It 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 11-year-old twins outside a laundromat in Lewiston, Maine, a city of 36,000.
The killing itself was shocking but so was Flick’s violent past, leaving Dobbie’s family and others in the town to question why he was ever allowed to be freed.
“There is no age that is ‘too old’ to commit murder,” Elsie Kimball Clement, daughter of Sandra Flick, said last year. “He never should have been on the streets.”
Forty years ago, Albert Flick was living in Westbrook, Maine, working at a doughnut shop and facing the end of his marriage. His wife, Sandra Flick, served him with divorce papers and had police officers remove him from their apartment. But, when he came to get his belongings, he was armed with a jackknife.
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Sandra Flick’s daughter from an earlier marriage, Elsie, hid in a bedroom and watched as Albert Flick bent her mother’s arm behind her back and covered her mouth with his hand. The daughter fled the apartment. When a neighbor went up to check on Sandra Flick, he saw Albert Flick on the stairs, covered in blood, and found Sandra Flick stabbed four times in the neck and chest, and once through her heart.
Flick was convicted in his wife’s murder and spent 25 years in prison. But the violence continued after 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 another woman with whom, a prosecutor said, he had a sexual relationship, in 2010.
A prosecutor then urged a judge to sentence Flick to about eight years in prison, calling him a danger to society and women. Despite his age — then in his late 60s — she told the judge that he was not about to stop.
Judge Robert E. Crowley cut that recommendation in half, sending Flick back to prison for less than four years.
“At some point Mr. Flick is going to age out of his capacity to engage in this conduct,” Crowley said, “and incarceration beyond the time he ages out doesn’t seem to me to make good sense from a criminological or fiscal perspective.”
Crowley retired as a judge shortly afterward, and he now works in alternative dispute resolution at a law firm in Portland.
Had Flick been imprisoned longer or remained on probation, authorities might have been able to keep a closer eye on him. But Flick had served his sentence and had the right to live freely.
Last July, he killed Dobbie in a nearly identical stabbing attack to the one on his wife. Prosecutors said that Flick was obsessed with 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 be out of the building. That is where Flick met her and began following her, even eating meals at the shelter.
Flick offered to buy her sons the healthy lunches she could not always afford. “She was just plain out of money,” Katharyn Cormier, a resident at the shelter told The Times last year, “and any mother’s going to accept that.”
Dobbie’s friends said that he followed her everywhere, despite being asked to leave 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 home, Dobbie was stabbed to death.
In court, Flick wore black headphones, to help him hear the proceedings. Bud Ellis, an assistant attorney general, told jurors that Flick knew Dobbie was going to be moving away from Lewiston and said that Flick thought to himself, “If I can’t have her, I will kill her.”
“We and the family and friends of Kim Dobbie are very gratified with the jury verdict,” Ellis said Friday. “Mr. Flick stabbed her to death in a similar fashion to how he murdered his wife Sandra in 1979. At least there is some level of justice in his conviction.”
Flick faces 25 years to life in prison during his sentencing hearing, set for Aug. 9. Maine has no death penalty. This time the prosecutor will seek a life term.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.