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A LITTLE ‘WIDOW’ SHOPPING

The murdered Staten Island fire marshal who mercilessly taunted his wife about her weight was a gun-loving “Rambo” killed by mysterious intruders while she was out shopping, her lawyer argued yesterday.

So-called “Merry Widow” Janet Mercereau, 39, was videotaped at Kmart at the time Doug Mercereau, 38, was shot in their bed in December 2007, Joseph Benfante said in his opening statement at her trial.

Benfante said the murder occurred 10 hours earlier than the time prosecutors claim Janet fired three bullets into her husband with his own gun.

“The man was a fire-marshal Rambo. He had no fear of guns. He loved guns,” Benfante said yesterday in Staten Island Supreme Court.

Mercereau was no deranged killer, but a caring wife who was shopping for kids’ clothing and buying red wine for her husband, even though she drinks only white, Benfante said.

His version of events conflicted sharply with prosecutor Yolanda Rudich’s account of how Janet callously shot her husband as her children slept, cleaned up the crime scene, and then pretended she’d just discovered the body when she called 911 the morning of Dec. 2, 2007.

Benfante claimed one or more phantom killers could have slipped in through the back door of the family’s home and left behind as-yet unidentified fingerprints after using the victim’s gun to shoot him three times in the head.

Finding the murder weapon would have been easy for them, as the victim left several weapons carelessly lying around the house and had a basement loaded with “hundreds and hundreds” of rounds of ammunition, he said.

At the time of Janet Mercereau’s arrest in March 2007, her lawyers said that her husband abusively taunted her about her weight during their troubled 12-year marriage and that she was sound asleep in her kids’ room at the time of the murder.

Dubbed the “Merry Widow” for cheerfully posing in her driveway for photographers, Janet dressed for her trial in somber black, but couldn’t help flashing a bizarre grin as she accepted a candy from her lawyers.

She faces 25 years to life behind bars if convicted.

“There is no reasonable possibility that anyone else could have killed Doug Mercereau, except the woman who had access to the gun and the time and opportunity to clean up afterwards,” Rudich said in opening statements.

“She is the only person who had something to gain from his death.”

Prosecutors showed jurors a grisly photograph of the victim’s blood-soaked body lying in his bed. The rest of the house was undisturbed, with no sign of forced entry and no missing valuables.

kati.cornell@nypost.com