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Court documents show Thuy Tien Truong, 35, had tried to escape her marriage to Lam in 2012.

He had emigrated from Vietnam in 1979 and was visiting his home country when he met Truong in a coffee shop in 2000. They married six months later and she came to Canada in 2003. He sponsored her family to come as well in 2009.

Truong said in a 2012 application for an emergency protection order that her husband became controlling shortly after she landed here. Lam changed her phone number because he didn’t want her to have friends. He wanted to choose her clothes. He didn’t want her to work, but she got a job anyway.

Then he hit her. Once, he choked her so hard she thought she was going to die, she said. He threatened to kill her if she called police.

Truong said in the document she was so unhappy she once had sex with another man. Lam became suspicious and ordered a DNA test that proved that their son, Elvis, was not his.

Lam planned to “actually kill off her whole family and he was going to look for a gun, but no one would sell it to him,” a court interpreter said while translating Truong’s testimony during an emergency protection hearing.

“He asked his ex-wife if she could find him a gun … but the ex-wife told him not to do it because he has two kids with his ex-wife too.”

Truong testified Lam showed her parents the DNA results and they begged him to forgive her for the affair. She said he sexually assaulted, punched and choked her when they were alone that night. Her sister eventually called police.