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Inside the Investigation: Solving the murder mystery of Donna Fisher


Donna Fisher was found in her home Dec. 5, 1986.{ } Authorities initially thought she suffered a brain anyeurism, but later determined she was strangled. (Family photo)
Donna Fisher was found in her home Dec. 5, 1986. Authorities initially thought she suffered a brain anyeurism, but later determined she was strangled. (Family photo)
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It's Dec. 5, 1986.

Thirty-eight-year-old Donna Fisher is discovered unconscious in her bedroom on Prospect Street in Cranston.

Her 18-year-old son, Bobby Fisher, is in disbelief downstairs.

“Numb, numb, I didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “I didn’t know what had happened.”

Fisher's mom had seemingly suffered a medical emergency, at least, that's what it looked like to EMTs at the scene and doctors at Rhode Island Hospital.

“They painted the whole scenario out,” Bobby said. “She had a brain aneurysm, something ruptured in her head, she went to try and call for help downstairs and then she had another attack, ripped the phone off, and then she tried to get out of the house, and that’s when she stumbled and moved the couch.”

It wasn’t until days later that they discovered Donna Fisher wasn’t the victim of a medical emergency, she was the victim of murder.

DEC. 5, 1986

It began as an ordinary day at the Fisher household.

“My father left for work early, he always left at 6:30 in the morning,” Bobby said. “I got up out of bed and got myself ready to go to work, gave my mother a kiss goodbye.”

Donna had plans to go shopping with her next-door neighbor’s wife.

It wasn’t until hours later that the then-18-year-old and his stepfather Billy learned she never made it out of the house that day.

“I got to work, I worked at the Polycom company during that time,” Bobby said. “I was actually sitting on the back loading dock, having a cigarette, when my next-door neighbor pulled in and said you have to come with me right now, your mother has been hurt and you need to come with me.”

When Bobby got home, EMTs were waiting outside.

The neighbor Donna had plans with that day had a key to the house and went to check on her after she didn’t hear from her. That’s when she reportedly found Donna unconscious in her bedroom and called 911.

Investigators found no signs of forced entry, but a few things were out of place.

A phone was hanging off the wall in the kitchen and the couch had been moved. Donna’s earrings were also found on the living room floor.

Despite the disarray, the brain aneurism theory fit and as far as Bobby and his stepfather Billy knew, there was no reason to question it.

EMTs began performing CPR on Donna and managed to get a faint pulse back.

“They put her into the ambulance and took her to Rhode Island Hospital where they were able to maintain the heartbeat there, but she still couldn’t breathe on her own,” Bobby said. “They put her onto a ventilator, and that was about the status for the first day.”

The following day, her best friend Linda, a nurse at Kent County Hospital, came to visit and made a shocking discovery.

“She saw what appeared to be ligature marks around my mother’s neck,” Bobby said. “She was the one that really pushed the doctors into doing and investigating more and digging deeper.”

It turns out, Donna hadn’t suffered a medical emergency at all. She was the victim of a crime.

Three days after Donna was taken to the hospital, her family made the difficult decision to take her off life support.

“My mother had never wanted to be on machine, and at that point she was being kept alive by a machine,” Bobby said. “The doctors had told us that there was a chance she wouldn’t be able to breathe again. There was a chance that she might be able to breathe again, but if they were to keep her on machines, she would be nothing more than a vegetable.”

Donna Fisher was pronounced dead on Dec. 8, 1986, with her son and husband Billy by her side. It was her 39th birthday.

An autopsy later confirmed her friend Lisa’s suspicions.

Donna Fisher had suffered a broken bone in her neck, a sign of strangulation. A rape kit was also performed, confirming a sexual assault.

Donna’s death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, sending Cranston police’s murder investigation into full swing.

PIECING TOGETHER A MURDER

Police collected evidence just days before Donna died, but the scene had already been tampered with.

“It was never treated as a crime scene because everyone was going off the brain aneurysm theory,” Bobby said.

As a result, he and his stepfather came home and cleaned the first day Donna was in the hospital.

