MURDER CASE DISSOLVED, BUT SO DID DOCTOR'S LIFE

EL CERRITO - With his mild manner and coifed white hair, Frank Fisher
doesn't seem like a guy who killed as many as nine people, as the state
once claimed.

As it turns out, the doctor wasn't really part of what investigators once
pronounced "a highly sophisticated drug-dealing operation."

He's just a 50-year-old doctor, Harvard-trained, who has lost his practice
and his assets, a man who's resorted to living in his parents' cramped home
as the result of a five-year battle to prove he is not a killer, not a drug
dealer, not guilty of Medi-Cal fraud.

One of the final volleys in that battle came last week, when a jury in
Redding acquitted Fisher on eight misdemeanor counts of Medi-Cal fraud.

The verdict marked the prosecution's latest failure to make any of its
allegations stick, and the apparent end of state efforts to prosecute
Fisher on criminal charges stemming from his once-booming medical practice
in the Redding area.

"After the trial was over, I got online and saw all the stuff he's been
through and I couldn't believe it," said juror Marty Glassett, a Burney
electrician. "It just felt like they were on a witch hunt to me."

"They" would be prosecutors for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, whose
office last week had no comment on the case.

In February 1999, Lockyer charged Fisher and the owners of a Redding- area
pharmacy with murder, drug dealing and fraud. The case began as a
blockbuster that drew national attention and earned Fisher the sobriquet
"Redding pain doctor" anytime he was mentioned on television, radio and in
print.

Lockyer, who at the time had been attorney general for just a month, called
a press conference to announce the arrests, saying authorities were saving
Redding from saturation with highly addictive pain medications.

Investigators believed Fisher was indiscriminately prescribing massive
amounts of painkillers to patients at his Westwood Walk-in Clinic in
Anderson, south of Redding, then sending them to fill their prescriptions
at the Shasta Pharmacy, owned by Stephen and Madeline Miller.

Authorities filed three murder counts with the original charges because
three of the patients were said to have died of overdoses of the powerful
painkiller OxyContin. Eventually, prosecutors would say they believed as
many as nine people in Fisher's care had died, although they ended up
filing five murder charges.

Fisher was arrested and handcuffed at his Anderson clinic. The clinic was
shut down, his assets were seized, and he and the Millers ended up in jail
for five months.

"My bail was set at $15 million," Fisher said. "I thought they set bail on
Colombian drug lords at $7 million or $8 million."

And then the case began to fall apart.

By July 1999, a Shasta County judge threw out the murder charges for lack
of evidence and allowed Fisher to be released on a $50,000 bond.

The case dragged on until January 2003, when a judge dismissed manslaughter
and fraud charges against Fisher and the Millers. He was left facing the
misdemeanor charges decided Tuesday.

"They made an enormous blunder, and they didn't want to admit it," Fisher
said in an interview last week.

The prosecutor in the final case was tight-lipped after the verdict. "The
jury has spoken," Deputy Attorney General John Dower told the Redding
Record Searchlight.

From the start, the case was controversial, in part because of the
national debate over how to treat patients suffering from chronic pain.
Some believe powerful drugs such as OxyContin are so addictive that
prescribing too much is inherently dangerous.

Fisher contends he treated his patients diligently while providing them
relief from pain.

Early on, holes in the state's case seemed readily apparent to Fisher and
his supporters, many of whom rallied outside the Shasta County Courthouse.

One of the alleged murder victims died when the car she was in smashed into
a tree. Prosecutors said she had massive amounts of oxycodone, the active
ingredient in OxyContin, in her blood. But court testimony later indicated
the toxicology reading had been a "false reading."

Another alleged murder victim was Tamara Lorette Stevens, who was being
treated for pain from a perforated stomach ulcer. Stevens died in September
1998, and authorities charged that Fisher's OxyContin prescriptions led to
her death.

But her husband, Robert, also a Fisher patient, disputed that in a recent
interview, saying Fisher had helped both of them immeasurably and that he
believes his wife died of heart failure.

"They didn't care," Stevens said. "He was helping people and I guess they
didn't think that the people deserved help because they were on Medi-Cal."

Stevens is a former farm laborer who blames years of field work for his
back pain. After Fisher's arrest, Stevens said, he could not find other
doctors in the area willing to risk dispensing medicine for chronic pain,
and ended up traveling to Fresno for help.

Now, he says, he has another Redding-area doctor who has prescribed more
OxyContin to him than Fisher ever did.

The huge amount of painkilling medicine Fisher was prescribing is what led
to the case in the first place. Medi-Cal officials noted there had been an
enormous jump in such prescriptions in 1998, with Fisher dispensing more of
the medicine than any of the other 50,000 OxyContin prescribers in the state.

At the same time, the Millers' pharmacy became one of the largest
dispensers of such medication in the nation.

Fisher says he simply was serving his patients, under state law, by
providing them with pain relief, and that he took extreme precautions to
avoid overprescribing.

At the time, his practice consisted of 3,000 patients, most of them
families and children seeking routine care. About 5 percent to 10 percent
of his patient load consisted of people seeking help for chronic pain, he said.

Fisher estimates that state undercover agents visited him at least seven
times trying to obtain prescriptions using bogus ailments, and that he
refused to provide them with medicine. So, investigators began looking for
victims.

"The attorney general's office looked at the amount of medication I had
prescribed and what it cost the medical program and developed a theory that
said that must have killed people," Fisher said. "Well, that's not the way
a murder case starts.

"It usually starts with a body, then they look for a perpetrator. In this
case they developed a theory of a murder case and started looking for bodies."

The judge never bought into the theory, tossing out the murder charges and
most of the other counts.

Eventually, Fisher faced eight misdemeanor counts of Medi-Cal fraud
accusing him of filing incorrect reimbursement forms. His attorney
estimated he was charged with exceeding legal limits by $150, Fisher said.

That case ended Tuesday, giving Fisher hope that his legal troubles - at
least the criminal ones - are over.

He still faces three wrongful death suits filed in the wake of the original
charges, cases he says his attorneys are confident can be defeated now that
he has beaten the criminal charges.

And the Medical Board of California still intends to pursue action against
him. The board filed an accusation, mirroring the criminal charges, that
has been on hold while Fisher fought it out in the courts. Now, the board
says, it will move forward to take Fisher's license.

For their part, the Millers say that even after the charges against them
were dropped, the state continued to make things difficult. They received a
court order allowing return of their assets, but claim Lockyer's office
still is holding $400,000 in cash; and the state Board of Pharmacy is
trying to revoke Stephen Miller's license.

The couple say they have lost one home fighting the case, and that they
have been living off money from life insurance policies and friends.

"I feel like I've been raped, like we've been violated," Madeline Miller said.

Fisher's own parents have used more than $100,000 in retirement savings to
help their son, who has not worked since the case began. At this point,
he's lost everything but a 1988 Mercedes sedan with 300,000 miles on it,
and his medical license.

And he wants to keep that license.

"I'll go back into some form of medical practice," he said when asked about
his plans. "Maybe I'll get a job. I don't know what I'm going to do next."