On
this date, August 9, 2019, Albert Flick, a 77-year-old man previously deemed
"too old to be a threat" was sentenced to life in prison on
Friday for fatally
stabbing a woman in front of her children, four decades after he was convicted
of a nearly identical crime.
This
is another great example of why Prisoner Rights Activists will remain silent as
it is too extremely embarrassing for them to talk about recidivist killers.
Albert Flick was convicted of killing Kimberly
Dobbie, 48, years after he murdered his wife
|
He
was deemed too old to be dangerous. Now, at 77, he’s been convicted of another
murder.
By
July
19, 2019 at 6:32 p.m. GMT+8
When
he came before a judge in Portland, Maine, in 2010, he was in his late 60s, and
had spent roughly a third of his life in prison. After doing time for killing
his wife, he had assaulted another woman and gone back to jail, only to get out
and attack a third woman. Flick’s violent tendencies didn’t seem likely to go
away with age, both the prosecutor and his probation officer warned. But the
judge chose to sentence him to just shy of four years in prison, noting that by
the time he was released in 2014, he would be 72 or 73.
Statistically
speaking, the judge who predicted that Flick would age out of criminal behavior
wasn’t wrong: A study compiled by the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2017
found that only 13.4 percent of offenders who were 65 or older when they got
out of prison were arrested again in the eight-year period following their
release, compared to 68 percent of those under the age of 21.
But
Flick was the exception. His first murder conviction came in 1979, when he was
living in Westbrook, Maine, and working as a doughnut maker. That January, his
wife, Sandra Flick, served him with divorce papers and had him escorted from
their apartment by police. Three weeks later, when she asked him to come back
and pick up his belongings, Flick brought his jackknife with him, the Lewiston
Sun Journal reported.
Sandra
Flick’s daughter from another marriage was home at the time, and watched
through a crack in the door as Albert Flick bent her mother’s arm behind her
back and put his hand over her mouth. When the 12-year-old heard a scream, she
ran for help. A neighbor arrived to find Sandra Flick covered in blood. She had
been stabbed 14 times, and lived just long enough to tell the neighbor that her
husband was responsible.
Originally
sentenced to three decades in prison, Flick got out after 21 years because of
good behavior, according to WCSH.
Not long after his release in 2000, he ended up behind bars again. In 2007, he
was charged with punching a woman he was dating and stabbing her with a fork, then trying to intimidate her so that she
wouldn’t testify against him. Then, in 2010, after getting out of prison yet
again, he assaulted a different woman in his Portland apartment.
The
woman told authorities that she and Flick had argued, and he had
put her in a headlock and hit her repeatedly with the butt-end of a knife, then
chased her with a screwdriver when she managed to escape. Police found Flick
trying to hang himself from a fire escape when they arrived at the building.
After the attack, prosecutor Katherine Tierney asked the judge to
sentence Flick to roughly eight years in prison, arguing that his violent
behavior toward women was unlikely to change as he grew older, and the only
solution was “significant” prison time.
“Clearly,
probation is not working,” she said, according to the Press Herald. “At this point, I just don’t know what else
to do. I think there’s a huge safety risk to women and society when it comes to
Mr. Flick.”
Flick’s
probation officer, Troy Thornton, similarly told the judge that Flick was “an
extremely violent individual when it comes to relationships,” the paper
reported.
“He
doesn’t appear to have slowed down at this point,” Thornton said, “and I don’t
see him slowing down in the near future.”
Those
warnings proved to be prescient. In 2014, after serving the nearly four-year
sentence handed down by Crowley, Flick was arrested for threatening the woman
whom he had chased with a screwdriver, telling her, “You’ll get yours” when they ran into each
other on the street. The septuagenarian pleaded guilty to violating his
probation, and was sent back to prison until 2016.
After
getting out, he relocated to the Lewiston area. There, he met Kimberly Dobbie,
who was living at a homeless shelter with her two sons.
