Beloved South End hairstylist Daniel Yakovleff died when the person who took him home stabbed him more than a dozen times with a chef’s knife, and not at the hand of a “mysterious third man,” a top Suffolk County homicide prosecutor said today during opening statements in the alleged killer’s murder trial.

Assistant District Attorney Mark T. Lee, deputy chief of District Attorney Daniel F. Conley’s Homicide Unit, told a panel of jurors that STEVEN ODEGARD (D.O.B. 8/5/67) met Yakovleff at a Tremont Street bar in the early morning hours of Jan. 17, 2008, and took the 20-year-old man back to his Dorchester apartment.

Lee said Yakovleff had “built up a loyal clientele and a close circle of friends” since moving to Boston. He spent the evening of Jan. 16, 2008, with some of those friends and another man who had recently come to Boston. They ate dinner at a Tremont Street restaurant, Lee said, before Yakovleff and one of his dinner companions went to the Boston Eagle, a nearby bar.

The two parted ways when Yakovleff left the bar, Lee said, and returned to the restaurant. He made a cash withdrawal at a nearby bank machine and ran into another one of his dinner companions, who noted that Yakovleff was now alone.

“Yeah, I ditched him,” Yakovleff said of the man with whom he’d left the restaurant and gone to the bar.

Lee told jurors that Yakovleff made one final trip to the Eagle shortly before 1:00 on the morning of Jan. 17. That, Lee said, is where Yakovleff met the defendant.

“Shortly before 2:00, as the Eagle closed, they decided they would retire to Steven Odegard’s apartment,” the prosecutor told the court.

“What happened next, plain and simple, is that Dan Yakovleff was murdered,” Lee said. “I can’t tell you exactly what happened. No one can, because a crime this violent is not one you commit in front of witnesses.”

Yakovleff was found about four hours later after Odegard called 911 from his cellular phone to report “a dead man in my house.” A uniformed Boston Police officer found him in Odegard’s bed, “awash” in his own blood, Lee said. Plunged handle-deep into the young man’s chest was a kitchen knife more than a foot long. He had been stabbed 15 times, with one of the wounds going so deep that it left a mark on his back.

Lee told jurors that Odegard spoke with Boston Police homicide detectives multiple times in the days and weeks that followed, at one point giving a two-hour statement in which “he said the murder was committed by a mysterious third man” who had come home with him and Yakovleff but who “never sat down and never touched anything.”

In the months that followed Yakovleff’s murder, Lee said, Boston Police criminalists processed 90 pieces of evidence from the scene for DNA testing and an additional 132 pieces of evidence for other forensic tests.

“There isn’t a scintilla of evidence” that puts another person in Odegard’s Tuttle Street apartment at the time Yakovleff was killed, Lee said.

“There’s an old adage that things aren’t always as they appear,” Lee said. “Sometimes, though, things are exactly as they appear.”

Paula Connor is the district attorney’s victim-witness advocate assigned to the case. Odegard is represented by attorney John Swomley and Judge Regina Quinlan is presiding over the case in courtroom 907 of Suffolk Superior Court.

Jurors are expected to take a view of the crime scene tomorrow.