Man Sought in Slaying of Two in Fullerton Kills Himself

A troubled former South Vietnamese military officer who served time as a prisoner of war and vowed he would never return to captivity committed suicide Wednesday after he had shot and killed his girlfriend and another man in a frenzy of jealousy and violence.

Shortly after daybreak and with police closing in, Dan Van Nguyen, 35, sat in his car in front of his former military commander’s house in San Antonio, Tex., pulled out a .22-caliber pistol and shot himself once in the right temple.

Police said the pistol apparently was the same one used in the Monday slayings of Lewis Long Vu, 34, of Bellflower, and Trinh Tuyet Duong, 28, at her Fullerton apartment.

Nguyen killed himself at the house of Hieu and Pearl Nguyen, who are not related to him but who were described as his closest friends. Nguyen had opened a restaurant with the couple last year and in a telephone call to Pearl Nguyen from Fullerton Monday night admitted that he had killed Duong and Vu.

After apparently driving straight from Orange County to San Antonio, Nguyen had gone to the couple’s house and promised that he would surrender to police. But when he went outside to his car to get a change of clothes, he shot himself.

Nationwide Bulletin

Fullerton police had issued a nationwide bulletin seeking Nguyen’s arrest after the bodies of Duong and Vu were discovered Tuesday in a Duong’s apartment on West Franklin Avenue. Police speculated that Nguyen had killed them both in a rage of jealousy, in part because Duong had spurned his romantic overtures.

Fullerton police were initially concerned that Duong’s 4-year-old son had been kidnaped, but he was located at the Westminster home of an uncle, where his mother had dropped him off Sunday.

“It is a sad end to a story that should not have happened,” said Detective Anton Michalec, an intelligence officer with the San Antonio police. “There is no easy way

to explain something like this.”

In piecing together the events that led to the slayings and suicide, police said it apparently began when Nguyen moved from Orange County to San Antonio last September to open a Vietnamese restaurant with Hieu Nguyen, who was his commander with a South Vietnamese helicopter unit in the early 1970s.

Friends said Nguyen referred to his old military commander as “the master” and would often confide in him his deepest problems.

When he left Orange County, where he had unsuccessfully run a beauty salon, Nguyen also left behind Duong. The couple almost immediately started having problems, police said.

In time, Michalec said, it became clear that Duong was seeing other men. At the same time, Nguyen’s San Antonio restaurant, the King Wah, hit on hard times, and he became deeply depressed.

“He was a hard-working person,” Michalec said. “He had been worrying a lot and couldn’t sleep or eat. He told Hieu he needed to get out of town to clear his head. He decided to go to California.”

When Nguyen returned to see Duong, a loud argument broke out and neighbors reported hearing a series of shots. The bodies of Duong and Vu were discovered Tuesday.

Not His Intent to Kill Them

Early Tuesday morning, Michalec said, Nguyen called Hieu and Pearl Nguyen to report “that he had killed them. That’s what he told them. He said it wasn’t his intent to kill them when he went to the house. He said they started arguing and something happened inside his head.”

Michalec said Nguyen then asked his friends if he should kill himself because he feared going back to prison if he surrendered to police.

“They talked him into coming back to San Antonio,” the detective said. “He must have driven straight through. He got here early this morning (Wednesday) and drove over to their place around 6 a.m. (CDT). They talked him into surrendering to me.”

“He agreed to this and said he was going to turn himself in. He said he was going to go get his clothes out of the car, take a shower and wait for me. They called me as soon as they found him dead in the car.”

Michalec said the stress of his failed relationship and business venture apparently became too much for Nguyen to bear.

“I think it was pride and mental erosion,” Michalec said. “He told Hieu at one time that this was the hardest year of his life, even harder than being in a prison camp in North Vietnam.”

Silvia Palmer, an information officer for the Fullerton police, said Nguyen had lived in the Orange County area before moving to San Antonio last year and had once operated and owned a beauty salon with Duong.

According to immigration records, Nguyen immigrated to the United States in 1985, after serving as a pilot of U.S.-made Cobra helicopter gunships for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam until the fall of the country in 1975. It could not immediately be determined how many years he spent as a prisoner of war, but San Antonio police said they believed that it was for an extended period of time.