A witness says he warned a veteran’s killer not to try intimidating the ex-army drug dealer before he was stabbed in his cabin.
The witness had met David McArthur a few months earlier and said he was not the sort of dealer who had trouble with anyone.
“I knew that this guy had been in the army and I’m like, why are you going to staunch this bloke … this is not a smart play,” the witness told the NSW Supreme Court in Wollongong on Thursday.
He said he told that to Mr McArthur’s accused murderer, Raymond Allen.
“It’s good that I know that, I’ll just stick this all the way through him,” Allen allegedly responded while holding a knife.
Allen has admitted fatally stabbing Mr McArthur at a caravan park at Sanctuary Point in southern NSW on July 25, 2021, but his barrister Gabriel Wendler has told the jury he acted in self-defence.
The witness said he was stuck in a drug-using lifestyle and had nowhere else to go when he travelled to the caravan park with Allen and another man, not because he was particularly interested in scoring more drugs, but because he was worried they would turn on him.
“I don’t go and score with two people that I don’t usually score with, that have got no money or previously ripped me off,” he said.
He believed the other man could have scored “on tick” from Mr McArthur without paying right away, and hoped the pair would get some drugs so they would not rob him.
He waited in the car while Allen and the other man went to Mr McArthur’s cabin.
He said he saw Allen come back twirling his shirt above his head before Allen and the other man began apologising to one another as they drove back to Nowra.
The witness said Allen pointed out blood covering the length of the knife’s blade.
“He didn’t seem fazed by it,” he said.
Allen later told him to clean the knife, grabbing a cask of wine and heading to bed.
“I wasn’t about to argue with him,” the witness told the court, denying suggestions from Mr Wendler that he had disposed of the knife himself.
He later saw Allen at a clinic and was told to wait for him outside.
“I didn’t wait for him,” the witness said.
He heard “on the grapevine” Mr McArthur had died and later gave police his account of the events in November 2021.
“I’d been wanting to tell them for a while, I just didn’t have the guts,” he said.
Mr Wendler confirmed with the witness that he had “engaged in acts of dishonesty regularly over the last 20 years”.
“Can I suggest you’re an experienced practitioner in the area of dishonesty?” Mr Wendler said.
The witness said: “I was a drug addict."
“I’m not lying now,” he told the court.
The prosecution closed its case on Thursday afternoon, with Allen expected to give evidence on Friday.
