Explicit

5. Sightings

Published Sep 4, 2024, 7:01 AM

Robert Fisher is nowhere, everywhere, all at once.

Missing in Arizona contains graphic depictions of violence and may not be suitable for all listeners. Summer twenty twenty three, I'm in Phoenix when I get a text from a law enforcement source.

I received some photos of a hideout about one to two miles from where Fisher's dog was found. I'm sending them to you. The GPS coordinates are with the photos.

This kind of lead makes me salivate, an excuse to leave the city, go to the mountains, hike in a forest, and search for a mysterious shack. Yes please, I open Google Maps, put in the coordinates, and soon we are sixteen miles north of where Mary Fisher's forerunner was found. Not as close as my source said, but still It's better than boiling in a concrete metropolis with one point seven million people during the hottest month in any American city in history. Our producer Chris, and I drive ninety miles north to paysin a mountain town of seventeen thousand. I need caffeine and sugar, so we stop at my favorite Arizona cafe, Common Grounds Coffee. I get an iced coffee and one of the best cinnamon rolls I've ever had passing paysin. We bump our way down dirt roads until my phone tells me we're close to the cryptic cabin about a mile away. Jittery with anticipation and from caffeine, we park exit and hike into the woods. We're in a Ponderosa pine forest, is partly cloudy and kaisobany's low eighties, very breezy and pretty. We're probably ten eleven twelve miles off any kind of paved road, and we're about to hike a mile to the coordinates that we have for this little shack or cabin that somebody found. There's all this equipment and old stuff in there, so I mean, what are the odds Robert Fisher was there? It's slow, but who knows? If I find a pistol with the right cereal number, some old winter green chewing tobacco tens, maybe we'll pay more attention to it. I don't think this will take as long as it seems. Famous last words, well wait, tutorial on the bear spray. So Chris and I went to Swarnego's story yesterday and bought Frontiersman Bear attack deterrent. Bare attacks on humans are rare, but in June twenty twenty three, right before our hike, a black bear killed a man as he drank coffee near Prescott, Arizona, dragging him seventy five feet down an embankment. And this isn't even the first time we've had to worry about bears. In season one, Missing in Alaska, while on a boat off the coast of a remote island searching for a missing plane, we spotted a brown bear on a nearby beach. So yeah, I take bear seriously. Oh my god, Chris, it's a bear. Just kidding. So we're kind of switched backing down this very steep embankment what looks like a dried out creek bed. It's getting thicker the woods, pine needles everywhere. It's pretty cloudy. Now it's cool, it's breezy, a little rock outcroppings.

Okay, what we're doing.

It's eleven fifty one am on a Tuesday, and we're looking for some mysterious shock in the woods in Arizona. From iHeartRadio and Neon thirty three. I'm John Walzac and this is Missing in Arizona, the story of a man who disappeared after allegedly killing his wife and kids, blowing up their suburban home and escaping into the wilderness. Twenty three years later, I'm hunting Robert Fisher and I need your help. Robert Fisher is nowhere, everywhere, all at once. There are so many leads and sightings of him. They require their own episode. Some are intriguing, some are absurd. I want to lay them all out and let you decide what to make of them. So join me on a tour of the world, from a bunker in Scottsdale to a Walmart in Payson, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Australia, even a siting at FBI headquarters, until we find Fisher. He is every lead. He is the wilderness cabin burglar, the gold panning hermit, the mysterious man in the canyon. As you listen, think of how exhausting this has been for law enforcement. Thousands of leads, few investigators, strode in, fugitive, alive and dead.

The nosy neighbor.

The nosy neighbor is the woman who heard Robert and Mary fighting the night of April ninth, two thousand and one. She didn't respond to my email's calls, text the letters, and didn't answer the door when I showed up at her house in episode three, I shared emails her son sent me. I bleeped certain things and said I'd reveal them later. This is the first reveal a fascinating new lead. Here's what her son said. Day after the Fisher house blew up, she saw him, Robert Fisher, driving his wife's vehicle down Miller towards McDowell near the Fisher house.

And turn east, which he never drove till that event.

Robert rarely drove Mary's Forerunner.

And told the cops about him and where he was heading, and was ignored.

This is a bombshell claim. According to her son, the nosy neighbors saw Robert Fisher in Scottsdale a day after the murders. Unfortunately, I can't verify or to tunk it without speaking to her, and she doesn't want to talk.

The bunker.

On the morning of April twelfth, two thousand and one, two days after the house explodes, an employee of the Mesa, Arizona Fire Department finds an anonymous, handwritten letter left overnight between the locked doors of Station Number one.

Robert Fisher, where the three family died in the fire. McDowell and Scottsdale Road. He has a trapdoor bomb shelter under his house. He may be over under his house. Look for three y three door under carpet.

Good luck, police find no sign of a bunker under Fisher's house. Rye bar Let me introduce you now to Brianna Whitney, the true Crime Queen of Arizona. Brianna is a reporter for Arizona's Family, a group of three TV stations in Phoenix, and host of the popular podcast True Crime Arizona. In twenty twenty two, she made a documentary called Finding Robert Fisher. Brianna is skilled and tireless. Unlike so many people in this industry, each he does original research. We meet in Phoenix and hit it off. In your career covering crime in Arizona. Is there one case that sticks out as the greatest unsolved case in state history? Is it Robert Fisher?

