A Port Alberni woman accused of murdering her son testified that he encouraged her to be more of a warrior and tried to prepare her for imminent attacks by sneaking up behind her and sliding his right thumbnail across her throat.
“To me, it felt what a knife blade would feel like. He did it nine or 10 times. I told him to stop demonstrating on me, that my nerves can’t take it. He was making me a nervous wreck,” Samantha Dittmer said Tuesday, as she took the stand in her own defence in B.C. Supreme Court.
Dittmer, 63, is charged with the second-degree murder of her son, Jesse McPhee, who was shot to death at point-blank range in the family home on Aug. 29, 2021.
McPhee was going through an acrimonious divorce and child custody issues, said Dittmer. He was concerned that his ex-wife’s boyfriend would come to Port Alberni and harm them and his fears were well-founded. An arsonist had set fire to his house in Tsawwassen twice. On Sept. 5, 2019, the house became uninhabitable when someone broke a downstairs window and threw a Molotov cocktail inside, she said.
McPhee had suffered a back and head injury in an attack and had launched a personal injury civil claim against a relative of his ex-wife. He was unhappy that Dittmer, who had neck and shoulder injuries, had let herself get weak, she testified.
McPhee was trying to teach her self-defence and to not be afraid, said Dittmer. He tried to teach her how to stab someone with a knife, how to stick her thumbs in someone’s eyes and how to use the palm of her hand to hit someone in the nose and stun them.
“It made me terribly nervous. I said: ‘Jesse, I can’t do this. I mean I can hardly cook anything let alone hand-to-hand combat. All you’re doing is making me a nervous wreck.’”
McPhee always had a knife strapped to his waist on a belt. On Aug. 1, he got angry at Dittmer’s dog for barking, pulled out his knife and started lunging at the dog, saying he was going to slit her throat.
Dittmer testified that she stepped in front of the dog and said “No you’re not.”
She moved quickly down the hallway to the family room with the dog, shut the door and sat there shaking.
“I was having difficulty breathing. I was quite traumatized,” she said.
Later, McPhee came in and placed a beautiful plate of food in front of her. She thanked him, but he got angry at her because he could hear her laboured breathing.
“He thought I was being dramatic about my level of stress,” she testified. “And he took offence to that and started yelling at me. … I was so upset that he just keeps treating me so badly, that he doesn’t even have sympathy for me when I’m having trouble breathing. I was very hurt and disturbed by his behaviour.”
Dittmer took the food back to his suite and put it on the floor.
All of a sudden he was over top of her, sticking his thumbs into her glasses and hitting her forehead, Dittmer testified. She screamed and stumbled away from him and ran upstairs. Later, she sent a text telling him to get out of her house.
Defence lawyer Brian Coleman asked Dittmer to describe the damage done to her home in Port Alberni by her son. The jury looked at photographs she had taken before McPhee moved in.
“I had it beautifully furnished and decorated with pots and pans and dishes and bedding and towels and pictures on the wall. It was all ready for him. It looked very nice,” she said.
When he moved in, he broke a TV in the master bedroom, then dragged a boxspring and mattress into the living room so he and his girlfriend Brandy Kazakoff could fall asleep watching TV in that room, said Dittmer. He took an axe to the fridge, chopped it and dragged it outside. He broke cupboard doors. He punched many holes in the wall. There was dirt and mess everywhere.
“He always apologized. I knew he was overcome with anguish and despair all the time. But there was nothing I could do at the time,” Dittmer testified.
On Aug. 25, he swung a big sledge hammer into the deck and put a hole in it just before the door.
“He said he wanted to see what kind of hole he could make. I was like ‘Oh my God. I couldn’t deal with it,’ ” she testified.
McPhee insisted on placing a gun under her bed in case people came.
“He told me it was not loaded. I was concerned because I had trouble handling the gun because of my injuries and I told him I wouldn’t be able to get it loaded fast enough. … He told me it was not loaded.”
Dittmer’s testimony is expected to continue today.
