Most Wanted: Robert William Fisher

today's episode is brought to you by curiosity stream more about them in a bit hello everybody and welcome back to another brand new episode of the casual criminalist why are we going at such a fast pace today i don't know but what happens here is callum has written me a script this one is most wanted robert william fisher then i'm going to read this script in front of me if you're watching this on youtube you can see me waving it around it's big this could be quite a long episode and afterwards jen our fine video editor is going to add some music add some images if you're watching this or if you're just enjoying the podcast epi episode version as i always say i'll paint a picture in your mind or more precisely callum will i'm just here for stupid comments let us begin oh before we begin if you'd like to leave us a review that would be amazing on our itunes or apple podcast as they now call it or wherever you get your episodes that would be grand and if you're watching on youtube remember to smash that like button yes yes here we go [Music] at 8 42 a.m on tuesday the 10th of april 2001 the residents of north 74th placed in scottsdale arizona were rudely awakened by a thunderous alarm clock a massive gas explosion tore through the fisher family home at number 2223 sending flames spewing from the windows the blast was so powerful it blew out sections of the brick walls and rattled the windows of every house in a half-mile radius neighbors dropped their morning toast and ran out to see what was going on they found the entire single-story house engulfed in flames that is not a nice alarm clock that is not an alarm clock at all that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would definitely kill your entire family i was in mexico once and uh it was the middle of the night and just i had no idea i didn't really realize until the next morning and uh someone was like did you feel the uh the earthquake in the night and i'm like oh that's what that was and that's why all my it's on the floor i slept through a relatively powerful earthquake that knocked every like all of like my phone and whatever you have on a bedside table was on the floor and i remember having this like weird dream about it like the uh it was the the bar you know that holds up a curtain like rattling around in there and i was like oh that makes sense there was an earthquake oh good what's this got to do with this is absolutely nothing just sorry for the early tangent let's just get on with the story it just like blew up one of them told a 911 operator were there people inside the house yes there were and they're probably dead i mean fairly accurate assessment probably with the house entirely engulfed in flames within seconds it was unlikely any of the family or four inside stood a chance firefighters arrived to find the next-door neighbors attempting to keep the six metre tall blaze away from their own homes with garden hoses not much better than pissing on a bonfire but i admire their enthusiasm yeah the difference between a hose and uh and a fireman's thing is insane i once got to use on those firemen's thing because when i was a kid the uh my we we had this like big hedge that went all the way around our property and it caught on fire one year i don't remember how or why and this is this is like one of my earliest memories but uh yeah it caught on fire and the fire brigade came and they let me have a go with the hose after they put out the fire and i was like that's pretty cool it's absolutely extremely powerful it took an hour longer for the professionals to extinguish the blaze after which the fisher house was just a smoldering pile of rubble then began the grim business of checking what was left at the inside even for a seasoned fire investigator it would have been a rough sight to bear lying on the bed was the remains of robert junior or bobby just 10 years old when he passed next they found 13-year-old sister brittany also still in bed and lying in the master bedroom was the body of their mother 38 year old mary fisher only three out of the four were accounted for the father robert fisher was uncounted for and given that the title of this episode is most wanted robert william fisher i'm going to guess that the usual premise of the husband did it is absolutely right in this case or maybe i mean at least he's going to be a major suspect that they're going to be looking for and since with your uncanny powers of observation you've already noticed that his name is in the title of today's episode i reckon you could work out where this is headed after hours of picking through the rubble roberfish's remains were nowhere to be found even more suspiciously the cops discovered that he had skipped out on work that day with no explanation oh robbie boy you murdered your family didn't you i'm gonna have to say allegedly because if he didn't um well it's all speculation isn't it then when the bodies of his wife and kids were moved to the morgue the full horror of the situation became apparent it wasn't the explosion that killed them all oh god hours before their suburban home was blown sky-high they had met an even worse fate at the hands of the man meant to protect them a man who would soon become one of the most infamous murderers to ever grace the state of arizona don't know if grace is quite the right word to use there callum he's gracing arizona with his presence his horrible scary child family murdering presence this is the story of the hunt for robert william fisher the fbi's most wanted fugitive number 475 giving him a number makes him sound like he's on the blacklist you know that uh james spader show which oh my god i've got like i love the blacklist there are some really good episodes but there are some episodes that are so sh that i can barely bring myself to continue watching the powder keg [Music] but before he was added to that rogues gallery of the usa's most dangerous criminals our missing man was as is often the case with blood-curdling murderers a thoroughly normal guy a navy veteran and devout christian on the outside robert appeared like your average all-american family man i asked the face and uh masking the the the man beneath he was born on april 13 1961 in brooklyn new york and moved to tucson unhelpfully spelt tuxen arizona when he was young after graduating from saguaro high school maybe he went on to serve as a petty officer on a warship in san diego however that was never his dream job robert always dreamed of being the best of the best chess thumping hooraring navy seal being a navy seal is really difficult though what was that tv was there a tv show or a documentary i watched where they're like ringing that bell when they want to leave and it's like you could leave at any time soldier and it's like yeah most of them leave because i don't know it looks really hard and don't they this is one part where they hold them under water until they drown and then they revive them and i'm like oh my god i could have cut it in regular ass military let alone being a neat navy seal it's so hardcore and according to my extensive research i.e watching the occasional war movie over the past 20 odd years becoming one of those is actually somewhat difficult oh my god callum and i are on the same page like we are aligned today callum when he attempted the in intense trials required to join the special forces robert never quite made the grade a blow to his ego that he'd never quite recover from yeah that's the difference with me i'd be like i'd go in be like yeah yeah i know there's no way i'm gonna it would get like get some breakfast time on the first day and they'd be like there's no breakfast for navy seals and i'll be like ding ding ding ding ding ding where's the nearest mcdonald's i need a mcmuffin that's the sort of coward i am so after being discharged in 1982 he returned to civilian