Missing in ArizonaExperts — and famous family slayings — offer clues.
Missing in Arizona contains graphic depictions of violence and may not be suitable for all listeners. This episode also discusses suicide. You can reach the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at nine to eight eight. I want you to run an experiment. Go to Google News, type in mankill's family, See what comes up. I'm scripting this episode. On May sixth, twenty twenty four, two weeks ago, a forty two year old named Jonathan Candy shot and killed his thirty nine year old wife, Lindsay, and three of their sons, ages eighteen, fourteen, and twelve. He then died by suicide. For some reason, he didn't kill his youngest son. That boy, ten years old, woke up the next morning, found his family dead, and called nine one to one. Jonathan Candy was a video engineer. He lived in a nice home in a well to do, Oklahoma City suburb. Hours before the murders, he even attended an NBA game that night, Jonathan and Lindsay had a fight. Jonathan shot Lindsay, then went room to room, killing his three older sons. According to Koco, a local TV station, it's unclear why he didn't kill his youngest son, or how that boy either slept through everything or ignored it. The Candy and Fisher cases are similar. Everyone was roughly the same age, dads, respectable jobs, moms caring for the kids, nice suburban homes, late night fights that apparently led to murder, no known history of domestic violence. These cases are called familicides, or more brutally, family annihilations. They're rare statistically, yet they're common enough that by the time this episode airs, you'll be able to google man kills family and read about yet another tragic, comparable case. This speaks to broader societal patterns. We lift up men, push down women, and try to subjugate women who don't consent to being controlled, often with violence. Yes, in some ways the Candy and Fisher cases stand out the Candy Boy survived, Robert Fisher disappeared. But in other ways they're not unique at all. They share similarities with hundreds of other familicides, and in these similarities we have an opportunity not only to learn about Robert Fisher, but to save lives 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. It's tough to research familicide because so little research has been done. The only experts are a few hyper specialized academics scattered around the globe, including Neil Webs Based of all places, in Phoenix, Neil is director of Arizona State University's Family Violence Center. He also has the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative. I'm looking at the Robert Fisher case. I'm sure, as a specialist and familicide in Arizona, you're familiar with that case.
Yeah, I know the Fisher case.
Yeah.
Neil wrote a book called Familicidal Hearts the emotional styles of two hundred and eleven killers. He divides family annihilators into two categories.
Vivid coercive, the sort of classic angry batterer who's bullying but vulnerable and dependent at the same time.
This annihilator is the stereotypical wife beater, motivated by shame and anger. He's obsessed with being a man, but he's really a bully. He hides, interfeares of abandonment, weak, with outer spasms of violence strong to him. Masculinity is control and control is violence.
These men, when you really look at their lives, they're not that powerful, they're not that in control. In fact, they kill when they're out of control and their power is ebbing.
About fifty percent of annihilators fit the livid course of subtype.
On the other end, civil repeatable. These are offenders where I could find no prior history of domestic violence. They were often respectable members of the community. There's often a lot of surprise expressed about the killing. The killings often were done not necessarily in the heat of rage, but as part of the unfolding of very uncomfortable circumstances like, for example, foreclosure on a mortgage, loss of a job, some grand ignominious end, perhaps saving the family from destitution, thinking that you're doing people of favor. Some people refer to this as misguided ultruism. There's a strong sense of entitlement there. There's a strong sense of narcissism there. Often there's a lot of repression, depression, suicidality, often very much masked, and they would probably number a third and then there was the remainder. Twenty percent of cases that rattled both I call those contradictory cases, and it was difficult to classify them.
This is probably where Robert Fisher falls in the middle. Civil reputable, a church going man who works at a hospital, no known history of domestic violence. His life spirals out of control. He'd rather kill his family than see it break apart like his did when he was fifteen. His parents had an acrimonious divorce, which impacted him severely. The boy whose world is destroyed becomes as a man, the destroyer of worlds. This blends into the other subtype, livid course of hyper masculine me man very controlling. One example, Robert fixated on Mary's weight. A family friend told me Robert quote was not going to have a fat wife or kids. Mary would hide cookies around the house. Another friend said, quote, he would make her go out and walk, then he would lock the door and he wouldn't let her in if he didn't think it was long enough. He was like, you need to do a double walk. A final example, the salt incident.
