For six long and lonely years, Divina worked tirelessly as a nanny in Canada, driven by a single, powerful dream: to save enough money to bring her husband, Joel, from the Philippines so they could finally start their life together.

In December 2010, that dream came true. Joel arrived in a cold and snowy Alberta, welcomed by his loving wife, just in time to celebrate a magical “White Christmas.” He was full of hope, ready to find a job and repay his wife’s years of sacrifice. But their joyful reunion would be tragically short-lived.

A dark secret from Divina’s years alone—a workplace affair—would soon surface, igniting a fatal confrontation between her husband and her secret lover.

The tragic story of what happened in that small Canadian apartment is a heartbreaking tale of a love triangle born from loneliness and shattered by jealousy.

While Divina had been faithfully sending money home and working towards their reunion, she had also found comfort in a relationship with a Filipino coworker, a man named Franco. It was a secret she kept, hoping it would fade into the past once her husband arrived.

But the past refused to stay buried. Just weeks after Joel’s arrival, he discovered the affair. The revelation was devastating, a crushing blow to a man who had just uprooted his entire life to be with his wife.

According to the perpetrator’s later testimony, the couple had a series of intense arguments, but ultimately decided to work through the betrayal and start fresh. Joel, however, was allegedly consumed by a quiet, simmering rage.

The situation escalated into a campaign of intimidation. According to Franco, the spurned lover, Joel began threatening him.

He claimed Joel used his precarious immigration status as a weapon, threatening to report him to Canadian authorities for the affair, an act Franco feared would get him deported and ruin his chances of supporting his own family back in the Philippines.

The tension culminated on January 4, 2011, less than a month after Joel had arrived in Canada. Franco, claiming he wanted to peacefully de-escalate the situation and beg Joel to keep his secret, went to the couple’s apartment.

He brought a knife with him, an act he would later claim was purely for self-defense, as he feared for his safety.

What exactly happened inside that apartment became the central question of a dramatic trial. Franco claimed that the conversation with Joel quickly turned aggressive. He alleged that Joel punched him and then turned to reach for something under a pillow.

Believing Joel was reaching for a weapon, Franco pulled out his own knife and, in what he described as a moment of panic and self-defense, attacked him.

The forensic evidence, however, told a much more brutal story. Joel had not been wounded once or twice in a defensive struggle; he had sustained twenty separate wounds from a sharp object, two of which were fatal blows to the heart.

The sheer violence of the attack suggested a level of rage that went far beyond simple self-defense.

In the aftermath, Franco disposed of the weapon and the victim’s laptop in a nearby dumpster, where they were later found by a local couple. After an intense investigation that unraveled the secret affair through Divina’s own text messages, Franco was arrested and charged.

At his trial in 2013, a jury was faced with a complex and emotionally charged case. Was Franco a cold-blooded killer who had eliminated a rival, or was he a terrified man acting in self-defense against a jealous and threatening husband?

The judge, in his final ruling, landed somewhere in the middle. He did not believe the act was premeditated murder, acknowledging the evidence of Joel’s threats. However, he also rejected the self-defense claim, citing the extreme and excessive violence of the attack.

Franco was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 12 years. The tragic outcome left a family shattered. Divina lost both the man she had sacrificed so much for and the man she had turned to in her loneliness.

Joel, who had traveled across the world for a dream, found his new life cut tragically short in a violent end. And a secret affair, born from years of long-distance sacrifice, had ultimately destroyed everyone it touched.