Do you know who murdered Candice Fisher? On May 29, 1989, 19-year-old Candice L. Fisher was last seen alive in Kansas City, Missouri, near the intersection of 37th Street and Main Street. A young woman who was reportedly navigating personal difficulties at the time, she vanished during the Memorial Day weekend, sparking a search that would soon end in tragedy. Her disappearance occurred on the same day as another local woman, Christina Brandolese, who went missing from a different part of the city.
Authorities later determined that the two cases were likely connected, as both women frequented similar areas and were discovered deceased within days of each other.
On June 2, 1989, four days after she was last seen, Candice Fisher's body was discovered in a rural area of Johnson County, Kansas. She was found in a hedgerow in the 25500 block of West 191st Street, just a few miles from where Brandolese’s remains had been located days earlier. The condition of Fisher's body made the investigation difficult; she had suffered blunt force trauma and her remains had been partially burned, a grim hallmark shared with the Brandolese crime scene. Due to the state of decomposition, medical examiners struggled to determine if she had sustained the same throat injuries as the other victim, though the similarities in the disposal and treatment of the bodies led detectives to believe the same perpetrator was responsible for both homicides.
The investigation into Fisher's death, known as Metro Case #174, involved detectives from multiple area police departments who formed a 'Metro Squad' to follow hundreds of leads. Despite their efforts, the case eventually went cold. The primary suspect in the murders was Richard Grissom Jr., a known serial killer who was active in the region at the time. Grissom had been released from prison shortly before the killings and was later convicted of murdering three other women—Theresa Brown, Joan Butler, and Christine Rusch—who disappeared in June 1989. Although investigators strongly suspected Grissom of killing Fisher and Brandolese, and reports suggested the women may have known him, no concrete physical evidence ever linked him definitively to their deaths. Grissom was sentenced to multiple life terms for his other crimes, but Candice Fisher's murder remains officially unsolved.
