"What are you trying to do - kill me?"

Those were the last words Gerald Dawson ever spoke, according to the woman who killed him, and it is that very question a jury must now answer.

When Karen Rodrigue fatally stabbed Dawson in the back early on June 17, 2004, did she intend to kill him? Or was she moving blindly, without forethought, overwhelmed by a "torrent of emotions?"

"She acted with reflex, fuelled by rage," her lawyer, Richard Fowler, said Thursday during his closing remarks to the jury.

She had just been raped, he said, by a man who had claimed to be her friend. And after he raped her, he acted as if it was all a joke.

"He ridiculed her, he dismissed her. ...What greater insult could you endure?" he asked the five women and seven men who are charged with finding her guilty or not guilty of second-degree murder.

"What could be a more awful act than being raped by a friend?"

After the alleged attack in the man's Marwell-area home, Fowler said, his client "tried to calm down. She tried to compose herself. She grabbed a beer."

But her efforts were overridden by an immediate and thoughtless urge "to inflict pain on the person who hurt her."

So she put down her beer, picked up a knife, crossed the room and stabbed Dawson in the back.

The blade went past his left shoulder blade and into his lung. He collapsed, unconscious.

Of Rodrigue's sometimes patchy recollection of the event and the hour or so following, Fowler said: "Contrary to popular belief, horrific situations do not replay in your head like a perfectly accurate video tape."

Her inability to remember, for instance, where she hit him as she tried to fight him off of her is evidence of how blinded by fear and anger she was.

"If she had a clear recollection of where she punched him, you would be skeptical," Fowler said.

He characterized the Crown counsel's assertion that Rodrigue and Dawson had "a mutually exploitative relationship" wherein she gave him sex in return for money and favours as "a tasteless theory ... the same as what Gerald Dawson said: 'You are a crackwhore; you sell your body for cocaine.'"

He dismissed the evidence of what she did in the moments and days after she killed Dawson.

"What she did afterwards only tells us what happened afterwards, what was in her mind afterwards," Fowler said.

This case, he reminded the jury, is supposed to determine Rodrigue's state of mind in the moment she stabbed him, nothing else.

"For you to convict her of murder," Fowler concluded, "you must be sure that she meant to kill him, and you must be sure that she was not provoked .... I implore you to accept (her) plea and find her guilty of manslaughter."

Crown counsel David McWhinnie painted a different picture.

He said the stabbing was the act of an addict, "strapped for cash," who was going to get what she wanted any way she could.

He questioned the credibility of her testimony and the evidence presented in her defence.

To make the inference that the Viagra found in Dawson's system proves he raped her "isn't logical; it doesn't flow," he said.

The fact Dawson was naked when he was killed also proves nothing, he said.

"For someone to be in their own house, scantily-clad or naked on a hot night" is completely reasonable, McWhinnie asserted.

There are a host of inconsistencies and "anomalies" in the body evidence, he said.

They include the missing beer can Rodrigue said she put down before she picked up the knife. During her testimony, she said she did not remember disposing of said can, yet it was not in the house when RCMP officers found Dawson's body.

"What we know is that the photographs (from the crime scene) don't match up with her evidence," McWhinnie said.

"In that same vein is the cot," he continued. Rodrigue said she fell asleep on it, and crime scene photos show it as being covered in papers and clothes.

Another inconsistency, McWhinnie said, "is her behaviour when they got to Gerald Dawson's residence.

"She said (in her testimony) she wanted to get the beer and go home...(but) she didn't say (to Dawson), 'I'll run in and grab the beer.'

"She went in...She had a beer...If she really wanted to go home, why go in, have a beer, smoke a joint?"

McWhinnie shed doubt on Rodrigue's description of how she hurriedly tried to cover her tracks before locking the house and driving off in Dawson's car.

"Has she telescoped events to make them sound as if they happened all of a sudden?" he asked the jury.

The reality, McWhinnie said, is that "this is an event that progressed and developed," and Rodrigue knew exactly what she was doing, before, during and after the killing.