Stobbe, Crown locked in duel

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This article was published 14/03/2012 (5143 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Soaring temperatures have made Winnipeg’s oldest courtroom uncomfortably warm, and the heat is also rising between a veteran Crown attorney and an accused killer.

Mark Stobbe will return to the witness box this morning for a fifth straight day, the last four of which have been spent under cross-examination by prosecutor Wendy Dawson.

Stobbe, 54, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in the October 2000 slaying of his wife, Beverly Rowbotham. He took the witness stand in his own defence last Thursday.

The Crown accuses Stobbe of hitting Rowbotham in the head 16 times with either a hatchet or axe, transferring her body from their home to his car, then parking the vehicle in Selkirk. The Crown’s theory is Stobbe bicycled back to his house from Selkirk, attempting to make her death seem like a robbery gone bad. Dawson lobbed a series of loaded allegations at Stobbe Tuesday.

“I take it she would have been no match for you in a physical struggle,” Dawson asked in reference to his much larger physical size. Stobbe had admitted he stood a full head taller and more than 100 pounds heavier than Rowbotham at the time of her death.

“I wouldn’t know. That was never empirically tested,” Stobbe replied. “We never had a physical struggle.”

Dawson also attacked Stobbe’s claim a stranger must have killed Rowbotham in their backyard while he slept inside. She questioned Stobbe’s claim he couldn’t hear anything, especially as he admitted to hearing their young son become “restless” in his bed that same evening.

“Either you don’t have good hearing or you do. Which is it?” Dawson asked.

Stobbe said he is haunted by the fact he somehow didn’t hear his wife being killed.

“That’s a question I’ve asked myself more than 1,000 times. I don’t have an answer for it,” he said. “Could I have heard something? I don’t know. Should I have heard something? I sure wish I did.”

“That’s because she wasn’t attacked by anyone else but you,” Dawson replied.

Stobbe has seemingly refused to look at Dawson throughout the marathon cross-examination, instead sitting with his body turned to her and facing the jury and his lawyer.

Dawson has spent a lot of time suggesting Stobbe “misled” the jury about his physical fitness at the time of the killing by claiming he was too out of shape to ride a bicycle the approximately 14 kilometres between his home and where Rowbotham’s body was found.

She also questioned why Stobbe is now able to provide so much detail about how he spent the days preceding his wife’s death, especially as he offered very little of that information to police investigators at the time.

Stobbe has vividly described details about yard work, home repairs and other mundane tasks.

“Twelve years ago, I could have given a lot more detail had I been asked,” he said Tuesday. However, he was unable to describe what clothes he was wearing when Rowbotham was killed.

“Is that because you disposed of them, sir?” Dawson asked.

She has also accused Stobbe of lying to jurors about the state of his marriage to Rowbotham and suggested it was much more rocky than he has let on. Stobbe admitted there were issues, mostly about their recently purchased home in St. Andrews and his long hours working in communications for the Manitoba NDP government.

He admitted Monday Rowbotham would often “yell” and felt “isolated and trapped” in their new home, but claimed their relationship improved in the weeks preceding her death.

Dawson is arguing Stobbe created a bogus story about Rowbotham being an avid “bargain hunter” in her shopping habits to cover up what really happened. Stobbe claims he fell asleep watching TV after his wife went to Safeway in Selkirk to complete a “big shop” that had been interrupted by their young son earlier that afternoon.

Stobbe admitted Tuesday their kitchen had plenty of groceries and likely wasn’t in need of more.

“I don’t know the need. All I can talk to is the fact. Bev obviously felt she wanted to go into the Safeway. Why she wanted more I don’t know,” he said.

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