An Erie killer vanished 111 years ago, a local historian found out what happened to him

Deep within the Court of Oyer & Terminer archives located at the Hagen History Center in Erie is a box of records related to the 1908 September term of court.

Only a handful of pages remain of Case No. 76: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. Ferdinand Fischer.

Sensational for its time, the case involved the killing of 69-year-old George Cook, a Moorheadville farmer gunned down in his vineyard by his brother-in-law, an eccentric local Teamster named Ferdinand Fischer.

Following a brief manhunt, Fischer was later arrested and indicted for Cook's murder. He would stand trial for Cook's murder in November 1908, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity — one of the first such cases in Erie County.

Removed to Warren State Hospital, Fischer escaped on June 20, 1909, but was later apprehended and returned in 1910.

When Fischer escaped again on August 12, 1911, he disappeared off the face of the earth.

In one of the letters in Fischer's court file, dated May 24, 1948, then-superintendent of Warren State Hospital, Dr. Robert H. Israel, sought to have Fischer discharged from their records.

"If he were still alive he would be 86 years of age. The probabilities are that he is dead or is an inmate of some other institution," wrote Israel.

Thirty-seven years after Fischer's disappearance, on October 26, 1948, Erie County Judge Elmer L. Evans agreed and ordered Fischer discharged from the records.

I discovered the case a few years ago when I completed the bulk of my research for my first book, "Murder & Mayhem In Erie, Pennsylvania," and decided to try to find out what happened to Fischer.

With advances in technology and genealogy, maybe there were finally answers as to what really happened to Ferdinand Fischer.

I spent the next year slogging through hundreds of newspaper articles, documents, and records without success and ultimately shelved the case due to lack of new information.

Following the release of my second book, "Erie's Backyard Strangler: Terror in the 1960s," I decided to revisit the case again.

Military, Warren State Hospital records break open the case

I approached the case from a new angle, starting over and focusing on just the basics.

Ferdinand John Fischer was born on December 20, 1861, in Hamilton, Ohio, to John and Catherine Fischer. The family moved to Erie by the early 1870s, however, family from Fischer's mother, with the surname Diefenbach, remained in Ohio.

Fischer's run-ins with the law can be traced with both newspaper articles and court documents to as early as October 1890, when he was accused of arson. Before he killed his brother-in-law in 1908, he also faced a variety of accusations over the years from theft to inappropriate conduct against women.

Evidence shows Fischer married twice and fathered six children. The details of his first marriage are unknown, and by 1900 he was either widowed or divorced when he married Melda E. Armstrong, an Erie woman, in 1900.

Laying out all the evidence this time revealed additional information related to what appeared to be a brief stint in the military during the Spanish-American War. I located documents showing Fischer enlisted with the 65th New York Infantry in Buffalo, New York, in 1898, although his enlistment was brief, lasting only a few months.

This, coupled with Fischer's records from Warren State Hospital, pointed to a pivotal clue. In addition to being a chronic alcoholic, Fischer suffered from inflammation of the nerves in his peripheral nervous system — known as neuritis. The records show that Fischer's neuritis caused him a great deal of pain, sometimes resulting in a loss of sleep.

There was also a petition by Fischer's wife requesting his parole in July 1911.

After the petition was denied, Melda Fischer and four of Fischer's remaining children resettled in Rochester, New York.

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Melda Fischer died in 1931 and was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. With assistance from the Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery, we finally located an article from 1914 in the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper in Rochester in which Ferdinand Fischer appeared in police court before a judge after he had been arrested and charged with throwing a lighted lamp at his wife, breaking two of her fingers.

Going before a judge, Fischer was placed on parole for a year and released. Fischer's address matched with a census record for the following year, 1915, which showed Fischer residing with his wife.

After 1915, however, Fischer then disappears from records again, with all signs pointing to him having abandoned his family in Rochester.

Furthermore, the Federal Census in 1920 lists Melda Fischer as widowed.

On a hunch I decided to search for Fischer's military records to see if Fischer ever sought treatment at one of the Soldiers & Sailors Homes throughout the country for his several medical conditions.

The hunch paid off when Fischer appeared in the register for the old Soldiers and Sailors Home in Dayton, Ohio, with disabilities listed as paralysis of the left side, most likely a complication of his neuritis.

The records also confirmed Fischer's maternal relatives residing in Dayton.

What was more interesting was that in1926 Fischer filed for divorce from his wife, which was later granted. This was astonishing considering the fact that until her death in 1936, Melda Fischer corresponded with insurance companies who were searching for her husband, suggesting she did not know where her husband was.

More records place fugitive Fischer in Tennessee

Suddenly the flood gates opened and more records were found. By the 1930s, Fischer had moved to Johnson City, Tennessee, where he continued receiving treatment at the Mountain Branch National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers.

On Nov. 6, 1931, Fischer married a widow named Catherine "Kittie" Broyles in Greene County, Tennessee.

Fischer's signature on his 1931 marriage license allowed me to also conclusively match his signature to a letter in his Warren State Hospital file from April 1910.

Fischer and his third wife later moved to Greeneville, Tennessee. No further newspaper articles or court records indicate if Fischer committed any other crimes, however this could possibly be due to his advanced disabilities.

On Nov. 3, 1948, Ferdinand Fischer died at the age of 86 due to heart failure. He was buried several days later in the Andrew Johnson National Cemetery in Greeneville, Tennessee, with full military honors.

Despite being able to learn about Ferdinand Fischer's life following his escape in 1911 — in a case that held those in Erie County captive to the fear and excitement of further possible heinous acts — there is still mystery surrounding the case.

By 1948, authorities in Erie were focused on a post-WWII world instead of chasing ghosts from the past who were possibly either deceased or incapacitated for society's benefit.

With the disappearance of Ferdinand Fischer, now finally solved 111 years later, questions still linger — likely until the end of time.

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Justin Dombrowski is a local historian and author of "Murder & Mayhem In Erie, Pennsylvania" and "Erie's Backyard Strangler: Terror in the 1960s." His third book, "Wicked Erie," which will discuss the Fischer case in greater detail, is scheduled for release from The History Press in October. You can follow his research blog at www.ErieTrueCrime.com.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Dombrowski research solves the disappearance of an Erie killer in 1911