Alabama campus shooter packed a history of rage

Not long after Amy Bishop was identified as the professor who had been arrested in the shooting of six faculty members at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, on Feb. 12, the campus police received a series of reports stranger than the shooting.

Several people with connections to the university's biology department warned that Bishop, a neuroscientist with a doctorate in genetics from Harvard University, might have booby-trapped the science building with some sort of "herpes bomb" designed to spread the virus, police officials said.

Only people who had worked with Bishop would know she had done work with the herpes virus as a postdoctoral student and had talked about how it could cause encephalitis. Bishop, a second cousin of novelist John Irving, had also written an unpublished novel in which a herpeslike virus spreads throughout the world, causing pregnant women to miscarry.

By the time of the reports, the police had swept every room of the science building, finding nothing but a 9 mm handgun in the second-floor restroom.

Over the years, she had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her. Her life seemed to veer wildly between moments of fury and scientific brilliance, between rage at perceived slights and empathy for her students.

Her academic career slammed to a halt with the shooting of her colleagues. Bishop, 45, is charged with murder in the deaths of three fellow biology professors, including the department's chairman, at a faculty meeting. Three others were wounded.

Her lawyer says she remembers nothing of the shootings and he plans to have her evaluated by psychiatrists.

The shootings took place after Bishop learned she had lost her long battle to gain academic tenure at the university. But they were not the first time she had come to the attention of law enforcement because of an outburst or violent act.

In 2002, she was charged with assault after punching a woman in the head at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The woman had taken the last booster seat, and, according to the police report, Bishop demanded it for one of her children, shouting, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop!"

In 1986, not long after a family argument, Amy Bishop, then 21, shot and killed her brother, Seth, 18, with her father's 12-gauge shotgun, according to the police report. She, like her brother, was a student at Northeastern University at the time.

She was not charged with a crime, and the shooting was never fully investigated by the police. She and her family said it was an accident.

In 1994, she and her husband, whom she met at a gathering to play the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game, were questioned in a mail-bomb plot against a doctor at Harvard, where she obtained her Ph.D. and remained on and off for nearly a decade to conduct postdoctoral research.

In her earlier brushes with the law, Bishop emerged unscathed, and University of Alabama, Huntsville, officials never knew of them. But she left behind a trail of neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances who were mystified by her mood swings and volatility.

She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé.

She was known to have "flip-outs," as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory.

Dr. Hugo Gonzalez-Serratos, now a professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, collaborated with Bishop on a 1996 paper while both were working in the cardiology department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, affiliated with Harvard. When the paper was completed, Gonzalez-Serratos said, Bishop flew into a rage.

"She was very angry because she was not the first author," he recalled, referring to the more prominent position. "She broke down. She was extremely angry with all of us."

Her contract in the department was not renewed.

About to explode

Even those who worked with her on fiction writing in Massachusetts described the experience as painful and said they always had a feeling she was about to explode.

"When I worked with her, I found she was always within striking distance of the edge," said Lenny Cavallaro, a writer who said he collaborated with Bishop on "Amazon Fever," the unpublished novel about the virus.

On the morning of Dec. 6, 1986, there was an argument at the home of Judith and Samuel Bishop, a Victorian house among the grandest in Braintree, Mass., a Boston suburb.

Judy, active in local politics and well known around town, had been horseback riding. Seth was outside washing his car. Sam Bishop, a film professor at Northeastern, was heading to the mall to do some Christmas shopping. Before he left, he and his daughter, Amy, had some kind of dispute, according to police records. It was over something Amy had said.

Amy went upstairs to her room and would later tell the police that she had decided to load her father's shotgun. She wanted to learn how it worked, she said, because there had been a break-in at the house not long before.

Amy had never used the shotgun before.

She loaded it and a blast went off in her room. Police later found evidence that she had tried to conceal the results of that blast, using a Band-Aid tin and a book cover to hide holes in the wall.

Carrying the shotgun, she descended the stairs to the kitchen, where her brother and mother were standing.

"I was at the kitchen sink, and Seth was standing by the stove," Judy Bishop told the police. "Amy said, 'I have a shell in the gun, and I don't know how to unload it.' I told Amy not to point the gun at anybody. Amy turned toward her brother and the gun fired, hitting him. Amy then ran out of the house with the shotgun."

