Brian Mlyniec, of West Warwick, and his lawyer, Andrew Bucci, examine a police photo yesterday on the opening day of Mlyniec’s trial for first-degree murder in the death of Kelly Ann Anderson in June 2006. Rescue personnel found Anderson, 42, lying dead on cushions in his living room.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

WARWICK — Exactly two years after police found 41-year-old Kelly Ann Anderson dead in a West Warwick house, the trial of the man accused of killing her began yesterday in Kent County Superior Court.

Brian Mlyniec, 45, is charged with first-degree murder in the 2006 death of Anderson. As emotional spectators looked on, jurors saw a battery of graphic photographs and heard a taped interview of the defendant telling the police what happened.

In an opening statement, prosecutor John Corrigan told jurors they would hear how Anderson, a recovering heroin addict, was trying to get her life together and would learn the details surrounding her death.

“At the end of this case, you’re going to have evidence before you so you can call this death exactly what it was: murder in the first degree,” Corrigan said.

Defense lawyer Andrew A. Bucci reserved his right to give an opening statement, and the prosecution immediately began calling its first witnesses.

Four witnesses took the stand — West Warwick Detective George Winman, Sgt. Scott Thorton, Patrolman Anthony Bettencourt and West Warwick Firefighter Eric Galloway.

It was around 1:30 p.m. on June 23, 2006, said Galloway, an emergency medical technician, when he went to 95 Harris Ave. in response to a report of an unresponsive woman. He said he found Anderson lying on her back on couch cushions in the middle of a disheveled living room and that Mlyniec was hovering over her.

“Oh, she’s moving,” Galloway said Mlyniec told him and his partner.

But she wasn’t, Galloway said, testifying that Anderson was “obviously deceased” when the technicians arrived. Anderson had no pulse. Her body was cold to the touch.

Prosecutors showed crime scene photos of Anderson. Her blue jeans unfastened. The blue unbuttoned flannel shirt she wore bared her chest. She lay on blood-stained cushions and pillows. Bruises covered her body. As the photos were projected onto screens, family members and friends sobbed. Some shielded their eyes.

Also yesterday, prosecutors played a videotape of detectives’ interview with Mlyniec in which he recounted how he met Anderson and the events leading up to her death. Jurors heard roughly an hour of the interview.

Mlyniec described a sputtering relationship between the two and said they reconnected when they bumped into each other at Kennedy Plaza in Providence on June 22, 2006.

Anderson had just left CODAC, a methadone treatment clinic, she told Mlyniec. She was scheduled to enter a one-year residential treatment in a few days. The two milled around Kennedy Plaza waiting for the bus, Mlyniec told the detectives. They talked. They drank a mixture of vodka and Gatorade. They went to 7-Eleven. They made out behind a Dumpster.

Still, Mlyniec said he was worried. Anderson was “out of it,” he repeatedly told detectives. Mlyniec offered to let her stay with him for a few days. If she was back on drugs, he wanted to make sure she got through the weekend to enroll in the program. They rode the bus to Mlyniec’s home.

There, they drank vodka and Sprite. And as they sat on the couch, Mlyniec said, something happened.

“She was laying there and her eyes were rolling back in her head,” he said. “I told myself she was probably overdosing.”

Mlyniec said he put her into a bathtub of cold water to revive her. Then he put ground coffee and water into her mouth, hopping the caffeine would wake her up. He said it did and that Anderson tried to get out of the tub, but slipped and fell. Mlyniec said he helped her to the living room, where she lay on couch cushions on the floor.

The next day, Mlyniec told the detectives, he advised a neighbor who normally takes him to work that he wouldn’t need a ride that day. The man asked Mlyniec about the shirt he was wearing: it had blood on it. The woman in his apartment had gotten her menstrual cycle, he told his neighbor.

Hoping food would help Anderson feel better, Mlyniec said, he bicycled to a store and bought some ice cream. Anderson ate some.

“She seemed decent,” he told detectives. “The same as she was the other day.”

The two had a short conversation, Mlyniec said, before he got a call for a job from the temporary agency he was working for. At the job site, he told some of his coworkers about the woman in his house that he believed was overdosing on heroin.

The detectives asked why he didn’t call for help if he was so worried about her. Mlyniec said she seemed fine and the job site was only 10 minutes from his house. But he said a coworker persuaded him to go home.

The police, ambulance and medical examiners would soon follow. They would find Anderson there, still lying on the cushions in the middle of the floor.

The trial will resume at 10 this morning before the jury and Judge Edwin J. Gale.

tbuford@projo.com