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Stobbe said slaying during shopping trip 'strange': sister-in-law

By: Kevin Rollason

Posted: 02/6/2012 12:48 PM

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES Enlarge Image

Mark Stobbe (left), has been charged with killing his wife, Beverly Rowbotham, in 2000.

Mark Stobbe laughed when he agreed how strange it was for his wife to be slain while grocery shopping in Selkirk, a Winnipeg murder trial heard Monday.

Barbara Kilpatrick testified the exchange happened when she phoned Stobbe from a conference in New Orleans after learning about the slaying of her younger sister, Beverly Rowbotham.

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"It was very emotional," Kilpatrick said today in court. "I was saying it would make more sense for me to be killed in the city of New Orleans than to be killed getting groceries in Selkirk.

"He said, 'Yes, that's pretty strange.' He laughed."

Stobbe has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder.

The Crown's case, based on circumstantial evidence, accuses Stobbe of clubbing his 42-year-old wife of seven years to death in the backyard of the couple's St. Andrews home and then shoving her body inside the family car and driving it 14 kilometres north to Selkirk, parking it along a fence near Kelly's Selkirk Service Station. The Crown says Stobbe then rode a bicycle home.

Court has heard police found dozens of blood drops, bone fragments, clumps of hair and other material in the garage and backyard of her home. Eleven of those items would later be linked by DNA testing to the deceased.

The Crown's theory is the couple got into an argument that ended in violence. Beverly Rowbotham hated the house they were living in and wanted to move to where she and their boys wouldn't be so isolated.

The trial is scheduled to continue through to the end of March.

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