life to work as of all things a firefighter which as you might guess requires a pretty in-depth knowledge of the ins and outs of domestic gas explosions but for now robert was quite content just fighting fires not starting them i have to say like i mean simon don't admit your crimes on a podcast but burning things is nice like i i definitely love making a fire as a kid i'd love like i think i told this story before how me and my friend would put gas canisters not like gas candles would be like deodorant cans and stuff on fires and watch them explode i mean from far away it's i don't know i got a kick out of that is that weird maybe that's weird i guess i'm a bit of a pyro it was around that time that he made the acquaintance of simon why you admitting crimes well is it someone burned down simon burned down his office in part of an insurance cab to be aware that he admitted to loving fires then isn't it it was around then that he made the acquaintance of one mary jean cooper a deeply religious young woman from chicago who went to the same baptist church as him they would eventually get married in 1987 with their first kid brittany following soon after and robert jr joining them in 1991. this is really sad these kids are my age 1987's when i was born yeah and they were killed in 2001. i was young in 2000. that was 9 11. so you i kind of remember i was in detention of course i was but i was young i was 13 14 years old so yeah that's sad that they died so early by the time their second born came along they had settled into a life of domestic bliss at a peaceful ranch style home on the north 47th place scottsdale the setting of the explosive start to our story on the surface they were so normal that it's honestly quite tough to flesh out their biography robert started working part-time as a cardiovascular technician and respiratory therapist at the local mayo clinic had spent his weekends off in the woods hunting and fishing despite the lingering back injury that ended his fire fighting career meanwhile mary poured her energy into looking after the kids at home and helping out at the local church one of her best friends lori greenberg said of her mary was very easy going she was easy to be friends with always willing to help we were the girl scout leaders together for our girl's troop she really enjoyed doing activities with all the kids she and robert came to functions together and they both participated with the kids functions well yeah i mean calum it does feel like this is a little bit fleshy not much to flesh out which honestly is a good thing like if the you know if we were doing a episode about wonderful people in their lives then obviously it'd be great to have a longer biography but when it's a true crime thing it's like no no less of a biography is probably a good thing although not for the family obviously i guess i mean i don't know just i feel like just having a normal not extraordinary biography is probably you know that's a pretty happy life low stress no worries easy going before we continue with the show today let me 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for basically 15 using criminalist it's a very good deal go check it out there is a link below use the code criminalist and let's get back to the show drill sergeant dad but behind the rosy facade hid a deeply unhappy household dad robert appeared to have taken his frustrated military ambitions out on his wife and kids by turning the house into a domestic boot camp as the self-appointed drill sergeant he was incredibly strict about the way the house was kept and would take every opportunity to undermine mary he once allegedly even hosed his wife down in the garden as punishment for perceived insubordination holy sh my dude i just can't imagine what world i could live in where it's like all right wife get out in the garden i'm going to hose you down with a cold hoes for being bad the idea of this is so extraordinary to me it's like what world were these guys living in in case anyone out there needs to be told this do not under any circumstance turn a hose on your spouse i mean unless they're on fire i guess that's the one exception i mean or unless you're having fun i could definitely imagine being in the garden like watering some plants or some [ __ ] on a hot day and just soaking my wife just for she'd be like what are you doing i'm like thought it was funny [Music] but i don't feel that makes me a bad person it just makes me a bad joker i feel intention is quite important robert fisher clearly had a pretty messed up idea of how a marriage should be which could potentially be traced back to his own parents divorce when he was 15. another thing he seemingly never got over ah yes i mean this is okay like everyone's parents are divorced well i i don't know what is it like 50 of people's parents are divorced or something crazy so it's like that's not you know normally it's like super abusive and stuff and it does seem like his dad was abusive but not your usual like multiple murderers start wearing it so i'm oh yeah draped when he was 12 it's like oh i wonder why he's so [ __ ] up i wonder why this isn't like i mean it's bad but it's not extraordinarily bad is what i'm trying to say but i doubt the kids were complaining when their dad did choose to spend time with them it wasn't all disneyland and ice cream he once tried to teach them how to swim by throwing them both off a boat into a lake mary's friend lori greenberg described the kind of guy he was as i can't even say that robert wasn't normal he wasn't a bully but he was the king of his castle that was just their relationship my dude then you obviously didn't know about the time he took his wife out to the garden and sprayed her down with a hose because if that ain't bullying i don't know what is no lori he was not normal if you think so then maybe you want to take a look at your own marriage also maybe laurie just didn't know about all of this stuff why would she it's their personal life you should probably not watching him spray down his wife in the garage i'm going to assume she doesn't know it's abundantly clear to me that the man was an emotionally and psychologically abusive and apparently i love though i love the insult as apparently the thought of losing this control of his own little world was to him the worst thing imaginable and although our domineering dad was a stickler for order and discipline when it came to others it turns out he had some pretty severe problems with self-discipline yeah i mean again i'm not at all surprised i'm not at all surprised because like people who hand out discipline probably not the most disciplined people they're just like upset at themselves for not being so disciplined and they're taking it out on people that they can control because their uh their heads don't work properly burning love a few years before robert's disappearance mary actually kicked him out of the house when he revealed to her that he was having an affair several reports suggest that he didn't come clean willingly it was the fact that he had contracted an std from the other woman that forced him to spill the beans the raging hypocrite of a man now reacted by retreating to the mountains on a camping trip telling his friends that he would rather die than lose his wife and kids wow that's a that's a twist perhaps out of fear of what he might do to himself mary agreed to take him back a few days later on the condition that they go to marriage counseling with their pastor greg cantelmo he said of the couple they didn't have any unique problem that was different from anybody else in the church yo greg how about you shut your mouth isn't that like if i go to therapy or marriage counseling or especially to like with a with a man of the cloth or like pastor or whatever it's like shut your mouth even if what i'm telling you is like simon even if that song is a completely