Afraid of upsetting his on-off girlfriend by severing their relationship, Michael James Quinn gave her a kiss on the cheek, put a knife in his pocket and went outside to kill himself.
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But when his girlfriend Cherie Vize, 25, tried to wrest the knife from him, he "pulled back and noticed blood coming from the right side of her neck".
Angry and shocked at what had occurred, he gave Ms Vize "a cuddle and kiss and told her everything was going to be alright" before he turned the knife on himself.
This is the account of Ms Vize's fatal stabbing that Mr Quinn, whose self-inflicted wounds left him quadriplegic, gave to a forensic psychiatrist while in Long Bay jail.
Mr Quinn also told the psychiatrist that he "would go overseas and be euthanized" once his "legal issues were dealt with".
The 27-year-old is on trial in the NSW Supreme Court for murdering Ms Vize, an art student, on the front lawn of the home he shared with his parents in Wollongong in July 2013.
Mr Quinn has pleaded not guilty, with his defence team arguing that he accidentally stabbed Ms Vize and his mental state may have been substantially impaired at the time.
Doctor Stephen Allnutt✓ said that Mr Quinn had reported that he thought his suicide would stop him upsetting Ms Vize and "free her up to be with another guy".
While the court has previously heard evidence about Mr Quinn's alleged obsessive behaviour towards Ms Vize, he told Dr Allnutt that he was "relieved" when they broke up and that she was emotionally unstable and continued to try to see him.
In the hours before her death, Mr Quinn told Ms Vize he would not see her anymore but she had cried and they had bought a DVD, talked about their relationship and had sex.
"I started thinking is the only way it is going to register with her if I am dead and we can not be together?," Mr Quinn said, according to Dr Allnutt's report.
The court heard that after Ms Vize was stabbed, Mr Quinn decided to slice his spinal cord because he thought "if I survived the other injuries I didn't deserve to be mobile ever again".
Dr Allnutt said Mr Quinn had a history of self harm and suicide attempts, suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and likely had a borderline personality disorder.
As a primary school student he had been sexually abused by a school counsellor, and had grown up planning to kill himself when he turned 25 after witnessing his great grandmother suffer from dementia and deciding he did not want to be "frail and rely on others".
Mr Quinn stopped taking his medication seven weeks before Mr Vize's murder, the court heard, because "she thought it was doing more hard than good".
Dr Allnutt, a witness for the Crown, said that he did not believe that Mr Quinn's mental state at the time of Ms Vize's death would have stopped him being able to control his actions.
"I do not believe that his abnormality of mind was of a nature or severity that it would have impaired his capacity to judge events, or know right from wrong," he said.
Under cross examination, Dr Allnutt said there was research that linked obsessive compulsive disorder with impaired impulse control and there could be symptoms, including agitation, if medication was suddenly stopped.
In a statement tendered to the court, a neighbour of the Quinn family, Gerhard Warth✓, said he heard a woman saying "No Michael, no, stop it" before he discovered Mr Quinn lying under a jacaranda tree with a knife sticking out of his neck.
Mr Quinn said he could not feel anything "from the neck down" and asked his younger brother to lift his arms up, Mr Warth said.
The judge-only trial will continue on Wednesday.