We went camping with them one time.
Fits your family friend John rode In, is there a night to cook.
They cook try tip steak, and she forgot the salt and he would not let that go.
You just like nagging her for the whole night.
John's wife Mary Beth, and we had salt.
Well, forgetting salt was like, what a jerk.
He could be a jerk and she wouldn't fight with him. She was very controlled by him. I remember once I drove from our house in Skoyspell to the Pavilions and then went later with her to dinner that night. She's like, I can't believe that John lets you drive there twice in one day. Like okay, I never even thought about that. He controls where you drive, how far you drive, how much you eat, like Mary, how many pieces of pizza? Is that just very controlling, but she put up with it.
My second femalo side expert is David Wilson. David is British, which seems random to say, but it's relevant. I'll tell you why in a minute we chat by zoom. David takes great delight when I use in American phrases like.
On the lamb. I love that I went to school in North Carolina and.
I always you know, I'm from North Carolina.
Oh, while I was at Chapel Hill.
I grew up in Carry, North Carolina, right near Chapel Hell.
Oh wonderful. I have such fond memories and we're speaking at such a sad time about Carolina, aren't we? In Because of the murder a couple of days ago.
It was literally yesterday. On August twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, a grad student shot and killed a chemistry professor at UNC. This is where the UK angle comes in. David co authored a seminole paper called A Taxonomy of Male British Family Annihilators. He studied fifty nine British annihilators. I didn't consider that important. I didn't even think about it before we spoke, but it matters.
Gaining access to guns in Britain is very difficult. As a result of the dun Blaine massacre of those school children in Scotland on.
March thirteenth, nineteen ninety six, a forty three year old man killed sixteen five year olds, their teacher and himself. The massacre led to a handgun ban in most of the UK. I want you to run another experiment. Go to Google news, type in school shooting. See what comes up again. I'm scripting this. On May sixth, twenty twenty four. Three days ago, a bullet hit a girl at a high school in DC. Five days ago, police shot and killed a boy with a pellet gun outside of middle school in Wisconsin. Twelve days ago, a boy shot and killed another boy at a high school in Texas. This is our society. That's not a comment on gun control. It's a statement of fact. This is our society. This is America twenty twenty four. And this is why I have to highlight that David is British, because easy access to guns means that while in many ways his findings on femili side are universal, in some ways they're unique to the UK. For example, only six of the fifty nine annihilators David studied used guns. The five most common methods were stabbing nineteen, carbon monoxide poisoning nine, strangulation eight, bludgeoning seven, fire seven, and then guns six. Most common day of the week Sunday, most common month August. Most common locations home thirty four, country lane ten, beauty spot six other nine. Most annihilators had jobs. Fifty five percent were thirty to thirty nine years old. Eighty four percent of victims were under the age of ten. Sixty six percent of cases were triggered by family breakdown, meaning the family broke up or was about to break up. How do the fissures fit in here? Robert was thirty nine normal employed normal. He killed Mary and the kids at home normal by slitting their throats abnormal, and shooting Mary abnormal. For the UK, Bobby was ten and Brittany was twelve abnormal.
The murders were likely.
Triggered by family breakdown normal and took place in April abnormal, on a Monday or Tuesday abnormal. You might ask, why does the day or month matter, Well, think about it. The most common month August, the most common day Sunday, the summer, the weekend.
Lots of fathers would gain access to their children, especially during school holidays, when they had access arrangements. After they had perhaps left the family home. They would take the children as if they were going to spend some time at his home or say at a picnic area, but he would rig the car so that they would all die through carbon monoxide poisoning.
David's paper separates annihilators into four categories, disappointed, anomic, paranoid, and self righteous, disappointed, believes that the family has let him down, that they've failed, either actively or passively, from fulfilling his view of what a family should be. Sees family as simply an extension of his own needs, desires, hopes.
