I have been such a bad blogger. Basically I haven’t blogged in months (don’t tell my boss). My excuse is that time has gotten away from me. I got married on New Year’s Eve and I feel like I am just now (three months later) finding some respite.
The thing is, today I am moved to take time to blog because I’m working on a story that blows my mind.
I’ve never been much of an NHRA race fan, but I’m now a big fan of Jegs Coughlin Jr and his Team Jegs Pro Stock Cheverolet Cobalt.
I’ve spent much of my adult life at crime scenes….belly-up to police tape in big cities and small towns….watching as emergency responders do their thing.
Over the last 30 years a lot of those scenes have sort of blurred together in my memory. A handful, however, stand out.
I’ll never forget the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after Timothy McVeigh parked his truck bomb out front–ripping the building apart and killing 168 men, women and children. When I first saw it with my own eyes it felt like somebody straight-armed my in the chest and knocked the wind out of me.
I’ll will also never forget the sights, the sounds, the taste and the feel of New York’s Ground Zero–the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the days immediately following 911 attack.
Add to the list of the unforgettable: a home in south Scottsdale–burned to the ground early one morning as t.v choppers hovered over head broadcasting the inferno on live television.
In the ashes, cops would soon find the bodies of a mom and her two children. I spent the next couple of days there at the crime tape as investigators combed through the ashes and as they pretty quickly determined that the woman, Mary Fisher had been shot before the fire was deliberately ignited and that her two beautiful children, Bethany and Bobby, had had their throats slit. Cops also promptly figured out that the killer was none other than the husband and father of this ill-fated family, a real piece of work by the name of Robert Fisher.
In the following days, the terrible story of the Fisher family would unfold, the story of a brutal, controlling and unfaithful husband, an abused wife who had finally had enough and two innocent children caught in the middle.
Robert Fisher ran like the coward that he is and he is still on the run. But in the off chance that he ever reads my “confessions of an ambulance chaser” blog, I have a standing invitation for him: if you ever makes your way back to the Valley of the Sun, look me up Bob, maybe we can meet in the parking lot of a bar some night, mano y mano, and maybe you can explain to me, dad to dad, how in hells name you can sink so low as to slit your childrens’ throats. Until then may your journey be the nightmare that you so richly deserve….mw
I’ve decided to give our dog Alley an honorary degree in nursing. She’s now a full fledged RN after looking after our son all weekend. He’s been down with the bronchitis, influenza and cold that’s going around and he’s been hit hard.
I’ve always been more comfortable at a crime scene than at a political rally.
As twisted as it may sound, stories about cops and robbers–death and destruction–murder and mayhem–have always made sense to me.
Politics–now that’s scary and confusing.
Chapter One
People sometimes ask me what’s the weirdest story I’ve ever cover. It’s a hard question to answer. There have been so many.
Like the one about the mid-west family that figured out a pretty effective way to perform a “do-it-yourself mummification” in the basement of their home.
It’s the story of mom and her kids who were so grief stricken over the death of their husband and father that they just couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from dear old dad.
So what did they do?
Well they decided to lie their deceased father out on some sort of lawn chair down in the basement of their home. The subterranean chamber had a concrete floor with a drain at the center of it. And it proved to be the perfect place to plop old pop.
Because–according to cops–over the next several months all of the fluids in the man’s body sort of drained out of his rear end and ran right down through the hole in the floor.
Police also told me they believed the mummification process must have taken quite a while to complete–leaving one to only imagine the rich bouquet that must have permeated the house during the hot and muggy months of a mid-west summer.
But finally success!–the corpse was transformed into something that to my eye looked very mummy-like–picture if you will a skeleton that has been shrink-wrapped in its own skin–a thick layer of yellowish beef jerky.
How do I know? Well one of the local cops was gracious enough to flash me a picture that was never released to the public–an image that is forever seared into my twisted memory.