ALFRED – On the day Kelly Winslow would have turned 32, her teenage daughter told a jury about the turmoil that descended on their home in Limington in the months before her fatal shooting.

The girl said she once heard a fight in another room and knew that Patrick Dapolito was hitting her mother. During another fight, Dapolito told Winslow that he was going to chop off her head and send it to her family.

Another time, the girl said, she awakened to a gunshot and came out of her room to see Dapolito hiding a weapon under a pillow and her mother looking frightened.

She said Dapolito once threw a purse at her as she tried to help her mother get out of the house. “He got her back inside,” she said of that incident. “I was scared, so I just backed away.”

Winslow’s daughter, now 15, testified Friday in Dapolito’s murder trial about events from the summer of 2009 to Winslow’s shooting on March 16, 2010.

If convicted of murder, Dapolito, 41, will face 25 years to life in prison.

Initially, Dapolito told authorities that he was high on cocaine and the gun in his hand accidentally fired after the couple went to sleep on the bathroom floor.

Now, the defense is saying that Dapolito was a drug dealer and Winslow was the victim of a dispute he had with his suppliers.

Dapolito cleaned up the bathroom and put Winslow’s body in a freezer in his basement before taking it to his father’s property in Upton. He surrendered to authorities three days after Winslow’s death.

The prosecution is expected to continue presenting its case Monday.

Winslow and Dapolito met when her daughter was 7 years old. The mother and daughter formed a household with Dapolito and his three daughters. Until the summer of 2009, Winslow and Dapolito got along well and theirs was a happy family, the girl testified.

But Winslow and Dapolito started fighting, she said, as he constantly accused her of infidelity. During a trip to Upton, Dapolito once demanded that Winslow write a chronological list of all of her sexual partners. He also said men were coming to the house to sleep with Winslow, her daughter and one of his own daughters, who is close to her in age.

“He said we were like that because my mom made us like that,” the girl said.

The girl testified that Dapolito’s accusations against Winslow didn’t make sense, given that they were never apart. She said Winslow didn’t have a job, her own car or her own cellphone. To get in touch with her mother, someone would have to call Dapolito’s cellphone, said the girl and other relatives.

The relatives testified Friday about how they got worried about the couple’s relationship.

In the fall of 2009, Winslow started seeming scared and a little edgy, said her brother, Jerry Winslow Jr. Around that time his niece called, saying Winslow was scared and wanted to be picked up from her home. He went, but Winslow wouldn’t leave with him.

Winslow’s stepmother — also named Kelly Winslow — testified that several months passed without even a returned text message. The stepmother sent a text to Dapolito’s phone, saying they were worried and were going to the home. Dapolito responded within an hour, saying he had had phone problems.

“I was afraid, because I knew what was playing out was not a good thing.” Winslow said.

Winslow’s daughter moved in with her father and his mother in January of 2010. She said she was sick of the fighting in Limington, and her mother and Dapolito had been forgetting to pick her up from friends’ homes and wouldn’t bring her to her basketball games anymore.

“I thought they didn’t care anymore, so I wanted to leave,” she said.

Winslow talked to her daughter the week she was killed. They were making plans to have dinner together for the girl’s 14th birthday. The girl said she forgot to make a follow-up call as planned and her birthday passed without them getting together.

The next day — two days after Winslow’s death — she called Dapolito.

“I called Patrick’s phone,” she said through tears. “He said he loved me and I was growing up fast and that he’d have my mom call me when she could.”

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

akim@pressherald.com

 

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