normal dude i don't want you telling that to people just be like i can't say because of confidentiality that's the words i want to see coming out of your mouth greg what the hell again if all the men in scottsdale were having an affairs hosing down their wives and trying to drown their children then the city really got bigger problems than the time we have but today not as big as problems of that what was the name of that town where the whole police force was basically a corrupt joke um oh god i made it like two weeks ago i can't even remember the name of the bloody town anymore but yeah they were worse off regardless with their pastor's guidance mary and robert managed to dodge divorce but their marriage was still as tempestuous as ever ah mary mary mary you should you shouldn't have let it i mean i don't want simon don't blame the victim she's just a victim but i'm just saying yo if your husband's spraying you down with a hose and having affairs and being in callum's words it's okay he's like mary take me back i can't live without you be like okay that's that's not okay have fun we're done we are done then towards the end of the year 2000 it appears as if our devout husband once again gave into the temptations of the flesh again several news articles reported in the winter of 2000 robert had told his colleagues at the mayo clinic that he'd contracted another std this time from a prostitute and a massage parlor oh dear which makes me wonder have you ever heard of condoms robert they're these brilliant little latex socks which could have prevented all of your troubles i guess a christian fundamentalist sex education skips over the finer points of massage parlor safety oh my god so dark thus the world's best husband and father sarcasm by the way found himself with an itch deep down in his nether regions and panic brewing deep down in his chest he was terrified that mary would put two and two together how would she ever do that robert and this time there would be no forgiveness good and there shouldn't be as i always say give me chlamydia once shame on you give me chlamydia twice shame on me give lee clydey a thrice oh my god man i should probably stop texting you when i'm drinking you [ __ ] savage which brings us to the spring of 2001 the figurative powder keg was charged the fuse lit and every day it burned shorter and shorter it appears as if mary might have finally come to terms with the fact that robert was not the changed man that he claimed to be in the weeks leading up to her death she told several of her friends that she was finally looking into divorce proceedings which to robert was as good as the end of the world go and uh what's this just go take the kids and stay at your mother's isn't that the like stereotype go do that please i know you're not going to because you die but uh please it doesn't make a difference whistle boy as i said before he'd rather die than be separated from his family or rather he'd rather they die than go on with their lives without him ah robert you selfish the spark on the 9th of april a little less than 24 hours before that massive explosion would shake the entire neighborhood awake life went on as normal in the fisher household in the morning robert left for his shift at the may oh yeah he works at the mayo clinic all his colleagues at the maya clinic i was thinking that's where he went for his std test ah big brain simon follow the bloody story and afterwards he picked up britney from school being a straight a student she was due to be inducted into the national junior honor society at a ceremony later that day while dad took brittany to receive her award mom accompanied little bobby to a gun safety class for kids holy sh what this is arizona after all i know nothing about arizona other than they make iced tea that arizona iced tea that's quite good i had no idea so i mean it's america so i know you're into guns but gun safety class i know gun safety is important but how about we just don't let kids have guns is that does the second amendment or whatever it is apply to kids surely it should be like what wait you can't drink till you're 21. let's just like say guns can be the same age can't we say that america probably gonna get some hate for that simon every child should have a gun when they're born i don't know why i didn't do that my southern american accent which annoys everybody someone every child should be given a gun of birth you know that you know that is right so i don't know that i don't know that is right robert was apparently irate throughout brittany's induction ceremony and forced his daughter to leave before receiving her certificate again robert you are such a she had spent enough late nights lying awake listening to her parents scream at each other to understand why not long after he pulled in at the driveway the neighbors heard him and mary having at it once again something that grown abundantly used to over the years this continued all evening peaking at around 10 pm soon after which the house went early quiet yeah i mean i don't like that like it'd be really uncomfortable i know it's like super first world problem or whatever but it's like i feel really uncomfortable like i don't really argue i mean of course i had the occasional argument with my wife over like stupid and then i'll apologize because i'm almost always in the rock but like i i get super uncomfortable when people are just having an argument on the street and if my neighbor's regularly arguing i mean to be fair my apartment has got super thick walls because like 150 years old which i'm grateful for but i wouldn't like it i always i feel super uncomfortable the whole time i'd just be sitting there like wait he's like is this the day that he finally kills her and then i feel guilty forever for not doing anything but i don't want to get involved in people's personal life i just want to let look away because i'm a coward come on let's let's get back to the story the exact sequence of events that transpired behind those doors is a mystery but the long and short of it is this robert william fisher filled with fear jealousy and malice massacred his entire family in cold blood we're gonna have to come up with a better insult than can't we because that is [ __ ] sick he started with mary creeping in while she slept and slitting her throat in a horrific feat of overkill he then fired a single revolver shot into the back of her head he then went to the bedrooms of his own children and he subjected them to a similar fate mate i don't get it i don't get it i don't get it i have children now and i'm like what i just it it can't be put into words if you have children you can understand this completely if you don't have children you can understand this completely as well but just like i don't know i felt like having kids and it's like oh my god i totally get it like it's it's just you get it it's crazy scottsdale pd detective john heinzelman told abc news they died brutally both bobby and britney had their throat slashed almost from ear to ear in robert's twisted mind this was better for his kids than splitting up their dysfunctional household with a divorce solid logic there robert i'm sure your kids would have hated having two christmases and not having to listen to their mom screaming even contracting the clap for the umpteenth time then with his entire family lying dead in their beds he set to work on the cover-up robert fisher grabbed a 20-gallon canister of gasoline and went from room to room dousing the floors and bodies he then ripped the natural gas line from the house's water heater and lit a candle on the kitchen table since natural gas is lighter than air he knew it would slowly fill up the house over the following hours gathering at the ceiling and working its way down until the moment it touched that little flame and then well you saw what happens oh man this is like one of those