It's Robert Fisher. I can say that without a doubt. It is Robert Fisher. It is probably the most well known true crime case in Arizona. It just sticks with people. And I think for that reason that for one thing, people arizonans investigators, detectives, people involved. Nobody can agree on whether they believe he's dead or alive right now, Yes, no doubt, one hundred percent. This is the most notable, most intriguing, high profile missing person case that Arizona has.

So there are five leads that you investigated that I just thought, well, Brianna did such a good job. I'm not going to duplicate her work, thank you. Let's start with the Rye bar lead, the infamous Rye bar lead.

I didn't even know what Rye was when I started this investigation, because you could drive down the highway and you've already gone through it.

Ray is a tiny town of thirty one people, an hour north of Scottsdale, just south of Payson. On April tenth, two thousand and one, the day the Fisher House explodes, a man and woman enter a bar in Rye around six forty five pm. It's cold outside, nasty. The woman appears upset. She goes to the bathroom. The man orders a shot of Johnny Walker red whiskey. He pays cash about five dollars plus a one dollar tip. When the bartender realizes she forgot her cell phone in the bathroom, she goes to get it and sees the man's companion vomiting in a stall. The bartender snags her phone and returns to the bar. Moments later, the man's companion exits the bathroom. The man speaks to her briefly, then gets her club soda. The woman takes a tiny sip, then they leave. They're only in the bar for about ten minutes. The man is thirty eight or thirty nine, the bartender says, six feet tall, one hundred and ninety to two hundred pounds, with crew cut hair, wearing a brown fedora style hat. The woman is twenty eight or twenty nine five two, one hundred and twenty five to one hundred and thirty pounds, with brown eyes and long, straight black hair, in black pants and a black jacket. When the bartender sees a photo of Robert Fisher, she says, quote, that's the guy I saw. This is perhaps the most famous of all the Fisher case. Leads I don't buy it. The idea that Fisher successfully pulls off a triple murder, sets his home to explode, then just pops into a bar on the way out of town in a fedora is frankly absurd. Also, there's a part of this story that's never been reported. It supports my opinion. I found it in a police file. Around ten pm that night, three hours after the couple leaves the bar, the woman shows up at a house across the street, where a friend of the bartender lives. The woman asks to use a phone to call her brother in Payson. She says her boyfriend left her and drove away instead of her brother. She calls the Kila County sh Sheriff's office trying to get a ride home. It's unclear what they tell her. The woman departs on foot down a road carrying a blanket. The bartender's friend describes her as thirty five five two to five four, one hundred pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, in a black suit, jacket and black pants. If you believe this lead, you have to believe that a fedora wearing Robert Fisher left his girlfriend and Rye and she later called the police asking for a ride, but was never identified.

The grocery stores.

The problem with trying to find Robert Fisher is everyone looks like Robert Fisher. He's generic, no crazy tattoos, no eyepatch, a vanilla everyman. Right after the murders, a witness claims to see Fisher at a Walmart in Paysin.

I went to Walmart and went through about ten hours of tape.

Kila County Detective Brian Hay.

After doing that, found out that their clocks were screwed up on their security cameras and that they hadn't place a tape. So I watched all that for nothing.

Almost immediately another lead comes in. Scottsdale Police tell three TV that there.

Has been an unconfirmed sighting of Fisher reportedly seen at this grocery store in.

Patient Bashes, an Arizona grocery chain. Hevey goes to Bashes and watches security tapes. He sees a man who could be Fisher. Interestingly, the man is with someone.

But whatever videos I saw were so miserable that they were basically useless.

How detail so.

Grainy that you couldn't make out any details whatsoever.

So I mean, you could have had Robert Fisher on film and it's so low quality.

Or we could have had Deputy Rodney Kronk, who was identified as Robert Fisher on multiple occasions driving his Dodge truck or a County vehicle.

It was almost a spot on match.

Really, Yeah, and he was with Healer County. Yeah, what was that like for him? Well, we tease him quite a bit about it. The only thing he lacked was a gold tooth. Other he looked just like Robert Fisher.

The tow truck driver.

I got information that a tow truck driver possibly pulled Fisher out of a ditch.

Scottsdale Detective TJ. Duran.

The reason why he believed it was Fisher because it's the same truck that we eventually found, and he had a dog with him, So we believed that he was up on a rim area, probably driving around trying to stay out of sight.

Do you remember specifically where that was.

I believe it was up near Blue Ridge Reservoir, which is directly north of Payson.

In twenty sixteen, the Arizona Republic says this lead is quote the last known confirmed sighting of Fisher. That's not true. It's never been confirmed. All we know is that a tow truck driver claims he pulled a man matching Fisher's description with a dog matching blue in an suv matching Mary's out of a ditch. What makes you think that lead in particular is a reliable lead? Since it came after all the publicity and the driver didn't speak up beforehand.

I don't know if he just saw it at the time and was like whatever, But I mean he described Robert the dog the fore Runner.

Former FBI agent Bob Caldwell.

I mean, he didn't do a toe slip, so he didn't take notes and write down the vehicle and all he did was give him cash or thanking him for pulling him out.

The tow truck driver claims this happened a few days after the murders, but he doesn't report it until after the fore Runner is located a week later.

It is a long ways of ways from where Young and the car was found to where he was pulled.

Out Scott Stale Lieutenant Hugh Lockerby, I.

