The ex-wife of Paul Douglas Peters has broken down in court, saying she still doesn't know why he put a hoax collar bomb around a Sydney teenager's neck.
"I couldn't believe it," Deborah Peters told the District Court in Sydney on Friday of the moment she found out Peters had been arrested.
Peters, who faced the parents of his victim Madeleine Pulver for the sentence hearing, wiped his eyes several times as he listened to his former wife give evidence.
He has pleaded guilty to aggravated break and enter and committing a serious indictable offence in relation to the incident on August 3 last year.
The court has heard Peters, 51, entered the Pulver family home at Mosman, on Sydney's lower north shore, on August 3 last year and attached the fake device around Ms Pulver's neck after cornering her in her bedroom.
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The incident sparked a ten-hour police operation before the device was confirmed as fake. He was arrested a couple of weeks later in the Louisville, Kentucky home he had shared with his wife.
Ms Peters told the court she still did not know why Peters carried out the act and she had never asked him. "I don't know if even Paul knows why he did it," she said through tears.
"Paul is extremely remorseful that his has happened."
The court heard the couple's marriage broke down in 2007 after Peters became "disconnected" but they were on the verge of reconciling before Ms Peters decided it wasn't going to work out. "I didn't want to go back to marriage with Paul and have the issues of anger and the mood swings," she said, adding she believed Peters drank heavily.
"His moods were manic. One minute he'd be happy, the next he would be upset. His personality was all over the place."
After Peters left the US for Australia, Ms Peters said she was "worried about him being alone" and asked him to come home. When he arrived back in the US on August 8, after he had attached the device to Ms Pulver, Ms Peters said he seemed "fine".
"He was light-hearted. He seemed happy," she said.