And aspirations.
Anomic has lost the source of the family's income or is facing the threat of bankruptcy. Oversocialized into a belief that consumption determines quality.
Of life, paranoid.
Annihilator believes that an external threat, which may be real or imagined, such as from social services whom he believes will take his children into care, will destroy his family. In his own mind, killing his family is a way of protecting them from that threat. Self righteous seeks to blame his partner or ex partner for the annihilation. Will have often been controlling, slash possessive in the past, narcissistic and dramatic, both in the method by which the annihilation takes place and in his statements prior to the murders.
I was always amazed by how performative the family annihilators in our study, where these are very dramatic events, and it reveals the underlying need for the hegemonic masculinity of the annihilator to be able to demonstrate, even in the moment when lives are being taken, that he's still the man.
This squarely fits Fisher. A family killed their throats, cut, a wife shot in the head, a house raped to explode. Robert the man is really Robert. The drama Queen David repeatedly mentions a similar annihilator named Christopher Foster. In two thousand and eight, Foster, a fifty year old British man, shot and killed his wife and daughter, their dogs and horses, burned down their house, and died by suicide.
What unites all of the family annihilators, whether you're talking about Robert Fisher or whether we're talking about Christopher Foster, is an idea of the performance of masculinity and how they have total control over their family as they see it, to do as they would please with those people within their family. They do not see their family members, their partner, their children as sentient beings, but almost as possessions, almost as if they're just like the TV or some kind of r They are simply reduced to being objects that can be used for whatever purpose the family annihilator would like to use them for.
I've tried to paint Robert Fisher not as a simplistic demon, but as a complex man, in part to highlight that there's no universal portrait of evil. Evil often sees you before you see it. By the time you know someone's evil, it might be too late to save yourself. Evil can lie dormant in a civil shell, then explode outward with sudden force.
It would be really easy if violent men, if murderers and serial murderers or family annihilators had horns on their head and a long pointed tail, we could point to them and say that's the killer. Avoid them. It doesn't work like that. There is a Hollywood trope that somebody like a Fisher, or serial killers or mass murderers more generally, will be some kind of dysfunctional loner who is clearly not socialized within his peer group or within the community in which he lives or operates. However, that's not the case. Whether we're talking about serial murderers or family annihilators. These men are often incredibly successful and well socialized within the group or neighborhood. They are seen as trustworthy and you know, John, whether we're talking about the United States or in Britain, And if I just think about serial murder for a second, our most prolific serial killer in Britain was a respected old fashioned general practitioner at GP, doctor Harold Shipman, who kills two hundred and fifteen, perhaps as many as two hundred and sixty of mostly older women patients that he had within his general practice. When he was first arrested, the other patients in his practice were so annoyed that Shipmen had been arrested they set up a fund to pay for his legal expenses, a fighting fund. So you know, here were somebody who was respected within the community. And if I think about the United States, your most prolific serial killer was a nurse, Charles Cullin.
Can I stop you real quick. I was born on September eighth, nineteen eighty eight, in Saint Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, New Jersey. That is the hospital where Charles Colin worked, and he was actively working as a nurse when my brother and I were both born there. I was born in eighty eight, my brother was born in nineteen ninety one. So the hospital where I was born in Livingston, New Jersey, Saint Barnabas is exactly where the most prolific serial killer in American history was working at the time I was born.
This is why you are so fascinated with true crime. I absolutely guarantee, and I often say John, that an interest in true crime is not just normal, it's necessary because if we understand the circumstances and which we are likely to face violence, we can avoid them. And there's a speed. As a specie, human beings have evolved because we solved mysteries, and why people kill is a mystery, and we want to understand that phenomenon better. And that's why it's normal and necessary to have the kind of interest that you've got and to do the kinds of podcasts that you want to make.
