A knife attacker was taking hard drugs in the days before he tried to kill two innocent pensioner neighbours at their Wolverhampton home, a jury heard.

Jobless David Brown admits being the person who wielded the knife, but denies attempting to murder Evelyn Leedham, aged 74, and her 77-year-old husband Reg. The 39-year-old’s ex-wife Sally, who visited Brown’s flat on the same floor as the victims in St Joseph’s Court, Merry Hill, told Wolverhampton Crown Court she lent him money for heroin.

“I loaned him £40 to buy drugs three days before the incident with the elderly couple and he probably used his benefit money the next day to buy more,” she said.

“He used heroin to escape from the depression that followed the death of his mother in 2006. That knocked him for six. He became a drug addict and that led me to leave him.”

She last saw Brown, who has tattoos on his body and head, around three hours before the attack on December 4 when she took frozen food to his flat. “I did not stay long,” she told the jury.

Brown later burst into the nearby flat of the Leedhams, cutting their wrists to the bone and waiting around two hours before calling an ambulance after Mrs Leedham said she blame the attack on someone else, said prosecutor Mr Peter Grieves-Smith.

Mr Leedham, a former mechanical engineer, said in a taped interview played to the court yesterday: “He was holding the knife with both hands in a very, very severe stabbing action.

“We were both in a terrible state by the time he finally called the ambulance and did not think we could live for more than a few minutes.”

A woman police officer asked to check some of the details of the attack but Mr Leedham replied: “To actually be in the same room when a person is trying to kill your wife is something you do not want to remember.” He then broke down in tears and the taped interview was immediately stopped.

Mrs Leedham, who was also stabbed in the stomach and neck, needed seven hours of emergency surgery while her husband required a blood transfusion and has lost much of the use of his right hand.

Brown also denies wounding the couple with intent.

The trial continues.