2001-01-19: Webbsleuths Forum (http://www.webbsleuths.com)
"The "Other" Housekeeper"


30 . "B, I don't know about the"
Posted by Maikai on Jan-19-01 at 00:47 AM (EST)

house, but there was another little girl kidnapped and murdered 24 years earlier, that lived a few homes away:

THE DENVER POST
Tragedy visited area in '72 death
Monday, January 4, 1997
Section: FRONT SECTION
Page: A-07
BY MARILYN ROBINSON
DENVER POST STAFF WRITER

Caption: PHOTO: The Denver Post/John Epperson

Police evidence technicians remove locks and door knobs from a door on the south side of the Ramsey home in Boulder yesterday.

BOULDER - The slaying of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey does not mark the first time a family on that block has mourned the murder of a child.

JonBenet was found strangled last week in the basement of her home at 755 15th St., near Chautauqua Park.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, another young girl who lived a few doors away in the quiet upscale neighborhood also was murdered.

Jessica Schaffner, 11, was shot to death Nov. 14, 1972, after she and her best friend were kidnapped on a neighborhood street. Her friend was wounded but survived. Peter Roy Fisher, now 59, was arrested and convicted of the crimes. He remains in prison under a life sentence.

Jessica had been at a party to celebrate her friend's 11th birthday, and the friend was walking her home when a man dressed in women's clothing drove by in a van and asked for directions.

The man, later identified as Fisher, returned, got out of the van to talk and invited the girls into his camper to see his dog.

Fisher pushed them inside, locked the door, then pulled a handgun and said, "No one's going anywhere," the survivor said in a 1993 interview with The Denver Post.

The girls were handcuffed together and forced to lie face down in the back of the van. The man drove in circles, then stopped and made the girls undress.

He sexually assaulted Jessica.

Eventually, he drove the girls up Sunshine Canyon toward Gold Hill west of Boulder, where he told them a man was waiting with a key to the handcuffs.

"I didn't believe it. I had more or less written it off that I was a goner," the surviving girl said.

Fisher ordered the girls to walk ahead of him in the deep snow down a path. They had gone about 15 feet when he pulled a pistol and started shooting.

"I didn't feel the shots," the survivor said. "I didn't feel the pain. I think my body just went into such shock that my mind shut if off. I kind of fell in slow motion."

Jessica died before her eyes. The survivor was hit in the chest and left thigh. She recalled thinking that Jessica was playing dead and sensed that Fisher was standing over them, staring.

Then he drove away. Terrified and bleeding, the girl tried to drag her dead friend up the steep snowy hillside. Unable to do so, she slipped her friend's hand from the cuff and pulled herself up the mountain. She flagged down a passing motorist.

Based on her description, deputies arrested Fisher as he drove down the icepacked road at the base of the canyon.

Fisher had a long history of sexually deviant behavior, including an arrest for indecent exposure at age of 17. He will appear before the state parole board next month for another parole hearing.