Skip to main content

The prosecution of Mark Stobbe. What's behind this travesty?

What the hell was that all about?

After seven weeks of testimony one fact is crystal clear---authorities don't have a shred of evidence against Mark Stobbe for the murder of his wife Beverley Rowbotham.

Not
A
Shred!

When the trial started, Crown attorney Wendy Dawson painted a horrific picture for the jury. A woman--a loving wife and a mother of two young sons--- butchered in her back yard. A heartless killer stuffing her bloody body into her car and abandoning both like garbage in a dark and empty parking lot miles away. A trail of circumstantial evidence leading straight to her husband. Dedicated police investigators ripping away the mantle of grieving spouse to expose the maniacal killer inside.

She was going to produce a mountain of indisputable evidence to build the circumstantial case---videotape, eyewitnesses, photos, charts, audio tests to prove that a woman's screams from the backyard could be heard in Stobbe's living room where he said he was watching a baseball game as his wife was being slaughtered.

There was even a bloody glove. Shades of O.J. Simpson.

She reveled in sheer numbers: 76 witnesses, 16 murderous blows to the head with an axe, hundreds of drops of blood and shards of bone found in the back yard and the garage.

And when it was over, the jury was asked to send Mark Stobbe to prison for life because---HE WAS FAT.

No, that's not a bad joke. That turned out to be the crux of the case against him.

It turns out that the Everest of evidence the Crown had collected proved only one thing---that Bev Rowbotham was murdered in October, 2000. There wasn't a hint of who killed her and absolutely nothing to implicate her husband.

The entire case against him turned on a series of motorists who said they saw a fat man on a bicycle on the road between Selkirk and St. Andrews during the time Beverley Rowbotham was killed and the time her body was discovered. And, hey, Mark Stobbe is fat. So he must be the killer, eh. Never mind that there was no evidence that the person on the bike was connected to the Rowbotham car in any way.

That circumstantial piece of the puzzle was supposed to be provided by witness Gary Beaton who testified the day before the February long weekend that he saw a man "slumped" behind the wheel of a parked car in Selkirk in which police later found the beaten body of Stobbe's wife.

"That's him," declared Beaton, pointing to Stobbe in court in a dramatic moment worthy of every episode of Perry Mason.

But that bold identification melted under cross-examination like ice in a highball in Cuba. Well, he told defence lawyer Tim Killeen, "that's him" didn't mean Mark Stobbe was the man at the wheel of the murder car. He only meant to say that he saw someone as large as Stobbe in the car. And maybe it wasn't even a man; it could have been a woman. After all, Beaton confessed, he wasn't wearing his glasses, he only glanced at the car for possibly 10 seconds, and he didn't tell police what he saw for another FOUR YEARS.

So, maybe, it wasn't even the same car.

The judge was so shocked at Beaton's testimony that he stepped in at the first opportunity to tell the jury essentially to disregard what they had just heard.

You may not know how unprecedented this move was.

Normally, a judge in a trial tries to act neutral. His only comment on the evidence of witnesses comes when he's telling the jury the rules they have to apply to reach a verdict, a process known as charging the jury. It's then he might explain the dangers of relying on eyewitness testimony without evidence that could corroborate it.

The judge in the Stobbe trial went far beyond that. He didn't even wait for the Crown to finish its case. He jumped right in to stop the jury from being contaminated by the witness.

"The case against Mr. Stobbe is circumstantial. You must be very cautious on relying on eyewitness testimony to find Mr. Stobbe guilty. In the past there have been miscarriages of justice, persons have been wrongfully convicted, because so-called eyewitnesses have made mistakes in identifying persons they believe responsible," said the judge as quoted in The Winnipeg Free Press.

He added Beaton's testimony was "very generic, very sparse." The Winnipeg Sun cited an even more damning denunciation from Mr. Justice Martin: “It is quite possible for an honest person to make a (mistaken) identification ... (Beaton) has never before suggested it was Mr. Stobbe he saw that night.”

And, just like that, the case boiled down to a fat man on a bicycle riding on the road in the rain in the dark on a cold October night. A man nobody could identify. Nor could they swear it wasn't a woman in a bulky coat. And neither could the police experts pinpoint the bicycle in question.

So, just how fat was Mark Stobbe the night his wife was murdered, anyway?

He's a big boy, but like most of us he was lighter 12 years ago than today. Still, he looks close to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford who was 320 pounds when he went on a public diet earlier this year.

The Crown insists Stobbe killed his wife in a murderous rage, dragged her body to one of his cars, lifted her into the back seat, put a bicycle in the trunk to be his getaway vehicle, drove the car to Selkirk, abandoned the car, took the bicycle out of the trunk, and rode it home, stopping occasionally to throw his wife's wallet and the axe into the nearby river.

Just how far is Selkirk from the former Stobbe home in St. Andrews? Newspapers have said it's 12 kilometres, 14 kilometres, 15 kilometres, and even 20 kilometres. That's anywhere from 7-and-a-half miles to 12 miles. A fat RCMP officer (actual weight unknown) rode the route on a bike and it took him 39 minutes.