Can't discount it. He was documented early on in the investigation by you know, we had a deputy sheriff by the name of Gil Marino follow up on it for TJ. And that was documented in the report and the guy described a silver fore Runner at the dog in it and the guy said he's from the valley. Well, what doesn't make sense is when you look at what he told the sheriff deputy and then TJ. And TJ's report was after he pulled them out, comes out to eighty seven. The tow truck driver goes left, which would be back south on eighty seven, and the four un remixser right and goes north on eighty seven. Well, that's in the mountain areas up there. You don't get too young by just getting out a separate road. You'd have to take like I don't even know how you get there through forest roads. So if you take a right, you have to go all the way up to the forty to Winslow or Holebrook or whatever, and then come all the way back down the backside of the Mogian rint Tuesday. It would be so far around it take you hours and hours. Or you would have to have gone right like he did, like he described, and then after a little bit time you turn and come back down south because that's the quickest route. It just doesn't make any sense or why he went all the way up there and gets pulled out. Did he get like he doesn't want to get exposed?

Now?

Did that really even happen?

I don't think it did. Neither does HeLa County detective buying Haby.

I've been to Blue Ridge hundreds of times. There's so many people in and out of Blue Ridge Reservoir Road that I suspect it if Robert was stuck in a ditch there or somebody else would have pulled him out of that.

Day inside of a touch talk. Yeah, toe trucks are not going to go there without a call.

They're not just going to be driving around. Did he tell you anything that wasn't public the tow truck driver.

I don't think so.

No.

I'd love to speak to the driver to gauge his trustworthiness, but unfortunately guys dead. August twenty twenty three. Okay, so just to give you an idea, we're kind of on the side of a very steep embankment that goes down maybe what do you think that is? Like five hundred feet very slippery slope, very steep, lots of fallen trees, burn trees, rocks everywhere, very slippery. We have boots and not very safe hiking to the mystery cabin. We realized the terrain is much more severe than it appears on topo maps. This is at least a forty five degree anglia. I think more. Start to feel it on my old decrepit op it goes in rock. It's also getting darker and cloudier. It almost feels like a good storm. This area has a colorful history. In nineteen twenty seven, a plane carrying a lion crashed in a canyon twenty miles south of here. Yes, a lion, specifically Leo the Lion, the famous MGM mascot.

There's still parts of the plane out.

There, HeLa County detective Brian Havy.

Anybody that's been in this area as long as I have have been to the side of the crash, let's left parts of the air plane that they never hauled out of there. I had a piece of a rear tail rudder for years and years and finally had disappeared or I gave it to somebody.

Both Leo and the pilot survived. The pilot hiked out to get help. A week later, a group from pace and made it to the wrecked plane. Leo was still in his cage. They fed him a slaughtered calf. Do you remember from the topo map there's this and then over there it goes into a longer canyon, and I think it's like right where this hits that longer canyon. So I do think if we just cut kind of diagonal down. I think we should let me just put my phone away and let's just cut down.

And then we're so close the baby blue truck.

Around five pm on April nineteenth, two thousand and one, a tipster calls the police saying Robert Fisher is driving a baby blue Ford truck south towards Payson. Officers speed north but can't find it. They get a report that it exited onto a side road. An hour later, they call off the search. By chance, this is almost the exact moment that Greg the camper finds Mary's SUV in the woods, forty miles east of Payson. This lead was first reported by the Payson round up the Hitchhike. Four days later, after a hectic weekend in the wilderness, Detective T. J. Jurand returns to his desk in Scottsdale.

When I came into work, I got a call and a woman and her husband. It was either two days or the day before we found that truck. They're driving south on Young Road from two sixty A top the rint. You go south on this forest road and that's your Young Road, and you start heading south towards Young. She says her and her husband were driving down the road and a guy is walking. Now she's in the passenger seat, so the guy's on the outside.

Of the road.

As they're driving down the road, this guy walks by him and you can't drive fast on that road because you'll slide everywhere. And her and her husband said, that's Robert Fisher. And I believe they saw him. I think he walked out of there.

Did they say one that.

Was I can't remember if they told me it was two days before, five days before. But when they saw the news and saw that the truck had been found, now, of course I was upset, thinking, why didn't you call us that day? Now that happens in everything you know, they might not have thought it was him.

Was it him?

How do you filter out people though that are just looking for attention?

Just by talking to her on the phone, and I knew she was telling the truth. It was instinct. I could hear it in the inflection in her voice.

Wouldn't Fisher have tried to stay off the road to the side, I mean, he got away to that point. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that he would be just strolling on the side of the road. After the crimes, knowing people are probably looking for him, right.

Right, But you're up north, you're in the country. You're thinking that most people you see up there on the Rim area camping, how long they been camping? Had they even seen the news, had they even read a newspaper? So he still has some time.

I respect Detective Duran, but we disagree on this lead. I'm very skeptical of it.

The pawn shop.

April twenty fifth, twelve twenty five PM. A man who looks like Robert Fisher enters a Phoenix pawn shop wearing green camo pants, a strike shirt, and military style boots that are scuffed but not muddy. He's scruffy and unshaven and appears to have been sleeping in his clothes. He browses the gun section, says nothing, then exits quickly after seeing a sign requiring photo ID. He drives east in a Toyota pickup truck plate two nine five FLb. The manager is eighty to ninety percent sure the guy was Fisher. Unfortunately, the shop security camera was off. Police check the bar next door. They find footage of the truck, but the angle is bad. They can't see the driver.

The old Ford.

Two days later, a friend of the Fisher sees a Robert lookalike driving an older Ford pickup truck in Scottsdale. She tells her husband, who calls the cops. I speak to him by phone. He doesn't want his name used. He and his wife knew the Fishers for sixteen years. They lived in the same apartment complex in Phoenix in the eighties. The wife gets a partial plate for sh Police find one hundred and seventy nine possible, none of the names ring a bell.