things where it's i gotta say it and people i don't know people always say on twitter like simon you're always saying people are psychos you know why because they are this guy is a total psycho um if you want to follow me on twitter i just post irreverent nonsense to be honest it's not really interesting sell it fact boy at simon whistler i'm on twitter twitter's such a twitter is a weird place it's kind of negative but i love it the head start just like the blast that rubbled through the neighborhood that morning the news of these horrific murders soon shook the entire state of arizona there was a killer on the loose to be considered armed and dangerous a fugitive child killer should have been at home celebrating his 40th with his family just three days after the blast but where he actually commemorated that milestone birthday was anyone's guess after killing his family and rigging the house to blow our twisted fire starter fell off the radar completely warrants were issued for his arrest and he was charged with first-degree murder arson of an occupied structure and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution beside that last one he's really worried about the unlawful flight and the the arson of an occupied structure he murdered two children and his wife if they catch him he's going to jail forever or maybe maybe death penalty if arizona's a state that uh allows kids to have guns i'm gonna bet it's one of those states that's still like yeah yeah you can choose if you want the electric chair or if you want the gas chamber so do you have lethal injury no lethal injection a check of his credit cards revealed that the last sighting was at a gas station atm 10 42 pm the night before the blast where he withdrew 280 the cash machine's camera caught footage of him taking out the money wearing an oakland raiders cap with his wife's toyota suv in the background it's not known if he had already carried out the killings by this point or not but there's a good chance we're seeing him in the process of skipping town if so that meant we surely would know oh wait maybe like because normally you can tell like i've seen enough csi where they stick that big like cooking it looks like one of those things you use to measure the temperature of a roast in the oven they stick that in the liver and they're like yeah he died like six hours ago but i guess if there was an explosion and a big fire then that's not going to be accurate i'm assuming this is him skipping down he's taking out 280 bucks i mean it it doesn't feel i guess that's you know that's enough money to get by for a little while if so that meant he had more than a 10-hour lead on the cops hardly ideal with that much time on the road he could be anywhere from san francisco san francisco to albuquerque or even seeing as scottsdale is just three hours from the border deep into mexico meaning that by the time the alarm was raised it appeared as if he might have slipped through their fingers forever yeah if he was you've got to go to mexico right you got to leave the country because i mean if you just go to another state it's 2001 or whatever they're gonna be like yo yo next i don't know where the hell arizona is but let's just assume the next state over is alabama i i'm pretty certain it's not because my american geography is like truly but they're just gonna phone up alabama and be like yo alabama fbi there's a guy who murdered his entire family can you look for him and they'll be like yes and i'm sure they can make the same phone call to like mexico but it's gonna be more difficult and i mean mexico's got their own to worry about they're probably like yeah we got okay we'll get to it we'll get to it americans we'll get to it got to go south at the border i mean i'm just basing this entirely on movies the mind of a murderer as robert fisher was beginning his new life on the lamb the reality of what he had done was beginning to set him back home i've been asked if i was surprised robert had done this mary's friend laurie recounted but honestly in those first days after the fire it was just inconceivable to me that's because for normal people the idea of murdering the people you love to protect them is totally incomprehensible yes it's insane but is the guy's a psycho we know this psycho but that's exactly what the fbi's psychological profilers believed robert's motive was early on federal investigators out of phoenix lent a hand to the scottsdale pd they set to work creating a portrait of the subject hoping to predict his next move what they were discovered was that there were certain red flags showing all along no sh on top of what you already know an old friend of the killers said that he was never the same after his navy seal knock back and took to organizing military exercises in the woods with his friends always desperate to impress them that is so childish it's like hey simon what should we do this weekend we got the we know we're going to hang out with the lads yeah it's like well we could uh you know just hang out go do some camping or we could go do military exercises in the woods where i impress you with my skills and be like they'll be like simon we're not 12. can't we just go camping like normal or maybe we could just go grab a drink slide a night just do some normal people rather than running around in the woods this meant doing things like sneaking up behind a family having a picnic and unloading his revolver into the air wait for real dude that sounds definitely like a crime my dude that is a crime i'm sure that's a crime that's like assault maybe not in arizona maybe in arizona like yeah it's a good time i'm sorry people from arizona i love your iced tea and i know nothing about your state just it got me going with the bit about the kids being having gun safety classes and the kids having guns this is my official apology to the whole state of arizona before i get my hashtag arizona council simon or shooting down an elk and then smearing his blood all over his face for a picture not what you generally consider good wholesome banter not at all police believe he even once baited a stray dog into attacking his labrador just so he could have a reason to shoot it dead mate you're look i'm not people are always like i've got another show and i once said and it seems to be the most controversial thing i've ever said that i value human lives over dog lives and uh people were like simon how can you say that dogs are better than people seem to be the general consensus of the internet which kind of alarmed me but uh dude the fact that you shot your labrador dead um people now now now look i mean there was no one on your side already mate you murdered your family but now that you're a dog killer you people have people now will have a whole kind of special hatred for you see i already had a special kind of hatred for you when you murdered your [ __ ] children but there's now people who are going to be even more upset at you clearly there were some violent propensities bubbling below robert's quiet emotionless demeanor which is why to me it almost seems like the whole thing was one big sociopathic malicious midlife crisis the jealousy whenever his wife talked to other men the insults she made about his sexual prowess the prostitutes the angst from his failed military career robert fisher was a deeply frustrated man looking back upon a lifetime of failures robert just do what everyone else having a midlife crisis does just buy a porsche it's much better someone come on just buy a porsche why'd you have to murder your family instead psycho because he was also a total coward of a man he was willing to burn it all to the ground just to take back some sense of control so even though the potential of divorce may well be how he justified the murders to himself it seems pretty clear to me that that's just a story he tacked on after the fact because even