By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – After a lengthy and sometimes lively discussion in chambers Friday, the judge presiding over Roger Keene’s manslaughter trial rejected a defense motion for mistrial.

At one point during the 45-minute conference among Justice Thomas Warren, prosecutor Lisa Marchese and defense counsel George Hess, their raised voices could be heard from behind closed doors.

After the session ended and the trio returned to the courtroom, Warren said he was denying the motion for mistrial based on some case law that had been cited by the attorneys.

Jurors were allowed back in and the trial resumed with state police Detective Warren Ferland on the stand. It was Ferland’s slip on Thursday about Keene being on probation that had prompted the defense’s request for a mistrial. Jurors aren’t supposed to know about a defendant’s criminal record.

Keene, 42, is charged with manslaughter, kidnapping and attempted murder in the September 2003 death of Leslie Stasulis.

Stasulis was the owner of Leslie’s Place, a bar in downtown Lewiston. She was found, her face battered and her head bashed in, lying on her back. She was perfectly perpendicular between the edge of the road and the center line, with her hands by her sides. Stasulis was found lying in the eastbound lane of Route 126 in Sabattus shortly after midnight on Sept. 12, 2003. She died nine days later.

Keene’s account

Much of Friday’s testimony and evidence centered on Keene’s account of what had happened in the hours leading up to the time Stasulis was found, and shortly after.

Marchese, an assistant state attorney general, questioned Ferland and then-chief investigator Rick Fowler about interviews they had conducted with Keene.

Over a period of several weeks and in the course of several interrogations, Keene began denying any role in Stasulis’ injuries and subsequent death. On Friday, on audiotapes, he acknowledged that he struck her, put her in the back of his pickup truck and left her in the middle of the road believing she was dead.

During a Sept. 16, 2003, interview, Keene, who originally said Stasulis wasn’t with him, went from saying she had been in the cab of his truck and either stepped or fell from it when she opened a door as it was moving, to saying he had put her in the back of his truck.

“Yes,” he replied, to Fowler’s question about putting her in the back. Then he added: “She kicked me in the balls, then tried to slap me in the face so I grabbed for her arm and she lost her balance and fell backwards, striking her head.”

Later in the same interview, Keene maintained that “This whole thing is one big accident.”

When asked by Fowler still later why he left Stasulis – Keene told police he and she were lovers, that they were in the midst of an affair that Stasulis’ husband had started to suspect – Keene said: “I was standing there when the car was coming, so I knew somebody would find her.”

In questioning on Sept. 24, 2003, again by Fowler, Keene also changed his stories.

“I never hit her,” Keene says early on, then later said, “I did hit her,” adding that he had struck her two or three times.

“She was hitting me,” he said. “I tried to stop her.”

Between prosecution witnesses Friday, Hess called an expert for the defense to the stand. Dr. Jack Daniels of Richmond, Va., a forensic pathologist, said the fatal head injury to Stasulis was typical of someone who had fallen off or out of the back of slow-moving or stopped pickup truck.

Keene has maintained that his lover fell from the back of the truck. The state has been trying to prove that she suffered the fatal head injury after Keene pushed her into a brick wall in an alley behind her Lisbon Street bar.

The trial resumes at 9 a.m. Tuesday in Androscoggin Superior Court.