Judy Bishop said the shooting had been an accident.

Tom Pettigrew, who was working in the body shop of a Ford dealership, said he and his friends saw a woman walking around, looking into cars, carrying a shotgun.

"I kind of stepped back and said, 'What's going on, what are you doing here?' " Pettigrew said. "She said, 'Put your hands up.' I put my hands up and repeated the question."

He continued: "She was distraught. She was hyperaware of everything that was going on. She said: 'I need a car. I just got into a fight with my husband. He's looking for me, and he's going to kill me.' "

Minutes later, the police found Amy Bishop, still holding the gun, nearby. According to Officer Ronald Solimini's report, she appeared frightened, disoriented and confused, but she refused to drop the gun until another officer approached her from the other side.

When the police took her into custody they found one shell in the shotgun and another in her pocket.

Police officers began to question Amy, but her mother arrived and told her not to answer any more questions. Paul Frazier, the current police chief of Braintree, said Amy Bishop's release "did not sit well with these officers," and the lieutenant in charge of booking that night told him a higher-up had given instructions to stop the booking process.

In an interview Wednesday, the area's current prosecutor, William Keating, district attorney of Norfolk County, was highly critical of the handling of the shooting 24 years ago, particularly because it appears that Amy Bishop's actions after her brother's shooting — demanding a car at gunpoint and refusing an officer's orders to drop the gun — were not conveyed to state authorities who investigated the case.

Keating said Amy Bishop could have been charged with weapons and assault felonies, which would probably have prompted a psychiatric evaluation. Had such a charge, or any of the others that followed, been on her record, it might have changed the course of Bishop's career and the fate of those who died in Huntsville.

Instead, the investigation was stopped.

Did someone intervene to save Amy Bishop from prosecution? Her mother served on the town committee, an elected legislative panel of 240 members that set the town's spending. Or was Amy's release merely a town's way of caring for its own, the way small towns do?

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has ordered the State Police to review its role in the case, and the district attorney is also conducting an inquiry.

Grievances and appeals

The job application for the University of Alabama, Huntsville, asked, "Have you ever been convicted of an offense other than a minor traffic violation?" Amy Bishop, who took a tenure-track job there in 2003, answered "no."

Technically, she was correct. She was never charged with her brother's death, and though she was sentenced to probation in the IHOP incident, she was never found guilty. She and her husband, James Anderson, were questioned in connection with the mail bomb, but nothing came of it. A law-enforcement official has said federal agents are now going back over the case.

Bishop also arrived in Huntsville with a padded résumé, giving the impression she had worked at Harvard two years longer than the university's records indicate. She, her husband, a computer engineer who now works at a startup company, and their four children settled into a house in a quiet subdivision, and she began her new job in the biology department.

At first, colleagues and students said, she came across as funny and extroverted. She was, however, not universally liked. Some students say they found her so unresponsive that they signed a petition complaining that, among other things, her test questions went beyond what was covered in class.

Graduate students did not last long in her laboratory, and those familiar with the department said most transferred to a different one before completing their degrees.

In 2008, Bishop seemed to be riding high. She and her husband had developed an automated cell incubator that was supposed to keep finicky cells, like nerve cells, alive longer and make experiments easier. The university, which would share in any proceeds, was trying to market the device, and the university president, David Williams, predicted it would "change the way biological and medical research is conducted," according to The Huntsville Times. In the winter 2009, a smiling Bishop was shown on the cover of The Huntsville R&D Report.

Prodigy Biosystems, where Anderson works, ultimately raised $1.25 million to develop the product.

In March 2009, however, Bishop received word that her bid for tenure had been denied because her research and publication record was not strong, colleagues said. Bishop appealed.

"Her attitude was not, 'I'm going to have to go find another job,' " said Eric Seemann, an assistant professor of psychology. "It was more like, 'When are these idiots going to clear this up?' "

She lobbied for a revote in the department, badgering people for support, colleagues said. Last November, a university spokesman said, her appeal was finally denied.

Bishop hired a lawyer, her husband said, and filed a discrimination complaint against the university. He said she also began going to a firing range. He said she claimed to have borrowed the gun she used.

Her lawyer said Friday that Bishop did not remember what happened next. But police and witnesses say that Feb. 12, Bishop went to a routine faculty meeting with a plan — and a loaded handgun.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.