Robert William Fisher

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert William Fisher is an American fugitive, wanted for allegedly killing his wife and two children in Scottsdale, Arizona. At 8:42 in the morning on the 10th of April 2001, the family's house exploded. Neighbors grabbed garden hoses before the fire crews arrived. In the ruins, investigators found his wife and both of their children dead. Fisher himself was gone, and so was the family car. He has never been found. Behind that single morning sits a man who grew up in Brooklyn, served in the Navy, and sat in church with his family. What shaped him? What did the people around him see in the years before the explosion? And how does a man vanish so completely while the FBI is searching for him?

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• 2. Childhood and Work

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  Brooklyn, New York City, is where Robert William Fisher was born on the 13th of April 1961. His father, William, was a banker, and his mother was Jan Howell. Robert had two sisters. In 1976, when he was 15, his parents divorced, and the three children went to live with their father in Arizona. All of them attended Sahuaro High School in Tucson. Friends and relatives said the divorce was turbulent and left lasting marks on him. A friend from high school recalled that Robert was "very bitter" about it. Close to the time of the murders, he talked about the separation with co-workers at Mayo Clinic Hospital. He once confided to an associate that his life would have been different had Jan not left the family.

  The United States Navy came first in Fisher's working life, and he tried to join the SEALs without success. He later became a firefighter in California, but a back injury forced him to retire. He then moved his family to Arizona and entered the medical field, working as a surgical catheter technician and as a respiratory therapist. For a time in the late 1980s he also sprayed weeds. One man who employed him remembered a quiet worker in serious pain who was nonetheless a good employee. When the murders happened, Fisher was a surgical technician at a Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale. In 1987, he married Mary Cooper.

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• 3. Life at Home

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  A garden hose is one of the images friends gave the police. Fisher turned it on Mary after deciding she had spoken out of turn. Those who knew the household described him as cruel, distant and controlling toward his wife and their two children, a daughter named Brittney and a son named Bobby. He and Mary fought over sex and money. Mary took a job that she told friends was a "security fund."

  Fisher was embarrassed that Bobby disliked hunting and fishing. He once tried to teach both children to swim by throwing them off a boat. Hunting partner Sandy Gillespie described the scene: "They were crying, and Brittney was screaming, and he pulled them back in the boat and he said, 'Now there, how's that?'"

  The house itself bent to his rules. He would not let the walls be painted any color but white, and he allowed only a few pictures to hang. Mary's friend Kimberly Sue Davidson told police that her mother had made special things, such as quilts, but Mary was not allowed to display them. She kept them in a closet while Fisher kept asking when she would get rid of them. Even so, he worked to be seen as a devoted family man.

  Mary's mother, Ginny Cooper, told investigators that Fisher rarely socialized with relatives because he feared getting too close to people and then losing them. Fisher's own mother, Jan, called herself a "yes-sir" wife who never stood up to her husband. She said she noticed similar dynamics early in Fisher's marriage and spoke to Mary about her worries. A close friend of Fisher's said his family bore a striking resemblance to the one he grew up in. Neighbor Wade Rencsok put it bluntly: "They did not have a happy marriage. They screamed constantly. Everybody heard it." Rencsok added that it was Mary's voice that carried through the walls, with lines such as "You're worthless." Away from the house, friends noticed a different set of troubling habits.

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• 4. Warning Signs

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  An elk was the setting for one of the strangest moments Fisher's hunting friends reported. After killing the animal, he began smearing its blood on his face. Fisher had hunted since he was a young adult, and friends saw disturbing behavior on trips and other outdoor outings. On at least one occasion he crept up behind a picnicking family and emptied his gun into the air.

  Several years before the murders, Fisher shot a stray pit bull. He said it had attacked his labrador retriever. Police maintained that he set up the encounter because he wanted to shoot the dog.

  Fisher had been active in the men's ministry at Scottsdale Baptist Church. A few months before the killings, he began pulling away from church activities, though Mary did not. Around 1998, when he despaired over his marriage, some friends said he spoke of suicide. That same year the couple went to the senior pastor for marital counseling.

  Fisher also told co-workers about a one-night affair with a prostitute he met in a massage parlor. A urinary tract infection kept him ill for several days in December 2000, and he fretted that Mary would learn its cause. Later he told a hunting companion he was renewing his commitment to his faith and marriage because he "could not live without his family." That remark may have hinted that he would choose suicide over divorce. Psychologists say an intense fear of loss is not unusual in people traumatized by a divorce in adolescence.

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• 5. The Night Before the Blast

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  At 10 pm on the 9th of April 2001, a neighbor heard a loud argument inside the Fisher home. Police theorized that the killings took place between 9:30 pm and 10:15 pm. At 10:43 pm, an ATM camera caught Fisher withdrawing $280, with Mary's Toyota 4Runner visible behind him. Because he was using her car, police believe the murders had already happened. He may have gone back to the house afterward. A media inquiry in 2025 claimed to have found two previously uncontacted witnesses. One said Mary's car was parked outside the house at 3:30 in the morning, and the other said the same at 5:30. If true, that would give Fisher a head start of no more than about three hours.

  Mary had been shot in the back of the head and her throat had been cut. Brittney and Bobby also had their throats cut, but showed no sign of gunshot wounds. The gas line at the back of the furnace had been pulled loose. Investigators believe a candle Fisher lit was meant to ignite the gas once it had accumulated and sunk to the flame. That delay would have given him roughly ten hours to get away.

