Vanessa asked her husband for a neck massage. It was the last thing she did.

When Vanessa Godfrey checked into a hotel with her husband, Jeffrey James Godfrey, in February 2022, it was meant to be the beginning of a fun weekend away for a friend's birthday.

On Valentine's Day morning, the 46-year-old woke up and asked her husband of 27 years to massage her neck. She moved to sit between his legs as he sat on the bed, his back resting against the headboard.

Godfrey began to massage his wife. Then, without warning, he put his arm around her neck and strangled her with "substantial pressure".

Godfrey, 53, pleaded guilty to manslaughter at Brisbane Supreme Court on Thursday accused of killing Vanessa at the Pelican Waters Resort on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

The court was told Godfrey suffered from drug-induced psychosis that sparked paranoid delusions that his wife had stolen his driver's licence.

Prosecutor Matthew Le Grand said Godfrey had been a heavy user of cannabis for over 30 years and meth for more than a decade. In the lead-up to Vanessa's death, he had become increasingly paranoid and started experiencing delusions about his wife.

The Valentine's Day attack was Godfrey's first documented psychotic episode, the court was told.

The night before, Godfrey realised his driver's licence and Medicare card were missing. Convinced Vanessa had stolen them, he confronted her, asking if "his whole life had been a lie" before they went to sleep.

He repeated these words the following morning, moments before he fatally strangled her.

After the attack, Godfrey sat looking at his wife's lifeless body. Believing he saw her breathe, he took a knife and cut her arms. Over several hours, he drank alcohol, took Valium tablets and cut his own arms.

Hotel staff eventually knocked on the door when the couple failed to check out. They found Godfrey unconscious on the floor and Vanessa in a pool of blood on the bed.

Godfrey confessed to police that he had killed his wife after an argument about his stolen driver's licence, which he claimed Vanessa had admitted to taking and told him no one would have discovered the truth.

An "indescribable" loss.

The couple's daughter, Olivia, told the court of the "indescribable" impact her mother's death had on her and her young daughter.

"I lost my beautiful mother due to my father's horrible choices and my caring father [is] now in a place I never saw him ending up," she said in a victim impact statement.

Olivia said her daughter now asks, "Why don't I have a nanny and poppy?"

Godfrey watched his daughter read the impact statement, wiping his nose periodically.

He was initially charged with murder as a domestic violence offence. However, after the case went through the mental health court, where Godfrey was diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis, the charge was downgraded to manslaughter due to diminished responsibility.

"He killed Ms Godfrey with the intent of ending her life. However, at the time of the killing he suffered an abnormality of mind which subsequently impaired his capacity to know he ought not to kill her," prosecutor Le Grand told Justice Glenn Martin.

Le Grand asked Justice Martin to consider a sentence exceeding 10 years, while defence lawyer Simon Lewis argued for less than a decade behind bars.

Justice Martin questioned the defence's argument that Godfrey should not be identified as a serious violent offender — which would require him to serve 80 per cent of his sentence — given the seriousness of the crime.

"Your client thought he had killed his wife, then thought, she is not dead so I'll make sure," he said.

"She put herself in a vulnerable position, no doubt, because she had no idea anything like this would happen."

Godfrey will be sentenced on January 30.

-With AAP

Feature image: ABC News.