Robert Dishman, 63, male, was shot late in the morning of November 28, 2016, during an incident at a home on 4 Am's Way in Effingham, New Hampshire. Emergency responders rushed him to Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center, where he succumbed to his injuries later that day. An autopsy by Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jennie Duval determined he died from a single gunshot wound to the chest, and the manner of death was ruled a homicide.
State authorities converged on the quiet border town as the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office, State Police, and Effingham Police opened a joint investigation. Then–Attorney General Joseph A. Foster, State Police Colonel Christopher Wagner, and Effingham Police Chief Timothy Butts announced the inquiry as detectives processed the scene and interviewed witnesses about what unfolded around 11 a.m. on Am's Way. Officials asked anyone with information to contact State Police Sgt. Justin Rowe as they worked to piece together the timeline of events that led to the fatal shot.
News accounts from the days that followed painted the same stark picture: a 63-year-old man known locally as Robert “Bob” Dishman was shot once in the chest at his Effingham residence and died at the hospital, the third homicide investigation opened in New Hampshire that week. The details released were spare and tightly controlled, reflecting a case still in its earliest hours, with neighbors recalling only that a man named Bob lived at the address where police activity clustered.
In the months and years since, public records and archives continue to list Dishman's death as a homicide without announcing an arrest or identifying a suspect, and advocacy and data sites catalog the case as an unsolved shooting from that date and place. No charging documents tied to the killing appear in statewide summaries, and official updates have not reported anyone taken into custody for the crime.
