The days following Gerald Dawson's fatal stabbing all blurred together in a haze of cocaine and alcohol, the accused told Yukon Supreme Court yesterday.

'Things were getting worse,' Karen Rodrigue said.

She was doing as much cocaine and drinking as much alcohol as she could acquire, she said.

'All day long, all night. All day long, all night,' she told Justice Leigh Gower and the jury. 'It was like one big bad day that was never going to end.

'I just wanted it all to end and just to fix everything.'

Despite spending vast quantities of time after Dawson's 2004 death with her common-law husband, Daniel McGinnis, Rodrigue said she never told him what happened.

'We never really had much of a conversation about anything,' she said of her sleepless days and nights. 'Because he didn't have nothing to do with anything.'

Ten days after Dawson died on the floor of his Marwell-area home, Rodrigue was arrested by police for possessing his blue Chevrolet Lumina.

After about eight or nine hours in police custody, Rodrigue was interviewed by RCMP Const. Bradley Wirachowsky.

This was the first time she told anyone what had transpired in the early morning hours of June 17, 2004, she testified.

'It was kind of a relief to tell someone exactly what happened between Gerald and I.

'I was trying to keep things as accurate as I could. I just wanted to get it off my chest because I'd been keeping it inside,' she said in cross-examination with Crown prosecutor David McWhinnie.

The day she was arrested, Rodrigue said she was coming to terms with the fact that she would have to turn herself in.

In the cross-examination, however, McWhinnie called the validity of this statement into question.

Rodrigue had a number of opportunities to turn herself in, he told the court, and she didn't take them.

For example, she was involved in a car accident on Main Street and fled the scene, he said, and had to pass very close by the police detachment on her way to the drug house at 810 Wheeler St.

When asked why she didn't tell police about the night at Dawson's two-bedroom house, Rodrigue said that she'd been scared and confused.

Vancouver-based forensic psychiatrist Dr. Shabehram Lohrasbe conducted a psychiatric assessment of Rodrigue before trial. He told the court this type of confusion in the aftermath of committing an act of great violence is not uncommon.

'It's not a surprise that at the end of 10 days, when she was confronted by a police officer, that she would be unsure about she wants to disclose,' he said.

'She was in a state of utter confusion and chaos in her mind.'

At various points during the days between the killing and the arrest, reality would begin to set in, Rodrigue said.

'(The situation) has got to come to some kind of halt, where I've got to turn myself in,' she said.

Rodrigue never did turn herself in though, as she was apprehended by police late the afternoon of June 27, 2004.

She has been in custody at the Whitehorse Correctional Centre ever since.

At the beginning of her direct examination, with defence lawyer Nils Clarke, Rodrigue explained that her childhood was marked by violence.

Born in Inuvik, she witnessed the shooting death of her brother by her father. Her father was found not guilty, she said, but the death marked her family and her life forever.

'There was yelling and screaming and arguing and the next thing I heard was a big bang. It was my father. He shot my brother,' she told the court.

'I think it just followed me right through my life. It's still a hard thing to talk about today �-. It just broke up my family and it hurt me.'

Children who see violence are more likely to act violently as adults than those who are the victims of violence themselves, based on recent research, Lohrasbe said.

Rodrigue was not the direct victim of violence, but she did witness it growing up, he told the court.

'She was exposed to a considerable amount of violence as a child,' he testified this morning.

'She saw a pretty horrific thing, which was her father killing her brother.'

In cross-examination, McWhinnie highlighted a number of inconsistencies in Rodrigue's account of the events leading up to Dawson's death and over the 10 days that followed.

Some details were different in the police interview, in the examination with Lohrasbe and in her testimony in court, he said.

For example, she told police that after Dawson raped her, he followed her into the kitchen, McWhinnie said.

On the stand, however, she said Dawson left the back bedroom first and was standing in front of a wash basin close to the fridge, and that she came in after pulling on her underwear and leotards.

'The sexual assault, I suggest, never happened,' he told the court.

The first time Rodrigue spoke about the rape was after Wirachowsky had said it in the police interview, McWhinnie said.

'That was your life line.

'You moved the body to conceal what you'd done. You cleaned up the blood to conceal what you'd done . . . . You told the police an untruth to conceal what you'd done.'

Inconsistencies are to be expected, however, according to Lohrasbe.

Memory is reconstructive, not reproductive, he said, explaining that we make small adjustments to a memory every time we recall it.

With traumatic events, he said, the changes in memory can be much larger. People incorporate suggestions about what may have occurred into their memory of a traumatic event.

They also incorporate what they want to believe happened, he explained.

'I would be surprised if there weren't inconsistencies,' he said, adding that he would also be suspicious if a story was exactly the same time after time.

Lohrasbe was set to continue his testimony this afternoon.

Witness examinations were expected to finish today, with Crown and defence lawyers scheduled to deliver their closing statements tomorrow morning.