So I said, my brother was born in nineteen ninety one. Well, my family at the time lived in a town in New Jersey called Sayerville, New Jersey. And there's a famous case nine days after my brother was born, where this little boy disappeared from a carnival. His body was found, but for many years they didn't arrest anyone. They later arrested the mother. Five year old Timothy Wilsey disappeared from a carnival in Sayerville, New Jersey on May twenty fifth, nineteen ninety one. I was two at the time, living a mile away. Police found Tim's remains in a marsh. His mother was later arrested, convicted of murder, and sent to prison. Then in twenty one, in a shocking four to three vote, the state Supreme Court set her free.
While not a.
Family annihilation, the wilty case was high profile for an obvious reason. The accused killer was Tim's mom. We can barely process these crimes when committed by a father, let alone a mother. How can a father kill his kids? How can a mother? Female annihilators exist, but they're rare. I wish I could tell you more, but believe it or not, no one keeps statistics. I can't go to FBI dot gov and search annihilation data. There is none, which, by the way, from a policy perspective, seems like low hanging fruit. We should track this stuff at a federal level. Regardless. Familicide is undeniably overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. David tells me something surprising. In the not so distant past, judges sometimes went easy on killer dads.
There was one particular case where the judge says, I think you suffered enough, and gay from a suspended sentence. It was unbelievable.
Now I have two more critical questions for David. One what can his research tell us about premeditation? And two what can it tell us about suicide? How likely is it that Robert Fisher planned the murders in advance? And how likely is it that he died by suicide? How common was it in family annihilations that the family annihilator premeditated and planned the annihilation versus day in the popular imagination snapped because I think people have trouble understanding how somebody could do this.
None of the family annihilator that I studied ever snapped. They all had planned to a greater or lesser extent. All of the family annihilations were a consequence of circumstances within the family that he felt he was no longer able to control. So you can talk about premeditation in a very kind of you know, like he had gasoline that he was going to burn the house, doarn he had bought that specially, he had thought about when the children were going to be home. He had premeditated to the extent of thinking in which order would he kill the children.
Every single annihilator, David studied. Fifty nine out of fifty nine showed evidence of premeditation, a finding supported by Neil Websdale, who splits annihilators into two groups, livid, coursive and civil reputable.
Premeditation was a strong element in both sets of cases. It was particularly strong in the civil reputable cases where people planned it out very carefully and clearly. The Fisher case is an example where there was considerable planning.
My third and final expert is Taylor Oatal. Taylor is a PhD student at the State University of New York at Albany. She spent a year and a half studying thirty nine familicides that occurred in the US between twenty nine and twenty nineteen.
The overwhelming majority of family sides are premeditated, even if it's not the full family unit. This is a trend I've seen in multiple cases is that they will plan on killing the spouse right and now they have this realization that they've killed the mother of their children. They are now a single parent. They don't want that burden, so they follow up and kill their children.
It's important that all three experts, Taylor, David, and Neil say familicide is almost always premeditated, because in the Fisher case, police have so far made public very little evidence, if any, that Robert planned the murders in advance. They note that he changed his oil two days before the murders, so what? And that he bought water purification supplies the night of the murders. Again, so what? He was going to go camping that weekend? Well, they say he always used bottled water. He never purified it with tablets or pumps. But I found a likely explanation for this in a police file. A few days before the murders, Robert and a neighbor watched a TV show called Eco Challenge, which featured a segment on water purification, which intrigued Robert. Well, police say, what about the ATM Robert took out two hundred and eighty dollars right before the murders.
Again, so what.
