A FAMILY DIES, A FATHER VANISHES
Mom, kids found murdered after house fire; 20-year manhunt begins
Steve Durgarian saw the column of smoke rising north of McDowell Road as he drove home from picking up breakfast at Jack in the Box. He lived a half-mile away, so he knew the black smoke pouring into the overcast April sky wasn’t coming from his house. But he knew a couple who lived in that south Scottsdale neighborhood. He hit the gas pedal of his Lexus SC400 and juiced the car straight up 74th Street. “I sure hope I’m wrong. I sure hope it’s not their house,” he thought to himself. “Their house” was the ranch-style brick at the end of the cul-de-sac.
It was the home of Robert and Mary Fisher. Durgarian attended the same church as the couple and had known Mary since high school.
It was their house on fire.
By the time Durgarian pulled up, the flames were already above the roof. The house looked like a giant bonfire, threatening homes on either side.
He had arrived before police or fire, but there was nothing he could do.
He tried to figure out the scene: It was about 8:45 a.m. on April 10, 2001. The Fishers’ children, 12-year-old Brittney and 10-year-old Bobby, would already be at
school, he reasoned. Mary’s Toyota 4Runner was not parked in the driveway, another good sign.
But Robert’s new Dodge Ram truck was in the carport. That meant he could be inside the home and not at work.
Durgarian reached for his cellphone and called Scottsdale Baptist Church, where Mary often spent Tuesday mornings. He wanted to let her know her house was on fire, but the person who answered the phone didn’t know where she was. Unsure what to do, he hung around and waited.
The usually quiet neighborhood filled with police cars, fire trucks, TV crews. News helicopters hovered, broadcasting live.
Neighbors said they heard a tremendous explosion just before the house caught fire.
One neighbor told police the couple had been arguing recently. He was sure Robert had killed himself and would be found dead inside the house.
Firefighters knocked down the flames and started searching the rubble.
They found the boy first, in his bed. Then they found the girl. Moving into a search of the couple’s bedroom, they found an adult woman. All three were dead in their beds, the mattresses below them had been consumed by fire.
Even before they were certain that the victims were Mary, Brittney and Bobby, firefighters were sure of one thing: The people in the house hadn’t been killed by the fire. Their throats had been slit.
The Fisher house was now a crime scene.
Robert didn’t show up for work that morning at the Mayo Clinic Hospital, where he was a cardiovascular technician.
He should have been there by 7:30 a.m. Robert’s supervisor called the house twice. Robert rarely missed work, and when he did he would always call in advance to let his boss know.
The family dog, Blue, also appeared to be missing.
Hours passed with no sign of Robert. His mother, Janet Howell, saw her son’s house on fire on television with his truck parked in the driveway. She first called his work, then called the fire department. The dispatcher said someone would call her back.
Police brought in K-9 dogs to search the rubble. There was nobody else inside.
Searching for a man and a motive
Fisher would soon be the subject of a manhunt. It would land him on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list and make the crime one of Arizona’s most memorable, even 20 years later.
Though police at first didn’t identify Robert as a suspect to the public, Don Bellendier, the sergeant in charge of Scottsdale’s Violent Crimes Unit at the time, told The Arizona Republic in a recent interview that police focused on Robert from the beginning.
If Robert had not been involved, he would have shown up right away.
“He would want to know what happened to his family,” Bellendier said.
Their investigation would uncover that a neighbor heard Robert and Mary arguing around 10 p.m. the night before the fire, and that argument may have been the trigger for the murders. Police speculated that the Fishers may have been on the cusp of divorce. Robert had told several friends that he would never put his children through that trauma.
“We have an idea for the motive, but Robert is the only one who really knows. The other three who could answer that question are dead,” Bellendier said.
One day passed, then another. Still, no Robert.
Bill Cooper, Mary’s father and a retired school principal, held a tearful press conference outside Brittney’s middle school. He pleaded with Robert to contact the family.
“Wherever you are Robert, please, we love you,” he said. “Just come home.”
The police investigation uncovered a grainy video of Robert the night before the fire, taking money out of an ATM a half-mile from his house.
In the security video from the ATM, Robert is wearing a black Oakland Raiders ballcap.
The Toyota 4Runner sits in the background. Robert appears to be alone.
Investigators believed Robert, a former firefighter, set the fire to destroy evidence of the murders. They alleged he unhooked a flexible metal gas line from the furnace. Then they believe he set an ignition source, possibly a lit candle. At some point, enough gas would fill the home and ignite with the candle.
Police impounded as evidence the gas hose from the furnace and a round, glass candleholder.
Dave Ott, a deputy fire marshal with Rural Metro Fire at the time and one of the investigators on the Fisher fire, recently told The Republic that Robert’s attempt at covering up the crime seemed hasty.
If he tried to hide the cause of death by staging the fire, he didn’t do a good job, Ott said.
Now the fire chief in Fountain Hills, Ott is still troubled by what he saw that day. He has never been able to return to the site of the Fisher home since the investigation concluded.
“I’ve done probably 12 fatal fire investigations,” he said. “This, by far, is the one I won’t forget.”
Autopsy reports say Mary, Brittney and Bobby’s bodies were severely burned and charred. No soot or burns were found in their windpipes, indicating they died before the fire started. Mary and Brittney had 5-inch gashes across their throats, slashed so deep that the knife left marks on the vertebrae.
The medical examiner’s report also found a bullet in the back of Mary’s head. The report was unable to establish which injury had been inflicted first. But either wound would have been enough to kill her, the report said.
A 10-hour head start
Murders were rare in Scottsdale, a suburb east of Phoenix with more than 200,000 residents, known for its luxury resorts and immaculate golf courses.
On the day of the fire, Phoenix police Officer Dan Adair was preparing to leave for work when the phone rang at his home.
He let the message machine pick up and heard his wife’s panicked voice. Call me right away, she said. Don’t let Tyler watch TV when he gets home from school until we have a chance to talk to him.
Adair grabbed the phone and listened as his wife told him unbelievable news about their church friends: Mary and Robert Fisher’s home had been destroyed in a gas explosion and fire. The Fishers’ son, Bobby, was one of Tyler’s best friends, and Tyler had spent the night there two nights ago.
“Is everybody OK?” he asked. “Brittney, Bobby and Mary are dead,” she told him. “Nobody can find Robert. He didn’t go to work today, and he’s not answering his cellphone.”
Adair drove into work, his thoughts scrambled. What could possibly have happened? he wondered.
He took his son over to the Fisher home later the same day and again a few days later, where friends piled flowers, balloons and handwritten notes outside the rubble.
The fact that children were involved made the crime especially tragic, said Doug Bartosh, who was Scottsdale’s police chief in 2001. Detectives “pulled out all the stops” to search for answers, he told The Republic in a recent interview.
They interviewed dozens of friends and co-workers to try to find where Robert may have gone. He would have had at least a 10-hour head start from the time he took money out of the ATM until his Scottsdale home blew up. The delay would have given him time to leave the state or even the country, complicating the possibilities for where he may have gone.
Ten days after the murders, a camper reported the family’s Toyota 4Runner in the forest east of Payson, near Young, Arizona.
Police found the family dog, Blue, cowering underneath the vehicle.
Inside it, they found the Oakland Raiders baseball cap.
But Robert had vanished.