HILLSBOROUGH -- Norma Shivers says that for 25 years she has been "99 percent positive" who killed her stepdaughter. Now she has DNA on her side, prosecutors say.
George R. Fisher, already convicted of another child's slaying, was indicted Monday on a charge of first-degree murder in the death of Shivers' stepdaughter, Carrie Ann Wilkerson, on Feb. 22, 1984.
The 7-year-old's body was found in the closet of a partly burned mobile home where she and Shivers lived in the Rocky Brook Trailer Park in Carrboro. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Shivers sat in Orange County Superior Court on Tuesday as Fisher was led into the room in handcuffs and a chain around his waist.
"It was strange," Shivers said after the brief hearing. "Just to know he's that close, to know he's in the room with me."
Investigators had considered Fisher a suspect early on, but a quarter century passed without prosecutors bringing charges. It might have remained that way but for a call about possible new information a few weeks ago.
District Attorney Jim Woodall would say only that the call did not lead to a new suspect. It did prompt the State Bureau of Investigation and Carrboro police investigators to take another look at the case.
"They knew there was a rape kit," Woodall said.
Investigators had looked at it in the 1990s, but the technology was not yet sophisticated enough to extract DNA from it, Woodall said. He said he would not talk about the new evidence that prompted the charges.
Similarities in deaths
Other evidence had pointed to Fisher soon after Carrie's death.
In August 1985, Fisher, a Hillsborough construction worker, was convicted of killing 8-year-old Jean Fewell of Chapel Hill and attempting to rape her. The girl was kidnapped as she walked to school on Jan. 30 of that year.
Jean's body was found with a clothesline-like cord around her neck, on the ground but pulled up against a tree behind UNC-Chapel Hill's Finley Golf Course, Woodall said.
Like Carrie, she had been strangled.
The two girls had known each other, and a photo of Fisher with Carrie was found in Fisher's home when investigators searched it after Jean's murder.
Investigators also thought the trailer fire had been deliberately set.
Fisher had served time in an Ohio psychiatric hospital and North Carolina prison for arson convictions.
Contact with Carrie
According to news accounts in 1985, a neighbor said one of Carrie's classmates knocked at Carrie's door the day she died to ask why Carrie was not waiting at the bus stop. Carrie replied that she couldn't come out because she had a friend with her, the child said.
That fall, investigators won a court order to take blood and hair samples from Fisher, who was serving life in prison plus 50 years for killing Jean.
The samples did not link Fisher to Carrie's death, and he denied killing her, but then-District Attorney Carl Fox said he remained a suspect. There were other suspects, but no one was charged.
Convinced of guilt
Shivers said after Jean Fewell's killing she was convinced that Fisher, the husband of a friend and coworker at what is now UNC Hospitals, had killed Carrie as well.
"I've known it in my heart ever since," she said.
Carrie was the birth daughter of Shivers' first husband and stayed with her after the couple separated.
On Tuesday, Judge Abraham Jones ordered Fisher, 61, who has been imprisoned in Maury Correctional Institute in Greene County, held without bail on the new charges. He does not have a lawyer, but Jones ordered that he be appointed one through the Office of the Capital Defender because he could face the death penalty.
No sense of justice
Fisher, wearing thick, black-framed glasses, shifted on his feet and shook his head Tuesday as Jones asked whether he had questions.
Shivers said too many years of pain have gone by for her to feel any sense of justice over the charges against Fisher.
"He looks fine," she said after he was led away. "He's adjusted to it. That's what hurts us. You want something other than the easy way in prison. You want something different than him sitting back in his cell."
News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this story.
