Once-convicted man pleads guilty to killing aunt in 2003
Tried and convicted of murder, sent to prison for 99 years but finally granted an appeal, Robert Walter Fischer agreed to plead guilty this week to avoid a new trial and obtain a reduced sentence that could free him in two years.
Fischer, 55, admitted he killed his aunt, Edith Camp, 69, on May 26, 2003, in her Hill Country Village home.
The evidence against Fischer, a Spring Branch resident who was 34 when he was arrested, was circumstantial. But a Bexar County jury found him guilty of murder in August 2005. He had been appealing his case ever since and has already served 16 years for the crime.
Those efforts concluded Wednesday with a guilty plea. His lawyer, John Ritenour, said he had worked with prosecutors since he was appointed to represent Fischer two years ago, and all were prepared to go back to trial.
“This was an old case. We looked at it again, and we came to what we thought was a reasonable conclusion,” Ritenour said.
Camp was found shot in the back of the head inside her home, and some of her belongings and money were taken, according to the appeal documents.
A ballistics report indicated “a distinctive firing pattern consistent with that of a .22 caliber Cricket Keystone rifle,” the documents state. But investigators did not recover a weapon nor the items taken from the home.
In the months and days before she was killed, Camp told a friend that she was upset with her nephew, indicated that she intended to “cut Fischer off of any further financial support,” and said that he gave her “the creeps,” the documents state.
At the time, Fischer was a support manager at a Walmart in Boerne, and two weeks before Camp was killed, a .22 caliber Cricket rifle was reported missing from that store, the documents state.
Ed Love, a firearms examiner with the Bexar County Crime Lab, tested a Cricket rifle with the serial number that immediately followed the stolen firearm and testified that the slug removed from the crime scene was fired from a “very nearly identical” rifle.
Prosecutors suggested Fischer stole the firearm from the store as part of a plan to kill his aunt.
Pete Gallego, the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office director of communications, said in an email that the case has had a long and somewhat torturous history.
The 2005 conviction was reversed in 2007 by the San Antonio-based Fourth Court of Appeals because of an error at the trial court level. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the Fourth Court’s decision and affirmed the conviction.
That was the end of Fischer’s “direct appeal,” but it cleared the way for another appeal attempt, by applying for a writ of habeas corpus, which Fischer sought in March 2010. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied it, but Fischer filed a second one based on new technology and evidence that was not available at the time of his trial, using cell phone tower location data, Gallego said.
He said the trial court, after a hearing, determined that the information would have been “vital to the case,” and Fischer “would not have been convicted” if it had been available and presented at Fischer’s trial. This time, the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld those findings and sent the case back to the 226th District Court to be retried — 20 years after the original trial.
Fischer agreed to plead guilty before Judge Velia J. Meza in exchange for a prison term of 18 years. He has served 16 years of his original 99-year sentence but a release date isn’t clear.
Ritenour said Fischer could become eligible for parole in two years but added that eligibility “does not mean he would be paroled.”