Alan Carter said that the investigation into the stabbing of his wife Karen ‘confirmed a relationship I did not want to believe’ and which she had denied.

The husband of a woman murdered at their French holiday home has described “a feeling of complete betrayal” after police said his wife’s new relationship with a local man might have been the killer’s motive, reports The Times.

“What has come out of this investigation has confirmed a relationship I did not want to believe, and that had been denied to me repeatedly by my wife,” Alan Carter, 65, said about the latest leads into the knife attack on Karen Carter in the Dordogne village of Trémolat.

The prosecutor leading the investigation said it was focused “on people likely to have had something against the victim, or against the couple that she had formed” — a blunt statement that, Carter said at the family home in South Africa, had compounded the grief and shock felt by him and their four children.

The man identified as being in a relationship with Mrs Carter is Jean-François Guerrier, a 74-year-old retired businessman who has a farmhouse on the edge of Trémolat. He was also the person who discovered Mrs Carter, 65, in her driveway dying from multiple stab wounds. They had parted shortly after spending the evening with others at a wine-tasting event.

Guerrier was later interviewed and released by police, who said they had no reason to suspect him. Also questioned was a 69-year-old woman who lived up the lane from the Carters’ property. She, too, was released after accounting for her movements at the time of the murder, police said.