NORRISTOWN — A 78-year-old Norristown man serving life imprisonment for the 1980 fatal shooting of a Collegeville woman has died in prison, the final chapter in a case that took many legal twists and turns over four decades.
Robert Fisher died Nov. 10 while he was housed at the State Correctional Institution at Fayette in Fayette County, southeast of Pittsburgh, a Pennsylvania Department of Corrections official confirmed on Thursday.
Maria Bivens, press secretary for the department of corrections, said Fisher died of natural causes.
In December 2022, Fisher was convicted by a Montgomery County jury of first-degree murder in connection with the July 10, 1980, fatal shooting of 26-year-old Collegeville native Linda Rowden, who was Fisher’s ex-girlfriend at the time, as she drove her 1979 Plymouth Volare along DeKalb Street near Basin Street in Norristown.
In March 2023, Judge Todd D. Eisenberg formally sentenced Fisher to the mandatory life prison term.
It was the fourth evidentiary trial in 42 years that Fisher faced in connection with Rowden’s death, after his previous first-degree murder convictions, at trials in September 1988 and August 1991, were overturned by appellate courts and after a mistrial was declared when a jury couldn’t reach a unanimous decision at a retrial in 2021.
Fisher, formerly of the 600 block of DeKalb Street, also is the only person in Pennsylvania sentenced to death three times and each of those sentences also was overturned by higher courts.
At the time of his death, Fisher was appealing his most recent conviction under the state’s Post Conviction Relief Act.
Rowden’s sister and several friends who attended numerous hearings and trials over the years and who had waited decades for justice for Rowden, expressed relief when Fisher was convicted again in December 2022.
First Assistant District Attorney Edward F. McCann Jr., who handled the most recent retrial with co-prosecutor Tanner C. Beck, previously said Fisher always lacked remorse for taking Rowden’s life and devastating her family.
During the latest retrial, McCann and Beck argued Fisher acted with a specific intent to kill when he fatally shot Rowden with a .22-caliber handgun that once belonged to Rowden’s father, a gun that Rowden had given to Fisher. The murder weapon was never recovered.
McCann argued the passage of 42 years hadn’t changed the “overwhelming evidence” of Fisher’s guilt, claiming Fisher was the only person who had a motive to kill Rowden.
McCann and Beck argued an angry Fisher killed Rowden to prevent her from giving information to police that could link Fisher to the 1980 murder of Nigel Anderson, a witness who had been scheduled to testify in a federal heroin case. Additionally, two days before she was murdered, Rowden reported to Norristown police that Fisher assaulted her.
McCann argued Fisher exhibited a consciousness of guilt when he immediately fled from Norristown to New York City after the killing, changed his name and took on a new identity. Fisher wasn’t apprehended until 1987 in New York.
But defense lawyer James P. Lyons suggested prosecution witnesses who claimed to witness the killing or claimed Fisher confessed to them provided inconsistent information and that anything they said could not be trusted.
Lyons and co-defense lawyer Benjamin Cooper argued Fisher did not kill Rowden and suggested another man, a front seat passenger in the car with Rowden and Fisher that day in 1980, could have shot Rowden. Lyons argued investigators focused solely on Fisher.
Fisher chose not to testify during the December 2022 retrial. However, testimony Fisher gave to another jury in 2021, during which he adamantly denied killing Rowden, was read to the jury during the 2022 retrial.
Fisher admitted he had been in the vehicle with Rowden and another man but claimed that during the ride he became ill from using heroin and got out of the car and headed to a nearby alley to vomit. Fisher claimed he never returned to the vehicle and later learned that Rowden had been shot by someone after he had gotten out of the car.
But McCann argued Fisher did not have reasonable answers for the .22-caliber ammunition that authorities found in his home or why he fled from Norristown.
Given that decades passed since Rowden’s death, several witnesses and some of the original investigators have since died and prosecutors, during a painstaking procedure, had their testimony re-read to jurors during the retrial.
Fisher was first convicted of Rowden’s murder in September 1988 and was sentenced to death. To win that conviction, prosecutors relied on Fisher’s previous conviction in federal court of violating Nigel Anderson’s civil rights.
In 1990, the state Supreme Court overturned the county murder conviction after a federal judge overturned Fisher’s federal civil rights conviction.
Fisher was then retried for Rowden’s murder in August 1991, convicted and sentenced to death a second time.
However, in June 1996, the state Supreme Court, while upholding the murder conviction, ruled Fisher should receive a new penalty hearing because jurors at his 1991 trial were improperly allowed to hear victim impact testimony from Rowden’s mother.
After a new penalty hearing in June 1997, Fisher was sentenced to death a third time.
But in late 2019, U.S. District Court Judge Gene E.K. Pratter overturned Fisher’s conviction, ruling a county judge’s instruction on “reasonable doubt” and an example of the concept the judge recited during the 1991 trial was “constitutionally deficient” and “fatally flawed” and that Fisher’s lawyer should have objected to the instruction. Pratter concluded Fisher’s constitutional rights were violated by the instruction.
Fisher’s 1997 death sentence also was overturned with Pratter ruling the aggravating factor relied on by prosecutors at the time was improperly applied.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld Pratter’s decision on Jan. 17, 2020, sending Fisher’s case back to county court for the retrial.
During the initial retrial in September 2021, Eisenberg declared a mistrial after a jury indicated it was “hopelessly deadlocked” and could not reach a verdict, setting the stage for the December 2022 retrial.