The stabbing accusation had the witness shaking their head.
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“You’re off your rocker, lady,” a witness said to Craig Allan’s defence lawyer Carolynn Conron during a testy cross-examination at Allan’s second-degree murder trial where Conron suggested the witness, not Allan, had stabbed London musician Daniel Fawcett to death.
Tuesday was the second day the witness, whose identity is protected by a court-ordered publication ban, has been in the witness box. Though the witness was reluctant to say anything Monday, by the end of assistant Crown attorney Marcia Hilliard’s questioning, the witness said Allan had used their knife to stab Fawcett, 52, after the witness had lured him to Gibbons Park in London on Nov. 6, 2022.
Allan, 50, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder at the Superior Court trial before Justice Patricia Moore that began a week ago. Fawcett, once the guitarist in the Canadian rock band Helix, died of a stab wound to the heart. His body was found in the park hours after his death.
The witness testified they had a beef with Fawcett who the witness said had assaulted, stolen and pestered them for drugs. The witness admitted to selling drugs to Fawcett regularly, and the plan that night, they said, was to beat him up.
The witness and Allan went to a parking lot outside the park at about 3 a.m. and split up, with the witness meeting up with Fawcett and Allan hiding in Gibbons Park for them to return. Surveillance video caught the two of them in the parking lot, before heading in different directions.
Twelve minutes later, the camera caught the witness and Fawcett going into the park. The witness testified Allan jumped out and they heard Allan say, “Do you like to drug and rape women?” with Fawcett yelling, “You got me.”
The witness kept walking and Allan caught up and threw them the knife that was discarded when the witness and Allan left town in a stolen car the next day.
But Conron suggested Allan was long gone from the park by the time the stabbing happened and linked up with the witness later that morning. The suggestion clearly jarred the witness.
“I lured a man into a park to his death.… At the end of the day, I walked him into a park and he’s dead because of me,” the witness said.
“Because you’re the one who stabbed him,” Conron said.
“Ha-ha, really. That’s bright. That’s really bright. I stabbed a man? That’s bright,” the witness said.
“I’d take a polygraph test on that one. I’m now a hostile witness.”
The witness accused Conron of putting “a spin” on the facts “You just said I stabbed a man? So, I don’t know how to spin this in whichever way I’m going to spin it, but I’m done here.”
The witness said Allan told them “he punched the guy with his left and then stabbed him with his right.”
“C’mon, Craig, let’s be honest here, as you hide behind your lawyer,” the witness said looking at Allan, seated in the prisoner’s box behind Conron.
Much of the day’s testimony focused on the witness’s activities as a drug dealer and their association with Allan. There were descriptions of a life on the edge, shacking up in hotel rooms, smoking crack cocaine and selling drugs to survive.
One exchange highlighted the attitude of the witness.
Conron asked the witness if they had ever been arrested and convicted of crimes of dishonesty. The witness said only once, as a youth, for mischief.
Conron proceeded to review a seven-page criminal record replete with convictions for fraud, theft of goods valued at more than $5,000, theft of less than $5,000, using stolen credit cards, possession of stolen property, and failing to comply with court orders.
“Where I come from, dishonesty means lying. This doesn’t make me a liar. It makes me a criminal,” the witness said, pointing to the criminal record.
“You don’t see yourself as a liar?” Conron said.
“Nope,” the witness said and added “for the most part” they were truthful.
“According to you, because I’ve broken the law and I’ve stolen some things, that makes me a liar on every count. According to reality, I’ve broken the law.”
The witness also denied begin violent, but Conron pointed out in text exchanges the witness had with Fawcett and other sources they had threatened violence and been involved in fights.
But the witness was defiant that, though both they and Allan had a part in Fawcett’s death, Allan was the stabber.
“We were both there. We both did this. I may not have put a knife in a human being, but we both committed a crime. At the end of the day, there is still a dead body. There is still somebody who is dead,” the witness said. “That is why I am here today. I am not here for any other reason. I don’t want to be here.”
“At the end of the day … somebody’s father is dead and this is why. He may have been a horrible human being to me but he was a good human being to somebody else. That’s the only reason I’m here today, because somebody is dead.
“We didn’t have that right to play God.”
The trial continues Tuesday afternoon.