The only evidence that made sense to me were the poor patterns proving that a liquid accelerant was used, which would indicate the arsonists stocked it up in advance. But in episode three we debunked this. Poor patterns are junk science. Not to mention, neither arsen dogs nor lab tests detected any liquid accelerant. My point here is not that Robert didn't premeditate the murders. I think he did. I'll make that case in a later episode. My point is that everything cited so far publicly as evidence of premeditation is in fact garbage. So that's why the academic angle is important. If Fisher's caught and there's a trial, prosecutors will likely call some of the same experts I've interview you'd end this episode, who found that the vast majority of annihilators did in fact premeditate their crimes. Finally, let me say this to law enforcement. If you have any better evidence, I recommend you make it public asap. There are people who know stuff, and they don't want to talk to you because they still don't believe Robert did this, or if they do, they think he snapped, not that it was a cold blooded, premeditated crime. If you want to squeeze out new leads, show these folks they're wrong. There's no point in saving evidence for a trial that's never going to happen. You got to catch him first. 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 Walczak. Thanks for listening. Now, the key question Robert Fischer's fate. What happened to him? Did he die by suicide in the wilderness? Did he escape in the absence of evidence? What can research tell us?
It wouldn't surprise me if he was alive at all. It looked like that was a well planned.
Exit, Neil Websdale.
He knew what he was doing, He planned it. The exit strategy was there.
The idea that someone can kill their children and not die by suicide is tough to process. When I ask people who think Fisher died why they think that, they inevitably asked me a question, how could he live with himself? Let's turn to statistics. David Wilson studied the fate of fifty nine annihilators. Forty died by suicide, thirty one immediately after the murders, six after a short delay, and three after a long delay. Eight attempted suicide but lived. The final eleven did not attempt suicide. That's a sizable minority nineteen percent, and it might be even higher in the US.
I wonder if they had been Americans, they would have attempted suicide by cop, and of course, because our police aren't routinely armed in Britain, that was never going to be an option.
And the biggest question of all, how common did you find cases in which male family annihilators successfully escaped.
None. I had no examples where the annihilator would escape or be still at large in the way that you were describing about Robert Fisher.
Remember, David identified four types of annihilators self righteous, disappointed, anomic, and paranoid. Taylor Ohal, the PhD student, further classifies as as either.
Self preserving or mentally ill.
If I had to categorize Robert Fisher, it would be self righteous or self preserving. So these offenders are less likely to commit suicide self preserving specifically, and they're more likely to deny that they had anything to do with it and flee because again, the only person that they're.
Concerned with are themselves.
And in this case, I would say, it's less about revenge and more about I need to shed myself with this family unit they're holding you back.
Taylor found that eighty five percent of American annihilators died by suicide, similar to the eighty one percent of British annihilators who either died by suicide or attempted it. That figure is lower for self preserving offenders like Robert Fisher.
Only sixty percent of these offenders commit suicide. They don't think they're going to be caught. They're above the law in their minds, so they don't need to kill themselves. For that reason, they view their family more as accessories than an actual family, so they don't feel compelled to reunify that family. That's why they were killing them in the first place. So they don't kill themselves, and they triumph flee because that, in their mind is what they're entitled to. They're saving themselves. They're gonna get rid of this family so that they can go and have a better life.
Like David Taylor found.
That nobody successfully fled.
If committing familicide and not dying by suicide is less common in the fifteen to twenty percent range, successful escapes are almost unheard of, and Robert Fisher did successfully escape. We just don't know his ultimate fate. Let's look now at a few similar cases and see if we can learn anything chrishiun Lungo. Longo, his wife, and their three kids, ages two, three, and four lived in Newport, Oregon, a seaside town of ten thousand. In December two thousand and one, Longo killed his family. He dumped two of the bodies, his wife and youngest daughter in Yaquina Bay next to Newport. Just outside the bay sits the wreck of an old ship. It is, by chance, my great grandfather's ship. He captained it during World War Two. After the war it sank mysteriously. It's known as the ship that committed suicide. Anyway, After Longo suffocated and strangled his family, he fled to Mexico. If you're wondering how an annihilator can live with himself, listen to this. Longo stole the identity of a New York Times writer named Michael Finkel. He spent his days in Cancun and Taloom, dancing, drinking, skinny dipping, and hooking up with a German woman. After someone recognized him, he was arrested, extradited, and sentenced to death. Finkol, the reporter, later wrote a book about the case called True Story Murder Memoir Maya Culpa, which was turned into a movie starring James Franco and Jonah Hill.
Xavier DuPont de Legonez.
In April twenty eleven, a French aristocrat named Xavier du BoNT de Legonez shot and killed his wife and four kids, ages thirteen, sixteen, eighteen, and twelve.
He also killed his.
Dogs and buried them in the backyard with his family. Xavier, the same age as Robert Fisher, then fled to southern France, where he spent four nights in hotels. He was last seen withdrawing cash from an ATM before abandoning his car and vanishing. Police didn't open an investigation until April nineteenth, twenty eleven, ten years to the day from when Mary Fisher's forerunner was found in Arizona. It took so long in part because Xavier spread letters saying the family was moving abroad immediately. That bought him time, maybe ten days. His last known location was a small town on the French Riviera, surrounded by rugged terrain. Like Fisher, investigators think he died by suicide in the wild, or escaped and is alive. They searched caves and abandoned mines for his remains. They didn't find any. In twenty fifteen, someone sent a photo of two of the murdered children to a journalist. On the back, they wrote, I am still alive from then until this hour and signed the name Xavier DuPont de Lagnez. In twenty sixteen, a security camera filmed a man who resembled Xavier at a French casino. In twenty eighteen, police raided a monastery looking for him, no luck. The case remains unresolved. Bradford Bishop Bishop was a Yale graduate who spoke five languages and worked for the US State Department. On March first, nineteen seventy six, after failing to get a promotion, he left work. Agitated, he went to a bank, pulled out cash, and bought a sledgehammer, a gas can, a shovel, and a pitchfork. Later that night, he bludgeoned to death his mom, wife, and three sons, ages five, ten, and fourteen. He packed all five bodies into a red station wagon and drove from suburban DC to an isolated swampy spot in eastern North Carolina, where he dug a pit and lit everyone on fire. He then stopped at an outdoor store in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where he used a credit card to buy fifteen dollars and sixty cents worth of supplies. Two weeks later, police found his car abandoned at a campground in the Smoky Mountains. In the back were a bloody blanket, a shotgun, and an axe. According to the Associated Press, the back wheel well was filled with blood. An FBI agent told reporters quote were working on the assumption that Bishop abandoned the car and took off into the mountains. Bradford Bishop and Robert Fisher share similar profiles. They were both thirty nine, Their wives were thirty seven and thirty eight. Their kids were about the same age. Both men allegedly killed their children as they slept in bed. Both have surgical scars on their lower backs. Both served in the military. Both are avid out doorsmen. Both care about fitness. Both are extremely controlling. Both prefer neat and orderly environments. Both lived in well to do suburbs, had no known history of domestic violence, and were once again respectable. Listen to this from a nineteen seventy nine Associated Press article. It's about the Bishops, but it could easily be about the Fishers. Quote neighbors describing the family as well liked puzzled along with police over the possible motive for the mass slaying. Police believed the most plausible theory of what happened to Bishop is that he carried out an elaborate plan to disappear. Since then, hundreds of sightings of Bishop have poured in from all over the world. From twenty fourteen to eighteen, the FBI put him on its ten most wanted list. In twenty twenty one, the FBI announced that a sixty three year old woman adopted as a child discovered via a commercial DNA test that Bishop was her biological father. Bishop apparently had her in college long before the murders and may not have known she existed. If alive, Bishop would be eighty eight. The case remains unresolved. John List by far the most famous family annihilator of all time. In November nineteen seventy one, List shot and killed his mom and wife. He then made him self a sandwich and went to the bank before picking up two of his kids, ages thirteen and sixteen, from school, taking them home, and killing them.
That night, his.
