Sitting down at a table in a bar called the Barking Cat in small-town Ontario, Allan Potter noticed the music. It was the fall of 2016, and he was with a man he believed to be his new boss, as well as another business associate, though he says now he had some suspicions about the men's real identities.
The two men were actually undercover RCMP officers, in the midst of an operation to try to earn Potter's trust so he would speak to them about the stabbing death of Dale Porter two years earlier.
"I love this song," Potter told the men as Asia's 1982 hit "Heat of the Moment" began playing over the clacking sound of a pool game.
Taking the witness stand at his murder trial in St. John's Tuesday morning, Potter used the phrase that formed the song title as he told the court how he had stabbed Porter.
"It's hard now to explain why you do things in the heat of the moment," he told the jury.
After three weeks and testimony from 33 Crown witnesses, Potter is the first — and expected to be the only — witness to testify for the defence at his murder trial. He testified he stabbed Porter, but it was in self-defence.
Porter, a 39-year-old fisherman and father of two from North River, Conception Bay North, died in the early morning of June 29, 2014, having been stabbed almost 20 times in his driveway.
Members of Porter’s family, who have attended every day of Potter's trial, cried at times as Potter gave his evidence.
Potter told the court he, another man (who cannot be named at this point) and that man's girlfriend had been having drinks at a bar in Bay Roberts the previous night when they met Porter, who was there with friends. Potter said the plan at the end of the night was to go to Porter's house for a party, and he, Porter, the other man and his girlfriend got into a cab together to head there.
"I remember some sort of maybe derogatory comment or some sort of unspoken thing between (the woman) and Dale. When we got to Dale's house, she said she wasn't going in. It seemed she changed her mind out of the blue," Potter said.
He said the woman left in the cab and he, Porter and the other man were standing in Porter's driveway.
Potter said Porter had offered to get the other man cocaine. Potter declined it, he testified, since he had just come off a two-week cocaine binge. He told his friend he "might as well get a couple eight-balls, if you're going to get it," and said Porter then made a phone call. After that, Porter and the other man began arguing, Potter said.
"I don't want to say this in front of (Porter's) family, but he was saying 'I'm f---ing your girlfriend tonight,'" Potter testified. "I apologize for my language to everyone in the courtroom."
Potter said the two men also argued over who would pay for the cocaine when it arrived.
"I really wanted to get out of there because it wasn't going in a good way," he told the court, adding he had asked Porter for a drag off his cigarette in an effort to distract him and diffuse the situation.
He said he went to one side of the driveway to urinate, and the argument seemed to escalate. He decided to take a knife out of his pocket.
"I took this knife out and I opened it up and it was kind of a delicate operation because I was still using the washroom at the time," Potter said. "My plan was to yell at them and hold the knife up and say, 'Listen, two of yous,' and that would get their attention to look at me and I would have the knife and they would snap out of whatever they were into."
Potter said when he turned around with the knife, he saw Porter with a knife of his own, advancing on the other man. Demonstrating to the court how he zipped up his fly and threw down the cigarette butt, Potter said he yelled, "Hey!" then told his friend to run.
"He did run. He left me there," Potter said. "Maybe if he had stayed and hit Mr. Porter from behind, we could have diffused the situation in a different way."
Potter told the court Porter came toward him, swinging the knife at him, so he tried to stab his hand and force him to drop the blade. He and Porter tumbled to the ground and, Potter said, he eventually got underneath Porter. He stabbed Porter's front side, he said, "trying to take the good out of him so he would drop the knife."
Potter said Porter had cut him a number of times on his head, shoulders and arms and continued to swing at him. When Potter saw the headlights of a car coming in their direction, he said he "very stupidly left." He returned to get his knife and, when Porter swung at him again, he managed to grab his wrist, punch him, and get Porter's blade out of his hand. He said he laid both knives on the ground.
Potter said Porter had been headed toward his house when he last saw him.
"Did you think of going to the police yourself?" Potter's lawyer, Randy Piercey, asked him.
"Kind of, but not really, because they were coming to me anyway," Potter replied, adding that he stayed in the Conception Bay North area at a friend's house for three days after the stabbing.
When asked by Piercey about his use of force to try to disarm Porter, Potter said, "I used the force I used to try and get Mr. Porter to release the knife he had. If he would have released that knife, I would have stopped.
"The man was advancing on me with a big blade. It was not long, but it was shiny and it was at night and he was a big man. … I thought I was in danger for my life."
Potter was arrested and questioned in the days following Porter's death, then released without being charged. It wasn't until the undercover police operation in Ontario two years later that investigators collected the evidence they believed was enough to charge him with murder.
An undercover RCMP officer posed as a man running a debt collection service, and offered Potter a job, saying he had seen him online. The day Potter was released from prison after serving a sentence for an assault charge, he met with his new "boss," who told him they had to track down two brothers who had skipped out on paying their debts.
The officer took Potter first to the Barking Cat, where he introduced him to another undercover Mountie posing as an associate. The police officers testified last week, telling the court they had told Potter one of the brothers had been located and killed, and Potter was to help them move the "body" — a dead pig wrapped in sheets and stuffed in a hockey bag — from a cornfield to a cemetery, where it was dumped in a fresh grave. Potter agreed.
Potter said Tuesday he started to realize something was up when he and his "boss" pulled into the Barking Cat's parking lot and there were no lights on the outside. By the time he got to the cornfield, he was scared, he said, though he was also suspicious about the "body." The blood on the sheets appeared staged, he said, and didn't move the way he had expected it to when the bag was lifted.
"I was trying to make a good impression and trying to do good and maybe turn my life around a little bit," he said. "But this was turning bad and it was turning bad fast. … I'm expecting to get killed, I just don't know how."
Prosecutor Sheldon Steeves cross-examined Potter on the job he thought he had been offered by the undercover officers, which the court has heard was somewhere between debt collector and hitman. Potter said he wasn't really sure what the job was supposed to entail, but didn't have the impression it would include violence.
Steeves pointed out Potter had asked one of the officers if he could help him get a gun. Potter said it was so he'd feel safer sleeping at night and wasn't related to the job.
Steeves asked Potter why he didn't leave after he saw the "body."
"Did you ask to get out? Or say that you didn't sign up for this?" Steeves asked.
"No, I kept my mouth shut. I tried to play it off and play it cool, but inside my guts were doing flips," Potter responded, adding he had attempted to "play off his paranoia" and laughed when the officers laughed in order to try to fit in.
Steeves questioned Potter about why he didn't tell his "boss," when he told him he had stabbed Porter and demonstrated for him how it had happened, that it had been in self-defence.
The audio of the demonstration, which had been recorded by a hidden device the officer was wearing, was played for the court last week.
"When I ... demonstrated to (the officer) how I had stabbed Dale Porter, that was to demonstrate to (him) that I had stones. That if they were thinking of doing something to me, that's what they were going to get," Potter said.
"What about when you said something was gone in the ocean?" Steeves asked, referring Potter to a section of the audio recording. "What was gone in the ocean, Mr. Potter? Were you referring to a knife?"
"I could have been," Potter replied. "I'm sorry, but I don't remember. Maybe I said that to show I was tough. I don't remember telling him the knife went into the ocean."
Steeves will continue his cross-examination when court resumes Wednesday morning.
Twitter: @tara_bradbury
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