AUBURN – Jurors acquitted bookkeeper Jan Mulherin of Leeds of two counts of theft after less than an hour of deliberation in Androscoggin County Superior Court on Friday.

Prosecutor Leanne Robbin said the abundance of evidence – namely checks that Mulherin had written over several years – might have had a role to play in the jury’s decision.

“The weakness in this case always was the paper trail,” Robbin said. “The evidence would have been right there, and if anybody had investigated, they would have seen it. That’s the kind of thing that can give a jury reasonable doubt.”

Defense attorney Walter McKee said the paper trail was too obvious.

“She would have had to be the dumbest bookkeeper who had ever perpetrated a fraud,” McKee told jurors in his closing argument Friday. “If you steal from someone, you might not want to leave the evidence lying around like that.”

Mulherin was accused of two counts of felony theft at the Poland-based safety equipment maker Safe Approach Inc. Owner Roger Dargie claimed she had overpaid herself for sales commissions. He testified that he fired Mulherin in 2006 for writing company checks to her children’s sports teams and later discovered that she had paid herself more than $10,000 in commissions that she wasn’t entitled to have.

Mulherin told the court Thursday that Dargie had approved the commissions she paid herself on sales orders. Although she worked primarily as office manager, she oversaw the company’s Web site, payroll and more.

Dargie’s testimony disputed Mulherin’s explanation, so McKee tried to cast doubt on the owner’s claims.

“What you need to consider before deciding isn’t the mountain of evidence the prosecution has presented, or the overwhelming paper trail they’ve shown you or the parade of witnesses that have testified,” McKee told jurors. “It’s whether or not you believe the word of Roger Dargie.”

McKee told jurors that evidence showed Dargie had a motive to get rid of Mulherin: “His wife didn’t like Jan,” McKee said. A disagreement the two had over testing of the company’s “personnel” safety netting added to the tension.

“In the end, Jan knew too much about his business, that thousands of nets the company manufactured were not tested – or worse yet, failed when they were tested,” McKee said. Dargie was looking for any excuse to fire Mulherin, McKee said

“This case is not based on any investigation by detectives, but was presented completely by Roger Dargie,” McKee said.

Prosecutor Robbin told jurors that the pattern of checks Mulherin wrote was evidence of fraud. The first disputed check she wrote was for $100 in 2003. She wrote a second disputed check in 2004, followed by checks for $225, $500 and $700 in 2005.

“She started small,” Robbin said. “When she didn’t get caught, the checks got bigger. It confirmed her suspicions about Roger, that he never would check up. She could do what she wanted.”