Malicious Gap.

On April twenty ninth, two people turkey hunting near Malicious Gap in the Tonto National Forest are sitting in camp taking a break reading when a man calls out from the woods. He emerges, bearded and dirty and tattered and torn camo clothes, carrying a sawed off shotgun. He asks for directions to Malicious Gap, where he claims he's meeting his brother. When he hears an ATV approaching, he gets nervous, says goodbye, and runs into the woods. The next day, the couple returns home to Montana. They don't report the sighting until July ninth, when police ask why they think it was Fisher. They say they saw a photo of him and quote knew it was the same man.

Oak Flat.

On May first, someone sees a Fisher look alike at the Oak Flat campground near Superior, Arizona. That's it, That's all.

I have on that one the pyramids.

On May second, a woman named Joyce Wilson calls the Scottsdale Police Department. Three years earlier, she says she and her husband were hiking in the Superstition Mountains forty miles east of Phoenix when they came across a remote campsite and a man who looked just like Robert Fisher. A year later, Joyce saw the man again in the distance. By the time she reached his campsite, he was gone. Instead, she found piles of rocks in the shape of pyramids all over the campsite. She saw bones and a fire pit. She took photos. Keep in mind this was before the murders, but Joyce believes the man was Fisher. She gives police directions to the campsite so they can search it. It's unclear if they do.

Tortilla Flat.

May third, the Arizona Republic headline false Fisher sightings tips surge across state quote Robert Fisher has become Arizona's version of Elvis, Spotted inconvenience stores and campgrounds all over the state. Someone sees him checking into a motel with bloody arms. Someone sees him building a rock wall on a remote road, sees him at a fortified campsite near Tortilla Flat, thirty miles east of Phoenix. That afternoon, Detective Durin flies over the area. No campsite, no fissure. In the next two decades, police are flooded with ten to twenty thousand leads. Only ten to twenty point one percent are deemed promising.

June seventh, two thousand and three.

Around six fifty am, a man with a shaved head and sunglasses drives by Fisher's old house in a white extended cab pickup with temporary paper plates. A neighbor panics. She calls nine to one one Police investigate the lead. They don't think it's Fisher, probably a guy cruising around looking for a used car for sale, they say. Canada, February two thousand and four.

Thousands of tips have come in over the years, and yesterday cops in White Rock, Canada, thought they may have nabbed the phantom fugitive at this home in British Columbia, Canada.

Tip is Huge.

Whitney, the host of True Crime Arizona.

Investigator's got a tip that there was somebody that looked like Robert Fisher living in white Rock, Canada.

White Rock, British Columbia, is a small city a mile and a half north of the US border. Here's what happens. A teenage boy with divorced parents thinks his mom's new boyfriend is strange. He and his dad start googling fugitives. They come across an image of Robert Fisher. He kind of looks like the mom's new boyfriend. So the boy and his dad call Canadian police and.

They went in guns of blazing to this house, to the point where they showed up like a swat team with guns everything. And if you think it's Robert Fisher, then yeah, you're dealing with probably one of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. So you go in with all precautions. They took this man into custody. And what's interesting about this man is that he had a lot of characteristics that match Robert. When you look at Robert from the outside. He looks like the everyday man. There isn't anything that's super identifiable that you could say, yeah for share him. But there are a couple of things you don't really see that do match up. One of those is he was missing a tooth where he had I think had a crown. This guy in Canada had the same tooth missing. Robert had also undergone back surgery, so he had a backscar. This man also had a backscar. So those are things that are kind of odd to match up if you're not talking about the same person. So they bring this man into the police station, and this is where it gets kind of strange. Robert Fisher's longtime next door neighbor was living in Washington at the time.

She's talking about the son of the nosy neighbor, the man who told me that his mom saw Robert in Scottsdale the day after the murders, the odd son. By two thousand and four, he's living in Seattle.

They end up agreeing that they're going to bring this long time neighbor up to the police station and act like they're putting him through the custody protocols. And in the singing room is an everybody else who's being taken into custody, which would include this man that could or could not be Robert Fisher. And so I talked to the neighbor several times on the phone. He told me that when he got into the room, the man kind of did it like a survey of the room, you know, if you're looking at your new surroundings, and said that when the two of them locked eyes, that the man looked stunned. And the neighbor says, he is one hundred percent sure that's Robert Fisher. And he didn't live next to Robert for just a year. He lived next to him for like ten years, like it was a long time neighbor. So the neighbor told him, yeah, this is definitely Robert. But they took that man's fingerprints and not only did it not match Robert, but it matched some other person's identity, meaning there was no way that this could be Robert.

Do you buy a chance to have a photo.

Actually have a whole Robert Fisher album on my phone for you of everything that I took. So this is the man wow from Canada, huh, which I can see it for sure. However, I think the Mexico tip looks more similar.

We'll get to that in a minute.

So this is the front, here's the back scar, wow, which you know is interesting. And here's the missing too.

Oh.

I definitely see he has a resemblance to him, for sure. Sergio and I, Brianna's cameraman.

Thought that this looked like he could be Robert Fisher's brother.

I see that. I see aspects of his face in this man, and when you combine that with the missing tooth and the backscar, I see it. But he's not somebody I see immediately having looked at every single photo Robert Fisher, and I think that's Robert Fisher.

