’Til death do us part – that’s the vow Georgina Lutz says her former husband repeated to her when they fought.

The oath took on a different significance, she told a territorial court Tuesday, after their wedding, when he started speaking regularly about suicide.

Lutz was the only witness called to testify against her former partner, Donald Bruce McKay, who was in court on charges of criminal harassment.

Over a full day of testimony, Lutz, a resident of Watson Lake, used the word “relentless” to describe McKay’s communication with her.

She said the stress of it made her sick enough to have to take a leave from her job, and that her children are scarred from the experience.

During her time on the stand, Lutz was composed, but requested two breaks. By the end of the day, she was wiping her eyes.

Lutz testified she first met McKay in 2008.

After their wedding in 2012, she said, he began acting differently toward herself and her two children.

“Bang, switch, my property. I own you,” she said of his attitude.

Lutz said McKay was manipulative and controlling, and that he used the threat of his suicide to “keep (her) hooked into his little game.”

She said she left him on more than one occasion, but he always brought up suicide, once laying out an assortment of knives and showing her an extension cord hanging from the rafters.

She said she maintained contact with him out of a feeling of responsibility.

“I didn’t want him to think that we were together, but I didn’t want him to kill himself too,” she said.

In the winter of 2015, she moved from the house they were sharing in Alberta, where McKay was working, to their former home in Watson Lake. She said McKay moved to Iskut, B.C.

In her mind, she said, they were separated at that point.

Once, she said, he spent a couple weeks living in a trailer near her house in Watson Lake, but she said she kept the doors locked.

“There’s absolutely no trust with him ... A person who does this to his family? We’re possessions to him,” she said, stating she was concerned for the safety of herself and her kids.

Lutz worried about what someone who talked so much about death might be capable of doing.

Eventually, she said, a judge’s order was put in place that Lutz and McKay were only to have contact to discuss division of property as part of their divorce.

Crown prosecutor Amy Porteous filed as an exhibit a collection of messages, including handwritten letters, emails and texts.

These illustrated that finances were often a topic of discussion, but that conversation also regularly veered toward McKay’s suicidal thoughts.

In them, he told Lutz that when he went through the list of ways he might end things, his favourite was while having sex with her.

He called her from Whitehorse General Hospital to tell her he’d been thinking of jumping off the bridge into the Yukon River.

The letters also regularly referenced McKay’s hope that they might reconcile and be a family again. Even discussing finances, he said, gave him light and hope.

Lutz called that belief irrational, and said she had never done nor said anything to suggest they might get back together.

“He was (living) in B.C. and I was in the Yukon,” she said. “I thought that was a clear enough message.”

She said she regularly tried to bring the conversation back to division of property.

On cross-examination, defence counsel Melissa Atkinson pointed out a handful of points in the communication between Lutz and McKay, where it appeared Lutz was discussing matters other than property division.

These included Lutz’s responses to McKay to “get help” and to “quit feeling sorry for (himself).”

Atkinson also pointed to Lutz’s statement to RCMP, given last fall. When officers asked if Lutz felt McKay posed a threat, her response was “mentally.”

Lutz testified that she had meant the threat of physical violence was always in the back of her mind.

“And unless I’m able to read your mind, I don’t know that,” said Atkinson.

Atkinson also suggested that a photo McKay texted Lutz, of his own wrist, with slashes across it, wasn’t out of character for him.

A hobbyist photographer, McKay regularly posted photos of himself to Facebook. Occasionally, these included bruised body parts, Atkinson showed the court.

Porteous argued that those were images of accidental injuries. That the photo of McKay’s wrist was self-inflicted, and he had sent it in the same string of messages where he asked that Lutz pack a bag of his things, including a knife.

Lutz called this behaviour a reminder of how he tried to break her down.

“It makes me sick,” she said of his communication.

The Crown and the defence are scheduled to make submissions to Judge Peter Chisolm on Thursday morning.