- In 1992, 17-year-old Amy Fisher arrived at Mary Jo Buttafuoco’s home claiming she was having an affair with Mary Jo’s husband, Joey, before shooting Mary Jo in the head
- Mary Jo survived but was left with facial paralysis and hearing loss and despite mounting evidence that Joey had been sleeping with Fisher
- Mary Jo eventually left Joey in 2003 and wrote about her experience in Getting It Through My Thick Skull
Mary Jo Buttafuoco thought her life was pretty much perfect.
Aged 37, she and her husband Joey, 36, were the proud parents to their two children Jessica, then nine, and Paul, 12.
The high school sweethearts had married in 1977, and Joey worked as an auto shop owner while Mary Jo took the kids to school and attended to the family home.
The morning of May 19, 1992, started off no differently to any other. After Joey went to work and Mary Jo dropped the kids at school, the mum of two set about doing household chores.
She’d just decided to re-paint some benches in the backyard when the doorbell rang.
Answering it, Mary Jo was met by a teenager she’d never seen before.
The girl said that her younger sister ‘Ann Marie’ was sleeping with Mary Jo’s husband. She even handed Mary Jo a T-shirt from Joey’s auto shop to prove the affair had taken place.
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Dismissing the claims, Mary Jo asked, ‘How old are you? 12?’
When she turned to go inside, the teenager produced a gun and aimed it directly at Mary Jo’s head.
She shot the mum in the right temple at point blank range. Then she fled.
Mary Jo later said she thought she’d been hit with a baseball bat. ‘My thought was, Where she did she get the bat? she recalled on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Neighbours who’d heard the gunshot rushed out to find Mary Jo bleeding. She was raced to hospital in a critical condition.
The bullet, which severed her carotid artery, became lodged in the base of Mary Jo’s brain, above her spinal column.
Mary Jo spent two days on a respirator, with Joey and their children close by her side.
But as soon as she was conscious, Mary Jo was able to give a detailed description of her assailant.
But it didn’t seem to make sense. Why would a random teenage girl come to Buttafuoco’s home to try to murder Mary Jo?
Finally, Joey made a confession. He recognised the shooter as the daughter of one of his customers.
She was 17-year-old Amy Fisher.
Amy Fisher was arrested and charged with attempted murder and criminal use of a firearm.
She claimed she – not her little sister – had been having an affair with Joey after meeting him at the auto shop a year earlier.
Joey denied this, telling the media she was suffering ‘hallucinations’.
Despite Mary Jo taking her husband’s word for it, others were less convinced. When the case hit headlines all over the world, tabloid newspapers dubbed Fisher the ‘Long Island Lolita’.
Meanwhile, miraculously, Mary Jo began to heal from her injuries. But the right side of her face was paralysed, and she was deaf in her right ear.
At Fisher’s trial, her lawyer, Eric Nailburg, depicted the teen as the wronged party.
He even claimed that Joey had instructed Fisher to commit the murder, telling her to start shooting the moment Mary Jo opened the door.
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The jury didn’t buy it. Fisher took a plea deal, pleading guilty to reckless assault, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Meanwhile, police had been chasing leads that Joey had in fact been sleeping with Fisher, who was a minor when they’d begun their relationship.
Not only had he signed motel receipts for their rendezvous, he’d also boasted about their relationship to a co-worker.
A year after Fisher’s sentencing, Joey Buttafuoco was charged with statutory rape. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in prison. Even then, Mary Jo stood by her husband.
At a parole hearing in 1999, Fisher changed her story, taking full responsibility for the crime.
‘I’d like to say something to Mary Jo,’ Fisher said. ‘What happened to you was not your husband’s fault, not your fault, not my father’s fault, and not Eric Naiburg’s fault. It was my fault, and I have spent the last seven years trying to figure it out.’
Mary Jo decided to offer forgiveness. ‘She has shown true remorse and sorrow for what she did to me,’ she said in court.
Turning to Fisher, she added, ‘You are being given a second chance in life, and I pray you will take it and make something positive out of all this tragedy.’
Fisher was released from prison shortly after the parole hearing.
Over the years, Joey Buttafuoco also changed his story, denying a relationship even took place.
In 1995 he was arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer.
Finally, in 2003, Mary Jo left him.
She wrote a book about her experience, Getting It Through My Thick Skull, concluding that her husband had been a ‘sociopath’.
Appearing on Oprah, she said, ‘The kids were little… I didn’t know anybody who ever got a divorce. My anger – and I look at it now and I cringe because I was so angry back in the day – was that it turned into this, “Did he or didn’t he?” Instead of, “Hey, what about me?”’
To this day, Mary Jo continues to suffer from her injuries, but in 2017, she had surgery which meant she was able to smile again for the first time since the shooting.
In 2019, she appeared on a 20/20 TV special about the crime, saying ‘Thank God, I’m still here to talk about it.’
