The jury was still out, deliberating his fate, when Ronald Fisher disappeared. Cheryl Gingrich had spent the last three days on the witness stand in a Newport, Rhode Island courtroom, reliving the most violent afternoon of her life while the man who attacked her sat a few feet away, staring at her with a smug look on his face. On Friday, April 22nd, 2005, the court docket recorded four simple words: “Defendant does not appear. ” The next day, Ronald sent a single-word email to his lawyers.
The subject line read, “Goodbye. ”
By then, nearly two years had passed since the spring of 2003, when Cheryl had agreed to meet Ronald for a first date. She was a college English professor and a mother of four sons. He had presented himself as a cultured, well-traveled doctor and yachtsman.
He told her he loved to travel, that he had been to South America, Europe, the Middle East, and China. He used an online dating site to find her. On April 12th, 2003, Ronald picked Cheryl up and drove her to Hinckley’s Marina in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where he kept a 60-foot yacht called The Lion King. She helped him clean the boat; the plan was to grab lunch afterward.
At one point, she was looking at a photograph of his two daughters when he threw her onto the bed and began forcefully kissing her. Cheryl later told police that he assaulted her forcibly and violently, without her consent. She was trapped aboard the boat, she said, and feared for her life. She couldn’t get off, and she couldn’t call for help.
In her statement to police, she wrote, “All I could think was I am alone in the bottom of this boat and no one will hear me if I scream. ”
The Portsmouth Police Department took the case. Detective A. J.
Bucci, now a retired lieutenant, remembered Ronald as a chameleon. He gave the appearance of being a good catch, but he wasn’t. He wore a facade of being a practicing doctor and lived the high life. He had the 60-foot motor yacht, but the boat was in deplorable condition.
He drove an older Jaguar and lived in an apartment house. A grand jury indicted Ronald on August 8th, 2003. There were three counts: two of first-degree sexual assault and one of second-degree sexual assault, all stemming from the same date. He was arraigned on August 14th, pled not guilty, and was held without bail.
He spent five days at the state prison complex before a bail hearing on August 19th. Bail was posted, secured against real estate, and he walked out. The court entered a no-contact order the same day, and Ronald surrendered his passport. But two weeks later, he was back before the court as a bail violator.
Still, over the next 14 months, he filed seven motions asking for permission to leave the state. Every single one was granted, even while the court held his passport. The trial was pushed through 2004 and into 2005 as both sides filed motions, argued over evidence, and set trial dates that were later scrapped. Finally, on April 19th, 2005, the case opened before a jury in Newport.
Cheryl testified, and so did Lieutenant Bucci. Cheryl later said that the whole time she was on that stand, she prayed the jury would see him for what he really was. The trial ran from Tuesday through Thursday. On Thursday, the defense moved for a mistrial and was denied.
On Friday, he didn’t appear. On Saturday, April 23rd, Ronald sent that email to his lawyers. He wrote that although he believed his trial had gone well and he expected to be acquitted, the small chance of losing could carry extremely harsh penalties. He had decided not to take the risk, he said.
He planned to leave the U. S. and enjoy life in another country where he had long been carefully planning a good, safe, and comfortable life. He told them a $5,000 check covering his legal fees would clear in a few days.
Then he added a postscript for one of his attorneys: “Please eat less chocolate and watch your diet. ”
When Cheryl found out he was gone, she said, “I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. ” Her son, Jan Hilfer, had been talking about the case since 2005. He said there was no question that they let him slip through the cracks.
The trial went to closing arguments without Ronald. Neither lawyer was allowed to tell the jury why the defendant’s chair was empty. The prosecutor, Carl Ricci, couldn’t point at Ronald, so he used a photograph from Ronald’s online dating profile instead. In his closing, he told the jury that Ronald had told a lot of lies, lived a life using fake names and fake identities, ran from things he was supposed to do, and tried to escape accountability.
On April 28th, 2005, the jury came back with a verdict of guilty on all three counts. Cheryl later said the trial did bring closure in some ways, and the guilty verdict was very important. But it also made her lose faith in the judicial system. Ronald had been treated so leniently, she said.
Why weren’t they tracking him better? His bail was forfeited to the state. His lawyer filed a motion for a new trial on behalf of a client who was already gone; it was denied. Then, on July 20th, 2005, a grand jury handed down a separate felony charge of bail jumping.
A spokesman for the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office told reporters that Ronald could spend the rest of his life in prison if caught. He noted that although Ronald had surrendered his passport, he might be using phony documents. The docket shows status conference after status conference through the fall of 2005. Defendant doesn’t appear.
Warrant outstanding. Then, the file went quiet for 16 years. There was no sentencing entry, not in 2005, and not ever. Two cases sat open for 21 years.
