The former wife of a man who killed their young son during a holiday in Greece has said she fears that she will “erupt with anger” at his trial today.

Natasha Steel has not spoken to John Hogan face to face since he grabbed his two children and jumped 50ft from a hotel balcony in Crete in August 2006. Liam, 6, died almost instantly when he hit the concrete but Mia, then 2, suffered only a broken arm after her father and brother’s bodies cushioned her fall.

Ms Steel, a 35-year-old casualty nurse, will sit just feet away from her former husband at the 19th century courthouse in the harbour town of Chania. Hogan, 33, who suffered a broken arm and leg in the fall, was moved for the trial from a high security jail on the Greek mainland to Crete last week. He faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for the murder of Liam and 12 years for attempted murder of Mia. However, some of the hearing will focus on his psychological state and whether he was of a sound mind at the time he jumped.

His former wife, who divorced him in June last year, has said that she will never be able to forgive him but believes he is serving “a life sentence in his head”.

“I have to face him and it’s going to be very hard but I’m also anxious about it because I don’t know if I’m going to erupt with anger.”

During the hearing, which could last just a few days, a panel of three judges and a jury of four people will hear Ms Steel describe the moment she discovered her husband had jumped from the fourth-floor balcony.

In an interview with ITV before she flew out to Greece, she said: “I’m scared about what I’m going to see in front of me, you know he once was a composed man who I loved and spent time with.

“He was my best friend, father of my children. I know he’s going to be a different man and that scares me the most about the trial, seeing him.”

Ms Steel, who now lives with a boyfriend in Newport, says she would “never forgive” Hogan but when asked what should happen at the trial, she replied: “I don’t care what the outcome is because I know that his sentence is inside his own head and I know that until that man dies he will hate himself for what he’s done.” She said the couple’s “make or break” holiday was blighted by rows which culminated with her announcing that she was going to leave him.

During one of the arguments at dinner in the hotel, Hogan had even threatened to burn down their family home in Bradley Stoke, Bristol.

She told ITV1’s Tonight programme, to be shown at 8pm today: “He’d suddenly come out with things like, ‘Well if you think if you’re having the house you’re mistaken and if you do have the house I’ll burn it to the ground.’” She said: “I thought, ‘What? You’d burn the house with us in it or the kids in it or with you and the kids in it?’ I didn’t know what he meant but that comment scared me.”

It emerged that Hogan had come from a family plagued by mental illness and that both his brothers had committed suicide. His threats mirrored the actions of the one brother who killed himself after torching the family home a few years after their father died suddenly.

When Ms Steel followed her husband to the hotel room in Lerapetra his mood changed. After announcing that he had booked flights for them to return to the Britain and packed, she tried to rearrange the badly filled suitcases.

“He had a crazed look in his eye and I remember the look and I thought, ‘Whoah, you know, I’ve not seen that look before’. I didn’t know what it meant, didn’t know what was going to happen next, didn’t fear ever for my children or my safety. And with that he started saying, ‘John’s packing is f***ing crap’, and shouting those words over and over again and running round the room, throwing every bit of contents out the cases around the room. And the next thing I know I turn around and no one is in the room. They’ve all gone.” She ran downstairs to find her son crumpled on the ground with severe head injuries.

“I’d never in my 12 to 14 years of nursing seen anyone look so close to death. Just the colour in his face, it was grey. He was in a heap, there was blood everywhere and the images of where the blood was coming from – his head – have only come back to me in later months. I didn’t think I’d remembered it, but every day since I get images of my little boy dying in my mind, every minute, every five minutes.” Her daughter remembers falling, despite being dazed by the impact.

“She would say, ‘Mummy, Daddy shouted at you, he threw the clothes and he threw Mia in the mud’, and that was her sequence of events. Liam was never included in that story. She remembers it now as well.”

In a statement to the court, Hogan said that the prospect of breaking up with his wife meant he was “overwhelmed by confusion” and unable to bear life without his children. “The desire to self-destruct exploded within me. As a result I lost my ability to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong.”

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