“There were two names on it,” Stokes said. “One of them was Jeffrey Ryan’s.”

Ormsby’s trial for the murder of two men and a 10-year-old boy nearly two years ago in the tiny town of Amity got under way Monday morning in Aroostook County Superior Court in Houlton.

Ormsby, an Ellsworth native who was living in Orient in 2010, has pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity to three counts of murder and an arson charge in connection with the stabbing deaths of Ryan, 55, Ryan’s son Jesse, 10, and Ryan family friend Jason Dehahn, 30, all of Amity, on June 22, 2010. They were found dead about 27 hours after the killings at the Ryans’ home on U.S. Route 1, according to police.

The defendant was arrested on July 2, 2010, in Dover, N.H.

Stokes said Ormsby went to Ryan’s trailer on the evening of June 22, 2010, intending to kill Ryan. He did not expected Ryan’s son, Jesse, or Dehahn, who was a neighbor of Ryan’s, to be there, the prosecutor told jurors.

The prosecutor said Ormsby stabbed Jeffrey Ryan first, outside in a woodshed, then returned to Ryan’s trailer and found the boy and the neighbor playing video games. There, Ormsby first stabbed Dehahn in the chest, then chased the terrified boy down the hall to a bedroom.

Ormsby stabbed Jesse Ryan in the back as he “cowered in fear,” Stokes told jurors. The boy was found dead, on his hands and knees.

Dehahn managed to escape the trailer, but Ormsby followed him, the prosecutor said in his opening statement. He repeatedly stabbed Dehahn in the back before slashing his throat, nearly severing his head from his body, Stokes told jurors.

The murder weapon has been described in court documents as a “combat knife.” Stokes told jurors that it had a 7-inch blade.

Defense attorney James Dunleavy of Presque Isle called the deaths in Amity “tragic, horrible and horrific.”

“The defense will put into context the events of June 22 and 23,” he told jurors in his brief opening statement.

The men who discovered the bloody body of Jesse Ryan were scheduled to take the stand after jurors returned from a lunch break at 1 p.m.

A jury of eight men and seven women, three of whom are alternates, were selected from a pool of 33 potential jurors just before opening statements were made.

The jury was seated after Superior Court Justice E. Allen Hunter and attorneys on both sides spent three days last week questioning 118 potential jurors. By the end of the day Friday, that number had been narrowed to 33 deemed impartial and able to serve.

Hunter also denied a defense motion to move the trial out of Aroostook County.

Dr. Marguerite DeWitt, a former state medical examiner who now lives in Texas, is scheduled to testify Monday afternoon. She examined the bodies at the scene and performed autopsies on the three victims.

DeWitt testified in July in Bangor in the manslaughter trial of Garrett Cheney, 23, of South Berwick in the hit-and-run death in Orono of University of Maine student Jordyn Bakley, 20, of Camden on Jan. 30, 2010. Cheney was convicted and sentenced to 15 years with all but seven years suspended.

Because of his insanity plea, Ormsby will be tried in two phases. In the first and longer phase, the jury will be asked to find if he is guilty or not guilty of the charges on which he has been indicted. If he is found guilty, the jury will hear evidence as to his state of mind at the time of the crime. Jurors then will be asked to determine whether Ormsby was criminally responsible for his actions.

If the jury finds he was insane when the crimes were committed, Ormsby would not be sent to prison but to the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta for an undetermined amount of time. If jurors find him guilty and sane, Ormsby would face a sentence of between 25 years and life in prison on each of the murder charges. He would face up to 30 years in prison if convicted of arson.

Judges are allowed to impose life sentences in Maine under specific circumstances. One of them is being convicted of multiple murders.

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