ALFRED — A slight smile graced the face of Jerry Winslow Sr. as he waited for jurors to enter the courtroom Thursday.

Once they did, the foreman announced they had found Patrick Dapolito guilty of murdering his wife, 30-year-old Kelly Winslow.

Her father had not been allowed in the courtroom before Thursday because of the possibility that he would be called as a witness. He never was called, and spent much of the trial in his truck outside York County Superior Court, and in the hallway where he showed off a portrait of his daughter — tattooed on his forearm.

Although he couldn’t attend the trial, Winslow said, he was confident about the outcome.

“I had a good feeling,” he said as he left the courtroom. “Because he deserves to be gotten.”

Dapolito, who is 41, will face 25 years to life in prison at his sentencing, which is not yet scheduled.

In convicting him, the 12 men on the jury rejected his claim that Winslow died because of a dispute between Dapolito and associates in his marijuana-trafficking business. The jury deliberated for 2½ hours before rendering the verdict.

Over 12 days, jurors heard contrasting characterizations of the couple’s relationship, allegations of abuse and descriptions of the couple’s involvement in the drug trade.

They heard how Dapolito initially claimed he had gone to sleep on a bathroom floor next to his wife while high on cocaine, holding a gun in his right hand. He said he woke up when the gun accidentally fired into his wife’s head.

This week, Dapolito testified that Winslow was killed while he was out of his home on the morning of March 16, 2010, as part of a conflict that began when he and another marijuana distributor cut out one of their partners.

And in his closing argument Thursday morning, defense attorney David Van Dyke added details of how the shooting could have happened.

He even composed a poem — “If that night in that/house someone be/Patrick Dapolito must go free” — to summarize what he said happened. Van Dyke recited it to the jury and displayed the lines, written on a page on an easel.

He noted that Dapolito and Winslow were traveling, with no precise plans to return to Maine, when the basement of their home in Limington flooded because of an unplugged sump pump. Van Dyke said someone could have caused the flood as a way to force the couple to come home.

On the morning of Winslow’s death, Van Dyke said, the killer went into the house after Dapolito’s 13-year-old daughter went to school and Dapolito left. The killer had probably been inside earlier, in the days when the house had been empty, and found Dapolito’s gun, Van Dyke said.

Dapolito said he had last seen the gun in the fall of 2009, hidden in a stack of jeans in the closet.

That morning, Dapolito went to the lake at the Moy-Mo-Da-Yo recreational area to snort cocaine, then went to buy cigarettes and coffee at a store in the nearby Steep Falls area of Standish.

When he returned home, Winslow was dead on the bathroom floor, where Dapolito had last seen her sleeping, according to the defense.

After Dapolito left to bring Winslow’s naked body — handcuffs on her right wrist — to his father’s property in Upton, his daughter heard noises in the basement, Van Dyke said.

The killer had either stayed in the house or returned, apparently to look for something related to Dapolito’s drug business, the lawyer said.

Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese called Van Dyke’s account “an evolution of a fabrication.”

She told the jury that Dapolito created an elaborate story about his drug trafficking when he realized the state could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Winslow was shot intentionally.

Dapolito had re-enacted his initial account of the accidental shooting for investigators, and a specialist from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had concluded that it couldn’t have happened as he described.

It wasn’t surprising that Dapolito’s daughter heard noises, Marchese said, because the girl would have been frightened after seeing blood on her father and blood and skin on the stairs to the basement that day.

And there were pets in the house, she said, to explain the possible source of the noises.

After the jury returned its verdict, Marchese said the state hasn’t yet decided on the recommended sentence, but it will be substantial because of Dapolito’s admitted drug history and other factors.

Van Dyke said that although he was disappointed by the verdict, he respected the jury’s effort to evaluate “very conflicting evidence.”

“We are looking at all available remedies,” he said.

Staff Writer Ann S. Kim can be contacted at 791-6383 or at:

akim@pressherald.com