By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

AUBURN – Unless Roger Keene changed his mind overnight and takes the witness stand this morning, his defense is over.

Keene is charged with manslaughter, kidnapping and attempted murder.

The state maintains he beat his lover unconscious, stuffed her under the tonneau cover of his pickup truck, then left her laying on her back, her hands by her sides, perfectly perpendicular in the east bound lane of Route 126 in Sabattus. That was on Sept. 12, 2003.

Leslie Stasulis, 42, and the mother of five girls – one now 9 years old – died nine days later at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. Besides cuts to her lip and around an eye, a spot on the back of her head consisted of “a big jumble of torn skin” over her fractured skull. Internal bleeding and bruising on and around her brain was so bad that surgeons couldn’t replace a plug of skull bone they had removed to relieve pressure.

Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese rested her case Tuesday afternoon in Androscoggin County Superior Court after calling more than 20 witnesses.

Keene’s lawyer, George Hess, called Thomas Bohan, a forensic physicist, as an expert for the defense to challenge police assertions about tire skid and acceleration marks left on the surface of Route 126 where Stasulis had been found.

Bohan was the third expert witness Hess had called during the trial. Earlier, the lineup of prosecution witnesses was interrupted twice as Hess put on a forensic crime scene investigator who specializes in blood spot analysis and a forensic pathologist who discussed Stasulis’ injuries.

After Bohan testified and the jury left the room for the afternoon, Justice Thomas Warren looked over to Keene. The judge cautioned Keene that his final chance to tell the jury what happened late on the night of Sept. 11, and shortly after midnight on Sept. 12, 2003, would come this morning.

Then, noting that Keene had already indicated he wouldn’t take the stand in his own defense, the judge outlined what he would tell the jury about that decision: that jurors should neither see guilt nor innocence in Keene’s silence.

For the better part of a week – testimony began last Tuesday – jurors have been hearing police, and sometimes Keene on audiotape, detail what happened that night.

Keene’s story has changed considerably over the course of a half-dozen police interrogations. He never refused to speak to police or request that a lawyer be with him at the interviews.

During those taped talks with police, Keene initially said he had said goodbye to Stasulis in the alley behind her Lisbon Street, Lewiston, bar. Later, he said that she had willingly gotten into his pickup truck to go for a ride and to talk, but had either fallen or jumped from the moving truck near Sabattus Pond.

Still later he went from asserting he had “never” struck her to admitting he hit her between two and four times. He also admitted pushing or shoving her so hard she hit her head against a brick wall in the alley.

Keene said he put her in the back of his truck after she was severely injured and asking him for help. He said he was going to take her to his parents’ house in Litchfield where Keene, then 40, was living.

Then he said that when Stasulis apparently woke while he was driving near the pond she knocked on the rear window of the truck, startling him. Keene said he alternately hit his brakes and the gas pedal a few times and pulled into the town dump road turnout.

He said he got out and looked in the back of the truck and Stasulis wasn’t there. He returned to the area where he first jammed on his brakes and saw several vehicles stopped with police and ambulances on their way there.

“I didn’t know she fell out till I got down the road,” he said on a taped interview played for jurors Tuesday.

However, elsewhere on taped interviews played Tuesday, Keene said he jerked the truck forward and backward because, “I think I wanted her to fall out.”

Once Keene’s lawyer rests his defense today, Marchese will offer jurors closing remarks followed by Hess’ closing and Marchese’s rebuttal.

Warren will then instruct and charge the jury.