DOVER – Prosecutors and defense attorneys in the trial of Gary Dodds closed their cases yesterday by calling each other’s version of events patently absurd.

Addressing jurors in Strafford County Superior Court, County Attorney Thomas Velardi said Dodds staged an April 5, 2006, crash on the Spaulding Turnpike and a subsequent 27-hour disappearance to help his nascent congressional campaign.

Unable to prove exactly where Dodds was during the missing time, Velardi said physical evidence confirmed that Dodds was not in the cold, as he had asserted, but rather somewhere much warmer, soaking his feet in cold water to fake injuries.

Defense attorney J.P. Nadeau countered in his statements: “What the state has done is they’ve taken innocent facts and diffused them with dark and sinister meanings. I’m going to ask you in my presentation not to let them get away with it.”

Nadeau said the story is much simpler. He said Dodds swerved to avoid a deer during a snowy night, slammed into a guardrail, triggering both airbags, and hit his head inside the vehicle.

Disoriented, injured and fearing fire because of the airbags’ smoky smell, Dodds fled, Nadeau said. He ran through the woods, over a nearby road and across the Bellamy River, finally climbing a steep hill before exhaustion toppled him, and he bed down in the pile of leaves where he was found more than a day later.

Velardi countered with a question for jurors: “Why is someone going to have a collision on Route 16, freak out, bolt from the scene in direction unknown, go across Spur Road, run by a bunch of houses and run into a black river at 8 o’clock at night?” Dodds, 43, of Rye, is charged with falsifying physical evidence, a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison, as well as creating false public alarm and conduct after an accident, both misdemeanors.

Velardi and Nadeau spoke passionately as the trial finished its third week yesterday, using their closing arguments to shore up their cases.

Nadeau hammered away at what has been the most difficult aspect of the state’s case for prosecutors to prove: motive. Although the state has no obligation to prove the reason for an alleged crime, Nadeau noted that prosecutors offered one anyway, saying that Dodds staged the crash to garner publicity amid financial turmoil in his campaign and a March 2006 letter from the Federal Election Commission threatening an audit.

Nadeau said the letter was sent to the wrong address, so Dodds had not received it until after the crash. Furthermore, the attorney said, former campaign manager Corey Corbin was to blame for many of the financial problems after blowing through $50,000 in “two months or less.” He said Corbin pursued a “vendetta” after having been fired and had come back to haunt Dodds at trial.

He also pushed aside accusations that Dodds used two mortgages, worth $60,000 and $30,000, to finance his campaign without his wife Cindy’s knowledge and pointed to her signing the loan documents as evidence that she knew of the money all along.

Both of them testified earlier in the trial that the money was used to renovate another property they had recently purchased.But Velardi said there was more to the story and told jurors to look at the financial records and trust their gut.“Just line up the dates from when they get the money to when they make personal contributions to the campaign, and draw your own conclusions,” he said.

The Dodds’ signed the $60,000 mortgage document on Jan. 27, 2006. On Feb. 10, 2006, Gary Dodds contributed a little more than $61,000 to his campaign.

Velardi referred repeatedly to physical evidence and testimony from police and rescuers that Dodds’ feet were purplish, with a clear line of demarcation just above the ankle, as though they had been immersed in cold water. Velardi recounted how cold-weather expert Murray Hamlet had testified that immersion was the only way Dodds’ foot injuries could’ve happened.

He also said Dodds would have had to take a very specific route after the crash to avoid the myriad houses and apartments near where he was found.

“You ain’t in the Ozarks; you’re in a neighborhood in Dover, New Hampshire,” Velardi said.

Velardi suggested that Cindy Dodds may have tried to help her husband through statements she made to authorities. Velardi noted that while Dodds was still missing, she pushed police to search the river and suggested he had hit his head, both of which later lined up with his version of events.

He also said Cindy Dodds had changed her initial story that her husband was going to a Somersworth meeting the night of the crash.

“It’s this constant backtracking and rewriting of history, fixing things you don’t like,” he said before singing the theme song from the TV show “The Facts of Life.”

Nadeau advised jurors the state had expended an abundance of resources to investigate Dodds and had put him through an extensive trial without definitive proof of a crime. Even if jurors accept the state’s case, Nadeau said, they could still find Dodds innocent.

“If you believe in your hearts and minds that it wouldn’t be fair to convict him, you have the right to acquit him,” Nadeau said.Nadeau also repeated a theme used throughout the trial: that the police simply had not grasped the seriousness of Dodds’ crash and had bungled the search for him, forcing him to suffer in the cold, then turned around and charged him with a crime.

“That’s what this case is all about, putting the blame somewhere, because for this length of time, Mrs. Dodds and her friends were trying to find her husband when the police were not,” he said.

As Velardi ended his closing, he told jurors that Dodds’ hope for a headline-grabbing rescue had gone awry, but he had already started down a path he could not veer from.

“He had a story he was going to stick to,” Velardi said. “It would’ve been a heroic story. It would’ve been a great story.” Jurors are scheduled to begin deliberations Wednesday.