AUBURN – Androscoggin County’s lone courtroom should be busier than ever next year as three murder defendants line up for trial before summer.

In January, Scott Poirier, 35, of Sabattus is scheduled to go to trial in connection with the shooting death of his father at the elder Poirier’s birthday celebration.

The following month, Sergio Hairston, 19, of Lewiston is slated to stand trial in the fatal stabbing of a Lewiston man in what police say was a drug-debt collection gone awry.

Todd Gamache, 23, of Auburn, charged with murder in the death of his girlfriend’s toddler, will face trial sometime in the spring, likely April or May, a court clerk said.

Murder trials don’t normally stack up like that, a clerk at Androscoggin County Superior Court said. They usually are more spread out.

The other courthouse in Androscoggin County is 8th District Court in Lewiston, where misdemeanor and juvenile charges are adjudicated. If a jury trial is requested, that case would be transferred to the county courthouse, which can accommodate a jury.

What compressed the murder trial schedule this time were two judicial appointments that pushed back the Poirier case, which had been on the calendar for September.

Shortly before jury selection for his trial, Poirier’s attorney, Michaela Murphy of Waterville, was appointed to the Maine Superior Court bench. At the same time, Androscoggin County Superior Court Justice Ellen Gorman, who was presiding over Poirier’s case, was tapped for a seat on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

Murder defendants typically go to trial about a year after they are indicted by a grand jury, the clerk said. Poirier was arrested in November 2006 after his father’s slaying, the first homicide in the region that year. It was followed by Hairston’s murder arrest three months later. A month later, in March, Gamache was being investigated in the death of his girlfriend’s 8-month-old daughter. He was later arrested and charged with murder.

Last month, a Canton man, 44-year-old Richard Dwyer, was accused of murdering a pregnant Lewiston woman who had gone missing for weeks before her body was unearthed from a shallow grave behind a Lewiston shopping center. No trial date has yet been scheduled for Dwyer.