Man Deemed Too Old to Be a Threat Fatally Stabs Woman — the Same Way He Murdered Wife 40 Years Ago

A 77-year-old Maine man has been convicted of the stabbing death of a woman, which is the second time in four decades he has been found guilty of such a crime.

Albert Flick was convicted Wednesday of stabbing a woman 11 times in front of her twin boys in a broad daylight attack in 2018.

The fatal attack was the second committed by Flick, who previously served 25 years behind bars for the 1979 stabbing murder of his then-wife, also in front of children — their’s and his wife’s young daughter from a previous relationship, reports WCSH, WGME and the Sun Journal.

The latest killing came just a few years after he was released from jail for assaulting yet another woman. In that case, a judge had rejected the prosecutor’s urging for a lengthy sentence, stating that Flick’s age — he was then in his late 60s — diminished him as a threat and did not warrant a long incarceration, reports the Associated Press.

According to the AP, Flick was released and moved in 2014 to Lewiston, Maine, where prosecutors say he grew infatuated with 48-year-old Kimberly Dobbie.

Dobbie and her twin 11-year-old sons were homeless and moved between the Hope Haven Gospel Mission shelter and locations in Lewiston such as the library and bus stop. Each time Flick followed, and he even ate at the shelter to be closer to her, according to witness testimony, reports the Sun Journal.

“Everyone wants to paint Mr. Flick as a creeper and in the aftermath in this incident, but again you have to consider in spite of all this ‘creepiness,’ I asked a number of people, was there ever a complaint?,” Flick’s attorney, Allen Lobozzo, said in Androscoggin County Superior Court in Auburn, according to WCSH.

“Was there ever a complaint to police of him following her around? The answer was no.”

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Yet on the morning of July 15, 2018, Dobbie was seated on the steps outside of a laundromat near her sons when Flick attacked.

She died from blood loss after one of the wounds cut the left ventricle of her heart, and another fractured a rib and pierced her right lung, according to testimony from Maine’s deputy chief medical examiner, reports the Sun Journal.

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At Flick’s two-day trial, jurors who watched surveillance video that captured the attack also saw video that showed Flick purchasing two pink-handled paring knives with 5-inch blades at the local Walmart two days earlier, according to the outlet.

“The obsession became, if ‘I can’t have her, I will kill her’ and that’s exactly what he did,” Assistant Attorney General Robert Ellis said during his closet argument, reports WCSH.

An obituary notice memorialized the victim, stating, “People who knew Kim loved her for her kind and gentle spirit. She had a ready smile and a quick wit, and she befriended everyone she met. Kim loved the beach, and Christmas was her favorite season. Her twin sons were her greatest joy.”

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The horror of what the two boys witnessed that day is something Elsie Kimball, the daughter of his first victim Sandra Flick, sadly knows all too well.

Kimball, then 12, was home the day her stepfather came over to get his things after her mother served him with divorce papers.

“I remember being behind the door in the bedroom when he knocked — because I didn’t want him to know ,” she told News Center Maine “I remember my mother screaming my name and me running out the door.”

Flick stabbed his estranged wife more than a dozen times.

Kimball believes that Dobbie could have been saved and her boys spared the pain that Kimball has lived with.

“They will spend the rest of their lives second-guessing and questioning themselves. ‘If I had tried to defend her instead of running, would she be alive?'” she told News Center Maine.

“I would like to just see in a line and stand there and tell boys, explain to them how this man was on the streets and how it’s okay,” she said. “How the law makes it alright for their mom to now be gone and for them to have to witness it.”

Sentencing for Flick was set for August 9. He faces 25 years to life.