Braintree Promises Search For Records In Amy Bishop/ Brother's Murder Case
The Mayor of Braintree said today that the town and its police department would work with the Norfolk County district attorney's office to locate all materials relating to the 1986 fatal shooting by Amy Bishop of her brother, Seth Bishop, a case that is drawing new interest because Amy Bishop was charged with shooting six people on Friday in Alabama.
The town and the police recognize "the importance of transparency ... The Braintree Police Department will conduct a thorough audit of all its records to identify if there were deficits in its past record keeping process," Mayor Joseph C. Sullivan said today in a statement.
The statement came after Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier on Saturday raised troubling questions about the handling of the case in his town, saying that a police report on the Dec. 6, 1986 shooting was missing and that the officer who prepared it remembered the shooting as happening during an argument, even though the State Police later ruled it was an accident.
More than two decades later, Amy Bishop now stands accused of shooting six of her colleagues – three of them fatally – at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Sullivan promised that the results of the review would be shared with the public and with law enforcement agencies.
Ala. Suspect Was Questioned In Bomb Case
A Biology professor accused of killing three colleagues and wounding three more in a shooting rampage at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said yesterday.
Amy Bishop and her husband were questioned after a package containing two pipe bombs was sent to the Newton home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg, a Harvard Medical School professor and physician at Children’s Hospital Boston. At the time, Bishop was working as a postdoctoral fellow in the hospital’s human biochemistry lab.
It was the second stunning revelation in two days about Bishop’s past. On Saturday, authorities said Bishop fatally shot her brother in Braintree in 1986 and was not charged after state prosecutors concluded that it was accidental.
In an interview last night at their home in Huntsville, Ala., Bishop’s husband, James E. Anderson, acknowledged that he and his wife were questioned by authorities about the 1993 mail bomb case, but said neither of them was a suspect. Rather, they were “subjects’’ of the attempted bombing investigation, he said.
It was “just a matter of questioning, being bothered, harassed. You know, the usual techniques, that’s all,’’ Anderson said. He told The New York Times, “In my files I have a letter from the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms] saying, ‘You are hereby cleared in this incident. You are no longer a subject of the investigation.’ ’’
Rosenberg had just returned home from a Caribbean vacation with his wife on Dec. 19, 1993, when he was opening a package addressed to “Mr. Paul Rosenberg M.D.’’ that had been brought inside with the rest of the mail by their cat-sitter. When he saw wires and a cylinder inside, he and his wife fled the house and called police.
A law enforcement official said yesterday that the investigation by the US Postal Service, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and Newton police had focused on Bishop.
“She was the suspect early on,’’ the official said.
The official, who had knowledge of the case, said Bishop was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her work. Investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had killed her brother, the official said.
Investigators conducted a search of the home where Bishop and Anderson were living and questioned the couple, the official said. Anderson was questioned about whether he had purchased any of the components used to make the bombs, the official said.
But the US attorney’s office in Boston did not seek any charges against Bishop or Anderson, and no one was ever charged with mailing the bombs.
The law enforcement official said federal prosecutors concluded the evidence was circumstantial and not sufficient to warrant charges. A spokeswoman for the US attorney’s office declined to comment yesterday.
At his home yesterday afternoon, Rosenberg declined to comment and referred questions to Children’s Hospital administrators, who said information on the case was not immediately available.
Sylvia Fluckiger, a lab technician who worked with Bishop at the time, told the Globe yesterday in a telephone interview that Bishop had a dispute with Rosenberg shortly before the bombs were mailed.
After the attempted bombing, Fluckiger said that Bishop told her she had been questioned by police. Fluckiger said Bishop told her police asked her if she had taken stamps off an envelope that had been mailed to her and put them on something else.
“She said it with a smirk on her face,’’ said Fluckiger. “We knew she had a beef with Paul Rosenberg. And we really thought it was a really unbelievable coincidence that he would get those bombs.’’
Sergeant Mark Roberts, a spokesman for the Huntsville Police, said yesterday that after receiving inquiries from the Globe about Bishop being a suspect in the 1993 mail bombing case, they were looking into the case.
“Presently we are trying to confirm it through law enforcement resources,’’ he said.
Bishop, 44, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville since 2003, was arrested after allegedly opening fire during a faculty meeting Friday, killing three colleagues and wounding three others, reportedly after learning at the meeting that she was being denied tenure.
Her husband said to the Globe last night, “Why’d she snap? That’s my question. I’ve got to get to the bottom of that, and when I get to the bottom of that, then I’ll just call a press conference and say, ‘OK, this is what happened. Let me clear the air.’ ’’
He added that, “Everybody loves her, and everybody, including myself - we were all shocked. We don’t know what happened. They don’t know what the university did to her.’’
