Reg Earle first saw Dale Porter the night of June 28, 2014, getting out of a taxi in front of the Coach House bar in Bay Roberts, headed inside for some drinks with friends.
Earle had known Porter from school, though Porter, 39, was a few years younger. They greeted each other — saying hello, how've you been — before heading inside.
The next time Earle saw Porter that night was in the washroom of the bar. They chatted briefly before two other men came in and Porter turned his attention to them.
One of the men was big and bald and wearing a vest; the other man was smaller and was wearing black jeans and a blue shirt.
"They started arguing back and forth," Earle told a jury in Newfoundland and Labrador Supreme Court in St. John's Tuesday. "The little fella was saying to Dale, 'You owes me this, you owes me that.' Dale said, 'I owes you nothing.' The little fella said, 'I'll make away with you,' and Dale said, 'You won't make away with me, I'll make away with you.'"
The Crown alleges the bigger man in the washroom that night was Allan Potter, 55, who is on trial for murdering Porter hours after the argument by stabbing him close to 20 times and leaving him lying in his own driveway. The smaller man, according to the Crown, was Potter's co-accused, whose name is banned from publication. He's set to go to trial at a later date.
Porter was a fisherman, a trucker and a father of two who lived in North River.
Potter's lawyers questioned Earle on his recollection of the washroom argument, asking him why he had first told the court it was the bigger man who had threatened to kill Porter, before changing his testimony after a break in proceedings to indicate it was the smaller man.
Defence lawyer Randy Piercey also pointed to a statement Earle had given to police three weeks after Porter's death. Piercey asked Earle if he had spoken to investigators only to try to clear two other men — his friends — as suspects.
"You wanted to point the finger away from them, didn't you?" Piercey asked.
"No," Earle replied.
"I suggest to you that you wanted to protect your friends, so you pointed your finger at two other men," Piercey said.
"I didn't want to protect nobody," Earle answered.
Piercey gestured toward Potter, who was sitting in the prisoner dock in the courtroom. Potter wears his hair shaved on the sides and back of his head and long on top, keeping it in a ponytail.
"You wouldn't call that fella there in the box bald, would you?" Piercey asked Earle, who said, "No."
"That wasn't the big fella in the bar that night, was it?"
"No. I've never seen that man before in my life," Earle replied.
Earlier in the morning the court heard from a 46-year-old woman who said she had been in a casual romantic relationship with Potter's co-accused at the time Porter was killed. Her name is also banned from publication.
The woman told the court she had been drinking at the Vikings Motorcycle Club clubhouse in Cupids with Potter and the other man that night, before going to the Coach House bar. She told the court the man she was seeing was a member of the Vikings, as was her brother.
At the end of the night, the woman said, she got into a cab outside the bar and waited for Potter and the other man, who came out with Porter. All three got in the taxi, she said, which then took them to a home in North River she believed to be Porter's. Once there, she said, the three men got out and asked her to come in the house to keep partying, but she was tired and drunk and wanted to go home.
On the way home, the woman said, she received a call from her boyfriend, who asked her to tell the cab driver to turn around and pick him up. The driver did, and picked the man and Potter up on the side of the road, not at the house.
The group then went back to the Vikings clubhouse, the woman said, and Potter left on his motorcycle while she and her boyfriend walked to her home. The woman said she had no memory of any conflict or stress amongst the men that night.
Three men who had been socializing with Porter at his home before going to the bar testified earlier this week, saying they had decided, when the Coach House closed, to get in a cab together. Porter had gone in a different taxi with two men and a woman, and the plan was to meet back at his place.
Tuesday morning, the driver of the cab carrying Porter's friends took the stand. He, too, was granted a publication ban on his name.
The cabbie said he and his father were both taxi drivers and were both working that night. He had been the one to take Porter and his friends to the Coach House, and had returned to pick them up when they called as the bar was closing.
After dropping a man and woman off in Spaniard's Bay, the cabbie headed toward Porter's residence and pulled into the driveway, waiting as his passengers got out.
"That's when all the commotion started, with them yelling out, 'Dale, are you ok?'" the cab driver testified.
When he turned the vehicle off in order to get out and see what was going on, he looked through a side mirror and saw Porter's body on the ground, illuminated by his reverse lights.
"I exited the vehicle and went to where he was and saw the devastation he was involved in. At that point, I knew it wasn't my typical Saturday night," the driver said.
Fearful for his own life, the cabbie said, he got back in his vehicle and drove away, calling for an ambulance as he backed out of the driveway. On the road he saw two men in the fog, attempted to flag him down, but he kept going, he said.
"If that had been a normal Saturday night, I would have stopped, but seeing what I had just seen, I wasn't trusting nobody," the cabbie explained.
He said he then noticed another cab coming toward him — his father, with one passenger aboard — and saw his dad stop and pick up the men.
"Immediately I called my father and told him somebody was just stabbed here in North River. Whoever you've got in the cab, get them out and get home."
Porter was taken to hospital in Carbonear by ambulance, but succumbed to his injuries about 45 minutes after he had been found in his driveway.
Multiple wounds could have proved fatal
According to Dr. Nash Denic, a forensic pathologist who conducted an autopsy on Porter's body, Porter could have died from one of a number of stab wounds.
Porter had 17 stab wounds and four slash wounds, Denic told the court Tuesday, along with extensive bruising on his neck that went deep under the skin. He died of blood loss, Denic explained, likely from a stab wound to the neck that had severed his jugular vein. Wounds to his chest and abdomen could also have been fatal, Denic said.
Some of the wounds pierced Porter's lungs and abdominal cavity, and others cut through bone, Denic said. The neck injury likely was one of the first, he explained.
"I come to this conclusion based on the presence of a smaller amount of blood in the abdominal and chest cavities," Denic said, noting he would have expected much more blood in those areas otherwise. "This means this individual was already profusely bleeding from the injury of the neck when the other injuries were inflicted."
Denic, who will take over as the province's chief medical examiner at the beginning of March, said the wounds appeared to have been made by a single-edged, non-serrated knife. Many of the wounds measured about 2.5 centimetres wide and 10 centimetres deep, and the knife had gone completely through Porter's body on at least two occasions. Injuries on Porter's hands and forearms were consistent with defence wounds, Denic testified.
"Injuries on the extremities, especially on the forearms and palms, can usually be characterized as defensive-type wounds. The victim will try to protect themselves by raising their arms to ward off the weapon," Denic told the jury.
Denic said toxicology testing revealed Porter to have a blood-alcohol level of twice the legal limit. There was also evidence of cocaine in his blood, though the drug wasn't consumed immediately before Porter died, Denic explained.
Denic will be cross-examined when Potter's trial continues Wednesday morning.
Twitter: @tara_bradbury
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