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Until the final weeks before he killed his family and himself, Peter Lee managed to hide his violent nature from the outside world.

A contradictory picture of Mr. Lee has emerged at the inquest into the five deaths that occurred when Mr. Lee's rage finally exploded last September.

The inquest, abruptly suspended on Wednesday after a legal argument over whether Crown prosecutors who handled his case must testify, has already shed as much light as it ever will on Mr. Lee.

The rest of the hearing, whenever it resumes, will centre on how the justice system responds to domestic violence.

To his closest friend and his family, Mr. Lee was generous, funny and kind. He was madly in love with his wife, Sunny Park. He was a doting father to his young son, Christian Lee.

But to the people who lived with him in the $1-million home nestled in a quiet, upscale Oak Bay neighbourhood, Mr. Lee was jealous, controlling and violent.

It wasn't until a car crash on July 31, 2007, that the public face Mr. Lee had cultivated started to fall away. Prompted by an inquisitive doctor, his injured wife opened up and told police that the crash was no accident, but rather an attempted homicide by an abusive and suicidal man who had just been told that Ms. Park was intent on leaving him.

Until then, there were few clues to an outsider that something was wrong at home.

Born in Korea to a family who already had four girls, Mr. Lee was the only son, the "baby." They moved to Canada in 1976, when he was 8. He joined the Canadian Forces while he was still in high school and served many years as a Navy reservist on the dive fleet team.

"He loved diving," one of his sisters, Lisa Yi, told the inquest. "He loved Christian and Sunny most, though."

He had a previous failed marriage to a woman who, like Ms. Park, had been more connected to her Korean culture. So thoroughly had he adapted to life in Canada that he could no longer communicate in Korean.

He met Ms. Park, who was in Canada as an exchange student, in 1999, and the two moved in together in 2000. Ms. Park was unhappy when she learned she was pregnant, but he was enthusiastic.

In a taped interview played at the inquest, Ms. Park told police the relationship had been abusive almost from the start, but it had escalated, particularly when she fought with Mr. Lee about his huge financial losses due to a gambling addiction.

Ms. Yi, however, believed the couple's relationship was harmonious - until Ms. Park's family found out about the baby. Ms. Park's parents and her sister, Jane Park, arrived from Korea and moved in. The couple married in 2004, apparently in response to family pressure. "When there was only three of them, he was happy," Ms. Yi told the inquest.

Ms. Yi, clearly struggling to explain her brother's horrific actions, told the inquest she believed Ms. Park and her family were trying to take possession of the family home and business and leave him with nothing.

"He thought there was no way out; he doesn't want to lose Sunny," she said.

After the car crash, police interviewed the couple and laid charges. Free on bail, he was not allowed back into the family home. Ms. Yi took her brother in. He arrived with only the clothes on his back, and this explanation: "He said they had a little argument," she recalled. He didn't accept that his wife wanted a divorce. At his urging, Ms. Yi tried to help reconcile the couple.

"We tried to [get] Sunny and Peter together, the way it was before," she said.

In his own police interview, Mr. Lee offered few insights. He hinted that his marriage was torn between two cultures. His wife's family was Korean, but he didn't regard it as his own culture. "I'm of Korean background," he told police.

Asked what was important to him, he replied: "My family."

His buddy from the fleet dive unit, Steven Mandy, recalled a generous and spontaneous friend who became depressed when his wife decided to leave him. He never saw him angry. "It was totally not his character," he said.

But Ms. Park knew otherwise. In her interview with police five weeks before she was killed, she warned of Mr. Lee's explosive, dangerous potential. He carried a knife everywhere, she noted. He threatened to kill her and her family. He threatened to kill himself. She was convinced it was going to get worse.

Mr. Mandy, who also offered Mr. Lee a place to sleep while he was out on bail after the car crash, saw his friend change in the final weeks. He remembered Mr. Lee sitting at his kitchen table one night, crying. "He wanted his family back," Mr. Mandy said. "He wanted the pain to stop."

Shortly after 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, Mr. Lee stabbed to death his wife, son and in-laws. He then carefully laid out the bodies of Ms. Park and Christian before stabbing himself in the heart, collapsing on top of them.