Every Town - Bethesda, Maryland: The Chilling Story of William Bradford Bishop, Jr.

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

Go to https://deadboltmysterysociety.com/ and use the promo code: deadbolt20 for 20% OFF your first order!Scary Mysteries Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiE86yS_VM7qjiICqRPmwLQ?view_as=subscriberOwn Shares In Our New HORROR MOVIE: https://www.startengine.com/an-angry-boyContact US: [e-mail] March 9, 1976, the screaming banner story of “The Washington Post” read:  “Five members of a Bethesda family — the wife, mother and three sons of a missing State Department official — were beaten to death in their home last week and then driven to North Carolina, where their bodies were set afire in an open grave.” The five bodies found at a burning pit in a woods in Columbia, North Carolina were later connected to deplorable murders in a split-level house in Bethesda, Montgomery County in Maryland on March 1, 1976. The wasted lives belonged to William Bradford Bishop’s family – touted as a barometer of an ideal American family in their community during the 1970s. But what their neighbors and the public didn’t know was the troubled figurehead of the Bishop family, Bradford, who when stripped of his prestigious title as an American diplomat revealed a shocking persona – that of an unhinged murderer.   Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with a morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between. With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime.

Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Every Town is being sponsored by our good friends over at the Deadbolt Mystery Society who have an amazing monthly subscription box service that if you guys are fans of true crime and unsolved mysteries, you need to check out. I'm a huge fan of the Deadbolt Mystery Society so I couldn't be happier to have them as our sponsor. Their boxes will have you playing the role of detective as you track down missing persons,

crack the case on an unidentified body, or are hunting down a serial killer before it's two. late. Right now I'm knee-deep in solving their box simply titled, Duel. This one has me tracking down a sinister group that calls themselves the scourge, who are planning on having two of their members partake in a twisted contest that has them murdering six people. Inside the box are all sorts of clues and pieces of evidence. One of the best things about these boxes are the QR code you scan that show you additional

videos, audio recordings, evidence, and photos. The reviews are in from people all around the world and the Deadbolt Mystery Society has 4.9 out of five stars, according to over 260 independent reviews. Right now, they're offering 20% off your order when you use the code Deadbolt 20. So go to Deadboltmysterysociety.com and use the code Deadbolt 20 to get 20% off and become part of the Deadbolt Mystery Society today. Every town has a dark side. In this episode, we traveled to Bethesda in Montgomery County, Maryland, where we check out the chilling story of William Bradford Bishop Jr., an American diplomat who turned into one of America's most wanted fugitives.

On March 9, 1976, the screaming banner story from the Washington Post read, five members of a Bethesda family, the wife, mother, and three sons of a missing state department official, were beaten to death in their home last week and then driven to North Carolina where the bodies were set on fire in an open grave. The five bodies found at a burning pit in the woods in Columbia, North Carolina, were later connected to deplorable murders that occurred in a split-level house in Bethesda, Maryland on March 1, 1976. The wasted lives belonged to William Bradford Bishop's family, touted as a barometer of an ideal. American family in their community during the 1970s. But what their neighbors and the public didn't know was the troubled figurehead of the Bishop family, Bradford, who, when stripped of his prestigious title as an American diplomat,

revealed a shocking persona, that of an unhinged murderer. I'm Andrew Fitzgerald, and this is every town. It continues to remain a mystery today why Bradford Jr. took the lives of his third 37-year-old wife Annette, 69-year-old mother, LaBelia, sons William Bradford III, Breton Germain, and Jeffrey Carter, aged 14, 10, and 5, respectively on March 1, 1976. As a consequence, he lost a beautiful family, besmirched his elite education, and gave up his dignified government position. Instead, he was included on the FBI, list of the most wanted fugitives for a long time.

Bradford should have turned 83 years old by now, and only his resurrection from a presumed decades-long self-imposed hiding can shed light on the heinous crimes he committed 44 years ago. I'm going to take you on an interesting ride today as we take a more intimate look at the life of a diplomat turned murderer-slash-fugitive. What I cannot guarantee, though, is if William Bishop, Jr. you're still alive today, after you mysteriously vanish since killing his family. By many standards, Bradford Bishop was the envy of many men and definitely a good catch for a lot of

women. He was born on August 1st, 1936 in South Pasadena, California, an only child of a petroleum geologist father and a homemaker mother. It's sensible to say that their comfortable life sufficiently provided Bradford with necessities and whims. Privileged to be an Ivy Leagher like his father, Bradford earned a Bachelor's of Science and History degree from Yale University. Academically, he was an average student and maintained a C-Average, but he had an aptitude for languages, so it was easy for him to learn several languages later on. He was gregarious and athletic on campus.

He played football as a college freshman. He took a break from studying for a year, but Bradford finished his degree and eventually received his college diploma in 1959. Shortly after accomplishing the first of his many achievements, he celebrated a milestone in his personal life. In August of 59, he married his longtime high school sweetheart, Annette Weiss, who he met at South Pasadena High School. Two years younger than Bradford, the Ohio-born Annette and her family, settled in the suburb of San Marino, Los Angeles when she was young. After high school, while Bradford went to Yale, Annette attended University of California Berkeley. Bradford and Annette's romance was deemed a match made in heaven by many.

