Lawmaker recalls Maine’s twin drowning cases

AUGUSTA – The story of a Houston mother convicted of murder after drowning her five children in a bathtub brought back haunting memories for Joe Brannigan.

Now a state legislator and executive director of a mental health agency, Brannigan was a Roman Catholic parish priest in 1966 when a central Maine woman was charged with murder in the bathtub drownings of her three children – 12 years after she was accused of killing her first three children the same way.

“I remember the burial, seeing the three white caskets lined up on a grave where the other three had been buried,” Brannigan says.

After the first drownings, which occurred in a Waterville apartment on March 8, 1954, a grand jury refused to indict the children’s mother, Constance Fisher, declaring her insane.

Fisher spent five years at Augusta State Hospital before being released.

On June 20, 1966, in a virtual duplication of the earlier episode, Fisher’s second set of three children were found drowned at the family’s home in Fairfield.

Fisher was tried and found innocent by reason of mental disease. The Superior Court jury deliberated for 20 minutes.

In both of the multiple drownings, the children’s father, Carl Fisher, returned home from work and found the bodies. On the second occasion, Brannigan was summoned to the scene by local police.

“The chief and I went up, steeled ourselves against what we already knew was there,” Brannigan recalls.

Inside the home, he remembers finding the 9-month-old baby he had baptized face down in the bathtub. Two other children lay dead elsewhere in the house.

Brannigan recalls finding Fisher in a bedroom. She was unresponsive but would recover. Not knowing the seriousness of her condition, Brannigan administered last rites.

Shortly after the funeral, “Carl said to me, ‘I really don’t want you to be calling me. You remind me too much of what happened,”‘ Brannigan says.

Fisher was confined at the Augusta state psychiatric hospital after her acquittal. In 1973, after disappearing from the hospital grounds, she was found drowned in the Kennebec River.

“When this case came up in Texas, I read some about it and the similarities were so striking I began to think about this Fisher case more,” says Brannigan, a Portland Democrat. “The support of the husband, the number of children, the drowning in the bathtub, all the business of God telling her to do it.”

Brannigan says mentally ill people have benefited over the years from an expansion of services and advances in treatment and that public awareness also has grown since the 1950s and ’60s.

But in criminal cases involving the mentally ill, especially those featuring a so-called insanity defense, Brannigan suggests more exposure may have bolstered public wariness.

“I don’t think we had as many sensational cases of mayhem as we have experienced since then. I think people were pretty sensitive to the kind of situation,” Brannigan says of the era of the Fisher case.

Now, Brannigan says, “of course, people have used this defense more when maybe it wasn’t legitimate or it was a close call. This is no close call in any of the cases we’re talking about.”