WINNIPEG - They held faded photographs Friday to remember the "baby sister" they lost 12 years ago to a brutal crime and Betty Rowbotham and Barb Kilpatrick held just as firmly to their view of who killed her.

"I mean, look at the evidence, did somebody from space land in the backyard and do this?" said Kilpatrick, who travelled from her home in Rocky Mountain House, Alta., for the trial of her dead sister's husband, Mark Stobbe.

After seven weeks and 80 witnesses in a case that largely focused on circumstantial evidence, Stobbe was found not guilty of second-degree murder by a jury Thursday of the crime he has always insisted he did not commit.

Beverly Rowbotham's hatchet bludgeoned body was found in her car 15 kilometres away from the couple's home in St. Andrew's, Man., in October 2000.

But evidence suggested she was murdered in her own backyard and her body taken there in the family car.

"Here's our little sister, a beautiful strong woman with so much to offer and so much more to give, and not only is she chopped up and murdered but she's callously thrown in the back seat of a car like a broken old doll," said her sister Betty Rowbotham, who still lives within a few kilometres of the house where her sister died.

She said the not guilty verdict caught the family off guard.

"We're of course, shocked, we're devastated, we're very disappointed with the outcome of the trial. It's been a long and arduous quest for us for justice for Bev."

She said they're leaving any further action to the Crown, which has said it is reviewing the case. They also praised the work of the police and prosecutors who brought the matter to trial after so many years.

The sisters said they want to ensure the couple's two children remember their mother.

But Kilpatrick is also asking people to write to the justice minister. She called the acquittal a travesty and said domestic violence against women must be stopped.

Stobbe has always insisted he is innocent of the crime and testified in his own defence at his trial, spending days in the witness box under cross examination by the Crown.

The sisters took a day to prepare themselves before commenting to reporters at a hotel near Winnipeg's airport.

Their voices were at times so low it was was difficult to hear them over the clicking of cameras.

Stobbe and Rowbotham came to Manitoba from Saskatchewan when Stobbe took a job as a communications adviser to the then newly elected NDP government of Gary Doer.

Her murder became one of the province's most puzzling unsolved crimes.

Stobbe's lawyer Tim Killeen has questioned why the Crown decided to proceed with the trial with so little evidence.

"After an extraordinarily thorough investigation involving hundreds of witnesses, hundreds of wiretapped conversations and everything else, there really was nothing whatsoever to tie (Stobbe) in," he said after the verdict.

Stobbe, meanwhile, conceded some will never believe in his innocence.

"There will always be some that are unconvinced," he said outside court. "But I think the evidence speaks for itself and the decision speaks for itself."