On the afternoon of June 30, 1966, Carl Fisher came home from work to the house he had built in Fairfield, Maine, and found his nine-month-old daughter, Natalie Rose, drowned in the bathtub. The house had no telephone, and he ran to a neighbor, Howard Wood, to call the police. Officers found Kathleen, six, and Michael, four, tucked into their beds, drowned. His wife, Constance, lay unconscious on her own bed after swallowing pills. The next day's papers called it a duplication of tragedy. Twelve years earlier Carl Fisher had come home to the same scene.
Constance Margaret Sirois was born in Oakland, Maine, on March 26, 1929, abandoned by her birth parents and adopted by the Sirois family. At seventeen she married Carl Marion Fisher, twenty-four, a World War II veteran who worked in a car shop of the Maine Central Railroad, and they settled in a small house in Waterville. They had three children: Richard in 1947, Daniel in 1948 and Deborah Kay in 1953. Constance grew anxious and depressed, worried constantly about the children, money and the cramped house, and tried at least once to kill herself.
On March 8, 1954, Carl came home to find the door locked. He called Dr. Richard Chasse, who had been treating her for depression, and the two men broke in. Daniel and Deborah lay in their beds as if asleep; Richard, six, was drowned in the bathtub. Police found Constance hidden under a bed, unconscious after drinking a bottle of liquid shampoo. Her note said she had drowned the children to save them from evil and that God had told her to. She was charged with murder, but a psychiatric examination found paranoid schizophrenia and she was ruled unable to stand trial and sent to the Augusta State Hospital. There she was treated with insulin injections and high doses of hormones that sometimes brought on seizures, and within a year she no longer heard voices. Carl tried to have her released in 1955 and the medical board refused. On March 6, 1959, partly because of a national push to move patients out of mental hospitals, she was released into his custody.
They had three more children, Kathleen Louise in 1960, Michael Jon in 1962 and Natalie Rose in 1965, and on June 30, 1966, they were the same ages their brothers and sister had been. This time Attorney General Richard Dubord announced that the state would not ask for psychiatric treatment in place of prosecution. A psychiatrist, Dr. Price Kirkpatrick, testified that her depression had returned because she had not been taking her medication properly. After an examination at Augusta she was found competent, and in January 1967 she sobbed as she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to each of three murder indictments. Capt. Albert Dross of the Waterville police and Dr. Joseph Hiebel of Thayer Hospital testified that she had answered their questions clearly and coherently, and Dross said he had found a gun and a knife in the house that she meant to use on herself. Her lawyer, George W. Perkins, persuaded the court she was insane, and she was committed to the Augusta State Hospital for the rest of her life. Over the years her diagnosis was recorded variously as paranoid schizophrenia, postpartum psychosis, sociopathy and dissociative disorder.
She was a quiet patient. In 1973 Carl stopped visiting because it caused him too much grief, and on October 1 she walked away from the hospital. On October 9 duck hunters saw a woman's body in the Kennebec River near Gardiner. It was Constance Fisher, and her death was ruled an accidental drowning, probably on the day she disappeared. The hospital superintendent, Roy Ettlinger, used the case to criticize the open-ward milieu therapy then in favor. She was buried in the family plot in Waterville with her six children, and when Carl died in 1990 he was buried there with them.