Barely 20 and a bit plain, Patricia Oberschelp fell hard for the handsome warehouseman from New York. Just under 6 feet tall, with ruddy cheeks, brown hair and blue eyes, Richard Paul Anderson had just enough of a criminal record to seem dangerous and just enough pathos to be romantic. Sent to an orphanage at 7, shuttled among East Coast reform schools, brilliant and beautifully spoken without formal education, he had a sadness about him, a yearning. Anderson had been in trouble with the law, of course—but his arrests had mainly been on robbery charges, accrued as he tried to steal what life hadn’t given him.
Defying her disapproving mother and stepfather, Oberschelp went with Anderson to Long Beach. It was 1967, and California symbolized freedom. They lived together for six months—and then the parents showed up. Oberschelp’s stepfather was Elbert Fisk, 46, a railroad man, steady and sensible, trying hard to be a father to her. Her mother, now Victoria Fisk, 44, was bent on bringing Oberschelp home to their nice little tract home at 5020 Towne South Drive in Mattese, a neighborhood in South St. Louis County.
Oberschelp finally did agree to come home—how willingly, no one knows. But she was there on the hot, humid morning of July 15, sitting on the couch in the family room while her parents ate a late breakfast in the kitchen.
Around 11 a.m., Anderson rang the doorbell.
Out in Long Beach, he’d continued setting a place for Oberschelp at his dinner table, sure she’d be back any day. Finally, he’d sent her money to fly back, but she’d refused. Now convinced that she was out of her mind on drugs and needed psychiatric help, he’d come back to St. Louis, determined to get her to a doctor.
“I want to see Pat,” he announced when Elbert Fisk opened the door.
“You’re not going to see her, Rich,” Elbert replied.
“I know she’s here. I’m coming in,” Anderson said. Oberschelp and her mother, still in the kitchen, heard a brief scuffle and then two gunshots.
Oberschelp’s stepfather—whom Anderson said later he’d always kind of liked—lay dead.
Fisk rose and ran. Recognizing Anderson’s voice from the family room, Oberschelp screamed to her mother to come with her out the side door. Behind her, she heard gunshots and assumed Anderson was firing at her. She cut behind their house to 5015 Fernhill Drive, running through the garage into the house and yelling for someone to call the police.
The shots Oberschelp had thought were meant for her had struck her mother instead: Anderson had fired at the woman he blamed for his separation from Oberschelp. Shot in the back and bleeding profusely, Victoria ran to 5005 Fernhill Drive, where Marjorie Jacobson was babysitting her grandchildren. Bleeding from the mouth, Victoria collapsed just inside the house. Det. Sgt. Jack Patty of the St. Louis County Police found her dead when he arrived.
Ten days before he showed up at the Fisks’ house, Anderson had gone with a buddy, Michael Dean Malone, to ring the bell at an apartment at 310 N. Skinker. They told music teacher Michael Kurhjan that they were dog groomers and asked to examine his dog. Kurhjan didn’t seem to find this suspicious; he had a pupil in the living room, so he told them to go into the bedroom to examine the dog. They left with his driver’s license and car keys and drove away in his yellow 1965 Chevrolet, which had been parked right outside the building.
Malone flew back to Long Beach. After the killings, Anderson took Kurhjan’s name as his alias and drove the Chevy to Cape Girardeau, where he used the stationery in his Holiday Inn room to write to his love.
“My dearest Pat,” he began. “This will be the last and final time that you will ever hear from me, however, if you have any decency left in you at all—my last and only wish is that you’ll finish reading what I have to say. By now you have no doubt learned that I killed your mother and dad. I really didn’t want to do it—but ever since we parted your memory has haunted me.”
The police intercepted the letter and raced to the Holiday Inn, where they found that a room had been registered to James J. Logue of Long Beach. He’d left without paying.
From Cape Girardeau, Anderson drove to Metairie, La., where he mailed a letter dated July 16: “Forgive me, darling, for that awful thing I have done. But I couldn’t stand by any longer and watch—as they destroyed your life. I never wanted to hurt anybody—least of all you.” He also sent a letter dated July 20: “For the past six days and nights I have been unable to take my own life—as freely as I did those of your parents. They kept trying to come between us.”
On July 24 in Biloxi, Miss., Anderson held up Staff Sgt. Harold Erwin Smith, who was working as a service-station attendant. Anderson, who reportedly possessed both a .22- and a .38-caliber pistol, robbed Smith of $79 and put him in the trunk of his own car. Anderson drove the car to Irvington, Ala., where he handcuffed Smith to a tree and left him, unharmed. In Atlanta, Anderson robbed a bank.
In September, Anderson made number three on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. He was considered “extremely dangerous.”
Richard Paul Anderson was born in Rochester, N.Y. His father was a police officer in Buffalo—even as an adult, Anderson always sounded proud when he told friends that his dad had been a cop. The father died when Anderson was young, though, and Anderson’s mother placed him in a Polish orphanage in Buffalo. Maybe she felt unable to raise the kids alone—he had at least one sister. He would never know for sure.