Did desk jockey Mark Stobbe, at 300 pounds plus, wearing a heavy fall jacket, ride a bicycle all that way? Then attach a hose and wash away the blood in the back yard? Then calmly phone RCMP and his in-laws to report his wife missing?

Can you spell p-a-r-a-m-e-d-i-c-s-9-1-1?

At that weight he wouldn't be riding on bicycle wheels. He would be riding on the rims. You need a mountain bike or at least special tires and wheels reinforced with extra spokes to carry that weight. Not that it matters, since nobody could put Stobbe on a bicycle on the highway on the night of the murder.

So, as we said in the beginning? What the hell was this all about?

RCMP pegged him as the killer from the first day. Indeed, the first hours of the investigation. They followed him for days, if not weeks, or months. They tapped his phones and recorded more than 1000 hours of his calls. They released false information to the press to trick him into confessing something. They had his wife's sister phone him to pressure him into making an incriminating statement. They lied to him about finding his blood in the garage to get him to say something they could use against him.

The worst that they could tell the jury was that Mark Stobbe once actually acted foolishly by dancing in public to try and amuse his sons who were grieving the loss of their mother. Otherwise his reactions were the reactions of an innocent man.

Seven weeks of evidence amounted to a circumstantial case alright, a case of malicious prosecution.

Somebody will have to answer for that.

Popular posts from this blog

The unreported bombshell conspiracy evidence in the Trudeau/SNC-Lavelin scandal

Wow. No, double-wow. A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist-- Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post--- has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story. The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It's bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money. The Trudeau-Snc-Lavalin scandal is

Crips and Bloodz true cultural anchors of Winnipeg's aboriginal gangs

(Bebo tribute page to Aaron Nabess on the right, his handgun-toting friend on the left) At least six murder victims in Winnipeg in the past year are linked to a network of thuglife, gangster rap-styled, mainly aboriginal street gangs calling themselves Crips and Bloods after the major black gangs of L.A. The Black Rod has been monitoring these gangs for several months ever since discovering memorial tributes to victim Josh Prince on numerous pages on Bebo.com, a social networking website like Myspace and Facebook. Josh Prince , a student of Kildonan East Collegiate, was stabbed to death the night of May 26 allegedly while breaking up a fight. His family said at the time he had once been associated with an unidentified gang, but had since broken away. But the devotion to Prince on sites like Watt Street Bloodz and Kingk Notorious Bloodz (King-K-BLOODZ4Life) shows that at the time of his death he was still accepted as one of their own. Our searches of Bebo have turned up another five ga

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. There, we said it.

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion.  We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak.  Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi

Nahanni Fontaine, the NDP's Christian-bashing, cop-smearing, other star candidate

As the vultures of the press circle over the wounded Liberal Party of Manitoba, one NDP star candidate must be laughing up her sleeve at how her extremist past has escaped the scrutiny of reporters and pundits. Parachuted into a safe NDP seat in Winnipeg's North End, she nonetheless feared a bruising campaign against a well-heeled Liberal opponent.  Ha ha.  Instead, the sleepy newspeeps have turned a blind eye to her years of vitriolic attacks on Christianity, white people, and police. * She's spent years  bashing Christianity  as the root cause of all the problems of native people in Canada. * She's called for  a boycott of white businesses . * And with her  Marxist research partner, she's  smeared city police as intransigent racists . Step up Nahanni Fontaine, running for election in St. John's riding as successor to the retiring Gord Macintosh. While her male counterpart in the NDP's galaxy of stars, Wab Kinew, has responded to the controversy over

Exposing the CBC/WFP double-team smear of a hero cop

Published since 2006 on territory ceded, released, surrendered and yielded up in 1871 to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever. Exposing the CBC/FP double-team smear of a hero cop Some of the shoddiest journalism in recent times appeared this long August weekend when the CBC and Winnipeg Free Press doubled teamed on a blatant smear of a veteran city police officer. In the latest example of narrative journalism these media outlets spun stories with total disregard for facts that contradicted the central message of the reports which, simplified, is: police are bad and the system is covering up. Let's start with the story on the taxpayer funded CBC by Sarah Petz that can be summed up in the lead. "A February incident where an off-duty Winnipeg officer allegedly knocked a suspect unconscious wasn't reported to the province's police watchdog, and one criminologist says it shows how flawed oversight of law enforcement can be." There you have it. A policeman, not

Winnipeg needs a new police chief - ASAP

When did the magic die? A week ago the Winnipeg police department delivered the bad news---crime in the city is out of control. The picture painted by the numbers (for 2018) was appalling. Robberies up ten percent in  a single year.  (And that was the good news.) Property crimes were up almost 20 percent.  Total crime was 33 percent higher than the five year average. The measure of violent crime in Winnipeg had soared to a rating of 161.  Only four years earlier it stood at 116. That's a 38 percent deterioration in safety. How did it happen? How, when in 2015 the police and Winnipeg's police board announced they had discovered the magic solution to crime? "Smart Policing" they called it.    A team of crime analysts would pore through data to spot crime hot-spots and as soon as they identified a trend (car thefts, muggings, liquor store robberies) they could call in police resources to descend on the problem and nip it. The police