With cunning criminal wisdom, Owusu-Ansah figured he’d burn the car instead and bought a canister of gas.

Christie Blatchford,

It’s not often you see a guy who is accused of first-degree murder in the stabbing-slashing-cum-immolation death of his ex testify, let alone claim that it was all in self-defence.

But that’s what Emmanuel (Manny) Owusu-Ansah is doing.

Owusu-Ansah took the witness stand Tuesday to tell Ontario Superior Court Justice Eugene Ewaschuk and the jurors the curious story of how he set out two years ago to slash the tires of his former girlfriend Bridget Takyi’s car, a plan he abandoned because he figured she’d know it had been him given that once before, he’d deflated her tires.

Then, with cunning criminal wisdom, Owusu-Ansah figured he’d burn the car instead (presumably, Takyi would never guess it was him if it wasn’t a tire attack and he branched out a bit) and bought a canister of gas to do it.

And then, in the wee hours of Jan. 19, 2013, when he saw Takyi herself, heading to her car in the parking lot of her mother’s building on her way to work, somehow — he claims not to remember — he ended up stabbing and hacking Takyi to death (with the knife he’d bought to slash her tires) and then setting her body on fire.

Thus did a simple planned act of vandalism, in Owusu-Ansah’s hands, escalate first to arson then to lethal physical violence and finally to desecration of the human being he frequently referred to as “the mother of my children.”

But, he added, it all went so terribly south only because the 27-year-old Takyi, whom he outweighed at the time by about 80 pounds, first lashed out at him with the knife, slashing him in the hand and thigh.

“I grabbed the knife,” he said, and in a ball of confusion and pain, “there was a struggle, and the next thing I know I’m in the car on the way to Nina’s (his then-girlfriend) house.”

Judge Ewaschuk asked him if that meant he didn’t remember inflicting 25 sharp-force injuries on Takyi or “dousing her with gas and torching her?”

“Your Honour,” said OwusuAnsah, “we’re not there yet.”

The regularly scheduled programming then resumed, with Owusu-Ansah picking up his narrative at the behest of his lawyer, Scott Reid.

According to Owusu-Ansah, after leaving the scene, he returned, tried to turn off Takyi’s still-running car, and went in search of her (because, remember, he forgot she was dead).

He saw her “lying there in the grass.” She was still alive, and as Owusu-Ansah put it, “I’m like really, what’s going on?”

By this time in his evidence, he was standing — he leaped up several times at critical junctures — and put his head heavily on the podium, at the same time loudly stamping a foot several times.

He told Takyi, he said, “Please don’t do this (it appears he meant die), I’m going to have to kill myself.”

At this point, with her dying breath, Takyi urged him, “‘Don’t do anything — (save yourself ) for the boys (their two youngsters).’”

Here, he put his big head down again and stomped a foot.

The pose appeared to be designed as a visual representation of grief (and indeed, OwusuAnsah about this time reached for a tissue), but the deliberate footstomping lent it such an equine air it wouldn’t have been surprising had he whinnied.

In any event, again, he said, he drove away from the scene, and again, he returned.

He was thinking, he said, “I’m f---ed. I don’t really know what happened to her. I was scared.” He picked up the gas tank, and though he didn’t say so directly, it appears it was then he set her body on fire. “I believe I was scared, or trying to hide evidence,” he told Reid. “I don’t know.”

The 32-year-old is pleading not guilty in Takyi’s death — sort of.

As Reid wound up a daylong examination-in-chief with the big questions — the first one, “Did you kill Bridget?” — Owusu-Ansah replied, “I have no reason to kill her.”

“That’s not what he asked,” the judge said, at which point Owusu-Ansah began offering a condensed version of his inability to remember.

“But you killed her?” Judge Ewaschuk asked. “Yes,” said Owusu-Ansah. Reid then completed his final set of questions, the last of which was, “Do you regret what happened?” at which Owusu-Ansah said, “Regret, that’s understatement.”

The two, who had a tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship, were at a particular low point at the time of Takyi’s death.

Just six weeks earlier, in a videotaped statement to Toronto Police, Takyi said he had threat- ened to kill her when she phoned police after he allegedly attacked her. The jurors have seen the videos and also heard the testimony of a female friend who was at the apartment when the attack happened, and who testified that she, too, was afraid for her life.

Owusu-Ansah was arrested on these allegations on Dec. 5, 2012. He was released the next day on condition he have no contact with Takyi and be under house arrest.

He breached virtually every condition of his bail, of course, and pictures he took the afternoon of Jan. 18 of Takyi and their children walking to her mom’s apartment, the day before her death, suggest he was stalking her.

Thoughtfully, Owusu-Ansah phoned Takyi’s mother to say he’d killed her. When in disbelief, she phoned her daughter’s cell, Manny Owusu-Ansah answered, and told her Bridget was lying outside her building.