Slain woman appears before jury on video

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Beverley Rowbotham: seen at Safeway (POSTMEDIA)

Like a phantom, her image flashes several times across a movie screen.

Beverly Rowbotham is first seen walking through the doors of a Safeway grocery in Selkirk, one of her young sons beside her, before coming back on screen to walk out the doors. A few seconds later, Rowbotham is back, pushing a cart into the store.

In a hushed Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench courtroom on Tuesday, the mother of two was shown walking through the meat department. Near the dairy area. A few metres over, she picks up a couple of packages of English muffins. She looks at Halloween candy and costumes with her son.

Rowbotham is wearing blue jeans and a dark pink, long-sleeved shirt. The images are blurred in the video, but they appear to be the clothes seen in photographs already entered as evidence at a murder trial. As evidence, they are bloody; at the store, they are not.

Scarcely more than 45 minutes later, at 3:18 p.m., as recorded on security-camera videotape on Oct. 25, 2001, Rowbotham walks out of the store, some bagged groceries in her cart and her son in front of her.

As her image left the screen, 13 jurors knew what Rowbotham could not: Just a few hours later, she would be brutally slain, with an axe or hatchet slamming repeatedly into her skull.

Mark Stobbe, Rowbotham's husband and a former adviser in the Manitoba government under premier Gary Doer, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder.

Court has been told Rowbotham, 42, was slain in the backyard of her RM of St. Andrews home -- so brutally, police found chips of her bones there -- before being stuffed into the back seat of the family sedan and driven to Selkirk, where the vehicle was abandoned.

Several witnesses also said in the hours and days after Rowbotham's death, Stobbe told them his wife went grocery shopping in the afternoon, but cut her shopping trip short when her child misbehaved, intending to go back later to finish up.

The witnesses also said Stobbe told them after Rowbotham left for the grocery store in the evening, he fell asleep, waking up a few hours later. He phoned family and police to say his wife was missing, and not long after, police found her body in their car in Selkirk.

The Crown's theory, in a case they admit is circumstantial, is Stobbe committed the slaying, drove to Selkirk and abandoned the car with the body in it, then cycled the 14 kilometres home.

Earlier, Martin d'Entremont testified he first met Stobbe when they were university students in Saskatchewan in 1976, and Stobbe later married the best friend of d'Entremont's wife.

D'Entremont said the only time he ever saw any "sharp words" in the relationship was when their two sons misbehaved and she told her husband to "take over the situation."

"They got along very well. They were very affectionate."

D'Entremont said a few months before Rowbotham was slain, he was in Winnipeg from Alberta and met the couple for lunch.

Asked by Crown attorney Wendy Dawson if the couple expressed any problems in the relationship, d'Entremont said "quite the opposite. They held hands. They kissed. It was quite normal affection."

Later, Robert Dewar, formerly Doer's chief of staff, described Stobbe as "a brilliant strategist."

Dewar said after the Doer government was first elected, Stobbe was hired to teach freshly appointed cabinet ministers how to speak to the media.

The jury at Stobbe's trial now numbers 13 after a juror failed to show up.

Justice Chris Martin dismissed a juror who said he was having "hardship" continuing to sit through the two-month trial, which began last week.

"He gave us a note," the judge told the remaining jurors. "We tried to find him... There will be further consequences but it is not something you have to concern yourself with."

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 8, 2012 A5