STRUGGLES WITH A DARK PAST
New documents reveal two sides of man accused of killing wife, kids
Robert Fisher’s black Labrador retriever, Ruger, bolted out of the family’s front door. A stray dog had wandered into the front yard. A quiet afternoon erupted in a dogfight. The two animals seemed locked in a deadly clash, Fisher would say later — right under the swing his baby played in. The 28-year-old Fisher ran inside, grabbed his 9 mm pistol and stepped to within 4 feet of the pit bull. He raised the gun, there on the front lawn of his Scottsdale home, and fired.
The dog staggered off, leaving a trail of blood.
The shooting soon triggered all of the responses expected in a usually tranquil community that day, May 11, 1989.
An animal control officer picked up the wounded dog but couldn’t find an owner. A police officer arrived to interview Fisher. And a reporter from The Arizona Republic asked him what had happened.
Fisher was protecting his family and the neighborhood, he said, and if he didn’t have a gun: “My dog would have been dead.”
The shooting unsettled some of his neighbors in the middle-class subdivision of ranch-style homes.
Twelve years later, 911 calls summoned police to the same home again on April 10, 2001.
Fisher would be accused of a much more serious act this time: slashing the throats of his wife and two children and rigging the house to explode to cover up the crimes.
This time, he wasn’t there to offer investigators or reporters an explanation. By the time the house exploded, police believe, Fisher was long gone.
He has been considered a fugitive ever since and on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for nearly two decades.
In new interviews with The Arizona Republic, friends and co-workers describe a conflicted man.
The son of divorced parents, he was so desperate to save his marriage he carried prayer cards with Bible verses. Yet a few months before the murders, he became disenchanted and stopped going to Bible study.
Some revelations paint a picture different from one that has often been suggested for the fugitive. Fisher portrayed himself as an avid outdoorsman, and speculation often focused on the possibility he escaped the law by living as a wilderness survivalist. But new interviews describe a man struggling with a chronic back injury, one that had left him in so much pain that in a trip a few years before the murders, he had been unable to carry his own pack.
Beyond the interviews and police records, perhaps the most vivid picture of Robert Fisher’s earlier life comes from the images in his own family videos. In them, he’s a happy father, coaxing kids to swim and ride bikes. Nothing seems amiss.
Those who knew him well remember a man who was generous with his time and his efforts.
But Fisher, friends remember, was controlling and picky, a stickler who wanted even the “junk drawer” in his house tidy. He criticized his wife for small mistakes. There were things it seemed he couldn’t let go.
‘I can’t believe you forgot the salt and pepper’
Family videos taken at birthday parties and dance lessons show Robert speaking kindly to his children. He uses the soft and singsong voice many adults revert to when talking to youngsters.
In a video taken in September 1993, he holds Bobby in his arms in the pool and coaxes him to swim a few yards to the stairs.
“You kick off. On 3. 1, 2, go buddy,” he says as his son swims to the side of the pool.
But videos capture only a snippet of someone’s life. Friends noticed tension in the marriage.
Robert considered certain household duties to be his wife’s job, said MaryBeth Roden, a family friend.
“We’d go camping and he’d say, ‘Mary, I want these kids in bed.’ Just like that, really stern. He would boss her around,” she said.
The families took turns cooking dinner on camping trips. On one trip, the Fishers bought steak to cook for the group but no salt or pepper. The Rodens had brought seasonings so the oversight wasn’t a big deal.
But Robert would not let it go. “He kept saying, ‘Mary, I can’t believe you forgot the salt and pepper,’ over and over.”
Mary organized parties for the kids and spent a great deal of time at Scottsdale Baptist Church, Roden said. She had a tough side and didn’t put up with crap. She wasn’t someone who cowered from an argument.
Robert was selfish, another friend told police. He paid the bills. But Mary had to pay for anything extra from her part-time job at a medical supply company. She saved to buy a computer and sewing machine and spent her own money on fast-food treats for the kids.
