The official FBI abstract on the crimes of Barry Fisher was twenty-nine pages long, delivered to me via secure download from Marly Dureaux at Science and Technology.
I started at the beginning, reading a one-page summary of the events that sent Fisher to prison.
Between August 1984 and May 1986, three Latina women went missing in San Diego County in California. The women were all in their thirties and vanished after meeting friends at a restaurant or bar for cocktails.
Within forty-eight hours of each disappearance, a relative of the women made a similar panicked call to the police. They’d discovered a human organ in a sealed, gallon-size Ziploc bag inside the missing woman’s apartment. There were no signs of the women.
When police arrived on each scene, they discovered the organ was a heart, neatly cut from the body with a surgical scalpel.
The three women’s blood types were matched to the organs, but that was as close to confirming identity as 1986 forensics could do. After the third woman went missing, the FBI was invited in, but came up with nothing new.
The glass door slid open behind me. Frank had changed into coveralls to undo the plumbing that ran beneath the tub. He headed around the house’s east side, a monkey wrench in hand.
I continued reading.
The big break in the Fisher case came on the evening of June 21, 1986. Off-duty Detective James Riordan had come out of a Costa Dorada restaurant and interrupted what appeared to be an altercation between a couple in the parking lot.
Detective Riordan was from Oceanside PD, thirty-five miles north of San Diego, and was not part of the missing persons case. Still, as he stepped outside, he noticed a man lifting a woman’s body in a fireman’s carry. Riordan was instantly on alert, his hand moving to rest atop his service weapon as he approached.
The man carrying the woman explained that his girlfriend had had too much to drink. But the off-duty cop noticed that the man’s pickup truck had what Riordan called a “tonneau cover” on its back. This was a molded vinyl covering that protected cargo from weather or would-be thieves. It could be folded back in thirds, until the entire truck bed was exposed, but Riordan noticed that only the closest third was folded back. To the detective, it looked like the man was about to slide the woman’s body under it, placing her in the truck bed. An odd location to put your inebriated girlfriend.
Riordan pulled his badge, and the man dropped the woman and took off down the street. But Detective Riordan was a track athlete in college. He caught the man in a hard tackle near the I-5 freeway on-ramp, holding him while the manager of a nearby 76 station called police.
When Riordan got back to the Costa Dorada, a special agent from the FBI was waiting. The agent had heard of the crime on the police band, and the two interviewed the woman the man had been carrying. Angela Vasquez was bruised, but alive.
Vasquez ID’d Barry Fisher as her attacker. She also explained the ruse he’d used: he claimed he was a resident of the adjoining apartment complex and was looking for his Chihuahua. If she went around one side of a vehicle, he would go around the other, and the dog would run to one of them. But as she got down on her knees to look under the truck, she saw no dog. The last thing she felt was Fisher’s hands around her neck in a chokehold.
I looked up from my reading. The sun had moved across the New Mexico sky, and I shimmied my chair back into the light. Flipped to the part of the file that described how Fisher had been adjudicated.
San Diego District Attorney Sheila Donahue slow-played the 1987 case to give police as much time as they needed to connect Fisher to the three missing women or locate the rest of an actual body. But nothing was found. The incident looked like an attempted abduction of Angela Vasquez in the Costa Dorada parking lot and nothing more.
Then a week before trial, the FBI discovered Fisher owned a self-storage unit in Mission Beach, registered under his mother’s maiden name. Inside was a massage table covered in heavy-duty plastic, along with a set of surgeon’s tools and two bone cutters. The place also contained a flyer for a dating event with Denise Gonzalez’s picture on it. Gonzalez was victim number 1.
The evidence gave the police confidence, but legally the case was still circumstantial, a fact reinforced by the lack of bodies. The defense was prepared to argue that the organs could belong to anyone, that the women had simply gone missing, and that none of it was related to Fisher’s “misunderstanding” with Vasquez in the parking lot.
And so, as the trial approached, the district attorney rolled the dice on a brand-new technology called DNA analysis that had led to a conviction in Florida just months earlier. They tested the three human hearts against comparable DNA from the women, then matched the DNA to a single spot of blood found inside the storage unit. Victim number 2’s blood, as it turned out.
The trial got underway, and six weeks later a jury sentenced Fisher to forty years in prison.
I looked up from the file at the sun, dropping over the fence line, and tried to imagine what it was like to reemerge into today’s world after almost four decades in prison.
And then someone comes for you a day later.
In Marly’s email, which accompanied the file, she clarified that Fisher had never admitted wrongdoing or reversed course on any testimony. At two separate parole board hearings in the 2010s, Fisher was offered leniency in exchange for telling the families of his victims where the rest of their loved ones’ bodies were buried, but Fisher refused to speak. After decades of good behavior, he was paroled out of Otero.
Flipping down my screen, I walked around to the crawl space Frank was exploring. A metal grate, two feet by four, was laid out on the nearby rocks.
“Everything all right?” I hollered.
“Not plum, but pert near,” Frank yelled back.
This was a Frankism. It meant things were workable.
Frank promised to lock up the place when he and Richie were done, and I took an Uber to a nearby Homewood Suites, where Cassie had secured our rooms. I checked into mine, then opened the door to the adjacent one, which we’d use as our meeting space.
I ordered dinner from a place called Inky Joe’s BBQ, which the front desk recommended. I even got a few salads and veggie sides, since Shooter texted that she was now a vegetarian and would expect broccoli and barbecued tofu. I was pretty sure she was screwing around, but I got the food anyway.
It was time to hear what everyone had found. Time for my specialty to take over. My ability to assimilate information, to connect dots unseen by others. Because if my theory was right, Barry Fisher wasn’t going to be the last one to die in this case.