The wife of a man who shot dead doorman Matt Clements has told of her horror as she listened to the incident over the telephone.

Linda Batchelor said her then future husband Kenneth had been “distraught and despairing” after he received several threatening phone calls from Mr Clements.

She urged him to call the police but he replied there would be repercussions if he did. “He knew what Matt was like,” she told Maidstone Crown Court.

Batchelor, a self-employed mechanic, is accused of murdering 20-stone Mr Clements after he turned up at his Chilham home in the early hours of November 18 2007.

Mr Clements, of Wayside Avenue, St Michael’s, Tenterden, was shot in the chest at point-blank range after climbing onto scaffolding at the cottage in Canterbury Road to get to Batchelor.

Prosecutor Cairns Nelson said Mr Clements, who ran a business providing bouncers to clubs and trained guard dogs, had become fixated that his girlfriend was owed maintenance by Batchelor’s brother Gary over children they had together.

He started to “demand money with menaces” from Kenneth Batchelor and a third brother David.

Mrs Batchelor said she was on the phone to her husband when he told her: “Oh my God, I think he has just turned up. Yeah, it’s him. He’s here.”

Asked how he was speaking, she replied: “I can’t find words for that because he is a grown man. To hear him on the phone...fearful.

“I told him not to hang up, so I could hear what was going on. I heard him open a window.

“He shouted: I told you three times not to call round. I have got nothing for you.’

“I could hear Matt Clements in the distance. He sounded aggressive.”

Batchelor shouted again: “Get off my property.” Mrs Batchelor said she heard Mr Clement’s voice getting louder.

She heard him say: “I told you I was coming to get you.

“My husband was very emotional,” she said. “He was distressed.”

She switched from her landline to her mobile to phone a friend who lived mid-way between Chilham and her then home in Mersham.

She went back to her landline and heard her husband asking: “Why are you here? Is it because of Gary?”

“I was hysterical,” said Mrs Batchelor. She asked the friend to call the police. She went back to the other phone and heard her husband say: “I shot him.”

Batchelor denies murder and manslaughter. The trial continues.