Bradford Bishop
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William Bradford Bishop, Jr. (born August 1, 1936) was a United States Foreign Service officer who has been a fugitive from justice since allegedly murdering five members of his family in 1976.
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[edit] Known biography
William Bradford Bishop, Jr. was born in Pasadena, California on August 1, 1936. He received a BS in history from Yale, and an MA in international studies (with a concentration in Africa) from the University of California system. He also attended Middlebury College.
After his graduation from Yale in 1959, he served 4 years in Army counterintelligence. Bishop is reported to speak five languages fluently: English, French, Serbo-Croatian, Italian and Spanish.
Bishop joined the U.S. State Department and served in the U.S. Foreign Service in many postings overseas. This included postings in the Italian cities of Verona, Milan, and Florence (where he did post-graduate work at the University of Florence). He also served as a foreign service officer in Africa including posts in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and in Gaborone, Botswana. His last posting was at State Department Headquarters in Washington as an Assistant Chief in the Division of Special Activities and Commercial Treaties.
As of early 1976, he and his wife Annette (age 37) had three sons, ages 5,10 and 14. He was 39 years old, anticipating a promotion, and was using a prescription anti-depressant drug called Serax, which can be addictive. On the afternoon of March 1, he learned he would not receive the promotion he had hoped for.
[edit] The Murders
After learning of this career disappointment, Bishop told his secretary he didn’t feel well and left work early. On the way home he bought both a ball-peen hammer and a gas can, which he filled at a gas station. Police believe that he used the hammer to kill first his wife, then his mother when she returned home from walking the family's golden retriever, and finally his three sons in their beds.
With the bodies loaded into the family station wagon, Bishop drove 275 miles (about 6 hours' drive) to a densely wooded area off North Carolina highway 94, about five miles south of Columbia, North Carolina. There, he dug a shallow hole where he piled the bodies, doused them with gasoline, and set them ablaze. The next day, March 2, a North Carolina state forest ranger was dispatched by a spotter in a fire tower to an area where smoke was rising from the trees. The ranger discovered the burned bodies and a shovel with a label from a Bethesda, Maryland store.
It was later confirmed that Bishop visited a sporting goods store in Jacksonville, North Carolina that same day and used his credit card to purchase tennis shoes. According to witnesses, he had the family dog with him on a leash, and was possibly but not certainly accompanied by a woman described as "dark skinned". All later sightings of Bishop are unconfirmed.
A week later, on March 10th, a neighbor of the Bishops in the Carderock Springs neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland grew concerned about the family's absence. The neighbor found the front door unlocked and entered to discover blood-spattered walls and floors, and then called police. Shortly afterward, dental records were used to confirm that the bodies found in North Carolina were the Bishop family.
On March 18, the Bishop family car was found abandoned at a campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, about 400 miles from the Columbia-area pyre. The car contained dog biscuits and a bloody blanket; the spare-tire well in the trunk was full of blood.
On March 19 a grand jury indicted Bishop on five counts of first degree murder and other charges. Evidence included his disappearance, the sighting afterward in the vicinity of the bodies, and bloody stains inside the family home that matched both his fingerprints and the blood of his family members.
[edit] Aftermath
Bishop had approximately one week of advance time before the authorities even began looking for him and could have traveled on his U.S. diplomatic passport. Because of the methods of air travel and immigration in 1976 throughout much of the world, he could easily have avoided leaving a paper trail of any kind.
Since 1976 Bishop has been allegedly sighted numerous times in Belgium, England, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The three sightings noted by the United States Marshals Service are as follows:
- In July 1978, Bishop was seen by an acquaintance of the Bishop family in Stockholm, Sweden
- In January 1979, Bishop was seen in a water closet in Sorrento, Italy by a co-worker who had worked closely with him at the State Department. Bishop ran when hailed by the co-worker.
- On September 19, 1994 on a Basel, Switzerland train platform, a neighbor who knew Bishop and his family in Bethesda, Maryland reported that she saw Bishop from a few feet away.
Alternate theories that Bishop died or committed suicide in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park or that he had defected to the Soviet Union are not seen as credible by the police at this time.
[edit] In the media
After the initial national headlines, the Bishop case has been the subject of articles in national publications like Reader's Digest and Time Magazine at milestone anniversaries. It has been followed intermittently on an ad hoc basis by the Washington Post, the Washington Star, and the Washington Times as well as local Washington D.C. television stations. The case has also been featured on television shows such as Unsolved Mysteries, ABC's Vanished and America's Most Wanted.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- March 2006 Washington Post Article marking the 30 year anniversary of the Bishop murders (registration required)
- Readers Digest on-line article abstracton Bishop
- Montgomery County, Maryland Sheriff’s page on Bishop
- U.S. Department of Justice’s page on Bishop
