Joseph Fischer was born in New Jersey in 1923 and grew up in Newark and Belleville. He described his own childhood as violent and spent most of his life moving between states and in and out of custody.
On December 26, 1953 he beat a man to death with a rock. He served a sentence for it at Rahway State Prison in New Jersey and was released in 1978.
While he was in prison he had corresponded with a woman named Claudine Eggers, who was some twenty-eight years older than him. On his release he married her. In 1979 he killed her at a trailer in Wassaic, in Dutchess County, New York.
The case did not begin with an investigation. On June 27, 1979 he presented himself to police, told them who he was, that he was an ex-convict out of Rahway, that he had done a stretch for murder, and that he had killed his wife. He was arrested on July 2. He then went further and said he had killed thirty or forty people in the previous year.
On the strength of that claim, detectives in several states looked at unsolved killings against him, in Arizona, Oklahoma, California, New Mexico, Connecticut and Maine as well as New York. Nothing accessible in the record shows any of them being charged.
He was sentenced on May 16, 1980, to twenty-five years to life. He died in custody in December 1991, aged sixty-eight.
Two killings are documented: the 1953 beating and the 1979 murder of his wife. His claim of thirty or forty more was volunteered without prompting by any investigation and was never tested, and the sourcing for this case is thin enough that the entry does not go past it.