Ronald L. Fischer was taken into custody on Thursday after authorities found him aboard a sailboat off New Jersey, ending more than 20 years on the run and a long case tied to America's Most Wanted. The 70-year-old former anesthesiologist had been listed among Rhode Island's Most Wanted fugitives after disappearing during his 2005 trial.
New Jersey coast
Authorities found Fischer on The Silver Lining, a 56-foot sailboat registered to Richard Graydon, an alias. The Coast Guard located the boat about an hour off the shore of New Jersey, then brought Fischer to a Coast Guard station on Staten Island, where custody was transferred to deputy U.S. Marshals and local law enforcement.
Wing Chau, the U.S. Marshal for the District of Rhode Island, said in a statement released Thursday by the US Marshals Service: “This arrest demonstrates that time does not erase accountability.” That message fits the way the case ended: Fischer had been on the run for more than 20 years, yet authorities still located him aboard a sailboat off the New Jersey coast.
Rhode Island trial
Fischer disappeared in April 2005 while on trial in Portsmouth, R.I., for first-degree sexual assault after prosecutors said he sexually assaulted a woman aboard his boat at a Portsmouth marina. He had also been wanted since August 1994, when he was arrested and charged with rape after an assault aboard The Dreammaker in Quincy, Mass.; that charge was later dropped when he pleaded guilty to assault and battery and received a suspended two-year prison sentence.
His case carried a wider profile because authorities described him as a master yachtsman, a world traveler and internationally connected. Fischer graduated from Cornell University, served as chairman of the anesthesiology department at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, and was an assistant professor at Brown University’s medical school before his medical licenses in Massachusetts and Rhode Island were revoked.
Carl Ricci on Friday
Carl Ricci, a former prosecutor in Fischer’s case, said on Friday that he was surprised by the arrest. “I was surprised,” Ricci said. “I just figured, you know, he made it this long, I just thought [he’s] probably going to make it for the rest of his life — if he’s alive.”
The arrest closes the immediate flight risk, but the next courtroom step was not set in the facts released this week. Fischer remains in custody after a capture that followed years on Rhode Island’s Most Wanted list, and the open question now is whether prosecutors move him back into a Rhode Island courtroom soon or later after transfer paperwork is completed.