Fifteen year old son had a soccer game. List attended the game, then drove the boy home and killed him two. He staged the bodies of his wife and kids in the ballroom of the family mansion in Westfield, New Jersey. He left his mom in her attic apartment. Lisz wrote a letter saying he killed everyone to save their souls. He lowered the air conditioning to preserve the bodies, piped in organ music through an entercom system, halted deliveries of milk, mail and the newspaper. Wrote letters saying his kids were visiting a sick relative, cut his face out of every family photo, and bolted. Police didn't find the bodies for almost a month. Imagine crawling through a window at night into a chilly mansion filled with gloomy organ music and five bodies. Two weeks after the murders, a man using the alias DBA Cooper hijacked a plane in the Pacific Northwest and parachuted out with two hundred thousand dollars cash. Investigators later considered List a suspect, but that theory went nowhere. Unlike List, who fled west, he abandoned his car at an airport and caught a train to Michigan, then Colorado. For the next seventeen years, he lived in Denver, under the alias Robert Bob Clark. He got an accounting job, joined a church, and in nineteen eighty five remarried. In nineteen eighty eight, he and his new wife moved to Virginia. A year later, America's Most Wanted featured the case. A former neighbor recognized that Bob Clark was in fact John List. List was arrested in Virginia, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in two thousand and eight. What can we learn from this case? Well, like Robert Fisher and Bradford Bishop, John List was respectable, a quiet accountant, a Sunday school teacher who lived in a mansion. Importantly, though he killed his family, escaped and lived under a fake identity for nearly eighteen years, and the case was everywhere books, films, TV shows. So by nineteen eighty nine, what was the point of yet another show?
But it worked.
John List was arrested age sixty three, the same age Robert Fisher would be today if alive. Scottsdale Detective TJ. Duran often calls Fisher the John List of our generation. I agree. If you want to learn more about the List case, I highly recommend the podcast Father Wants Us Dead by Jessica Rimo and Rebecca Everett. Thomas Shaffrey. On July eighteenth, nineteen seventy two, eight months after the List murders, in Irvington, New Jersey, only ten miles from the List House, a former police officer named Thomas Shaffrey shot and killed his wife and two daughters. Police found them in bed, shot in the head. Thomas was thirty nine, the same age as Robert Fisher. His His wife, Estelle, a kindergarten teacher, was thirty three. Laura was twelve, Alison eleven. I've only ever seen a photo of Laura nineteen seventy one, sixth grade. Zoom in in the middle.
There she is.
Six kids down stands another girl, Laura's best friend. That girl is my mom. The Irvington police chief told reporters that the Shafferys were quote a real nice family. The business was doing well, so there was no problem there. It was just one of those things, Just one of those things. And how sad is that? What does it say about our society that, yes, familicide is rare, but common enough. It impacted my mom. My mom would often hang out at Laura's house. She recalls that Laura had a round, pretty face with light brown hair, twinkling blue eyes, and a beautiful smile. They loved the song band of Gold by Frida Payne and seventies fashion any style boots, maxie skirts. They were in the same Girl Scout troop. Laura's mom, Estelle, was one of their leaders. Thomas, Laura's dad, was a tall, stocky man with brown hair. My mom said, quote, I always remember him as surly, never seeming to be in a good mood. Surprising because Estelle was the opposite, open, nurturing, caring. My mom remembers having dinner with the Shafferys right before the murders. Thomas barely made eye contact, barely spoke. Laura said, don't mind him, That's just the way he is. The day of the murders, my mom was home school was out for the summer. In a soft spoken, distraught voice, my grandfather told her what happened. I then ran outside and got on my bike. My mom said, since Laura's house was only a few blocks away, I rode over there very quickly, but needless to say, was instantly stopped by the police. I remember sobbing uncontrollably, suddenly realizing in my heart that what my parents said was true. Orial service and Mass was held at the Catholic church next to our elementary school. I vividly remember seeing the caskets by the altar. For many years, my mom couldn't comprehend what happened. She still can't. The murders were one reason she later chose to study family law. She wanted to be a judge to watch over children. My point here is not that my mom is special. It's that, in the context of familicide and more broadly, domestic violence, unfortunately she's not. Violence against women and children, and yes, even men, is obscenely common.
It's so common.
Multiple Robert Fishers have killed their partners. In nineteen eighty a Robert Fisher killed his girlfriend in Pennsylvania.
It's so common.