Agreed, that's why I feel. But when I was interviewing John.

Heinzelman, the current detective.

He was like, you know, this is something where you can't look at him and say yes, it's for sure him, or yes it's for sure not, and so you have to go through everything to fully identify whether it is or is it.

There is an uncanny resemblance concerning the two individuals. But today disappointed Scott's Dell cop saying despite a strong physical resemblance, fingerprint test show that the man colored in Canada unfortunately is not their guy.

People of course are asking you, well, could he have changed his fingerprints? Can you talk about that?

So fingerprinting is obviously a big part of forensics, and each individual person has their own set of unique fingerprints. You and I we don't have the same fingerprints as any other person in the world. And they still look at fingerprints almost like a tree trunk. So you know, when you're looking at tree trunks, you're counting how all the tree is by the rings in the stump or the trunk. That's similar to fingerprints. You're looking at whirls and arches and unique imprints that they give. So the only way you can change your finger tips or prints is to obliterate them or burn them off so that if your finger is pushed down it doesn't create an actual print. That's hard to do, or it'd have to cut your fingers off. There is no other way to alter your fingerprints. And with the Canada tip, it's not like that person didn't have a fingerprint. His unique fingerprint matched the identity of somebody else, So that's how you know for sure that it wasn't Robert Fisher.

If you like this show, please download our first two seasons, Missing in Alaska and Missing on nine to eleven. For updates, visit meon thirty three dot com or follow me on Twitter at John waalzac Jo n Wa l Czak. Thanks for listening. So moving on to the Mexico lead.

Mexico lead, that one was just like, oh crazy.

Tell me about that.

So, because I had started this investigation when I first started Your Prime Arizona, I had made contact with the detectives in it, t J. Duran, Hu Lockerby, John Ainsman, and I really respect all the work that all three of them do, so they would give me a little bit more information than maybe was out there. And when I knew I was doing a documentary, I told him I wanted to go down certain leads, and I knew about the Canada one, that one was pretty well reported, but the Mexico tip was not. And they told me, well, there was this crazy Mexico tip with these pictures, Like what Mexico tip? What pictures? And when I interviewed Hugh Lockerby, he brought the pictures with him. So there was this man that was in a small Mexican town a little south of the border because it was on a Gulf town and this man had taken some pictures with tourists who were there visiting mom and daughter, maybe some other people. And because this wasn't too long after the Fisher family home explosion, his picture was everywhere. And so when this mom and daughter got home from their vacation, they were looking through their pictures and they saw they had taken pictures of this man. And then it's like something clicked and they said, oh my gosh, this looks like Robert Fisher. Maybe we should report this to the FBI, and they did so, Scottsdale Police FBI. They end up going down there finding this man and who I think worked in the area, all of that interviewed him and deemed that it was not Robert Fisher, that it was somebody who worked in the area. He did not match the prince and everything else. But these pictures are wild to the point that when investigators got the lead, they said, we need to get there right now. This is concerning because this is possibly truly Robert Fisher.

Didn't Fisher's family say the same thing about the photos.

Yeah, So Robert Fisher's sister hadn't seen the pictures before we did our documentary and they were new, they hadn't been out there before. And she told me that when she saw the pictures, her heart stopped. She really thought that could have been her brother. And when we're talking family too, I mean, yeah, you're looking at these and the people closest to Robert thought this could have been him. That's a very credible tip. But obviously it wasn't. But yeah, to hear that his own sister, who saw those pictures for the first time, thought wow, this really could be my brother is pretty wild.

Can we look at those photos?

Yeah, this is the mom and daughter, so we have this guy. They're a little blurry, but some of them look better than others. Here's this one.

Uh huh.

I thought this was the best one.

The mouth is similar, the face is similar. I definitely see the resemblance.

One percent.

Can you talk about the bodego tip.

Yeah, somebody had called in and said that they were taking pictures of themselves at a bodega.

In Guatemala in two thousand and nine, just taking.

A normal picture outside of bodega, and this man's captured in the background. And these people told investigators that when he saw himself in the background, he came up and said, get me out of this. I don't want to be in the your background. I don't want to be in your picture, which put these people on high alert, like, okay, no worries. We were just taking our own picture. We were trying to take a picture of anybody. So they found that very suspective when they got back. They also reported their pictures to the FBI. And so he's kind of in the background, this man and a couple of them looks kind of nondescript. That's a thing with that tip, We don't know. Could that have been Robert Fisher? Yeah, I could have, but there was never any confirmation. They never could find the person that was in the picture.

So when you did this, you got a bunch of leads. One of the leads that you got was about a man who came out of the woods and attacked someone. Can you tell me about that lead and your process and investigating it. Yeah.

I was in the middle of recording of podcasts for a completely different story. So this is a long time homicide detective in the valley who's very experienced on very high profile cases, and I just mentioned to him that we were doing the Robert Fisher investigation, and he said, oh, my gosh, I have a tip. Said what he said, Yeah, so I used to own this house up in Sholo.

Forty miles east of where police found Mary's forerunner.

