Ronald L. Fischer was on the run from a rape conviction when he was hired as the Chief Medical Officer of Immix Biopharma on L.A.’s westside under an alias
After two long decades on the run from a rape conviction, a former Rhode Island anesthesiologist and Brown University medical school professor who hid out in Los Angeles under an alias was captured sailing on the East Coast under his L.A. alias, Dr. Richard Graydon, U.S. Marshals say.
Ronald L. Fischer, 70, a former anesthesiologist, was accused of raping a woman during a date in 2003 while they were on a yacht of his, the Lion King, which was docked in Portsmouth at a marina near Rhode Island’s ultra-ritzy Newport at the time.
During his April 2005 trial in Newport’s Superior Court on first-degree sexual assault charges, right before closing arguments, Fischer wrote a letter to his attorney Robert Mann saying “he was fleeing the country,” according to an affidavit written by a U.S. Marshal’s deputy. Fischer wrote that he had made plans to “enjoy life in another country where he had long been carefully planning a good, safe, secure, and comfortable life.
That same day, April 23, 2005, he called his two daughters, Sarah and Kathryn, “and told each that he was leaving the country,” Deputy Robert Charette wrote more than two decades ago.
Fischer then booked a flight out of Boston’s Logan Airport for London, England, set to depart that same night, but later voided the ticket. After he vanished, his ex-wife, also an anesthesiologist in Rhode Island, Dr. Nancy Stein, told federal investigators her husband “had friends in other parts of the world,” and likely chartered a boat.
Inside his Rhode Island home, Fischer had “literature on how individuals could change identities and disappear,” investigators discovered after executing a search warrant. By then he had transferred the ownership of two cars to his daughters, and gave a Jaguar away to an unknown recipient.
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Weeks after he fled, Fischer was convicted in absentia, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. For more than two decades, there wasn’t any trace of him.
Only in recent weeks, a task force in Rhode Island comprised of Deputy U.S. Marshals assigned to the Rhode Island Violent Fugitive Task Force, working alongside FBI Special Agents, FBI intelligence analysts and Rhode Island State Police, “pursued newly developed investigative leads,” and began tracking The Silver Lining, which had been registered to a Dr. Richard Graydon.
That name, investigators learned, was also tied to Immix Biopharma, a company based at 11400 W. Olympic Avenue in Sawtelle on the westside. On Monday, after news that Fischer/Graydon had been locked up, the company submitted a Form 8-K to the Securities and Exchange Commission confessing to the firm’s hiring of a sham doctor for its board. On the form, Immix noted, “Richard Graydon has been terminated and is no longer with the Company for reasons unrelated to his activities at the company.” But the drug development company did list him as its Chief Medical Officer, one responsible for a new drug Immix wanted approved by the FDA that had been working at Immix since March.
“Immix appointed Dr Richard Graydon as Chief Medical Officer. Dr Graydon previously oversaw approval of major oncology drugs at Merck and Johnson & Johnson, including Keytruda and Darzalex,” the company boasted.
They began following the man they believed to be Fischer, and found him piloting The Silver Lining at about 11:20 a.m. on Thursday as he was sailing on the East River toward the Long Island Sound, the Marshals Service said.
Fischer will also face federal charges for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in Manhattan, prosecutors say. Fischer used other aliases besides Richard Graydon while on the lam, according to federal officials, including Ronald Stevenson, Robert Anderson and Wahler Fritz.
Fischer’s career as a doctor and Ivy League Medical School professor came to a crashing end after he was convicted of another sex crime in Quincy, Mass. In 1996, then a practicing anesthesiologist, he pleaded guilty after prosecutors charged him with assaulting a woman two years earlier on another boat of his, The Dreammaker.
He received a two-and-a-half-year suspended sentence and five years’ probation, according to those reports.