“The first thing that you do when you get into a house that’s kind of upside down without thinking about what you’re doing is put everything back together and clean. So unknowingly, we tampered with a lot of evidence, a lot of things that could’ve been used,” Bobby said.

Although the crime scene had been manipulated, police still managed to recover evidence, including blood.

Cranston police also brought in three suspects for questioning: Bobby, his stepfather Billy, and a third person, considered the main suspect at the time.

“Obviously, they looked at my father. They looked at Bill first because they always look at the husband,” Bobby said.

Then, it was Bobby’s turn.

“The detective said to me at one point, ‘I know you did it, and I’m going to prove it, and you’re going to rot in jail,’ while slamming his fist down on the table,” he said.

Cranston police sent the blood recovered from the scene out for testing, which ruled out Billy, Bobby, and the main suspect.

That ruling was based off blood type only, an investigative tool that isn’t always accurate and has since been replaced by DNA.

But with no signs of forced entry and DNA in its infancy, police didn't have much else to go off, until now.

ONGOING INVESTIGATION

Cranston Police Detective Robert Santagata took over the case in mid-2019, but it’s a case he already knew well.

“My former employer was a retired detective from here who was the original investigator in 1986, so I used to sit with him in his office and he would talk about this case constantly because it bothered him so much," Santagata said.

The original detective on the case, William Grady, was also family friends with Santagata. He says Grady remained attached to the investigation until he passed away years later.

“I believe it was 2008 when the detective on the case before me called me and asked to get in touch with Grady,” Santagata said. “The first thing that he (Grady) said to me was I don’t know why they’re looking at this the guy, the guy who did it is dead.”

Grady believed the original suspect was responsible, but in the 2000s police began to think otherwise.

“Grady then called me back and said, 'You know, you guys might be onto something we didn’t even think about in 1986,'” Santagata said. “It kind of re-opened his eyes to it and then unfortunately he passed before anything could get done with it.”

Santagata said when he first got the case, he spent hours familiarizing himself with the information he had already heard second-hand from Grady.

“It was just a matter of me going through everything. I had to read a 6-inch binder worth of paperwork, sit down with it, and refresh my memory,” Santagata said. “Reading the reports was refreshing what I knew previously about the case, and then looking at the evidence, and seeing where it had gone.”

Back in the 1980s, DNA was in its infancy. Decades later, it could become the tool that ultimately cracks the case.

Before Santagata got the case, previous detectives had used evidence from the scene to create a partial DNA profile on the suspect.

“They had for years been sending evidence out to the state police crime lab to be tested for DNA,” he said. “There were things that came back. I think in 2012, there was a sequence that had come back from DNA, but it was partial so didn’t really help us because it wasn’t enough to go into the CODIS system.”

CODIS, or the Combined DNA Index System, is a national DNA database created by the FBI to link the DNA of suspects to the DNA at crime scenes.

Now, CODIS isn’t the only tool at Santagata’s disposal. There’s also genetic genealogy which has been used to crack cold cases across the country by using DNA to trace a family tree.

Santagata is still sending DNA to the state crime lab in hopes he has enough to then send it off to genealogy, which could point him straight to the suspect.

“I’ve been here for 20 years and I’m going to be here for a little while and I’d like to be the one to put this case to bed for my friend, who was the original investigator, and for the family,” Santagata said. “I’d like to be the one to say, 'Hey, you know, sorry it took us so long, but it’s over.'"

With a new set of eyes comes a renewed sense of hope for Bobby.

Decades later, he says he believes he knows who killed his mother that morning. Now, it's a matter of proving it.

“I know who did it,” Bobby said. “It would be closure for me for everyone else to know who did it. It would be closure for me for him to be officially named.”

While the case has remained cold for decades, Bobby credits a podcast, "Murder She Told," for thrusting it back into the spotlight.

He now hopes the new interest and investigative tools will finally put his mother’s killer behind bars.

“This person is living his life,” Bobby said. “He’s had 36 years of Christmases and Thanksgivings and weddings and birthdays and is living a normal life and I’m stuck in the past.”

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