On June 27, 1979, a fifty-six-year-old man walked in to the police in New York and told them who he was: Joseph Fischer, an ex-convict out of Rahway State Prison in New Jersey, where he had served time for murder. He had killed his wife, he said. He was arrested on July 2. Then he told them he had killed thirty or forty people in the previous year.
His wife was Claudine Eggers, some twenty-eight years older than he was. They had begun writing to each other while he was in Rahway, and when he was released in 1978 he married her. In 1979 he killed her at their trailer in Wassaic, a hamlet in Dutchess County.
Fischer had been born in New Jersey in 1923 and grew up in Newark and Belleville, in what he described as a violent home. On December 26, 1953, he beat a man to death, and he spent most of the next quarter century in custody for it.
His claim of dozens more killings sent detectives in several states back through their unsolved cases, among them killings around Flagstaff, Arizona; Moore, Oklahoma; Los Angeles and San Francisco; Ruidoso, New Mexico; Cooperstown, New York; Hartford and Norwalk, Connecticut; and Portland, Maine. None of them led to a charge.
On May 16, 1980, he was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for the murder of Claudine Eggers. He died in custody in December 1991, at sixty-eight.