Mary confided to a friend that she was irritated by Robert’s high sex drive. She told the friend the couple agreed to have sex at least every other day, telling the friend, “I think he just wants to because he can.”
“Five minutes and it’s no big deal ... it was like, uh, dishes, laundry, sex,” the friend told police in a transcript of the interview.
The path of a fugitive
Robert grew up mostly in Tucson, the middle child with two sisters. His parents divorced when he was 14, and the upheaval left a lasting emotional scar. He would tell friends he would never put his kids through a divorce.
After graduating from Sahuaro High School in 1979, he enlisted in the U.S.
Navy stationed out of San Diego, where he trained in aircraft handling and fuels. He told friends he tried but failed to become a Navy SEAL, an experience that left him bitter. He chose not to reenlist in 1982.
Robert took a job with the Borrego Springs Fire Protection District in rural San Diego County.
He met Mary Cooper through a Baptist Church social group in 1984. She was an outgoing, blue-eyed blonde who grew up in Scottsdale, the daughter of a school principal. The couple met, got engaged and married during the course of a year.
Robert hurt his back on a fire call and that led to surgery and a medical discharge. The couple moved in 1986 to Arizona where he enrolled in an associate degree program in the medical field. It would lead him to become a respiratory therapist and a cardiovascular technician.
They bought a three-bedroom house near Mary’s parents near 74th Street and McDowell Road in Scottsdale.
Brittney Jean was born in 1988. Robert William Jr. arrived two years later. They called him Bobby.
Robert spoke proudly of his children. By 2001, Brittney played baseball, basketball and softball. Good grades earned her an induction into the National Junior Honor Society. Bobby played trumpet and had recently taken a hunter safety course.
Robert had worked at Scottsdale area hospitals before being hired at the Mayo Clinic Hospital. He was prompt and reliable, scrubbing in and assisting physicians during surgery.
He worked lots of overtime and was compassionate to patients. And he was friendly with his co-workers.
The world would soon come to know the fugitive Robert Fisher. But to his coworkers, he was Bob.
Fisher plagued by back injury
Media reports portrayed Robert as an outdoor enthusiast. He had at least six guns and three hunting knives.
Police investigators found that he had purchased a water filter and dozens of water-purification tablets a few days before the murders. Fisher asked the clerk at the sports store questions about purifying water, giving the impression he planned to be camping for a while.
It was easy to speculate that Fisher was planning on long-term survival. He knew the forests, had the equipment, and might have planned his every move.
But Fisher’s hunting buddy, Jim Roden, said the outdoor survivalist label was way off base. Robert was a weekend adventurer who loved to hunt and fish.
Jim, though, recalls having to carry Robert’s 25-pound duffle bag for 3 miles on a 1997 hunting trip they took to the Galiuro Mountains northeast of Tucson.
“He wasn’t in amazing, extraordinary condition,” Roden said. “He constantly complained about his back.”
Robert stood during work staff meetings because sitting hurt his back. In the year before the murders, he consulted with doctors about having another back operation but decided to take a conservative approach and wait.
Once fanatical about lifting weights, Robert stopped working out a few months before the murders because he believed the weights hurt his back.
He had prescriptions for a narcotic painkiller, an anti-anxiety medication and a muscle relaxer.
An affair threatens the marriage
A turning point happened in 1998, when Robert revealed he had an illicit encounter during a massage. Friends say Mary threw him out of the house. Robert intended to camp for several days in the forest east of Payson while Mary decided whether she would take him back.
MaryBeth Roden said he had written his wife a letter, saying he couldn’t live without her but would understand if she wanted to end the marriage. He threatened to kill himself in the letter.
He intended to stay away for a month but returned after a few days.
Back at home, Robert embarked on what a friend called a “season of redemption.” He appeared to be on a healing path, carrying 3-by-5 cards with Bible verses to help guide his actions.
“I saw a guy that, at times, was really pursuing goodness,” said Jim Roden, the hunting buddy who attended church with the Fishers and is the brother-inlaw of MaryBeth Roden.