Ronald went on the Rhode Island State Police list of the state’s ten most wanted fugitives. His profile listed 17 aliases and described him as a master yachtsman, a world traveler, and internationally connected. He had been featured on America’s Most Wanted. When investigators searched his East Greenwich house after he vanished, they found several books hidden in the drop ceiling of the basement: books on how to conceal your identity, and books on establishing offshore accounts.
His email had said he had long been carefully planning. Leads went in every direction and none of them landed. Someone heard Brazil. Cheryl was told at one point that they were looking at Costa Rica.
A deputy marshal called it a worldwide search. Fisher moved around, he said, but not from country to country. He moved around the circles he knew and understood. People were unknowingly helping him; they didn’t know who he was or what he was wanted for.
Lieutenant Bucci never understood how he stayed gone. In April of 2025, he said it surprised him given the technology out there and Ronald’s ties back to Rhode Island with family. The prosecutor, Carl Ricci, became a criminal defense lawyer, but he kept running into Ronald’s face on the most wanted displays at local police departments. He would see the picture and think, oh, that picture, I remember that guy.
Cheryl couldn’t move on. She was treated for PTSD and developed agoraphobia, a fear of leaving her own home. She basically became a hermit, she said. The incident changed the whole trajectory of her life.
It affected her family life because she couldn’t really function as a mother. Two of her four sons had to go live with her parents. She always lived in fear of seeing him again because she never felt that he was far away. At one point, boarding a plane, she was certain she was standing next to him.
She was positive it was him, and she was sweating bullets. While all of this was going on, Cheryl did something that never turned up in any of the news coverage. On April 11th, 2006, one year after Ronald disappeared and one day short of three years after the assault, she sued him. It was a personal injury claim filed in Washington County Superior Court, and she demanded a jury.
You can’t sue a man you can’t find. Her lawyer filed a subpoena, and a hearing was set on a motion for alternative service, which is what you file when a defendant can’t be handed the papers normally because no one knows where he is. That’s the end of the docket. The case sat untouched for ten years.
On April 28th, 2016, it was marked closed. Nobody ever managed to put the papers in his hand. Somewhere in those years, Ronald Fisher became Richard Braden. Federal investigators now believe he was using that name by at least 2017, and that he was living in the New York area.
In 2017, Richard Braden self-published a book about the genetic risks of cancer. In October of 2022, a clinical-stage drug company in Seattle, Washington that works mainly on breast cancer treatments announced that it had retained Dr. Richard Braden as its interim chief medical officer. The company told the market that Dr.
Braden had come to them from Johnson & Johnson, where he had been a senior director in clinical development for their subsidiary. It credited him with the approval of a CAR-T cell therapy for multiple myeloma plus a handful of other drugs. It said he had trained at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital and gotten his MD and PhD at Stanford. At the end, it noted his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at Cornell, which is where Ronald Fisher did his undergrad.
The company’s chief executive welcomed him warmly. When NBC 10 in Providence called the company about it that month, the company said Dr. Braden had been an independent contractor for less than two weeks in 2022 and didn’t answer any follow-up questions. The announcement was later taken off the company’s website.
Then, on March 30th, 2026, another biopharma company, Immix Biopharma, put out a press release announcing it had finished enrolling patients in a late-stage trial of a cell therapy for a rare blood disorder. Buried in the same release was a second announcement: the company had brought on a new chief medical officer. The new chief medical officer was Dr. Richard Braden.
Immix told its shareholders it had brought on a board-certified hematologist/oncologist with over 20 years of experience, most recently at Merck and Company and Johnson & Johnson. The release credited him with the regulatory filings behind seven approved drugs, four of which are among the best-selling cancer medicines on Earth. Johnson & Johnson told NBC 10 it never employed anyone by that name. Merck & Company simply didn’t respond.
Two publicly traded drug companies had handed senior clinical leadership to a man whose resume nobody appears to have called a single reference on. He had an active federal warrant. He had revoked medical licenses in two states. His real name and photograph were on a state police most wanted page.
In the second week of July of 2026, the FBI got a tip from an online sleuth. Multiple agencies spent 48 hours running it down and connected Richard Braden to Ronald Fisher. A supervisory deputy U. S.
Marshal said that once they focused on the Braden identity, they found his location by linking him to sailing, his boat, and a yacht club. After 21 years, 17 aliases, and a fabricated medical career, they got him on boats, the one thing he would not give up. Task force members went to a marina in Jersey City, New Jersey and set up surveillance. On the morning of Thursday, July 16th, 2026, the Coast Guard told them the boat was moving.
It was a 56-foot sailing vessel called the Silver Lining, registered to Richard Braden. Working off a Coast Guard response boat, deputy U. S. Marshals and Coast Guard personnel intercepted the vessel about an hour offshore.
