Convicted Killer Gets Released Because Hes Too Old to Kill
A Murderer Accounted Too Old for Violence Was Just Convicted of Another Killing
The 77-year-one-time man, who was free despite a long history of violence against women, was convicted of an attack nearly identical to his killing of his wife 40 years agone.
A murderer with a long history of violence confronting women — but who had been freed from prison house and accounted unlikely to hurt anyone again because of his advancing age — was convicted past a jury in Maine this week in the stabbing expiry of a mother of twin boys.
Information technology took the jury less than an hour to convict Albert Flick, 77, for the 2018 murder of Kimberly Dobbie, 48, who was slain in front of her eleven-yr-quondam twins outside a laundromat in Lewiston, a city of 36,000.
The killing itself was shocking, only so was Mr. Flick'south violent past, leaving Ms. Dobbie's family unit and others in the boondocks to question why he was e'er immune to be freed.
"In that location is no age that is 'too one-time' to commit murder," Elsie Kimball Cloudless, the daughter of Sandra Movie, said last twelvemonth. "He never should have been on the streets."
Forty years agone, Mr. Flick was living in Westbrook, Me., working at a doughnut shop and facing the end of his marriage. His wife, Sandra Flick, served him with divorce papers and had police force officers remove him from their apartment. Only, when he came to become his belongings, he was armed with a jackknife.
Ms. Picture show'due south daughter from an earlier marriage, Elsie, hid in a sleeping room and watched as Mr. Motion-picture show bent her mother's arm behind her back and covered her oral cavity with his manus. The girl fled the flat. When a neighbor went up to cheque on Ms. Flick, he saw Mr. Moving-picture show on the stairs, covered in blood, and found Ms. Flick stabbed four times in the neck and chest, and one time through her heart.
Mr. Moving picture was convicted in his wife's murder and spent 25 years in prison. But the violence continued afterward his release: He was convicted of punching and stabbing a woman — who a prosecutor said was a girlfriend — with a fork in 2007, and of assaulting and threatening some other woman with whom, a prosecutor said, he had a sexual relationship, in 2010.
A prosecutor then urged a judge to sentence Mr. Movie to nigh eight years in prison house, calling him a danger to society and women. Despite his age — then in his late 60s — she told the gauge that he was not near to stop.
Judge Robert Due east. Crowley cut that recommendation in half, sending Mr. Movie back to prison for less than 4 years.
"At some point Mr. Flick is going to age out of his chapters to appoint in this carry," Gauge Crowley said, "and incarceration beyond the fourth dimension he ages out doesn't seem to me to brand skilful sense from a criminological or fiscal perspective."
Mr. Crowley retired every bit a approximate shortly subsequently, and he now works in alternative dispute resolution at a law firm in Portland.
Had Mr. Motion-picture show been imprisoned longer or remained on probation, the authorities might have been able to keep a closer eye on him. But Mr. Flick had served his sentence and had the right to live freely.
Terminal July, he killed Ms. Dobbie in a nearly identical stabbing attack to the one on his wife. Prosecutors said that Mr. Flick was obsessed with Ms. Dobbie, 48, who was homeless and living in a shelter.
She would go to the library during the day, when the shelter required residents to exist out of the building. That is where Mr. Flick met her and began following her, even eating meals at the shelter.
Mr. Film offered to buy her sons the healthy lunches she could not always afford. "She was just obviously out of coin," Katharyn Cormier, a resident at the shelter told The Times terminal year, "and whatsoever mother's going to accept that."
Ms. Dobbie'southward friends said that he followed her everywhere, despite existence asked to get out her alone. She also spurned his romantic overtures.
She and her sons had just been awarded an apartment of their own, outside Lewiston before her death. The day before caseworkers were going to take them to their new dwelling, Ms. Dobbie was stabbed to expiry.
In court, Mr. Picture show wore black headphones, to assist him hear the proceedings. Bud Ellis, an assistant attorney general, told jurors that Mr. Moving-picture show knew Ms. Dobbie was going to exist moving away from Lewiston and said that Mr. Film thought to himself, "If I tin can't have her, I will kill her."
"Nosotros and the family unit and friends of Kim Dobbie are very gratified with the jury verdict," Mr. Ellis said on Friday. "Mr. Moving-picture show stabbed her to death in a similar fashion to how he murdered his married woman Sandra in 1979. At least at that place is some level of justice in his conviction."
Mr. Flick faces 25 years to life in prison house during his sentencing hearing, set up for Aug. 9. Maine has no capital punishment. This time the prosecutor volition seek a life term.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/albert-flick-convicted-kimberly-dobbie-murder-maine.html
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