On Oct. 25, 2006, 70-year-old Edward Lee obtained a Dorchester District Court restraining order against his son, a Suffolk County homicide prosecutor told a Superior Court jury today. Three days later, a Roxbury woman discovered his severed head and limbs in her back yard.

It was Edward Lee’s son, BRIAN LEE (D.O.B. 9/14/63), who beat the man to death in the victim’s Hollingsworth Street home, mutilated his body with a power saw, and dumped portions of his remains in the Homestead Street compost barrels, said Assistant District Attorney Holly Broadbent. Brian Lee’s trial for first-degree murder began today.

The elder Lee was “a quiet man who kept to himself,” Broadbent said during her opening statement. “Occasionally, the defendant – his son – would live with him at his residence.”

Neighbors heard the father and son argue and observed their “cold and distant relationship,” but no one witnessed Edward Lee’s homicide, the prosecutor said.

That act went unseen, Broadbent told jurors. There would be no witnesses who could describe the fatal beating, she said, but jurors would hear of the “gruesome, horrifying, and yet calculating steps” Brian Lee took to cover his tracks.

On Oct. 27, Broadbent said, Lee was at his father’s house waiting for a garbage truck to arrive “so he could dispose of the bloody sheets and bloody mattress” on which he had dismembered the corpse.

On Oct. 28, he was seen walking into the back yard of a woman for whom he had once done manual labor. He was carrying white plastic bags, the prosecutor said, and was empty handed when he left.

The woman went into her back yard and opened the bags to see what Lee had discarded.

“She found the severed remains of Edward Lee in her trash,” Broadbent said.

Lee is representing himself with the assistance of defense attorney Denise Regan. Prosecution testimony is ongoing before Judge John C. Cratsley in courtroom 815. The victim-witness advocate assigned to the case is Katherine Moran.