The New York Times reported that Anderson said he did not know his wife allegedly had a gun when she went to the meeting Friday at the university. “I had no idea,’’ he told the paper. “We don’t own one.’’
He told the Times that Bishop was fighting the school’s decision to deny her tenure.
In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Anderson said wife “didn’t want to go the way of’’ another university scientist who lost tenure and was now driving a shuttle bus.
In that interview, he also said he spoke with Bishop yesterday morning by telephone and she said, “I know you guys are obviously in shock.’’ He said she wanted to know whether their four children were OK and whether they’d done their homework.
He said he was dating Bishop when she shot her brother to death in 1986, an incident he called “an absolute accident.’’
The Globe reported yesterday that Bishop, who was 21 at the time, shot and killed her 18-year-old brother Seth on Dec. 6, 1986, inside their Braintree home.
Braintree Police Chief Paul H. Frazier said Bishop killed her brother with a shotgun after an argument, fired two other rounds inside the house, then later pointed the gun at a passing car while fleeing.
Prosecutors declined to bring charges after Bishop’s mother, Judy Bishop, insisted the shooting was accidental.
Since the Alabama shootings, Frazier has raised questions about whether the Braintree investigation was mishandled. But John Polio, who was the town’s police chief at the time and is now retired, defended the original investigation. He said Saturday that at the time, he had asked the district attorney to review the case. Also on Saturday, the Norfolk district attorney’s office released a six-page investigational report on the shooting issued at the time, which concluded that it was an accident.
Braintree police said their own file on the case went missing shortly after the 1986 shooting. Yesterday, Braintree Mayor Joseph C. Sullivan said the town has begun an investigation to determine what happened to the report.
“The Braintree Police Department will conduct a thorough audit of all its records to identify if there were deficits in its past record-keeping process,’’ Sullivan said in a prepared statement. “The results of this review, when completed, will be shared with relevant law enforcement agencies and the public.’’
Also yesterday, a person briefed on the mail bomb case said the search of Bishop’s computer in that inquiry turned up a draft of a novel that Bishop was writing about a female scientist who had killed her brother, and who was hoping to make amends by becoming a great scientist. The person spoke to the Globe on the condition of anonymity.
A former colleague who worked with Bishop described her as sweet, neat, and very nice. “She was always smiling,’’ said Mercedes A. Paz, a retired Harvard biochemist who advised Bishop on her thesis. “Everybody loved her.’’
But some of her neighbors held a different view.
Before Bishop and Anderson moved to Alabama in 2003, they lived in a tight-knit community on Birch Lane in Ipswich with their three daughters and son.
Neighbors described Bishop as an angry person who often called police when teens were playing basketball or skateboarding in the neighborhood, and yelled and cursed at children for being too loud.
“She wouldn’t let the ice cream truck come down the street,’’ said one neighbor, who declined to give his name.
Ipswich police confirmed two calls for neighborhood disputes from Bishop, but did not release any details. Bishop also called police on March 8, 2002 to report receiving harassing phone calls, police said.
Onetime neighbors Denise and Nishan Mootafian said they stopped letting their children go over to play with Bishop and Anderson’s children, in part because Bishop “got very agitated by noise.’’
“I just feel like she was a ticking bomb who could have gone off on any of us,’’ Denise Mootafian said.
Once, neighbors organized a block party and didn’t tell Bishop because of conflicts she had with people, she said. “At that point things were so tense.’’
“We weren’t sad to see them go,’’ Nishan Mootafian said.
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Alabama Professor Killed Brother In 1986
The University of Alabama-Huntsville biology professor accused of killing three colleagues fatally shot her brother in Massachusetts more than two decades ago, police said Saturday.
The revelation by Braintree, Mass., police that Amy Bishop shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth M. Bishop, in 1986 raised troubling questions over how that incident was handled.
The Boston Globe reported at the time that Amy Bishop had accidentally shot her brother. It quoted then-Braintree Police Chief John Polio as saying that Bishop had asked her mother, Judith, in the presence of her brother how to unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun when the weapon went off. Seth Bishop was struck in the abdomen and died at a hospital 46 minutes after the Dec. 6, 1986 shooting, according to the report.
"Every indication at this point in time leads us to believe it was an accidental shooting," Polio said at the time, according to the Globe.
But Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier, at a news conference Saturday, offered a different account of the 1986 shooting, the Globe reported. Frazier said Amy Bishop fired three shots during an argument at the family home, then fled. She allegedly pointed the shotgun at a motorist before being arrested at gunpoint by officers.
Frazier said Bishop was being booked into jail when Polio, the police chief at the time, ordered her released her to her mother.
Frazier said he was basing his statements on the memories of one of his officers who had arrested Bishop. He said the records from the case have been missing since at least 1987.
"I don't want to use the word 'cover-up,' but this does not look good," he said.
In an interview at his home Saturday, Polio, 87, told the Globe: "There was no cover-up." He said he followed all department procedures and then-District Attorney William Delahunt's office conducted an inquiry and the decision was made not to file charges.
Delahunt, now a U.S. representative, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Tenure Dispute
Bishop, now 42, is accused of gunning down three of her colleagues Friday during a University of Alabama-Huntsville faculty meeting in an apparent tenure dispute. Three others were wounded — a rare instance of a woman being accused in a mass shooting.
Bishop, a Harvard-educated Neurobiologist who became an assistant professor at the school in 2003, was taken Friday night in handcuffs to the county jail, and said as she got into a police car: "It didn't happen. There's no way. ... They are still alive."
Bishop's husband was also detained for questioning but police did not call him a suspect.
On Friday, Bishop presided over her regular class before going to a biology faculty meeting where she sat quietly for about 30 or 40 minutes, one University of Alabama faculty member told the New York Times. Then, she pulled out a gun and began shooting, firing several rounds before her gun either jammed or ran out of bullets, said the faculty member, who had spoken to people that were in the room.
After she left the room, he said, the remaining people barred the door, fearing she would return. She was arrested outside the building without incident.
A really big Nerd
Students' assessments of Bishop varied. Some recalled an attentive, friendly teacher, while others said she was an odd woman who couldn't simplify difficult subjects for students.
Sammie Lee Davis, the husband of Maria Ragland Davis, a tenured researcher who was killed, said his wife had described Bishop as "not being able to deal with reality" and "not as good as she thought she was."
In a brief phone interview, Davis said he was told his wife was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of another faculty member who got angry and started shooting.
Maria Ragland Davis was killed along with two other biology professors, Gopi K. Podila, chairman of the biological sciences department, and Adriel Johnson. Another two biology professors and a professor’s assistant were wounded and were at a Huntsville hospital in conditions ranging from fair to critical.
Bishop and her husband, Jim Anderson, had created a portable cell incubator, known as InQ, that was touted as a replacement for the old-fashioned petri dish and less expensive than its larger counterparts. The couple won $25,000 in 2007 to market the device.
Andrea Bennett, a sophomore majoring in nursing and an athlete at UAH, said a coach told her team that Bishop had been denied tenure, which the coach said may have led to the shooting.
Bennett described Bishop as being "very weird" and "a really big nerd."
"She's well-known on campus, but I wouldn't say she's a good teacher. I've heard a lot of complaints," Bennett said. "She's a genius, but she really just can't explain things."
Student Complaints
Amanda Tucker, a junior nursing major from Alabaster, Ala., had Bishop for anatomy class about a year ago. Tucker said a group of students complained to a dean about Bishop's classroom performance.
"When it came down to tests, and people asked her what was the best way to study, she'd just tell you, 'Read the book.' When the test came, there were just ridiculous questions. No one even knew what she was asking," Tucker said.
However, UAH student Andrew Cole was in Bishop's anatomy class Friday morning and said she seemed perfectly normal.
"She's understanding, and was concerned about students," he said. "I would have never thought it was her."
Nick Lawton, 25, described Bishop as funny and accommodating with students.
"She seemed like a nice enough professor," Lawton said.
The Huntsville campus has about 7,500 students in northern Alabama, not far from the Tennessee line. The university is known for its scientific and engineering programs and often works closely with NASA.
The space agency has a research center on the school's campus, where many scientists and engineers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center perform Earth and space science research and development.
The university will remain closed next week, and all athletic events were canceled.
Female shooters rare
It's the second shooting in a week on an area campus. On Feb. 5, a 14-year-old student was killed in a middle school hallway in nearby Madison, allegedly by a fellow student.
Mass shootings are rarely carried out by women, said Dr. Park Dietz, who is president of Threat Assessment Group Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based violence prevention firm.
A notable exception was a 1985 rampage at a Springfield, Pa., mall in which three people were killed. In June 1986, Sylvia Seegrist was deemed guilty but mentally ill on three counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder in the shooting spree.
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Sources: Boston Globe, MSNBC, Fox News, Google Maps
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