It was Monday, April 30th, 1979, and Pacific Power & Light employee Bob Gilbert was performing his regular daily task of checking the dam that formed Mirror Lake from the surrounding Deschutes River in Bend, Oregon. On this particular day, though, he came across something as unexpected as it was grisly: a human thigh.
Police were immediately summoned to the scene, and divers soon found yet another thigh in the water west of the dam. At this point, investigators were uncertain whether the body parts belonged to a man or a woman, or exactly how long they had been in the water, as they showed no signs of decomposition, or predation by marine life.
The following morning, another Pacific Power & Light worker named Gregg Sheerer spotted a left forearm in the dam’s grate, after which a larger search of the pond was undertaken, though the process was slow and difficult due to the murkiness of the water.
Over the next few weeks, more body parts turned up: a fisherman snagged a severed left leg in the pond on May 21st, and the next day, police divers recovered a head, a left hand, and a lower right leg. By the end of May, only the victim’s torso was still missing; to this day, it has never been found.
Upon examination, it was determined that the victim had been murdered only a short time before the first thigh was found in the water, and that the body had been cut apart with expert skill. Though the remains were now confirmed as female, the identification of the victim was slightly delayed after the medical examiner first mistakenly stated that the remains were those of a woman in her late teens or early twenties.
Days later, however, the coroner revised his report, claiming that the dead woman was actually between thirty and forty years old. Eventually, the victim was conclusively identified as forty-seven-year-old Mary Jo Templeton, a maid who had been living and working at the El Rancho Motel in Redmond. The subsequent inquiry established that Mary Jo was last seen alive by her grown son at his home on April 10th, but had spoken to a friend on the phone as late as April 26th, four days before parts of her body began emerging from Mirror Lake.
Shortly after the victim was given a name, police began following up on a promising lead: murderer Joseph Fischer, who had been paroled from a New Jersey prison in the summer of 1978 and had apparently been on a killing spree ever since, turned himself in to authorities in Poughkeepsie, New York.
In his statement, he confessed to shooting a male camper in Bend, Oregon at around the time that Mary Jo had disappeared, and it was this declaration that drew the attention of detectives working her case. Though Fischer claimed that he had murdered twenty women in various states over the previous thirteen months, however, he told police that he was not responsible for Mary Jo Templeton’s death, and further alleged that he never cut up any of his victims.
But Fischer, it should be noted, was not the most reliable source. No campers had been shot dead in Bend, Oregon at the time Fischer proclaimed, though there had been a shooting like that described in Salem, Oregon. Likewise, Fischer was an admitted alcoholic, and told authorities that he had a hard time remembering things when he was drinking.
In an even more damning development, a witness soon came forward and asserted that she and Mary Jo Templeton had been drinking in a Redmond tavern called Danny’s Den with Joseph Fischer not long before Mary Jo’s murder. Other witnesses in Redmond claimed to have seen him in town as well, but investigators could find no motel records or any other physical proof that he had ever been there.
Indeed, detectives later told the media that their prime suspect in the homicide case was subsequently found to be out of town on the date of Mary Jo’s probable slaying, though they never affirmed this suspect as Fischer.
In 1988, the FBI revealed that the murder of Mary Jo Templeton bore intriguing similarities to six other homicides, four of which were in Missouri, and the remaining two of which occurred in Tennessee. As of this writing, nothing appears to have come from this lead, and while a new plea was made for information in the case as recently as 2012, no new evidence has been brought to light, and the individual who killed and dismembered Mary Jo Templeton may remain at large.
Crime Immemorial 