Sister spoke with victim just hours before death

WINNIPEG — Hours after speaking by phone with her sister, Betty Rowbotham was in a deep sleep when she was awoken and told the same sister was missing.

Only a few hours later, she heard the worst news possible — her sister, Beverly Rowbotham, was found slain inside the family’s car outside Kelly’s Selkirk Service Station in Selkirk, Man., 14 kilometres from her home and husband and two children.

Betty Rowbotham told a nineman, five-woman jury Thursday that she last spoke to her sister on the evening of Oct. 24, 2000. Beverly was checking that Betty would still look after her two young boys while Beverly went for a job interview the next morning with the province’s Justice Department.

Betty said a few hours later she was awoken by her daughter at about 2:30 a.m., who said Mark Stobbe, her sister’s husband, had called.

“She asked me if we’d seen Auntie Bev,” Betty said. “She said she got a call from Mark that Bev was missing.”

While her husband got dressed and headed out into the night with their son to look for Beverly, Betty told court she phoned Stobbe to offer to look after the two boys.

“He said Bev said she would go into town to Safeway to finish up the shopping,” Betty said. “He fell asleep, and when he woke up the lights were on and Bev was not home.”

Betty said when she got there, Stobbe told her he wanted to look outside for his wife. He was gone about half an hour.

It was in the early morning hours of Oct. 25 that a police officer came to the home in St. Andrews, Man., and told them that Beverly was dead.

“I gasped,” she said. “I hugged my husband and son. Stunned disbelief … I remember holding Mark’s hand and waiting for Bev to come home.”

Stobbe, 54, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder. He is on unpaid leave from his job as executive director of the Saskatchewan Craft Council, based in Saskatoon.

The jury has been told Rowbotham’s body — she was barefoot — was found slumped in the back seat of the couple’s Crown Victoria sedan, her skull split open and a finger and part of another finger chopped off. Police later found a severed finger on the car’s floor next to a child’s toy car. A pair of socks and slip-on shoes were also on the car’s back seat floor.

Crown prosecutor Wendy Dawson has told jurors they believe Stobbe killed his wife with a hatchet by striking her 16 times in the head, driving her body to Selkirk and returning to his rural St. Andrews home on a bicycle.

Betty told court she remembered seeing an axe or hatchet in the backyard of her sister’s home a few weeks before she was killed, in a tree stump used as a chopping block.

When asked by Dawson if she thought the tool would be put away later, the woman said the couple was “really conscious of safety.”

She also testified that it was not like her sister to put her shoes and socks on the floor of the car’s back seat, behind the driver’s seat.

The trial is set to run until the end of March.