people who slaughter their whole family don't want to see themselves as some kind of bad guy a textbook narcissist like fisher would find the angel of mercy angle a lot more palatable i have no idea how on earth you can wrangle that in your head to make any sense robert but what do i know i got my degree in forensic psychology from the university of wikipedia this is the casual criminalist after all yes it's important it was called the criminalist people like oh qualifications it's like no no no it was just a good name for a show because i like alliteration the caveman of arizona but enough about my glaring lack of qualifications let us get back to the hunt now that we know exactly what kind of man we're dealing with here will the authorities be able to use that information to bring him in more than a week passed after the killings with no indication as to robert fish's whereabouts several reports had come in from the night of the disappearance including one from a truck driver who said he helped someone who looks like fisher tow his car out of a ditch beyond that not much else it's gotta be really unfortunate if you're on the run for the police from the police and you just have a random car accident oh god my means of getaway is now in a ditch ten days is plenty of time to reach basically anywhere in north america but as it transpired fischer may have been closer to home than anyone expected all along after ten days of dead ends the cops got their first break mary fish's suv was discovered at a remote car park in the wilderness near the town of young about 90 miles to the northeast of where robert was last seen oh yeah he was one of these big outdoors guys maybe he's just like off hiding in the woods mar by the caveman of arizona might imply that he's hiding in some sort of cave in the state of arizona the report came in after a group of campers had spotted the family dog blue cowering underneath the vehicle half staffed to death the only signs in the man himself were his rate way i thought he shot his dog oh my god i can't keep up with this guy's crimes the only signs of the man himself were his raiders cap left on the passenger seat and a pile of human feces on the ground outside the door brilliant as usual a moment of silence for the poor forensic technician who had to deal with that as for the prior owner of said feces it appeared as if he must have abandoned the dog and walked off into tonto national forest 2.9 million acres of rugged scrubland and mountain woods after all this was basically his home turf he claimed to know the terrain in those parts even better than the native apache people whose reservation was situated just one mile from where the car was found in fact he and laurie greenbeck's husband rode atvs in the same area one week before the murders and she believes he was up there scouting it while they were camping this is i mean america is so big you have such big forests and wildernesses and stuff the idea like i grew up in the uk and it's like you can't just go hide in the forest like someone's gonna find you it's gonna be about 20 minutes before someone just wanders by oh hello good afternoon so i'm trying to hide in this bloody cave because i murdered my family and it's like oh well i mean good luck with that dear because there's i mean there's so many people in the uk and it's so small there's just not that there's no giant wildernesses where you can just hide forever there are people everywhere not only that he was an accomplished woodsman who had all the necessary skills to survive in the wilderness if need be for a fugitive looking to start a new life off the grid arizona offers plenty of relatively comfortable housing in the form of hundreds of limestone caves which are scattered over the landscape calum and i are very different definitions of comfortable housing cave is not what comes to mind cave is literally like what i feel we've spent the last several tens of thousands of years working it out of you know we used to be cave people then we built houses because they're nice many of them are connected in underground in an underground honeycomb-like formation if you don't mind the odd rattlesnake bite they make for some pretty nice real estate all the comforts that paleolithic life has to offer the question remains though did fisher intend to live in these caves or was he planning to die there after the car was found one of the state's biggest ever manhunts commenced with 100 police officers joined by spelunking groups and hunters familiar with the land oh they are going hunting for some complicated prey after a couple of days scouring the area the cops found signs of recent activity at an easily accessible cave popular among local explorers that sounds like the worst possible like when you think of like where should i hide should we hide in a popular cave popular with explorers or not i choose the not option they secured a special kind of camera usually used for inspecting sewers to find out but neither our murderous mountain troll nor his remains were inside a further week of false alarms and the search was cooled off either robert had gone so deep into the caves that he ran out of oxygen and will never be found he was holed up in one of the hundreds of caves which weren't searched or he never actually went into the wilderness at all perhaps the toyota in the car park like the house explosion was just another diversion except the house explosion diversion was [ __ ] because it took them about five minutes to realize oh these people were murdered beforehand whereas the toyota one in the woods would actually be like that's quite decent which seems out of character you know got to do something worse than that because he's not very bright wanted generic human mail scottsdale police detective tj jiren who worked the case back then believes it's option three not long after the car was found he received a phone call which suggested that fischer may have left those woods alive and they could be painfully close to catching him i got a call from a couple that was actually up there a few days before we found the truck and they were on the old young road and as she passed him she looked at her husband and said that looks like robert fisher so he walked out of there unfortunately the couple sat on their hands and never reported the sighting so robert fischer was able to slip through their fingers once again and the cops wasted an entire week chasing their tails in the wilderness all that spelunking for nothing and more importantly giving him even more time to get away report if you see someone who looks like a criminal just phone the tip line it's okay if you're wrong it's okay but maybe you're right even if robert was living in the woods for a while after the murders it appears as if he eventually decided to take off which would explain why poor blue the dog was abandoned there perhaps he was unable to follow when he got into another vehicle that doesn't mean the murder-suicide theory is wrong as such maybe the killer initially planned on competing the final act of murder-suicide but wasn't able to go through with it so where did he move on to next well that's the million-dollar question or rather the 100 000 question that's how much the fbi offered up as a reward when fischer made it onto their top 10 most wanted list the year after his presumed escape from arizona this is like a really like the bounty for catching criminals is really strong because then it's like even if you make friends with this dude as if you're a criminal on the run if you make a friend and they put it together like a hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money it's like yeah yeah he's my new friends but i've only known him a couple of weeks then i saw the fbi thing it's like yeah i won a hundred grand it's a lot of money over the following years he became a regular feature on crime-fighting