Ronald was taken into custody without incident on a federal warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Under questioning, he told them he was Richard Braden, and he kept telling them that until they ran his fingerprints. The First Assistant United States Attorney said, “You can run, but you cannot hide from justice. ” He said Ronald would now return to Rhode Island to face the consequences he sought to evade for more than 20 years.
When Ronald was brought into court in New York, prosecutors said his Connecticut driver’s license in the Braden name was invalid. A deputy marshal said Ronald had been in touch with his two daughters on and off across the past 15 years. When asked whether either woman was under investigation, he wouldn’t answer. Immix Biopharma fired Richard Braden on Friday, July 17th.
The company later filed a form with the Securities and Exchange Commission saying he was terminated for reasons unrelated to his activities at the company and that his short tenure had no material effect on the business. His biography came down off the company’s website, and the press release announcing his hiring was pulled off the internet. Two law firms announced investigations into whether the company or its executives had violated federal securities laws. Ronald was held at Rikers Island in New York, where he waived extradition.
Rhode Island authorities brought him back and processed him at the same state prison complex where he had spent five days back in August of 2003. On Monday morning, July 27th, 2026, Ronald Fisher was walked into Newport County Superior Court, the same courthouse he had walked out of 21 years prior. The judge wiped the outstanding warrants off the books. He entered a not guilty plea on Ronald’s behalf for the bail jumping charge and set bail at $20,000 secured, but it was a formality, as Ronald was being held with no bail at all on the sexual assault conviction and was a bail violator on top of that.
The judge gave him three weeks to find an attorney. The whole thing took under five minutes. Three days before that hearing, Cheryl sued Ronald Fisher for the second time in her life. This one was filed in Providence and Bristol County Superior Court.
It brought claims for battery, assault, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and asked a jury for damages, interest, and costs. The complaint described Ronald’s conduct as extreme, outrageous, beyond all possible bounds of decency, and utterly intolerable in a civilized society. As of the date of this recording, Ronald hadn’t filed a response. On the same day as the arraignment, Cheryl’s lawyer filed an emergency motion, and a hearing on a temporary restraining order was set for the following afternoon.
Ronald was due back in court on August 17th. Three matters were stacked on that date: the violation of bail on the 2003 case, a pretrial conference on the bail jumping indictment, and a determination of whether he had found a lawyer. He had still never been sentenced. He faced up to life in prison.
Last year, before anybody knew where Ronald was, Cheryl’s son Jan said, “This guy has been out there free to do whatever he pleases for the past 20 years. And what this man pleases to do is attack women. ” After the arrest, Jan said the family’s first reaction was disbelief, and they aren’t finished. He said, “We still have the judicial system that needs to do their job, and number one, not let him slip through their fingers again.
” He also wanted to give his mother credit. She had a feeling that Ronald was hiding in plain sight. She had said that for years, and she was correct. When asked in April of 2025 whether she thought Ronald would ever be found, Cheryl said, “Oh, I think he’s hiding in plain sight.
I don’t think he’s far, far away at all. ” Fifteen months later, they found him on a boat in Jersey City. The U. S.
Marshal for the District of Rhode Island said, “This arrest demonstrates that time does not erase accountability. We hope today’s arrest brings a measure of justice and long-awaited closure to the victim and everyone impacted by these crimes. ” The Rhode Island State Police put out their own statement, praising the persistent, coordinated work and the numerous troopers, both currently serving and retired, who pursued the case for two decades. They never stopped seeking justice for his victim.
The prosecutor from 2005 said he was surprised. He figured Ronald had made it this long and would probably make it for the rest of his life. Cheryl credited the people who helped take Ronald down. She said it took more than a village; it took a whole region to catch a person like that, and it took a long time.
What she kept coming back to was how fast the end was after how slow everything else had been. She said it seemed amazing to her, and that they did it in the space of 48 hours was even more incredible after a gap of a third of a lifetime. To suddenly capture somebody that quickly. She didn’t know how they did it, but she was grateful from the bottom of her heart.
Cheryl knows exactly where she wants to be when he’s finally sentenced. The last time she saw Ronald Fisher in that courtroom in 2005, he sat very casually at the desk with his attorney, just staring at her with a kind of smug look on his face. Now, she said, she’ll be able to do the same to him. She wants to watch from the gallery this time, not from the witness stand.
When she found out what he had named the boat, she laughed. She said, “His silver lining has come to an end and now his lining is going to be a lining behind iron bars. I hope, I sincerely hope for the rest of his life. ”
On the first morning of the first day in 21 years that she woke up knowing where he was, Cheryl Gingrich said this: “I was happy to think when I woke up I thought I slept last night in my bed, Ronald Fisher slept last night in jail.
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