‘Never seen again’: 46 years after his wife vanished, man arrested in Alabama killing

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — The prime suspect in the 1978 disappearance of a young woman from southwest Michigan is back on police radar, and the reason is chilling.

The development comes 46 years after Joyce Fisher, 28, vanished from the Sister Lakes area near the Van Buren/Cass County line.

Joyce Fisher was a devoted mom to a 1-year-old daughter and taught special education in Dowagiac schools.

Her estranged husband, long suspected in her disappearance, is 72 now and living in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

That’s where police say Jerry Wayne Fisher shot and killed his neighbor over an alleged property dispute on May 26, 2024.

According to his obituary, Jerry Fisher’s neighbor, 49-year-old John Kevin Farley, was a veteran of the U.S. Army National Guard and served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning a Purple Heart.

“They’d been going back and forth about a property line,” said Detective Jonathan Glaze of the Tuscumbia, Alabama, police department. “They both filed police reports on each other. Supposedly, (Farley) went on to Mr. Fisher’s property, and I guess they got into an altercation, and Mr. Fisher shot him twice.”

Tuscumbia police arrested Jerry Fisher in May on a manslaughter charge, but a grand jury in Colbert County, Alabama, upped the charge to murder in August.

“(Fisher’s arrest) kind of stirred this case back up,” said Van Buren County Sheriff Daniel Abbott, referring to Joyce Fisher’s 1978 disappearance. “I can tell you from our standpoint, we would love to get some closure on (Joyce’s case)….Hopefully, (Jerry Fisher’s) conscience will get the best of him and he’ll come clean and at least tell us what happened, where she’s located. For her sake and (her) family’s sake.”

Abbott said his detectives are talking to Tuscumbia investigators, hoping the Alabama arrest will serve as leverage and prompt a deal-making confession.

Abbott said the spotlight may help in other ways too.

“If there’s a witness out there right now that could come forth to give us some closure (in Joyce’s case), man, I would ask that they do. Do it for Joyce’s sake. It’s the right thing to do.”

There have been tips over the years, including one that claimed Joyce’s body was in a lake near where Jerry had lived.

“We did dive a private lake down in the Sister Lakes/Keeler area with the information. We didn’t come up with anything at the time.”

A DIVORCE AND A DISAPPEARANCE

In April 1978, Jerry and Joyce Fisher were in the process of divorcing, and Joyce had moved to Chicago to live with her parents along with the 1-year-old daughter she shared with Jerry.

But on April 14, Joyce traveled to her parents’ cottage on Cass County’s Indian Lake for a visit between Jerry and the child, according to court documents.

The next day, Joyce left her daughter in her mom’s care and drove to an antiques store in Sister Lakes for a brief meeting with her estranged husband.

“She was meeting (Jerry) at the time in Sister Lakes regarding a car title,” Abbott told News 8 in an interview Friday. “They left to get the (title) notarized. He shows back up at the store 45 minutes later, and she was no longer in the car. Never seen again.”

Joyce’s parents fought Jerry for custody of their grandchild and won, according to decades-old newspaper articles.

They raised Joyce’s daughter, who’s now in her late 40s.

Joyce’s parents have since died.

Ten years after the disappearance, in May 1988, a Van Buren County jury found Jerry Fisher guilty of involuntary manslaughter in Joyce’s presumed death.

But her body had never been found, and in 1992, the Michigan Court of Appeals overturned Jerry’s conviction due to lack of evidence.

Jerry Fisher was released from a Michigan prison after serving four years.

A CONVICTION OVERTURNED

“We reverse the conviction because the evidence was insufficient to submit the case to the jury, and the trial court erred in denying defendant’s motion for a directed verdict at the close of the prosecutor’s case,” wrote the appeals court in its decision. “Due process requires that the prosecutor introduce sufficient evidence that could justify a trier of fact in concluding that defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecutor in this case failed to introduce sufficient evidence to support submitting any of the homicide theories to the jury.”

While the appeals court acknowledged that a body was not required to prove a murder case, it also noted that it had “found no reported Michigan decision involving a missing body where these was no direct admission, no physical evidence, and no witness to some part of the killing or the disposal of the body.”

The case against Jerry Fisher had none of those elements, according to the appeals court.

“In this case, there was no physical evidence, such as bloodstains or a weapon, linking defendant to Joyce’s death. He did not admit that he killed his wife….No witnesses to Joyce Fisher’s death have come forward, and her body has never been found.”

A police officer did testify that, upon suggesting a possible sequence of events to Jerry Fisher during an interview, the suspect responded, “It’s not like it seems, it didn’t happen that way, I didn’t mean for it to happen that way.”

But the appeals court said Jerry’s alleged statement first appeared in a police report authored in April 1987.

None of the officers included it in their original reports.

“One witness testified vaguely that a year or two after Joyce’s disappearance, while the defendant was drinking one evening, he said his wife was gone ‘and nobody can find her’ or ‘nobody is going to find her’ or something to that effect,” reported the appeals court.

The justices noted that Jerry lied to his second wife about the circumstances surrounding the end of his first marriage, but “not in any way that reasonably can be construed as an admission that he knew Joyce was dead….Defendant told other people in the years following her disappearance either that he was divorced or that his wife was institutionalized.”

ALLEGATIONS OF BEATINGS AND THREATS

Joyce Fisher had told family and friends that Jerry beat her frequently during their two-year marriage, according to the appeals court ruling.

He allegedly threatened to do worse.

“Joyce testified at a hearing in connection with the divorce that defendant had threatened to kill her in mid-January 1978, approximately three months before she disappeared,” wrote the judges in their ruling.

Jerry Fisher is currently out on bond awaiting trial in the shooting death of Farley.

He’s wearing an electronic ankle monitor.

His next court hearing in Colbert County is scheduled for Sept. 3.

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