NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — To her patients at the fertility clinic where she worked as a registered nurse, Melanie McGuire was a smart, caring presence, the perfect antidote to the anxiety and uncertainty of infertility.

But in state Superior Court Monday, a prosecutor suggested to jurors that McGuire's compassion ended at the exam room door. The 34-year-old, the prosecutor charged, murdered her husband William in 2004, sliced his body into four pieces with a power saw and tossed them into the Chesapeake Bay packed in trash bags and stuffed into the couple's luggage set.

"Just like garbage," Assistant Attorney General Patricia Prezioso said in her opening statement Monday morning.

McGuire's first-degree murder trial, which is expected to last six weeks, pits what prosecutors portrayed as a mountain of circumstantial evidence tying her to the gory crime against the defendant's sterling reputation as a medical professional.

"This is a woman who spent her life helping to nurture life as a fertility nurse, not taking it," defense attorney Stephen Turano said during an opening in which he repeatedly told jurors that the case was "about character."

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 "Ms. McGuire did not murder her husband. She did not dismember his body. And she doesn't know who did," he said.

William McGuire, a 39-year-old Navy veteran, computer analyst and adjunct professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, was last seen alive April 28, 2004, shortly after the couple closed on what prosecutors have described as the victim's "dream house" in Warren County.

Two suitcases of his remains were pulled from the water off Virginia Beach the next month. A third washed up on an island near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel.

At the time of his disappearance, Melanie McGuire, his wife of five years and mother of his two young sons, was having an affair with her physician boss at the Morristown, N.J., clinic where she worked, Reproductive Medical Associates of New Jersey.

McGuire told friends and relatives that her husband had packed his bags and left after a violent argument. She subsequently sought a restraining order and filed for divorce, accusing William McGuire of verbally abusing her and their sons, Jack, now 7, and J.T., 4, and gambling away their meager savings in Atlantic City.

In court Monday, Prezioso said Melanie McGuire concocted the allegations against her husband after she had murdered him.

"There is no evidence that William McGuire ever left that apartment that night of his own volition," Prezioso said.

The prosecutor is also seeking a perjury conviction against McGuire for statements she made in family court while seeking the restraining order.

Prezioso said prosecutors would present evidence that McGuire planned her husband's murder, including Google searches on the couple's computer for "murder and suicide" and "undetectable poison" and the defendant's purchase of a .38-caliber revolver two days before her husband vanished. Slugs removed from William McGuire's head and chest were from a .38. The gun the defendant bought has never been recovered.

Speaking to jurors for just under an hour, the prosecutor seemed to have to rush to mention each piece of evidence, which, she said, includes conflicting alibi statements, toll booth records, forensic analysis of hairs and garbage bags, surveillance tapes and phone taps.