tv shows like america's most wanted and a steady stream of tips came through as a result but the problem was lots of people looked like robert fisher you know when you create a character in a video game and it starts with a default template for a human male while that non-descript character is basically robert fisher six foot one white buzz cut normal as hell yeah it's it's like with me everyone's like oh look there's another guy who's balls and has a beard and wears glasses it's simon whistler it's like yeah okay okay thanks twitter i've seen a million pictures of bald bearded dudes and i don't think everyone looks like me because i know what i look like each time his face appeared on tv generic white men across america were picked up by the police oh god i really hope some like bald bearded dude doesn't become a who looks like me becomes a serial killer that would suck each time his face spit on tv white generic men across america were picked up by the police in case in cases of mistaken identity like the time a guy was dragged off in cuffs from a pizzeria in virginia a few years after fish's escape or later on when the cops kicked down an innocent man's door in colorado each time one of these default adult males was arrested scottsdale held its breath thinking the nightmare of the fish family massacre might finally be coming to a close and every time they were disappointed then came the most promising break of all three years after the murder multiple reports came in describing a man who fit fish's description down to the very smallest detail this doesn't sound convincing though because if i was fisher and i'm like generic bald dude a generic dude like uh got the buzz cut all of this i'll be like i'm growing a beard i'm growing my hair long i'm getting some glasses i'm making myself less generic that's that's the immediate plan it was a compelling twist because while most people assumed he would have fled to mexico it appeared as if he had tricked them by heading north instead on february the 4th 2004 a team of three dozen canadian swat officers they're like a regular swat just a little bit more polite surrounded a house in the affluent town of white rock just one while north of the us border the day before a local man had been browsing the fbi's most wanted website and discovered that his neighbor's boyfriends looked a hell of a lot like a certain family killing fugitive out of arizona yeah i mean i don't know i don't know who's on the americas on top 10 fbi most wanted and they could have definitely fled abroad and she'd be looking out for criminals a cluster of other sightings of the same individual had been reported from the vancouver area in recent weeks suggesting that rob official was living under a false identity as a canadian citizen it was his new girlfriend's house perched on a seaside hill looking out over to american waters which the cops besieged early that morning fischer and his girlfriend were still asleep inside when they batted in the front door a group of armed police stormed the ground floor and the fugitive tried to make a break for it out the back where more lay in weight uh-oh like dude when they've surrounded your house and they're like breaking down the door do you think they've not got the back door covered so yeah let's go right out of the back it's like bro they've been setting up outside your house while you're asleep where you just be like okay okay yeah hi with half a dozen guns drained on his back robert fisher fell to his knees and surrendered ladies and gentlemen we got him this time there was no doubt in anybody's mind this was the guy robert william fisher of arizona he looked exactly the same as he did during his past life and even the key identifying marks matched up this fake canadian had a surgical scar on his back exactly where fischer was operated on after a back injury brought an end to his firefighting career and his upper left canine tooth was missing robert fisher had gotten a crown the exact sort of identifying mark that you might want to haul out with a pair of pliers if you were on the run even one of the killer's own neighbors picked the arrested man out of a lineup confirming his identity so you can imagine the excitement of special agent bob caldwell the fbi's lead detective in phoenix when he flew up to vancouver to look his prey in the eye for the very first time his three-year hunt had finally come to an end i get the feeling because there's a few pages left in this one and the way callum is phrasing this that there's something up and this isn't the guy or there's definitely something up right all that was left was to finish up the paperwork and have a monster extradited back home to face justice or so they thought the double bluff see when robert fisher was brought in for booking at the jailhouse in vancouver the detectives hit a my little road bump his fingerprints didn't match the fbi that is a big deal like unless the where did they get his fingerprints from in the first he was in the military so they have his fingerprints from then this is the this is i mean that is fairly damningly not him then isn't it the fbi had sent up a copy of fisher's old 1979 u.s navy file for the canadians for reference but somehow the arrested mans were different okay either there's a mistake going on but either way let's test his dna just get a court order it's 2001 they've got that dna technology i mean maybe it's a bit early early days but they've got that [ __ ] take a sample right is that right did they have this in 2001 i feel like they definitely did so take a sample of his dna take a sample of his dna from i don't know his car or whatever from back in there they must have samples of this um yeah you figured out the mounties could see the face of robert william fischer staring back at them from across the interrogation room but some other data denied what was right there in front of their eyes impossible they were 100 certain this was their guy does he have a twin what's the explanation here you can't change your fingerprints and there was no sign that his prince had been intentionally altered that would leave all kinds of scarring yeah i mean without brutally scarring your fingers of course for the top minds over at the royal canadian mounted police there was only one explanation for this strange turn of events prepare yourself for a twist that even m knight shamalam sham this guy is an impossible to pronounce name i'm really sorry shyamalana lan would probably think is a bit over the top see the more the rcmp looked into the man's past the more they started to believe he really was the person he claimed to be a natural-born canadian citizen oh he does have a twin doesn't he but that didn't mean that he was innocent of the fisher family massacre far from it so in the years from 1991 to 2001 there was a massive gap in this guy's life story in those years the cops couldn't account for his whereabouts and neither could anyone he knew before and after that time span he had a verifiable history in canada multiple family members confirmed that he was born and grew up there so did he steal someone's identity and then go back to his old identity what so what in the world was he up to when he fell out of sight for a decade rcmp officer tim shields answered that question with a shocking revelation quote we have to cover off the very real possibility that this 45 year old canadian man had not moved to the u.s and assumed another identity and actually had a family there before moving back to canada wait so they're saying that yeah okay they're saying what i'm saying that he had a fake identity yes he's saying it was actually this random guy been living in arizona under the false identity of robert fisher wait someone stole robert fisher's identity that makes no sense he's the most of all the identities to steal why would you choose that one this would mean that the