And this man that used to live there was attacked by a man that came out of the woods asking for money and food. And it was right around the time that Fisher disappeared. And I don't think they ever caught that person. And immediately my journalism senses are like wow, because especially with a case like this, you get so many tips that it's easy to say, oh, this is just not credible, or oh, there's nothing to that. But this is coming from somebody who investigations like this and had for a long time. So I'm thinking, wow, I've got to track this down. This is a crazy tip. So I tracked down the house. Then I went back looked at like the county assessor's website to figure out who owned it. Figured that part out he had since died, but it was easy to go back and find old information. So once I had his name, I figured, Okay, now I'm trying to figure out if there's a police report who took it. I believe it ended up being the Navajo County Sheriff's office, and I put in a Freedom of Information Act request which is known as a FOYA, to get the police report from that day. I got it back and it described this entire interaction. This guy comes out of the woods. He's asking the homeowner for money. The homeowner says he'll allow him to work around the house or work on his property for money. The guy says no and then ends up hitting him, and there's an assault that goes down, and then before officers can get there, the man is gone. They never found him. And that's what the report says, which is very Robert Fisher. And then it goes on to say the man's tall, slender that also could be Robert Fisher. It did say he was likely in his twenties, which would not have fit Robert, but you never really know what those things. There was quite a bit that did fit it. Where we were able to rule this tip out completely was the date this happened, I believe, eight months before the Fisher family home exploded. And that's how we were able to say, okay, no, this was not Robert. He had not disappeared at that point, and the detective just got the months off just a little bit, so we know that that's not Robert Finland.

My mom called me Britney Fisher's teacher, Ms Honey.

And she says, so they think they found Robert Fisher in Finland, and it was her Finish sources that thought that they had found it. It wasn't necessarily the FBI. It was rumor and mail going around in Finland, specifically Helsinki. And then my mom said, yeah, he would blend in there perfectly, but then he would have to learn Finish, so then he would stand out. So then we thought probably not, but who knows.

Australia in late two thousand and one or early two thousand and two, a doctor who knew Fisher is on vacation in Australia when he sees a man who looks just like, yes, you guessed it Fisher. I contact the doctor but he never responds. Instead, I speak to a colleague who worked with both men. He requests ananimity.

Because we all believe that he's still alive, and if he was capable of doing this to his family and he was truly trying to hide, and if he was starting to be pinned down or something like that, would he retaliated the people that gave inside information to how he could be found.

There was that feary us.

Definitely.

We meet at a donut shop, which by chance started renovations. Today, of all days, it's loud cacaffeinists. We're at a tiny table in the corner as workers hammer and saw behind us. I expect to be buzzed at a cafe, but not like this. However, I don't want to scare off the source. And the donuts in Vietnamese iced coffee are great. Shout out to Bosa Donuts. So we proceed with the interview.

What did he say he saw in Australia, Him and his wife and I think his kids. They were on vacation in Australia and they were in an open area. It was like an open marketplace, walkways and stuff like that, and he said, I saw this guy. We had eye contact.

He goes, I know it was Robert Fisher.

He goes, I immediately grabbed my family and we took off and we went in a building and called the police, and the police showed up.

They explained the situation.

The police actually contacted the FBI. The FBI helped the Australian police kind of put them in hiding, moved them out of their hotel room, put them in a different hotel room in hiding, and then they were down there and found the person and it was not him.

Oof, probably the worst audio of any interview I have ever done. I'm sorry anyway, to make a long story short, the man in Australia was not Fisher.

The medical magazine there.

Was publication, a medical publication that I saw that they had taken a picture of a healthcare worker in a hospital in Canada, and that picture looked exactly like Robert Fisher. And I contacted the FBI about that, and they went up there and they found that person, interviewed him, determined he was not Robert Fisher.

The sheepherder's cabin.

Before the murders, this coworker told Robert about a secret spot in northern Arizona.

There was like an old sheepherders cabin there.

Can you tell me about that cabin?

Was it abandoned, Yes, it had been abandoned for probably thirty forty years.

It was very.

Small, probably smaller than this little section that we're in. Yeah, very very tiny, but it was It was about ten fifteen miles north.

Of Williams forty five miles south of the Grand Canyon.

Today, you can't even get there. It's all cordoned off and private land and stuff like that. So but back then it was very I wouldn't say easy to get to. You had to kind of know where it was to get there, and a lot of people typically didn't go there unless it was like hunting season.

People would you would see.

More people at that time of year. But this happened in the spring, and hunting season in Arizona's mostly in the fall.

So you've told the police about this span, Yeah, do you know if they want to go to truck?

Yeah, and they they didn't find anything there, the canyon man.

A few weeks after Fisher vanishes, Scottsdale Detective TJ. Juran gets a call from a sheriff's deputy in Coconino County, north of Phoenix.

And he said, Hey, I had an interesting incident occurred. They were doing a search and rescue in a canyon. So where Robert Fisher's truck was found. If you walk up Young Road to two sixty year now on.

Top of the rim, the muggy on rem.

Just west of that is a lake called Willow Springs Lake. Behind that lake, it's damned. Behind that dam is a canyon. At first, it starts out to be a small canyon, then it grows, and I've piked it a couple of time. They had a search and rescue and there were two incidents where they were on a cliff doing a rescue and he looked out over the canyon and he saw a man.

Now wasn't Robert Fisher.

Who knows, but he resembled them, And once he saw the search and rescues, he turned around and beat feet. Another incident occurred where in that canyon you can fish the stream there, and supposedly.

A guy was down there.

I don't know if he was fishing or hunting, and some guy approached him and got mad at him that he was in his area. So the guy got kind of creeped out and left. And then, of course, when somebody mentioned Robert Fisher and showed him a picture, he says, that looks like the guy that confronted me. Could it be possible he was up there for a little while before he left the area. Sure, it's possible, but I do not believe that he's living out in the country as a grizzly Adams. I'm just not buying it.

