A TV news bulletin broke the story of a Cranage woman’s murder to the man standing in the dock accused of the crime, a court has heard.

David Ryan, 47, of Byrom Street, Hale, told Chester Crown Court he had been ‘very shocked’ after hearing about the fate of Diana Lee.

Diana was found murdered in her garage on Thursday, August 9. The court was previously told that Ryan met her on August 8 where they had sex in the back seat of her Vauxhall Corsa.

Ryan told the jury on July 4 that he first heard about Diana being murdered on Saturday, August 11, 2012 when watching a TV bulletin.

“I think it must have been Saturday when I found out about Diana,” he said.

“I was shocked, very shocked and when I saw pictures of her on the TV I couldn’t believe it. It just didn’t seem real that that had happened.

“There were loads of thoughts going through my head and I couldn’t believe what had happened to someone that I had seen the night before was dead and had been murdered.

“It didn’t seem comprehensible; I just couldn’t put it into words.”

Gordon Cole QC, defending, then told the jury about a selection of search terms that police officers had found on Ryan’s computer.

The court heard that Ryan had typed ‘countries that have extradition treaties with the UK’ into an online search engine after reading about Diana’s death on the news section of the Cheshire Police website.

Ryan was asked what the purpose of the search was.

“I was just having a general nosey of what the treaties were because we had been talking about Asil Nadir (the Turkisk Cypriot businessman who was chief executive of Polly Peck),” he said.

“He was in the news for several months.”

Ryan stressed that he was not looking to flee the country after Mr Cole had asked him why he had searched for background information on Angola, Morocco and Nigeria.

Computer records also showed he typed in ‘do you need a visa to live in Somalia’, then ‘Libya’, and then ‘Costa Rica’ after looking at the previous web pages.

But the time Ryan spent on the pages was only a matter of seconds which he said showed he was just ‘flicking from one page to the next’.

Ryan denies murdering Diana Lee. The trial continues.