Shortly after 1:30 a.m. on the day Gerald Dawson was killed, Karen Rodrigue was sitting in his kitchen, drinking a beer and about to smoke a marijuana joint, she told Yukon Supreme Court on Tuesday afternoon.

She said her plan was to finish her beer, smoke the joint and a cigarette, then head home.

In those early-morning hours of June 17, 2004, however, events transpired in Dawson's Marwell-area home that left him dead on the floor of his two-bedroom house.

Rodrigue was the only witness that night. These are the events led up to Dawson's death in his small green home in the Old Village, according to Rodrigue.

That afternoon, she and her common-law husband, Daniel McGinnis, were doing cocaine in the apartment they shared on Jeckell Street, she told the court.

'We would split it. I would smoke my half and he would inject his half.'

They were also drinking and she described her state as 'pretty high.'

While they had only $15 left between them, Rodrigue and McGinnis decided to go find some local dealers to see if they could get another half-gram of coke.

Since half a gram costs between $40 to $50, they would have to 'front' the rest, meaning they would owe the dealer the outstanding cash.

They had no success obtaining more drugs, Rodrigue said, so McGinnis went home and she went to the 202 Lounge in downtown Whitehorse.

She drank between six to eight Molson Canadian beers before calling Dawson at around 11:40 p.m., she told the jury.

Dawson came to pick up Rodrigue downtown. They made a variety of stops, including trying unsuccessfully to sell some of Dawson's prescription pain killers to a friend in the McIntyre subdivision, and the two ended up back at his house.

'I'm sitting at the kitchen table by myself drinking a beer,' she said. Dawson was in the other room watching TV.

She smoked the joint and asked Dawson for a ride home numerous times, she said, but he refused, saying he was already in bed and it was too late.

Rodrigue did not have money for a cab and said she did not feel safe walking home through that neighbourhood at such a late hour. She decided to spend the night at Dawson's, sleeping on a separate cot.

'I'm gonna rest here, but there's not gonna be any hanky-panky,' she remembered telling Dawson.

At about 2:30 a.m. she went to bed, taking off her shoes and her jeans, court was told. Rodrigue was wearing what she described as grey leotards with brightly-coloured flowers on them, under her jeans.

She dozed off for a while and woke up to Dawson calling her name and shaking her arm.

'I was woken up by Gerald pulling me on the arm saying, Karen, Karen . . . Come lay with me, just come lay with me.''

Rodrigue said Dawson was 'persistent' in his demand that she lay down with him and she got up out of bed and asked him what he was doing.

'He grabbed my arms and threw me onto his bed. And I said, What the f-are you doing?''

Rodrigue said that Dawson responded to her by saying, 'I know you want it, I know you want it. Don't try to say you don't.'

Dawson held Rodrigue's arms across her body with one hand and proceeded to rape her vaginally, she testified this morning. She said she tried to fight back by freeing one arm or the other and hitting Dawson with her fists.

She said she didn't know exactly how long the sexual assault lasted, but it could have been between five to 10 minutes.

'It seemed like forever that he was inside me,' she said.

She said she couldn't remember if Dawson had ejaculated inside of her, but the assault ended when he got off of her.

An argument ensued during which Rodrigue said she was screaming and Dawson was laughing as though the situation were a joke.

'Do you realize what you just did? You just raped me,' Rodrigue said she told Dawson.

She threatened to call the police but Dawson said they wouldn't believe her because she was a 'crack head,' she testified.

'You can't get everything for free, I got to get something out of it too,' she said Dawson told her.

The last comment she made to Dawson was, 'Yeah, you're fthinking this is a big f joke.'

Then she grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter and stabbed him in the back, she testified.

'What are you trying to do, kill me, hurt me?' were Dawson's final words, according to Rodrigue.

While she doesn't know why she went through this series of actions after Dawson fell to the ground, she said she dragged his body into the bedroom and covered it with a sheet.

She cleaned up some of the blood on the kitchen floor and got dressed, before leaving with his car keys and a gun, and her bloodied socks and the knife in a plastic bag, she said.

'I was thinking of using it on myself,' she said about why she'd taken the gun. 'Because I didn't know if anyone would believe the story. If I could live with this.'

She finally returned home at around 5 a.m. Her common-law husband, Daniel McGinnis, said he remembered waking up and seeing the time on an alarm clock beside the bed.

'Karen's at the window . . . I can hear her yelling,' he told the court earlier this week.

McGinnis was suffering from an extreme hangover when Rodrigue arrived home and didn't clearly remember some of what occurred that morning.

He did remember her mood, though.

'She was kind of rough-looking,' he told the jury. 'She looked like she was irritated or buggered, or screwed up or something.'

The following 10 days Rodrigue and McGinnis spent partying drinking and doing coke.

They used Dawson's cars to travel around the city. Rodrigue had told McGinnis that Dawson was out of town and had lent her the car until he returned.

The police arrested Rodrigue and McGinnis on June 27, the day Dawson's body was discovered in his home.

Initially arrested for possessing one of Dawson's cars, Rodrigue was subsequently charged with second-degree murder.

Just before the court broke for lunch today, Rodrigue was asked how she felt about having killed Dawson.

'I feel terrible because Gerald was a friend of mine. It's not right for what he did and it's not right for what I did. I'm just really sorry everything had to happen this way.'

The trial was set to continue this afternoon before Justice Leigh Gower.