The gold panning hermit.

There was a guy, a hermit living up outside of Prescott.

Former FBI agent Bob Caldwell.

And he was panning for gold and they said he looked like Fisher. As soon as I got the call, I called some law enforcement up there that I know. They actually went out found the guy. He's living in a little lean to tent panning for gold.

It wasn't Robert the Fossil Creek burdler.

For many years police keep an eye on car and cabin break ins in the Arizona Wilderness. We had one guy that was doing burglaries once again. HeLa County Detective Brian Hay at.

The Fossil Creek Trail had a camp up there, hidden in.

The woods, eighteen miles northwest of Payson, and.

It took us almost six months to find his little man cave out in the woods.

This was sometime in the early two thousands.

He had firearms and weapons and dan goods and stuff.

They catched the burglar. It's not Robert.

Fisher, the Utah mountain Man.

From twenty seven to thirteen, A mysterious man breaks into dozens of cabins in the Utah Mountains. By winter, he steals supplies, defaces religious icons, and leaves little notes that, depending on his mood, are either menacing or polite. By summer, as hikers flood in, he hides in the woods with guns, radios, batteries, and dehydrated food. The longer he evades authorities, the more his legend grows. He morphs into a folk hero. In twenty twelve, he's caught on camera in Camo toating a rifle and shuffling around in purple snowshoes. He kind of looks like Robert Fisher. The FBI considers the possibility that he might be Fisher, but in twenty thirteen police catch him. His name is Troy James Knapp. My sources here were Outside magazine and the Associated Press.

The Buddhist compound.

Investigating this case. I repeatedly hear rumors linking Robert Fisher to a remote Buddhist compound. Specif that residence of the compound saw Fisher a week before the murders, not far from where police find Mary's suv, maybe stashing supplies or scoping out an escape route. Or that the Buddhist helped fisher flee, which is laughable. I picture robes of monks running through the woods with a gun toting conservative fugitive. It's absurd but intriguing, and I have to exhaust every lead before every lead exhausts me. So I search and search for months, no luck. Then I find Woody kleinb Thank you for playing Where in the world is Carmen San Diego with?

I appreciate it.

Woody is a lifelong resident of HeLa County and a member of the Board of Supervisors.

Well, Heila County goes from about twenty eight hundred feet to over seven thousand feet pushing eight thousand feet, so you've got all the lower desert type country right up into the pines, so you got grasslands in between, and literally you can change climates in about two hours in Ina County. Is cool, but a lot of people do have that perspective that we're all desert. We're not. You know, winter times, we'll get snow down to the thirty five hundred four thousand foot mark, which puts snow on the sorrels in the desert. Even on the higher elevations. It's not uncommon to have two or three feet of snow.

What he is, and I say this sincerely, thank God, familiar with the Buddhist compound. In fact, he now owns part of it.

I bought the cattle part of it. They had one hundred and fifty acres right there, and I had the cattle, and I had a camp and crailes right there next to them. So I was going through there quite a bit and talking to him and whatnot.

You know the name of the ranch, by chance, it's the ellen Wood Ranch at ellen Wood.

Yeah Ell INWD.

The Ellenwood Ranch is fourteen miles west as the crow flies of where police find Mary's fore runner. It appears to have been owned in two thousand and one by a Brooklyn born woman whose followers believe she's a reincarnated seventeenth century saint who lived in a cave in the mid two thousands. What he takes three members of law enforcement to the compound to ask about Robert Fisher.

We honestly didn't spend more than about fifteen minutes in there with those folks.

I went to the Buddhist calling, I talked to those people there.

Former FBI agent Bob Caldwell.

He wasn't there.

They never had contact with him at all. He's not the kind of person they would allow him there.

Anyway.

I went over there as well.

Kila County Detective Brian Haby. So you went and investigated o lead.

What do you remember that virtually every male subject that was at the Buddhist camp fit Robert Fisher's description by their haircut, skin color, so on and so forth. So it could have been easily a mistaken identity, but they had seen nobody, and anybody that walks into the Buddhist camp is recognized and talked to, and so had he been there, they would have definitely known about it.

Colorado.

On October eleventh, twenty fourteen, police in Commerce City, Colorado, northeast of get a tip that Fisher is hiding in a local townhouse. When they respond, two men flee. One appears to reach for a weapon, so an officer shoots at him and missus. Police catch and fingerprint the men. Neither is Fisher. This lead was first reported by the Arizona Republic. The traffic stop sometime in the late twenty tens, we had.

A traffic stop out in the West Valley.

Scott Stale, Detective John Heinzelmann.

By a Miracle County Sheriff's deputy where he made a traffic stop and he said, oh, this is him, and we rallied. I remember coming to this building from home, like, get in here right now. They've got him all to turn around to say, okay, it's not.

The FBI encounter.

While in Arizona, I interview a Fisher family friend who requests anonymity. A few years ago, while touring FBI headquarters in DC, she turned a corner and ran into Robert Fisher quote and I literally screamed. I mean, it was like, ah, and my husband and goes, look, we're at the FBI museum. You didn't think he'd be here, And I go, this is ridiculous. It was like a full size poster of him. It just freaked me out. Okay, yes that was a red herring. I'm sorry. It was just too good to pass up. She wasn't traumatized. I promise we laughed about it together. This story is so deeply sad. It's an active defiance to make space for levity. Speaking of the FBI, I get why they removed Fisher from the ten most Wanted list, but I hope they put him back on it. In the meantime, special Agent Taylor Hannah and Scott Still Detective John Heinzelman. The current investigators are busy. They get leads almost every week, me and John.

