Ronald L. Fischer was arrested this week on a sailboat off the coast of New Jersey, ending more than 20 years on the run after he vanished during a Rhode Island sexual assault trial.
He is now 70 and was found aboard The Silver Lining about an hour offshore, a federal and Rhode Island investigative team said. The arrest brings a close — at least for now — to a case that had kept Fischer on Rhode Island’s Most Wanted list for years after he disappeared in April 2005 from a trial in Portsmouth.
That trial involved a woman who said she was sexually assaulted aboard Fischer’s boat at a Portsmouth marina. Fischer, a former anesthesiologist from East Greenwich, had also built a public reputation that made his disappearance even stranger: he graduated from Cornell University, led the anesthesiology department at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket and served as an assistant professor at Brown University’s medical school.
The boat itself carried another clue. Officials said Fischer was found on a 56-foot sailboat registered to Richard Graydon, an alias. The vessel had put him just out of reach for decades, even as investigators knew to look for a man they had once described as a master yachtsman, a world traveler and internationally connected.
His arrest also reopens a history that went well beyond the 2005 trial. In August 1994, Fischer was arrested and charged with rape after he assaulted a nursing student aboard The Dreammaker at Marina Bay in Quincy. The charge was later dropped when he pleaded guilty to assault and battery, and he received a two-year prison sentence that was suspended. His medical licenses in Massachusetts and Rhode Island were later revoked.
The 2005 case built on a separate 2003 allegation involving Cheryl Gingerich. She testified that Fischer brought her to The Lion King, docked at a marina in Portsmouth, that she helped clean the boat and that he then pushed her onto a bed and forced himself upon her. Days before closing arguments in the trial, Fischer emailed his attorney with the subject line “Goodbye,” saying he had decided not to take the risk and leave the U.S. for another country.
Carl Ricci, who said he was surprised by the arrest, captured the long odds on Fischer ever being taken back into custody. He said he had figured Fischer had probably made it for the rest of his life, if he was alive. That assumption is what made the arrest news this week so striking: after two decades in hiding, the case did not end with a sighting or a rumor, but with investigators finding him at sea.
Wing Chau said in a statement that the arrest demonstrates that time does not erase accountability. The next question is a practical one: when Fischer appears again in a Rhode Island courtroom. That was not clear on Friday, and the arrest leaves investigators with a fugitive case solved but the legal finish still ahead.