Intelligent but restless, Anderson quit school after the seventh grade. He worked odd jobs, stole a bit, was sent to reform school in Elmira, N.Y. He came to St. Louis as a teenager—no one knows why—and was arrested several times on charges of robbery or disturbing the peace. He worked as a clerk, an electrician, a laborer, a service-station attendant, a stockboy and a warehouseman.
Anderson’s life had settled down a bit—two years with no arrests—when he met Pat Oberschelp at a party. Introduced by his good friend Michael Dean Malone, they fell in love instantly and soon moved in together. Then they started fighting. Separating. Returning to each other.
“Their relationship was stormy,” Missouri Supreme Court Justice Robert Donnelly would write in 1974. “The record is replete with evidence that Pat was promiscuous in her amours and the appellant accused her of a lesbian relationship with one of her girlfriends.”
For six months after the killings, Anderson ran amok. He wound up in Canada, where he was finally arrested after committing armed robbery, then convicted and sentenced to 16 years. He served only three before being released and extradited to the United States in December 1970. He was brought to St. Louis County to stand trial for the Fisk killings.
St. Louis County Police officers said Anderson admitted to them that he had hated his girlfriend’s mother, that Victoria had always given him a hard time. “I remember shooting her,” they say he told them. “I enjoyed it. I can’t imagine why I shot Elbert. I liked him and he liked me.”
He was indicted for the first-degree murder of Victoria Fisk. During the trial (April 10–21, 1972), Judge George Cloyd barred children from the crowded courtroom, explaining that the testimony might be “X-rated.”
Assistant prosecuting attorney Noel Robyn tried the case and asked for the death penalty. Anderson’s public defenders, first Sam Vandover and then Allen Kimbrell, never denied his guilt but claimed that he had been mentally unstable at the time of the slayings.
Five years had passed since the killings. Patricia had married and was now Patricia Craycraft, living in Chicago. She returned for the trial and testified nearly nonstop from 9:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. on April 12 and again the next morning. She spoke of Anderson’s mood swings and occasional suicidal depression. She read his letters aloud, breaking down twice. Interwoven with tenderness, the letters contained what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described as “vicious charges of unnatural sexual relations between her and others.” She denied being a lesbian.
The prosecution made much of the fact that, a few weeks before the killings, Anderson had shown up at the home of one of Oberschelp’s friends, where she was staying. Brandishing a gun, he had insisted that Oberschelp go with him to a county motel and have sex. Craycraft testified that Anderson threatened to kill her parents if she told them of the incident, which the prosecution framed as a forceful abduction. But when Kimbrell put the couple’s friends on the stand, they testified that his behavior had seemed like harmless joking.
A woman who’d known Anderson as a teenager recalled an incident when he sat down in her home with a shotgun between his knees, his chin on the muzzle and his finger on the trigger. “He remained in the same position for nearly three hours,” she testified, “but eventually I talked him out of it.”
Other friends mentioned his envy of their happy family lives, how he played with their children.
Dr. Robert Thomas, a clinical psychologist, and Dr. Nathan Blackman, a psychiatrist, both testified that Anderson had severe depression and was incapable of premeditation.
“Beneath that calm exterior the man is an explosive paranoid personality,” said Thomas. Psychiatrist Thomas Flynn, the state’s expert witness, countered that he found Anderson sane and responsible for his actions. FBI Agent Cecil M. Miller and former Agent James P. McMahon testified that they had interviewed Anderson in Toronto and that he had said to them, about Victoria Fisk, “I never wanted to kill anyone as bad in my life.”
Anderson sat calmly through the trial, taking notes and whispering with Kimbrell.
The jury, five women and seven men, found him guilty of second-degree murder, not first, and sentenced him to 60 years in prison. He quietly placed his hands behind his back to be handcuffed.
Anderson appealed his conviction, and in 1974 the court found that Judge Cloyd’s refusal to instruct the jury on a possible, less grave finding of manslaughter was a reversible error. The decision was reversed and a new trial scheduled. Under a plea bargain, Anderson pleaded guilty before Judge Robert Campbell and was sentenced to 25 years. The state went along with the 25 years because Oberschelp, now Craycraft, had refused to return to St. Louis County and suffer through another trial. As a result, Anderson was never tried for the killing of Elbert Fisk.
On February 16, 1975, Anderson wrote to Campbell, in a perfectly formed elegant script, insisting that he had never planned to kill, that he knew now that he had not been in his right mind. He begged Campbell to retain an expert in drugs or hypnosis and put him “in a suitable state of unconsciousness to determine ... more accurately what actually happened there that day.”
“Your Honor, I realize this request is highly unusual,” he added, “but I’m so desperate to prove that the death of Mr. and Mrs. Fisk was an accident, and not the result of some sort of cold-blooded plan by some sort of mad dog killer that I’m willing to submit to any reasonable test.” He alluded to his childhood and years in reform school, his need to make it on his own. “By the time I was 21, I was an emotional wreck wrapped up in myself, angry at life, jealous ... I’m not the same wild, confused and bewildered individual that I was then, eight years ago. I’m more talented, more patient now, and less thoughtless of others. I have gained an acute understanding of the conflict that raged within me.”
Anderson promised the judge that the horror of his actions remained fresh—“The sorrow hasn’t been softened by time or distance”—but then he gathered his dignity and pointed out, “Every person in the world could be placed in a position where they would commit murder.” He compared the penal system to Sahara Desert natives who believe they can cure emotionally disturbed relatives by leaving them for seven days in a deep well. He asked the judge to entrust him to the care of Dr. Blackman or Dr. Thomas.
The letter went into Anderson’s file. He wound up spending only seven years, total, incarcerated.
His crimes had been impulsive, brutal, almost incomprehensible. But it’s what happened afterward that was the real surprise.
In the famously rough Missouri State Penitentiary, in Jefferson City, Anderson began to paint—he favored watercolors—and sketch in charcoal. His tone was dark and ominous when he was depicting people, bright and cheerful when painting landscapes or flowers, urgently narrative when he gathered objects into still lifes.
Sen. Thomas Eagleton once happened to see some of Anderson’s work on exhibit at the Forest Park Hotel, where Eagleton then maintained a small apartment. He wrote to Anderson immediately: “Frankly, I was amazed at the excellent quality of the work.”
Anderson also read avidly, educating himself and soaking up current events. After the Patricia Hearst kidnapping, he wrote eloquently to Patricia’s parents, expressing his support of them in their plight. In June 1974, he received a reply on thick, smooth stationery, “Randolph A. Hearst” engraved in the upper left corner: “Your thoughts and prayers for Patty are a source of great comfort to us.” The note was signed in blue ink by Catherine and Randolph Hearst, who no doubt hadn’t a clue about Anderson’s own Patricia—and the fate of her parents.
Anderson also trained a dog in prison, a blotchy medium-sized German shepherd mix, and he brought the pup with him one weekend when he visited Kenneth Ziegler, attorney Allen Kimbrell’s investigator in the public defender’s office. Ziegler watched Anderson work with the dog by voice command alone, speaking quietly, receiving perfect cooperation. “Go to the front of my car,” Anderson said, and the dog went to the front of the car, sat down and looked at him expectantly. “Come back here and sit where you were before,” Anderson said, and again Max obeyed. “Come to the tree”—and Max did. “Come around and climb on my back.” Again Max did as his owner requested, leaping on Anderson’s back and putting his paws on his master’s shoulders. Ziegler looked for hand signals but saw none. Anderson used no physical force or gesture, only the spoken word.
He’d learned that its power could be sufficient.
“It’s difficult for a lot of people to understand,” says Ziegler, sounding embarrassed, “but Richard and I got along well. We had a lot of talks about personal things. I couldn’t ever dismiss from my mind what he had done, but, putting that aside, he was a very personable young man, very intelligent. I’d say he and I were good friends and have no qualms about saying it—even though he was a murderer.”
Ziegler points out, a touch defensively, that he wasn’t the only one who grew fond of the killer. Anderson’s attorney, Kimbrell, wound up inviting Anderson to live on his land, and another public defender went to bat for him with the parole board.
So what was the root of the early violence? Did Anderson despise his mother for putting him in an orphanage? “He seemed disappointed,” says Ziegler, “but he never talked strongly or harshly against her. I spoke to his sister a couple times before the case went to trial, and she seemed sympathetic. But she did not come for the trial.”
Anderson was charming and articulate, Ziegler adds, “and he always seemed to have a lady friend. He had several when he was in the penitentiary—I don’t know how he found them. One thing for sure—and I was always aware of this—Rich was a con man. And I probably told him that to his face, and he probably agreed with me.”
Anderson gave Ziegler and Kimbrell several of his paintings. Kimbrell deeded him an acre on his country property in Jefferson County and gave him an old trailer where he—and Max—could live. There, the transformation completed itself, changing Anderson from his former headstrong, impetuous, paranoid self into a sedate, introspective, quiet man. The early violence had, to all appearances, burned itself out.
New comforts—art, books, friendship—made Anderson gentle; age itself, the years lost to prison and serious heart problems reminded him of his own mortality. He spent his time painting, doing odd jobs and fishing. He fell in love, and when the woman moved in with him he bought a nicer trailer. She stayed with him, although they never married.
The end was anticlimactic: Anderson died of heart problems in June 2000 at the age of 59. His ashes were spread over his favorite fishing pond. Years after all the rage, screaming and gunshots, the silence was complete.
Sources for this story included St. Louis Post-Dispatch news articles, police reports, judicial opinions, correspondence and interviews.