fingerprints on the navy file were from the real robert fisher who's now presumably dead or otherwise oh wait oh i'm sorry no i get it god i'm so dumb this is hang on have i got it right there was a dude called robert fisher who was in the navy who at some point died and then someone stole his identity and became this criminal and then he fled to canada and now they're trying they're comparing his fingerprints are the actual robert fisher who died years ago and was not actually a criminal as far as we know he was just a navy dude what is going on is that right let's just carry on that would mean the fingerprints on the navy far were from the real robert fisher okay who is now presumably dead or otherwise unaccounted for how did you get away with this in like relatively modern day whatever happened to the real man the sneaky canuck identity thief had taken his place married mary and lived 10 years of a fake life before murdering his family and returning to his old identity up north imagine living with someone for an entire decade and finding out they were canadian the whole time truly chilling stuff i don't know about you but my mind is well and truly it is at mind-blowing column absolutely mad this is yeah i was like okay i could figure this out there's probably it's not going to be a that is this is a twist this is a hell of a twist as was fbi agent caldwell's but for but for all the wrong reasons he wasn't so much blown away by the unexpectedness of the twist as much as its utter jaw-dropping stupidity yes i know i might have got you all hyped up with these mad revelations so i'm sorry to inform you that none of it turned out to be true oh okay wait what this is wait is this section called the double bluff it is okay well done callum well done uh so it's just someone screwed up blame the mounties it was them that pushed the theory when the press pressed against agent colwell on the possibility he replied that's absurd we know who robert fischer is he was born in brooklyn new york he moved to arizona lived in tucson for a long time his family has all been here in the state of arizona we've tracked robert fisher throughout his life his parents we've had contact with them the whole time remember robert fisher didn't just appear out of the aether in 1991 he met his wife way before that oh yeah even his eldest kid was born before then so oh yeah 1987 not 1991 sorry to imagine that some canadian who in this theory looks nothing like him came down and replaced him without mary or his parents noticing of course not yeah callum says of course not you usually have to scroll down to the bottom 10 of reddit threads to find a theory this dumb if anything this little side plot to the story just proves the power of confirmation buyers some rcmp detectives were so damn convinced that they had the right man they were willing to propose absolutely ridiculous b-movie plots to explain away the evidence in reality it was just such an unfortunate coincidence that fisher and this unnamed canadian citizen despite living separate independently verifiable lives looked exactly the same and the same physique got surgery on the exact same spot and messed up the exact same tooth they were essentially each other's doppelgangers that is insane the odds of that are just what are the odds crazy since the less evil twin was being held on an immigration offences warrant he was able to walk free after one week when his fingerprints verified that he was in fact a citizen this is the craziest twistiest thing ever as thing stands but callum i hear you ask what happened to the actual robert fisher you just spent 10 minutes honestly more after simon's had his go rambling on about the plight of some canadian look alike but what we really want is justice damn it well first of all i apologize for misleading you thank you callum and second i'm sorry to inform you that the 2004 case of mistaken identity is as close as we have ever come to closure on the case this guy is still on the run this april the 20th marked the 20th anniversary of the murders and robert fischer is still out there dead or alive we don't know that's crazy is he still on the fbi's most wanted that sighting by the couple up near the apache reservation is perhaps the last anyone saw of him not for a lack of exposure of course fischer has remained on the fbi's top 10 most wanted list that entire time and there's still plenty of buzz surrounding his case detective heinzelman said earlier this year we still get tips on a weekly basis if not daily basis the tips we get vary from any number of things it could be something as simple as i was looking at facebook and i saw a person named bob or robert fisher don't it's got to be an incredibly common name that's some top-tier web sleuthing read the most wanted list search names on facebook and wait for the reward money to come flowing in but sadly fischer has even managed to evade these brilliant anti-armchair sherlocks he's avoiding them by just not being on facebook facebook sucks in lieu of a satisfying conclusion to his story let's take a second to review the possibilities for where he is now murder suicide yeah he's probably just his bones are in one of those caves somewhere right one of the most popular theories and probably the most anticlimactic is the idea that fisher may really have wandered into the woods way back in 2001 and ended his own life you may think we've ruled that out already by virtue of the fact that nobody has come across his remains in two decades but it can't be discounted completely after all he had threatened to kill himself back when mary kicked him out three years prior and this was the exact same area where he had contemplated suicide at that time it would also explain why his bank accounts were never touched after withdrawing that measly 280 even if he was spotted by that couple potentially leaving the forest he could have returned to the area some time after the fact and you'll remember that a search was conducted after the car was found but there remains the fact that the wilderness up there stretches out for hundreds of miles a completely thorough research would have taken years yet there's just so much wilderness and all of those deep like labyrinth of caves eh well you don't necessarily gonna find him if he really is dead and gone robert fisher's remains could be hidden deep inside some remote ravine picked to pieces by animals until there's not much left to find at all that sounds like the most likely thing right the fact that he's never been found yeah he's dead the troglodyte life however some people maintain that our killer was probably too narcissistic to go through with ending his own life with that in mind another theory goes that fisher who knew the wilds of arizona like the back of his hand could have retreated from the world entirely after the murders and is still living wild he would probably have known dozens if not hundreds of hiding places which he could move between to avoid detection not to mention the fact that he'd be many many miles from the nearest person on most days and to make matters more difficult detective heinzelman said earlier this year the other part of that is that the car was less than a mile from the apache indian reservation that is a sovereign nation that we don't travel into wait hang on but you could ask them if you can right go search if you're looking for some like wanted family killer they're probably going to be like they'd be like pretty okay with you searching for a horrible murderer right is that if you escape to mexico mexico is a sovereign nation they're going to be like sure i mean we'll help you out we've got our own crimes but we're not going to obstruct you the jurisdiction of the arizonan police ends at the borders of that reservation meaning that bishop could have escaped from their influence by just walking one mile from where his car was