For two years, Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota had an unsolved mystery.
Someone was leaving urine around campus. In trash cans. In water bottles. In other professors' office decorations. Campus security investigated. Nobody could figure out who was doing it. The mystery sprinkler remained at large.
Then a student left her backpack outside her biology professor's office for six minutes.
When she came back, it was soaked. It smelled. She knew immediately what it was. She also knew who had been nearby.
Paul Fischer, 55-year-old biology professor, 25 years at Macalester College, had been peeing into a cup at his desk and disposing of it around the building for approximately a year and a half to two years.
The mystery was solved.
The Confession
When investigators confronted Fischer about the student's backpack, he had an explanation.
He told police he had developed a habit of urinating into a cup and then dumping the contents into trash cans or laboratory sinks on campus. On the day in question, he said, he may have accidentally splashed some urine onto the student's backpack while disposing of a cup near his office.
A little bit of piss, he suggested, must have missed the trash can.
Investigators also asked Fischer about the six other on-campus incidents involving urine — the trash cans, the water bottles, the decorations in other professors' offices. He was linked to all of them. The serial sprinkler, it turned out, had been right there the whole time. Teaching biology. For 25 years.
Macalester College's Department of Public Safety told police that an investigation had already been underway before the backpack incident. Fischer had been caught urinating around campus. He resigned while the investigation was ongoing.
The Charges
Fischer now faces a felony charge of first-degree property damage, according to court records obtained by the New York Post. The charge relates specifically to the student's backpack, which was so thoroughly soaked that she submitted $2,070 in receipts for damaged items.
The felony carries up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He is due in court in early November.
The student had been gone for six minutes. That's 360 seconds. She came back to find the aftermath of what Fischer called an accident and what law enforcement is treating as criminal property damage.
The Macalester College biology department did not respond to requests for comment, possibly because they are still processing the revelation that their mystery campus urinator was a tenured colleague who had been teaching introductory biology while developing what he described to police as simply a "habit."
The Question Nobody Is Answering
Here is the part that nobody — not Fischer, not the criminal complaint, not any of the reporting — has attempted to explain: why?
Why develop the habit of peeing into a cup in the first place, when there are bathrooms on every floor of a biology building at a Minnesota liberal arts college? Why then deposit the contents into other professors' decorations? Why, for two years, keep doing it?
Fischer hasn't offered an explanation beyond calling it a habit. Campus security had been investigating for two years and never caught him in the act. The student caught him by leaving her backpack unattended for six minutes.
He taught there for 25 years. He taught biology — the science of living organisms, cellular processes, the mechanics of life. He presumably knew, as most adults do, where bathrooms are.
The mystery of why a 55-year-old professor with a quarter century of institutional loyalty developed a secret cup-peeing ritual at his desk is, at this time, unsolved.
Unlike the identity of the serial sprinkler.
