An Auburn man who spent over two decades in jail for stabbing his wife to death in 1979 was arrested and charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of a woman in downtown Lewiston on Sunday morning.
Albert L. Flick heads for Portland District Court on Feb. 1, 1979, for arraignment on a charge of killing his wife, Sandra, in Westbrook.
Police say Albert Flick, 76, stabbed Kimberly Dobbie, 48, to death in front of her 11-year-old twin boys outside a laundromat. He was arrested and charged with murder on Monday upon his release from Central Maine Medical Center, where he had been treated for chest pains after being tackled by passers-by who attempted to aid Dobbie, police said.
Dobbie and Flick were acquainted with each other, but were not romantically involved, state police said.
Flick was being held at the Androscoggin County Jail and will make his first appearance in Androscoggin Superior Court on Wednesday morning at 8:30am.
Dobbie was stabbed when she stepped outside Rancourt’s Laundromat at 11 a.m. Sunday. She was at the laundromat on Sabattus Street with her two children, who watched as passers-by pulled Flick off their mother and held him down until police arrived.
Dobbie had been living with her sons at Hope Haven Gospel Mission on Lincoln Street.
According to police, Dobbie had just started a load of laundry when she stepped outside the building. Surveillance video shot at a nearby store shows Dobbie walking past that store and then Flick pacing back and forth for several minutes just before the assault. The video also shows Dobbie’s boys running back and forth between their mother and the laundromat during the attack.
Friends held a vigil for Dobbie outside the laundromat on Monday night.
“She will always be remembered for her smile and the love of her children,” Kathy Cormier said Monday night. “She was taken way too soon in the most heinous of ways.”
Flick was convicted of murder for stabbing his wife, Sandra Flick, to death in 1979. He was sentenced to serve 30 years in prison, but was released in October 2000.
Flick was in and out of custody and probation after his release on charges of criminal threatening with a dangerous weapon, tampering with a witness, violating condition of release and assault, according to the Department of Corrections. His last release from prison occurred Jan. 28, 2016.
According to court records, Sandra Flick, 35 served her husband with divorce papers on Jan. 10, 1979, and had him physically escorted from their apartment by police. In the weeks following, they argued frequently, often about custody of their two young boys.
On Jan. 29, 1979, Sandra Flick asked her husband to come to her apartment on Brown Street in Westbrook to remove his belongings. He had a gun and knife with him when he parked his car about three-quarters of a mile from the apartment, and took the knife with him to the apartment.
According to court records, Sandra Flick’s daughter from a previous marriage was home and hiding in a back bedroom when Flick arrived, and she watched through a crack in the door as Flick showed his wife how to use the knife to remove fishing hooks from lines.
Then, according to court records, when Sandra Flick bent over one of the poles in the living room Flick “seized her arm and bent it behind her back, putting his other hand over her mouth. He pushed her into a chair, saying that he loved her and didn’t want to have to hurt her.”
When Sandra Flick screamed, her daughter ran out of the bedroom and saw Flick “sitting on her mother on the chair.” She heard him say “Now you’ve had it,” and the girl ran to an apartment downstairs.
A neighbor there called police and, as her husband was going upstairs to the Flick apartment, he “met Flick coming down the stairs with blood on his hands and blood stains on his pants,” according to court records.
Flick asked the man to get help, “claiming he that he didn’t mean to do it.”
When the neighbor went into the apartment he found Sandra Flick “covered with blood, cut in the throat, but still alive,” according to court records.
Sandra Flick told the neighbor that her husband had stabbed her; police later found her husband’s 3-and-a-half-inch jackknife in the living room.
She later died from loss of blood from 14 stab wounds to her neck and chest, including one stab through her heart.
During his trial, Flick testified that he and his wife had been bickering in the living room and when his wife asked her daughter to go downstairs, Sandra picked up the knife and threatened to kill him. At that point, he said he grabbed her arm and the two fell. He ended up on top of her and, when he realized she was injured, he left the apartment to get help.
The year after his murder conviction, Flick appealed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court questioning pre-trial procedures, admissibility and sufficiency of the state’s evidence and instructions to the jury, but the court found no errors at trial and upheld the conviction.
At the time of his conviction, Flick’s attorney said his client had served in the U.S. Army and had received a hardship discharge. At the time of the murder, Flick had worked as a doughnut maker at the same company for 19 years.
During the sentencing phase of trial, Flick’s family testified that he was a good man who had grown up in an atmosphere of violence, arguing for a minimum sentence. But Justice Harry P. Glassman said that the crime was a “particularly brutal killing. I have rarely seen as much blood (as was described by state’s witnesses) in this courtroom,” according to Portland Press Herald archives of trial coverage.
Glassman also noted that even though Flick had been a law-abiding citizen for his 36 years, “that the pressures that Flick faced leading up to the murder were the same that many other persons being divorced face without resorting to physical violence.”
Flick, whose most recent address listed with the Maine Bureau of Identification was on Pine Street in Lewiston, appears to have been released from prison in 2007, after having served out his sentence on the murder conviction, settling on Bramhall Street in Portland.
On June 2, 2007, he was arrested in Portland and charged with misdemeanor assault involving domestic violence. Additional charges of criminal threatening, felony assault and aggravated assault were later added, but the aggravated assault charge was dismissed as part of a plea deal.
Two months later, he was charged with tampering with a witness and violating conditions of release.
He was later sentenced to serve six months in jail on the June charge.
On the charge lodged in August, his probation was partially revoked and he was sentenced to two years in prison, beginning in March 2008.
After his release in 2010, Flick was charged with criminal threatening with a dangerous weapon and assault, once again in Portland, and was sentenced to two years in prison.
And in 2014, he was charged in Portland with criminal threatening, but that charge was dismissed as part of a deal in which he pleaded to a lesser charge.
He moved to Lewiston in June 2014, about the time the last case was being prosecuted.
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