Topically you vet them together. Sometimes they come via FBI, sometimes they come through Scott Stilpadi.

Unfortunately, there's really no good formula to vet tips that come in, and it's anywhere from on the one side to say, I'm a psychic in Boise, Idaho, and I had this vision that I saw him, or all the way up to he's this guy. I think one that I had was he's a pastor in a small church in Wisconsin, and here's his name, and here he is. So those are kind of things that I'll talk to folks about. What's an actionable lead or what's something that I can follow up on a homeless guy in the streets of Los Angeles. There's not much that we can really go out and do. But if it's he's living under this name and he's in this community, then we have something that we can work up and determine. Okay, is this person is he just look like him or is it something that we need to go with it even further.

Let's say Robert Fisher is alive. Can you imagine interviewing him?

Oh my gosh, that would be my number one interview I could ever ask for.

Once more, Brianna Whitney, the host of True Crime Arizona.

I have so many questions. Obviously mean everybody else, but no, I can't imagine. And honestly, I am quite sure that if he was found alive, he wouldn't say a word.

I think the same thing. I feel like if they somehow found him, he would say nothing. He would wait for an attorney, there would be a trial, and he would not be one of these guys that would speak. I think he would sit there in silence with a smirk on his face.

That's what I think too. I think he's way too conceded to give away any sort of how he's been living or what happened.

Well, and you know, one of the things I asked people is how intelligent he was, And everybody has told me the same thing, which is like he was kind of smart, like not Einstein, not super high Q. But if Robert Fisher pulled this off and is alive, this was one of the greatest escapes in the history of American crime, and that a degree of intelligence.

I was going to say, yeah, if he pulled us off and he's still alive, then he's smarter than everybody thinks. You can't be mediocre and pulled this off.

Summer twenty twenty three, Chris and I are still hiking to the cryptic cabin, the hideaway shack, a tipster told us about sixteen miles north of where police found Mary's forerunner. But I don't think this is safe. I think we should turn around. Well, that's unfortunate. That's better than what breaking your leg and tumbling down five hundred feet Again for everybody listening at home, Yeah, we have no cell service. It's just me and Chris. We're in hiking boots. But we're on the side of this very steep hill more than forty five degree angle, probably fifty or sixty degrees. You're one slippery rock away from tumbling down five hundred six hundred feet. It's spraining your ankle or breaking your leg. There's no clear path for us to get to these coordinates. I mean, I think it would take us safely probably another few hours, and we're not even that far. As the crow flies it's also getting darker. It looks like it a thunderstorm, and we've still got a hike a mile and a half. We should go, Can you lead us out? We tried so we don't make it to the cabin, but I review photos of it. It's petite and made of logs. To get in, you crouch down and crawl through a small door. Inside there's dirt covered detritis, a rake, a saw, a frying pan, a cooler, white mugs, a Folger's coffee container, no sign of a pistol or winter green tobacco.

Ten.

As we come to a clo I want to review all the leads we covered in this episode. Am Nosy Neighbor, the bunker rye Barra hitchhiker paysin Walmart, paysin Bashi's Colorado, tow truck driver, pawn Shop, old Ford traffic Stop, Oak Flat, Tortilla Flat, the Baby Blue Truck, Mexico, Canada, Finland, Australia, No More Singing, Guatemala, Malicious Gap, the Pyramids, the medical Magazine, the two thousand and three neighbor leads, the Buddhist compound, the gold Panting Hermit, the canyon Man, the mountain Man, the sheepherder's cabin, Fossil Creek, Burglar, FBI headquarters, even this damn shack ah, so many leads. We didn't start the fire, but we're looking for the man who did. Coming up a rocky hill with my henley choking my neck so that the mic doesn't slide too far down, only the best audio for our loyal fans want to capture this and all it's glory. So if I coumble down a hillside and they find this, they'll be very sad, but at least at least still have an ending. Next time I'm missing in Arizona, her husband recall and red friny messages for.

Robert Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Someone had mentioned he might be homosexual, and maybe it was his homosexual lover.

You can reach us by phone at one eight three three new tips that's one eight three three six three nine eight four seven seven, by email at tips at iHeartMedia dot com, tip s at iHeartMedia dot com, online at neon thirty three dot com, or on Twitter at John Wallzac j O n W A. L. Czak. Paul Duckan is our executive producer. Chris Brown is our supervising producer. Hannah Rose Snyder is our producer, Paul Gemperlin is our researcher, Ben Bowen is a consulting producer, and I'm your host and executive producer John Wallzac special thanks to Bring Whitney. If people want to follow you on socials or anything, where can they find you?

I'm on the mall, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I mean all of it's the same. It's at Brianna Whitney. Brianna only have one in.

Additional production support provided by Ben Hackett. Recreations voiced by Joe McCormick, Matt Frederick and Ben Bollen. Header titles voiced by Me and morphed with altered AI software. Cover art by Pam Peacock. Neon thirty three logo designed by Derek Rudy. Our intro song is Utopia by Ruby Cube. Please download the first two seasons of our show, Missing in Alaska and Missing on nine to eleven, and if you're so inclined, give us a five star rating. Missing in Arizona is a co production of iHeartRadio and Neon thirty three

Missing in Arizona

In 2001, Robert Fisher killed his family, blew up their suburban home, and vanished in a remote Ariz 
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