attempted to kill himself by gassing himself in his car in his garage.

A day later he was detained under the Mental Health Act while he underwent psychiatric assessment at the Harold Kidd Unit in Chichester, which is run by the Sussex Partnership NHS Trust.

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Helen Leegood told the inquest that during his assessment he confided in her about his problems, including his torment over his wife’s previous relationship with a man and his excessive spending on cars.

She said: “Mr Goswell was clearly a man who projected an image to the outside world that people would like to see and that image was of a confident, professional man.

“He wanted people to see that he was successful with a lot of the trappings but he was aware that that wasn’t the man he was.

“Behind the mask, he was a man of low esteem, a glass-half-empty man. He most envied people who had contentment and, despite the trappings of success, he never found that contentment.”

The inquest will resume on November 4.