Witnesses
who testified in court this week said that Flick developed an
obsession with the 48-year-old, following her from the shelter to the public
library, the bus stop and Dunkin’. Though she never reported him to the police,
she told her friends that she didn’t appreciate the attention. The mother of
two planned to move to an apartment in Farmington, about an hour away, and made
it clear to Flick that he wasn’t coming.
Flick
went to Walmart and purchased two pink-handled paring knives.
“It
became if ‘I can’t have her, I will kill her,” Assistant Attorney General Bud
Ellis told jurors, according to WGME. “And that’s exactly what he did.”
On
July 15, 2018, Flick followed Dobbie to the laundromat, where surveillance footage
captured him stabbing her at least 11 times. It took jurors only 40 minutes to convict him of murder on Wednesday, even
though they weren’t told of his previous history of violence toward women.
Crowley,
the judge who predicted that Flick would “age out” of his violent behavior,
retired from the bench in 2010, the same year that he handed down the nearly
four-year sentence. At the time, he was widely praised by attorneys, other
judges, and even the father of one convicted murderer, who wrote a letter to
thank him for treating the family with dignity. He told the Press Herald, which noted that he was stepping down while
“at the top of his game,” that he wanted to return to private practice.
Now
a mediator at a firm in Portland, he could not immediately be reached for
comment late Thursday night.
“I
firmly believe this could have been prevented,” Elsie Clement, whose mother was
stabbed to death by Flick in 1979, told the Press Herald last year. “There is no reason this
man should have been on the streets in the first place, no reason.”
INTERNET
SOURCE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/19/he-was-deemed-too-old-kill-again-now-hes-been-convicted-another-murder/
Convicted murderer, 77, given life sentence for stabbing he
committed after deemed 'too old to be a threat'
A
77-year-old man previously deemed "too old to be a threat" was
sentenced to life in prison on Friday for fatally stabbing a
woman in front of her children, four decades after he was convicted of a nearly
identical crime.
Albert
Flick was convicted last month stabbing 48-year-old Kimberly Dobbie 11 times
while her twins watched on a Maine sidewalk
in 2018.
Prosecutors said the elderly man was infatuated with Dobbie, who he
met at a shelter while she was waiting on an apartment in Farmington. Witnesses
said he routinely followed Dobbie and her twin sons to bus stops, the local
library, and Dunkin', before eventually stabbing her in front of a
laundromat.
The
broad daylight attack in front of the laundromat and Flick's purchase
of two knives were caught on surveillance video.
"He is a monster," Lori
Moreau, a friend of Dobbie told AP. "I hope
he rots in hell.”
Judge
Mary Gay Kennedy said on Friday that the attack on Dobbie was
premeditated and Flick showed no remorse for his actions, saying 'nah' when the
judge asked if he had anything to say, according to the Sun Journal.
Flick
had a long history of violence against women and was sentenced to 30 years
in prison for stabbing his wife, Sandra Flick, 14 times after she served
him with divorce papers in 1979.
A
judge who sentenced him for assaulting another woman said in 2010 that Flick
would no longer represent a threat because of age by the time of his release in
2014. The judge disregarded the recommendation of the prosecutor and probation
officer for a longer sentence.
During
Flick's trial last month, prosecutors told the jury that Flick took action
because Dobbie was planning to move away.
"The
obsession became 'If I can't have her, I will kill her,' and that's
exactly what he did," Assistant Attorney General Bud Ellis said.
Pennywise the evil clown
in the 1990 TV series and the 2017 Movie.
|
Defense
attorney Allan Lobozzo said there was no indication that Flick posed a threat
to society.
Caitlin
Jasper, one of the alternate jurors during the trial told the Sun Journal she
felt sorry for the victims 11-year-old children and the three men who witnessed
the attack.
"It
was soul-crushing for them, and they'll never be able to forget it," said
Jasper.
Susan
Dobbie, the victim's mother, is in the process of adopting the twins. She and
Dobbie's sibling plan to provide a home for the boys in Massachusetts.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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