BANGOR – After dropping a young couple off at the movies, Allan Buchanan stopped his cab in the middle of the theater’s parking lot Thursday night.

“Don’t get me started,” said Buchanan, a veteran driver for Dick’s Taxi, as he looked in through a stand of trees into the Stillwater Avenue construction site where just days before his fellow driver, 60-year-old Donna Leen, picked up the man accused of murdering her.

“It could have happened to any one of us.”

Buchanan, 50, was one of about 200 people who came to St. John’s Catholic Church on Friday to mourn the death of the Bangor woman, who was remembered as a “spirited” person who loved her job – one of the most dangerous in the city.

During the afternoon service, friends and family remembered Leen as a caring mother and grandmother who “loved [now-deceased race car driver] Dale Earnhardt, although she didn’t drive like him.”

Her weekend slaying shook the city’s competitive but close-knit community of cabdrivers and focused attention on the perils of the oftentimes stressful job.

Leen, with 20 years of experience behind the wheel of a taxi, was found dead in her cab Sunday morning in a remote field behind a Corinth farmhouse.

Carl Wayne Heath, a 20-year-old Fryeburg man with numerous felony convictions and a history of mental illness, was apprehended three days later in New Jersey and stands accused of beating Leen to death with a hammer that police say he stole from the Bangor construction site.

Heath, who was picked up on a routine traffic violation, remained in a New Jersey jail Friday where he faces fugitive from justice charges and almost certain extradition to Maine on the murder charge, state prosecutors said.

Although it’s been nearly 20 years since a Bangor cabdriver was last murdered on the job, Buchanan said the dangers are real and always in the back of a veteran driver’s mind when he starts the meter.

“There’s a sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth sense,” Buchanan said, of a veteran driver’s ability to assess a threat. “You just have to be careful.”

The personable Buchanan was careful as he prepared to pick up a fare on the city’s west side Thursday.

“Oh, a kid,” he muttered as he pulled the taxi up to the corner of Court and Ohio streets. Buchanan gave the young man a good look and a friendly “Hey, buddy!” as the fare walked up to the idling cab, which like the company’s nine others has a black ribbon tied to its antenna in Leen’s memory.

But after a $10 ride to Eddington and a decision that the affable pizza delivery man was no threat, Buchanan let the fare run into his friend’s house to get some cash to pay the fare.

He did.

“Here’s one mistake rookies make,” Buchanan said as a young man jogged past a barking dog and into an open doorway. “Some might make a big deal out of him having to go inside … then it becomes a trust issue, and if the chemistry is wrong, there could be a problem.”

While there were no problems for Buchanan on Thursday night, later in the company’s smoke-filled dispatch office there were plenty of stories – from fighting to robbery, and even passengers jumping out of moving vehicles.

Working alone and carrying cash, taxi drivers continue to do one of the nation’s most dangerous jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bureau’s 2000 statistics indicate that 70 cabdrivers were killed last year while on duty, for a fatality rate of about 25 for every 100,000 employed.

For comparison, 12 of every 100,000 police officers and about 15 of every 100,000 firefighters died while on duty last year, according to the 2000 statistics.

Diane Muffuletto – one of just a handful of woman cabdrivers in the city – knows how dangerous her occupation can be.

Now a dispatcher, the 37-year-old said she’s had a “couple close calls” during her 10 years behind the wheel of a taxicab. But for Muffuletto, it was a passenger who later turned into a stalker that drove home the danger of her job.

“I’ve been lucky,” she said from her office at Town Taxi. “We’ll all probably be a little more careful now, but we’re not going to be panicked.”