August 6, 1990: Arthur Clark of Crystal River, Florida is arrested for the rape of Cindy Fisher the previous day; in the words of Judge Gary Graham: “This was a violent rape of a total stranger upon a public thoroughfare” adding “The weight of the evidence against the defendant is great”.
Fisher gave a detailed description of her alleged attacker down to his jewellery, but on August 31, the charges are dropped and Arthur Lee Clark is released from gaol, and on September 18, Cindy Annette Fisher is arrested and charged with false reporting.
When this case was first added to the Timeline, the above was credited as based on the report by Keith Morelli in The Tampa Tribune, FLORIDA Edition, September 20, 1990, page 1, (accessed through NewsBank).
When it was moved to a separate page, ie this one, in June 2020, some more research was added; I found reports in the archive of the Tampa Bay Times on the regular Internet.
The story got rather complicated and included the arrest of the alleged victim’s boyfriend for threatening Clark’s brother with a screwdriver.
Cindy Fisher was charged with perjury, and after initially trying to plead NO CONTEST to two of them, Judge Graham rejected the offer, so the State dropped the case. As usual, falsely accused men seldom get justice.
This article appears to have been published around October 3, 1990, but for some reason, as the reader will see, it is dated October 17, 2005. I haven’t contacted the paper – I’m usually ignored when I do – but I would suspect this was the date it was added to the archive.
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