A jealous divorcee spied on his wife's new boyfriend with binoculars before deliberately running him down with his car and fatally chopping at his head with an axe, a jury has heard.
And the elderly man's subsequent excuses and stories to police and to the NSW Supreme Court in evidence should be rejected as they are contradictory and inherently implausible, the prosecutor said in her closing address on Wednesday.
There is no dispute that Cabramatta West man Thanh Tran, 79, repeatedly struck Pok Min Fah's head with the axe after hitting him with his car on March 14, 2019.
Tran has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter, arguing his judgment was substantially impaired due to a loss of control caused by trauma from his lived experience of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot's regime.
The Crown, however, contends that the angry older man was bitter his wife was divorcing him and had begun a new relationship with the 59-year-old and "forcing him to start a new life".
Married for more than 30 years, the couple had a strained relationship and were in effect separated with his wife sharing their daughter's bedroom for the last 15 years of their life together.
"After years of this unhappy marriage, she found someone that she wanted to start a new life," the Crown said, adding they shared a passion for singing.
Tran told his daughter that Fah was a bad person and destroyed his family, Nina Tran said in evidence.
But Tran later said he held no ill feelings towards the new partner and remained "neutral".
To police, he claimed he was acting in self-defence after the alleged assailant punched his head, and was forced to retrieve the axe from his car boot.
He then told a psychologist the man appeared threatening as he was carrying a ladder from his old home.
While Fah lay on the ground defenceless, Tran with force struck him more than 10 times at a fast pace with anger in his face, one witness wrote in a statement.
This caused bones inside his head to crack like an eggshell, and loosened parts of his fractured skull, amongst other severe injuries, the jury heard.
Tran explained in evidence that the axe was in the boot due to previous assaults, and the binoculars were kept in his car to watch soccer matches on a field.
The Crown rejected these assertions respectively as extraordinary and inherently implausible.
By the time Tran arrived in Australia his life was marked with such severe loss, trauma and grief, he suffered stress far greater than any local could ever conceive, his barrister Janet Manuell SC said.
After growing up in Cambodia a few kilometres away from the Vietnam border and the ravages of war, Tran was then marched about to various refugee camps, forced into labour from sunrise to sunset, and experienced "the disappearing" of about 16 family and friends, she said.
"How does any person deal with losses of that magnitude?"
The closing addresses continue.