Robert once worked late into the night, helping Jim dig holes for trees in tough soil outside Jim’s new house. When Robert started his job at the Mayo Clinic Hospital and could no longer commute by bicycle, he gave Jim his expensive mountain bike.
Robert was ‘not a monster’
Jean Rountree, Robert’s younger sister, said her brother was loving and caring toward his family. He was “not a monster like the newspapers and TV shows have made him out to be.”
She told The Republic recently that she is holding out hope the police and FBI are wrong about her brother and “they just haven’t found enough information to look any other place.”
The last 20 years have been horrible for the family, she said, because they don’t know whether Robert, or someone else, committed the murders. She and her sister have lost their brother. Their mother, Janet Howell, has lost a son and two grandchildren. Robert’s father, William Frank Fisher, died in 2016.
“We’re grieving and yet we have to live in a state of forgiveness without even knowing if he did it,” she said.
Rountree doesn’t believe her brother planned the murders. The weekend before the house blew up, he fixed the air conditioner on the roof. He almost had the mortgage paid off. If Robert had planned the murders, he wouldn’t have worked so hard to pay off the house, she said.
She doesn’t put stock in the police theory that Robert murdered his family because he and Mary were on the brink of divorce. The fact that a neighbor heard them arguing the night before the murders doesn’t mean they were fighting over Mary ending the marriage, she said.
“Just because someone doesn’t want a divorce in their life doesn’t mean they are going to kill people because of it,” she said.
Mary Fisher’s family did not respond to interview requests.
Co-worker: He felt ‘trapped’ in the church
Robert confided to a co-worker in early 2001 that he believed he contracted a urinary tract infection in December 2000 after going to a massage parlor.
The co-worker told police Robert had stopped short of sex, but verged on paranoia about the encounter. He feared people would look at his medical records, and that people at church would find out and tell his wife.
Robert revealed the masseuse story to a second co-worker, saying that his wife and his children were “his whole world,” and he feared losing them.
Robert’s devotion to the church subsided a few months before the murders.
A co-worker, who was interviewed by police after the murders, said Robert resented how much time Mary spent at the church.
“He felt really trapped in that church,” the co-worker told police, according to a transcript of police interviews.
After the murders, police questioned co-workers about whether Robert may have been “lusting after” or having an affair with someone at the hospital. They told police they heard no such thing.
In hindsight, his hunting buddy and friend Jim Roden believes Robert probably had a dark interior world filled with troubling thoughts and was working hard “to keep the monster down.”
He believes there were two sides to Robert: a side that was trying to do what was right and a hidden, darker side.
“Without question,” Roden said, “in my mind, he gave way to rage.”
Investigators maintain their theory that a looming divorce spurred the crime.
The evening before the explosion, about 10 p.m., a neighbor heard Mary and Robert arguing. Investigators say Robert may have killed his family, believing that his kids would be better off dead than going through the trauma of divorce.
Fisher had the option of walking away without harming his family, said John Heinzelman, the Scottsdale detective currently assigned to the Fisher case.
“Instead,” Heinzelman said, “he committed these brutal murders and then disappeared.”
But the week of the murders, Fisher had happier plans.
On Monday, he left work in a good mood. A co-worker agreed to fill in for his on-call status so he could attend his daughter’s induction ceremony into the National Junior Honor Society that evening.
And he had already asked to take Friday off work. He was planning a family camping trip then, the day he would turn 40 years old.
Ruger, the old black Lab, was gone by then and the family had a new Queensland Heeler mix named Blue. Bobby was 10. Brittney was 12.
It was nearly 12 years to the day since Scottsdale police had last come to their house to investigate a shooting.
By then, nearly everyone would have forgotten about that day, and the short newspaper story about it afterward. The story where Fisher explained that he had no choice but to shoot, and had no reservations about pulling the trigger.
“Just because someone doesn’t want a divorce in their life doesn’t mean they are going to kill people because of it.” Jean Rountree Robert Fisher’s younger sister