abandoned i'd wagered that the killer was very aware of that little loophole and used it to his advantage during his escape but does that mean he could still be there chewing on squirrel meat and tapping the sap from cactuses to survive some people believe so but i think it's a bit far-fetched to say that he was living wild in the apache nation for any significant period of time the idea that he's still alive up there is probably little more than an urban legend yeah i think so it's just so unlikely isn't it still though if you happen to be planning a trip up into the wilderness of the northeast of phoenix arizona and you happen to spot some bearded golem creature crawling out of the mouth of a cave with a rifle on his back you might want to call the fbi don't worry about it though you probably won't a false identity all right so let's circle back to the realm of plausibility once again and consider the most likely scenario wait the dead scenario is so likely it's improbable that robert fisher would have settled into life of a cave-dwelling prehistoric man for very long especially given his bad back if he is still alive it's very much likely that he's hiding in plain sight with a different postcode a different name and a different appearance detective heinzelman believes that fisher could be living in a small town where he gets paid cash and he works as a handyman or he could be in a big city and blend in i mean that's going to be really hard like you got to get a fake identity right you can't just be like not and you've got to have like surgery or you're going to get caught because you look like him no i mean you can't just live life without id you're going to need [ __ ] at some point according to the fbi there could be as many as 200 000 american fugitives living under fake identities like this okay maybe i was wrong 200 000 which means there's a solid chance you've crossed paths with one at some time or another maybe you're even maybe you've even met fisher himself or lived next to him or worked with him or dated him oh callum why must you terrify us so avoid those generic men and that doesn't only apply if you're living in the usa agent bob caldwell the guy who went up to canada to debunk the rcmp body snatcher theory believes there's a solid chance fischer is in fact living abroad maybe canada maybe mexico or maybe somewhere in far off south america consider the fact that in 2008 a group of tourists in guatemala actually got into a bar fight with a man that looked a lot like him could it have been our guy living out his final years under the south american sun if so then i sincerely hope his cushy retirement is one day interrupted by the sweet tucker bunch of justice and so with that in mind wrap up the wanted poster wherever he is it falls upon you the public to inject new hope into the hunt hopefully in a few months or years we'll be doing a follow-up episode about how this despicable child killer was finally brought to justice for his crimes let's run over the details one more time robert william fischer is described by the fbi website as six foot 190 pounds with blue eyes and brown hair which in the old days was cropped short key identifiers include a surgical scar on his lower back and a golden crown on his upper left canine due to lasting pain from surgery he's said to sometimes walk with a strange posture puffing out his chest this may have exacerbated with age in his past life he was known to chew tobacco particularly a brand called copenhagen and bear in mind that fisher would have turned 60 this april so add in an extra 20 years onto any photos from the years preceding the crime in 2016 the fbi actually released an age progressed picture showing what he might look like nowadays if that sounds like someone you know then there could be a 100 000 reward in it for you and remember it's not just about the money you're also you're not betraying your friends you're betraying someone who lied to you about being a child murderer so keep that in mind it's totally okay and bonus you get a hundred thousand dollars even if this guy is your friend betray his friendship trust me you should however i cannot stress enough if you also happen to live in the vancouver area then there's a solid chance you've just spotted that gap-tooth canuck from before please excuse exercise due caution before having the poor guy dragged off to jail again if i was robert fisher i'd be like moving to canada where there's that guy who looks exactly like me because then no one's gonna dob me in because they'll be like no no no it's just that i got that guy with a confusion and that just about concludes coverage of the decades-long hunt for scottsdale's most notorious murder app one of the fbi's top 10 most wanted since the inception of that list in the 1950s about 90 of those featured had been captured or otherwise accounted for with around 60 being caught within a year of being added which means that with his tenure approaching the two decade mark fisher has the dubious honor of being one of its longest featured members of all time here's hoping this streak can be brought to an end soon i kinda still think he's dead i just think he's dead that's the least his family's memory deserves after having their lives cut short by the one person who was supposed to protect and care for them the most all because he was too cowardly to face the consequences of his own actions and lastly please remember if you're currently googling the number for the fbi hotline to drop the tip that blows this case wide open be sure to give us a name check in the report if you're feeling generous a little cut of that 100 000 reward wouldn't go awry either call it 50 50 yes nice one callum you know it's all about that money dismembered appendices number one as always i wouldn't let you go without answering the question on everyone's mind what happened to blue well when the two-year-old queensland healer mix was found approached by the cops he was extremely arrayed porcupine quills in his muzzle circling the suv barking at anyone who came near it took the soft touch of veterinarian patty blackmore to calm him down and tranquilize him he then lived out the rest of his days happy and healthy according to the vet nice to have one little happy ending to plaster over all the horror it's a happy ending of that small part of the story i'm not really sure it's successful he plasters over all of the horror seeing as a guy murdered his two children and wife horribly and never faced justice number two you might be wondering how robert william fish's 20-year stint on the top 10 wanted list stacks up against the all-time record that belongs to a man named victor manuel gerena who took off with 7 million from his wells fargo armored car job back in 1983. he was top of the list for an impressive 32 years before being taken off meaning that fisher might be able to make a run for the record after another decade and a bit i sincerely hope someone's able to cut his streak short before then yeah yeah the victor manuel garina who just drove off with seven million dollars it's like ah okay i mean that's bad but who cares the child murdering guy i'm like find him and let's get him in prison as soon as possible please or hopefully he's dead this has been an episode of the casual i'm finishing up hopefully he's dead oh god i mean but yeah this has been an episode of casual criminals thank you so much for watching or listening have you consumed the show if you're watching on youtube smash that like button make sure you subscribe if you're listening as a podcast form please leave a review that would be awesome and uh yeah that's about all i've got for you i'll be back real soon with another episode and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 307,108

Keywords: true crime

Id: rg7JDifs65I

Length: 60min 20sec (3620 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021