Twenty-five years ago, a Scottsdale man named Robert Fisher became one of Arizona’s most elusive fugitives.
On April 10, 2001, his Scottsdale home exploded into flames.
Firefighters put out the flames and found the bodies of Fisher’s wife and two children. Fisher and the family’s dog were gone.
Police named Fisher as the murder suspect and found his wife’s car in the woods near Payson. The dog was underneath. But Fisher was nowhere to be found.
Investigators searched the woods and a nearby cave extensively and found nothing. Fisher was put on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted List. But, to this day, no one knows what happened to him. And many people think he’s still alive.
The Show talked about the case and the theories about Fisher’s whereabouts with Charlie Minn, director of the 2011 documentary “Where is Robert Fisher?” streaming on Amazon Prime now.
Full conversation
CHARLIE MINN: I mean, this shocked everyone. Just a visual of a conflagration. And when they got to the burning house, they found three bodies inside. The mother and the two young children. The mom was shot in the head, and then the two children, their throats were sliced.
So this is a heinous crime. And then when you throw the fire on top of, just made for quite the visual. And to this day, like the movie says, where is Robert Fisher? We don't really — we don't have an answer. Police have absolutely combed that Tonto National Forest. Nothing has come up. They dug through caves, they — you name it, they tried it, they did it. And there was no body part found, no skull, nothing.
... So the big, the big question is, did the Fisher escape? Fisher was bragging that he was an outdoorsman, a survivalist. Did he somehow escape? Did he have help? Was there a second car involved, and has he started a new identity somewhere?
LAUREN GILGER: Right, so you talked to there about, you know, where he went up into the Tonto National Forest, where his car was found, at the very least.
What do we know about what happened following this explosion at that house?
MINN: Well, just that — the car was found with a dog nearby. So we know that he didn't do any harm to the dog. But to me, it looks as though, as if Fisher was trying to, by any means to escape. I'm leaning towards that he's alive, only because there has been no evidence to show that he's dead.
And as I said earlier, I know that police went through a lot of the different caves inside, and that's not an easy chore to dig through those caves and do a clean sweep of it. So unless Fisher somehow committed suicide and somehow his body part was somewhere inside a cave and they couldn't locate a body part, that's possible as well.
This is definitely a very confusing crime. They believe they actually found Fisher at one point up in Canada, but it turned out not to be Robert Fisher. As a matter of fact, they went as far as bringing the neighbor of Fisher's up to Canada to do an identification. And everything seemed to line up, but — and again, all this is, is in the movie. I don't want to give away too much, but that person was cleared eventually.
... More people believe that he is in Mexico. The problem with Fisher is that he looks like a lot of people. You go to a Diamondbacks game, you'll probably find five to 10 people who look like him. So I think people have to be very keen on the specifics.
I think what FBI and law enforcement always tries to stress to people is the person's height. Because you can change everything. You could change the hair color, your look, gain weight, lose weight, but you can't change your height.
Yeah, this is gonna be a real tough. Fisher was known to be an outdoorsman. He bragged about being an outdoorsman and being a survivalist. So, you would think that's right up someone's alley to try to be a fugitive and to try to evade capture.
GILGER: So tell us a little bit about some of those theories that you've alluded to that have popped up since where people think he may have gone. I mean, it seems that this case, because it went cold and because it's been 25 years, it's such a mystery, has sparked a lot of kind theories, maybe conspiracy theories included.
MINN: Well, they took Robert Fisher off of the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list in 2021, which kind of puzzled me. The reason why that happens is because law enforcement doesn't consider that person to be so much of a threat anymore.
As a matter of fact, another FBI's top 10 from Arizona was taken off in 2022, a year after Fisher was removed. And that's Jason Derek Brown. And I'm looking to do a documentary on him, because the FBI used to get more calls for him than any other fugitive.
Brown shot a guy that was taking money — he worked for a courier company out of the AMC Ahwatukee. And he shot him six times in the head in broad daylight and took $56,000 worth of cash and escaped on a bicycle.
But Fisher, apparently, the law enforcement doesn't, I guess, fall under the category of being that dangerous anymore. So they took him off the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list. And I'm sure that didn't make the families happy at all because again, there has been really no official end to this case because we don't have a body.
We don't know if Fisher is alive or not.
GILGER: Yeah, it sounds like a lot of people do think, and you might be one of them, that he is still out there.
MINN: Possibly. And, again, I say that because nothing was found.