  The blast collapsed the front brick wall and rattled the window frames of houses all around. Neighbors fought the flames with garden hoses until firefighters arrived and held a 20 ft blaze to the one property. A string of smaller explosions, thought to be rifle ammunition or paint cans, kept the crews back. One firefighter hurt his leg slightly when he lost his footing. In the burned-out bedroom, crews found the bodies of a woman and two children lying in bed. They were Mary, aged 38, Brittney, aged 12, and Bobby, aged 10.

  In the weeks before her death, Mary had told several friends she planned to divorce Fisher. Investigators theorized that he felt threatened by that plan. They also think he did not want his children to endure what he had endured as a boy. The explosion, they believe, was meant to destroy evidence and perhaps make police think he had died.

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• 6. The Abandoned 4Runner

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  On the 14th of April 2001, Arizona Department of Public Safety officers received a statewide bulletin telling them to arrest Fisher. He was named the official person of interest in the case, and to date the only one. Six days later, the last physical evidence of where he had been turned up. Police found Mary's 4Runner in Tonto National Forest near Young and Payson, 100 miles north of Scottsdale.

  The family dog, Blue, was outside the vehicle, sheltering beneath it, hungry and agitated. Inside lay an Oakland Raiders hat identical to the one Fisher wore in the ATM footage. A pile of human excrement sat near the passenger door.

  Police searched the ground around the car but entered only one of dozens of nearby caves. Some of those caves link into an underground network that runs for miles. Several professional cavers have suggested Fisher hid there before escaping, killing himself, or dying from low oxygen. Cavers have explored the caves many times since 2001, and no trace of him has surfaced.

  The car sat less than a mile from the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, which police never searched. Officers followed a set of footprints onto the reservation but found no sign of Fisher. A couple said they had seen a man resembling him walking along Young Road several days before the car was found. The woman reportedly said to her husband, "That looks like Robert Fisher." They did not report it until after the vehicle turned up.

  An acquaintance of the family, Lori Greenbeck, offered one more clue. Her husband had camped with Fisher in that same area shortly before the 10th of April. He believed Fisher had been scouting the ground and was very familiar with the region.

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• 7. Manhunt and False Leads

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  The 19th of July 2001 brought formal charges in Phoenix. A state arrest warrant accused Fisher of three counts of first-degree murder and one count of arson. A federal warrant from the United States District Court for the District of Arizona followed, charging him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. On the 29th of June 2002, the FBI named him the 475th fugitive on its Ten Most Wanted list. He also appeared on America's Most Wanted's "Dirty Dozen" of notorious fugitives and was profiled on The Hunt with John Walsh. The FBI offers a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to his capture.

  By April 2003, agents had received "hundreds and hundreds of leads." Every reported sighting proved inconclusive or false. In the first years, some people in his old neighborhood said a man resembling him drove through the area.

  In February 2004, Canadian police in Vancouver arrested a man who looked strikingly like Fisher. He had a missing tooth where Fisher had a gold bicuspid, and a surgical scar on his back as Fisher did. His fingerprints did not match, and Scottsdale Detective John Kirkham said they showed no scarring that would suggest tampering. The man was held for about a week until a relative correctly identified him. His name was never released.

  In 2012, the FBI told local law enforcement that Fisher might be living near where Mary's car was found. In October 2014, police raided a house in Commerce City, Colorado, on a tip that he was hiding there. They arrested two occupants but found no sign of him. In April 2016, the fifteenth anniversary of the murders, the FBI and Scottsdale police displayed new age-enhanced photos of him at a news conference.

  On the 3rd of November 2021, Fisher came off the Top Ten list. Yulan Adonay Archaga Carias, the alleged leader of MS-13 in Honduras, took his place as the 526th addition. The FBI explained: "Because the extensive publicity Fisher's case received during its nearly 20 years on the list has not resulted in his successful location and/or capture, the case no longer fulfills that requirement." Fisher nonetheless remains a wanted fugitive.

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• 8. Theories and Profile

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  Time, money and his own words feed one theory about Fisher's fate. He is believed to have had little cash, years have passed, and he had spoken of ending his life before. So some speculate that he died, probably in the wilderness near the abandoned car, and his body was never found. Others think he most likely survived and built a new life under an assumed identity. In that case he may have died years later without anyone identifying the remains.

  If he lived, he may have hitchhiked out of the area or had help from an accomplice. Police and survival experts doubt that he stayed in the woods near Payson. Finding food and shelter there is hard, and no evidence has ever shown anyone living in that forest. Detective John Heinzelman offered another picture: "He 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."

  Police have also considered a crossing of the southern border. His disappearance came before the September 11 attacks, when border security was looser than it later became. In 2009, tourists in Guatemala had a hostile encounter with a man said to resemble him. Police have speculated that Fisher may have started a new family. They cite the fear that he might one day leave and destroy it, as he did his first, as a chief reason to keep searching. Heinzelman conceded that they may never learn his fate: "Maybe this is the best we have, knowing he did it, and never finding him again."

  FBI agent Bob Caldwell described Fisher as "arrogant. He's cocky. He's a know-it-all...and a loner." Fisher chews tobacco and prefers the Copenhagen brand. His appearance is average, though the back problem from his firefighting injury sometimes gives him an odd, erect walk with his chest out. He is an avid hunter and fisherman, is considered armed and extremely dangerous, and has ties to Florida and New Mexico.

  In 2011 came a documentary, Where Is Robert Fisher?, built largely on interviews with journalists and detectives. It also includes one of his sisters and a neighbor. Its most unusual material is home footage of Fisher, filmed by Mary herself.

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