After 42 years, and five trials, a Montgomery County man is convicted of killing his girlfriend
The first-degree murder verdict against Robert Fisher brought closure to the family of Linda Rowden four decades after she was shot to death.
For 42 years, Chris DiDomenico waited for her sister’s killer to face justice. On Wednesday, in a Norristown courtroom not far from where the murder took place, DiDomenico watched that justice unfold.
A jury convicted Robert Fisher, 76, of first-degree murder in the death of Linda Rowden after just 30 minutes of deliberation. The reactions to the verdict, four decades in the making, were swift and immediate.
Fisher thrashed, screaming that the jurors were racist, and had to be escorted from the courtroom.
DiDomenico, for her part, clasped her hands in spontaneous joy, a button holding her late sister’s photo pinned to her sweater.
“I am just totally ecstatic. I didn’t think this would ever happen,” she said after the hearing. “This really, truly feels like closure. Now, Linda can rest.”
Rowden, 26, was shot twice at point-blank range as she drove Fisher and another man, Richard Mayo, through Norristown in July 1980. Rowden had been working as a confidential informant with Norristown police, who at the time were investigating Fisher for his alleged involvement in the murder of a rival drug dealer.
Fisher fled Norristown after the shooting and was arrested seven years later while living in New York City under a fake name.
He successfully appealed two convictions and three life sentences in this case, but those outcomes were overturned because of legal errors made by judges or trial lawyers. His fourth trial, held in September of last year, ended in a mistrial when one juror refused to cooperate with his peers.
This week’s trial, Fisher’s fifth, was his shortest, lasting just three days before Montgomery County Judge Todd Eisenberg.
Prosecutors had long held that Fisher was responsible for the murder. Fisher insisted that it was Mayo, not he, who shot Rowden. But, prosecutors said Rowden’s injuries were inflicted in such a way that it would have been “nearly impossible” for Mayo, sitting next to her in the passenger seat, to have caused them. It was much more likely, experts testified this week, that Fisher shot her from the car’s backseat.
After the shooting, another one of Fisher’s girlfriends told police Fisher told her he had killed Rowden during an argument, and the woman said she later helped him escape to New York. He left behind .22-caliber ammunition that had been clipped in an identical, unusual manner to the bullets pulled from Rowden’s body.
» READ MORE: From 2021: "40 years later, a Montgomery County woman shares her grief as her sister’s alleged killer goes on trial"
Fisher’s attorney, James Lyons, said after the verdict was read that while he was disappointed with the outcome, he respected the jury’s decision.
“We thought the witnesses that testified had myriad issues, which I think affected their credibility, including lying through all the proceedings,” Lyons said.
Lyons told jurors during his closing argument Wednesday that prosecutors had rushed to judgment and built their case on those unreliable witnesses. Chief among them, he said, was Mayo, whom he called a self-serving liar who initially refused to cooperate with police.
And even when he did agree to speak with investigators, Mayo gave multiple, inconsistent statements before providing detectives with the narrative that they say implicated Fisher.
During his own closing argument, First Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann said the case against Fisher was one of “overwhelming guilt.”
“Even 42 years later, these facts scream the truth,” McCann said. “And that is that this defendant is guilty of first-degree murder.”
McCann urged jurors to pay close attention to the “web of evidence” surrounding Fisher, including corroborating statements from multiple witnesses who witnessed Fisher flee the scene with the murder weapon in his hand.
There was no one else, McCann said, who had any motive to harm Rowden. And he noted that it wouldn’t be the first time Fisher had attacked Rowden: Two days before her death, police had issued a warrant for Fisher’s arrest for assaulting her inside his apartment.
Fisher’s contention that it was Mayo who killed her, sparking a conspiracy to implicate him in the murder that has lasted four decades, was ridiculous, McCann said.
“Before you walked into these doors,” he said, “you wouldn’t have bought that story. Don’t buy it in here.”
Fisher, who will be sentenced in the coming weeks, faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison.