Killer is Busted....Wait!....No he Wasn't
/
KOLD in Tucson broke the big news that Scottsdale family-killer Robert Fisher had been captured.
There was just one tiny mistake on their story....Fisher was not arrested.
The story was posted on the station's website tucsonnewsnow.com, which is home to both CBS-affliliate KOLD and Fox-affiliate KMSB.
It seems the station confused the facts of a story from over the weekend in which a bogus tip about Robert Fisher at a Colorado home led to the arrests of two men.
The story stated that Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the country after killing his wife and two children in 2001, "is now behind bars."
"Investigators have confirmed a man arrested in Colorado is 53-year-old Robert Fisher," and that a tip led to his capture.
But Fisher was never at the home, much less arrested -- and authorities never said that he was. As other news outlets in Arizona and around the country reported, police only found two suspicious men at the Commerce City, Colorado, home.
Michelle Germano, news director for KOLD, didn't want to get into how the "egregious" error happened. But "there have been consequences," she says.
Although journalist Colton Shone's name is at the top of the story in an apparent byline, Shone only posted the article online and didn't write it, she says. Germano declined to identify the author.
The station says the story was on the website for about 10 minutes before the unnamed reporter read an article on azcentral.com about the Fisher tip in Colorado and realized a mistake had been made. The bad info wasn't broadcast on the airwaves.
Also, the reporter should have corrected the facts rather than removing the article entirely from the website, Germano says.
"All those involved have been talked with," she says. "We take these matters very seriously."