Robert William Fisher, Our Robert Fisher isn't even the first Robert w. Fisher featured on America's Most Wanted for killing his wife. That honor goes to Robert Wayne Fisher, who murdered his wife in Louisiana nineteen eighty eight. I want to end this episode by speaking to two groups of people. First, men, It's not normal or moral, or acceptable or strong to abuse or kill women and children.
It's weak. Please seek help.
Second women, if you think you can predict when a controlling partner might kill you, you're wrong. Mary Jane Longo couldn't predict it. Agnes DuPont di Legnez couldn't predict it. Annette Bishop couldn't predict it, Mary Fisher couldn't predict it. Estelle Shaffrey couldn't predict it, and.
Neither can you.
The time to act to seek help is now. It's critical to note again that none of these annihilators had documented histories of physical abuse. But abuse takes many forms.
The most common that we think of is physical abuse Taylor otelp hitting, shoving, kicking, anything that is causing somebody physical harm.
But that is not at all the full extent of domestic violence.
Some more common ones are economic control. So, oh, I'm the sole earner in this house, you don't need to work your job.
I'll take care of you.
But then that turns into, well, all the money you have is my money.
No, you can't go spend that money. People start to restrict.
Their financial independence and it forces them to be dependent on their spouse, making it harder for them to leave.
Emotional abuse.
This is widely ranging, but a lot of times it is in the form of blaming. The offender blames their spouse for all of their problems, and that spouse comes to believe that they are worth nothing, that their entire worth is in their partner, and again this prevents them from leaving. Another really really big one is isolation, and I think this is one that's probably not recognized as widely, is that these offenders tend to saw off their spouse from all their other support systems so that the only form of support they have is the offender. That way, they can't leave because they have no one else to go to. It can also be verbal calling them horrible names, can be sexual in the form of porgion or abuse or rape, and then social kind of leads into that isolation territory, so things like stalking, physically restraining a person, controlling their sexual behaviors, what they wear, making violent threats, and not allowing them to leave to divorce them, or all forms.
Of domestic healths.
Circling back to Robert Fisher, Taylor thinks he's alive. It's interesting to think that he could have another family.
He absolutely could and probably does. To be honest, what makes you say that? Because everything is about him.
If that first family didn't meet his needs, he's going to shed that family and go find one. He does so, maybe a wife who in his mind, is more subservient, children who are more obedient, a family who's more financially successful, just going and recreating what he wants his self image to be.
If Robert Fisher is alive, if he has a new family, they're in danger. So women and men not sure about Robert's sexuality, look at your partner if you were born after April two thousand and one.
Look at your dad.
If you think he's Robert Fisher, contact law enforcement in a safe and urgent manner. Neil Websdale, the expert in Phoenix, also thinks it's likely that Robert Fisher is alive. But this is about so much more than Fisher. Like me, Neil sees familicide, particularly in an American context, as an indictment of a six society. I want to emphasize that this is not isolated to one political tribe, the Red killers, the Blue killers. Familicide is bipartisan. Domestic violence is bipartisan violence is the bipartisan glue that binds us.
What we're dealing with here is a society that wants a reason, is a society that wants to exhibit shock at these horrors. But it's the same society that is in many ways alienated, the society that could be You know, I should be careful what is say say here, But it's the only society on Earth that's dropped nuclear weapons on another country. We live with various abominations. When you look at the treatment of Native people's, when you look at American history, the blood is in the soil. It's here. So I think, yes, you're looking at the haunting presence of the inexplicable with these cases. And when people say they can't understand, none of us can understand. But we should realize that there but for the grace of whatever, there but for fortune, go you and I.
If you're experiencing or at risk of abuse, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at one eight hundred seven nine to nine safe. That's one eight hundred seven ninety nine seven two three three. Next time I'm missing In Arizona.
He made the trip to go talk to these survivalist people and it was right before.
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, tips 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 Decan is our executive producer, Chris Brown is our supervising producer. Hannah Rose Snyder is our producer. Paul Gemperlin is our researcher. Ben Bollen is a consulting producer, and I'm your host and executive producer John Wallzac. 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