He stood six foot tall, 180 pounds, was handsome with his brown eyes and hair and well-educated, while she was artistic and as attractive as actress Ali McGraw with her dark blonde tresses. What glued them much closer to one another was their fondness for sports. Both were avid tennis players, and Bradford was also into riding motorcycles, camping, and hiking. The happiness of the young couple was completely fulfilled when they built a family with three good-looking sons. Like their athletic parents, the eldest and middle children were into sports, such as swimming, skateboarding, basketball, and gymnastics. While raising their brood, Bradford, and Annette also pursuing. their individual goals.

The possibilities for Bradford seemed endless as he conquered his dreams one by one. They were essentially a poster for the perfect American family. Shortly after tying the knot with the net, Bradford enlisted in the U.S. Army on August 7, 1959, at Fort Dix in New Jersey. He trained at Fort Benning in Georgia and enrolled in the Army's Intelligence School in Fort Hallibird in Baltimore, Maryland. Wanted to be fluent in foreign languages, he learned Serbo-Croatian at the Army's Language School in Monterey, California in the summer of 1960. In August of 61, Annette gave birth to their eldest son, William, who they nicknamed Pino.

Bradford Jr.'s four-year career as a U.S. military intelligence specialist brought him to Yugoslavia, an independent communist government under the dictatorship of Joseph Brose Tito. Part of Bradford's work was listening to Yugoslavian radio broadcasts and translating Serbo-Croatian publications into English as part of their counterintelligence work. Bradford then welcomed assignments in the Italian cities of Verona and Florence, learning the Italian language along the way. A short time later, Annette and their young son joined Bradford over there. He was assigned in Verona when his military,

enlistment ended in 1963 and accepted his honorable discharge with a medal for good conduct. Instead of heading back to America right away, the bishops decided to stay in Florence where Bradford completed a master's degree in history at Vermont's Middlebury College in 1964. The following year, with a postgraduate degree and fluency in foreign languages, Bradford pursued his goal of working for the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Programme, program. He had always aspired to be an ambassador and vowed to become one by the age of 50. Initial impressions of Bradford weren't favorable. As an Army intelligence operations specialist he worked with once noted as weak judgment and inadequate common sense and problem solving.

Despite this, though, Bradford was accepted, and in December of 1965 he was appointed as a junior officer of the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The bishops were highly regarded in the small American community there, thus Bradford got high marks from the U.S. ambassador. His fluency in Italian brought him to Milan in 1968, where he advanced a foreign service officer grade five. Two years later, he was sent back to America for an opportunity to finish his second master's degree in African studies.

at UCLA in mid-1971. Family-wise, the bishops grew bigger with the birth of Jeff. Clearly, Bradford was having the best of both worlds. Well, that's how the observers were perceive it, but for those privy to the affairs of the bishop family, cracks were starting to show that were difficult to miss. Following the completion of his postgraduate degree from UCLA, Bradford was assigned in June of 1971 to the East African office. of the Bureau of African Affairs in Washington. His foreign assignment was in Gabaron, Botswana, in January of 72, where his newly widowed mother, Lobelia, joined them.

The bishops became a family of six since then. In the two years that Bradford was assigned in Botswana, his deputy chief, his designation was second to the ambassador. Steadily, he was inching his way to realizing his lifelong dream, and the family returned to Washington in 1974, and settled in a $100,000 contemporary house in Bethesda, Maryland. It was close to the school where the three boys went

and country clubs where the bishop couple played tennis and socialized with neighbors. Their two sons were active in swimming competitions too. Since living with some Bradford and his family, Obelia took on the responsibilities of cooking, driving the kids to school, going to the supermarket, and even helping her grandchildren in their schoolwork.

This allowed Annette to pursue her passion for the arts, so she enrolled at the University of Maryland despite Bradford's opposition. He wanted his wife to be confined at their home and be a hands-on mother to their sons. Most people thought that Bradford felt professionally accomplished, but that was far from the truth. He was dissatisfied and wanted more than working a desk job as an assistant chief in the division of special activities and commercial

Treatings at the Washington State Department, which he started in 1975. Bradford was keenly interested in getting a diplomatic post in another country, but Annette was averse to the idea since she was taking an art course in Maryland. Their disputes caused marital tension, which was one of the red flags in a brewing disaster in the bishop household. Certain sources also disclose that the family's taxes had been audited by the IRS due to financial trouble despite Bradford's annual $26,000 salary in the mid-1970s, or around $125,000 in 2020. In fact, his mother helped out in buying their Bethesda house with a $30,000 down payment. Bradford's job included promoting economic opportunities overseas.

In one trip in January of 1976, an alleged infidelity on Bradford's part surfaced, when he was seen with a woman in a ski resort in Italy before attending work-related meetings in Geneva, Switzerland. Was it a signal of the beautiful family no more, a perfect home crumbling? The last straw that broke the camel's back was when Bradford was bypassed for a promotion he truly wanted. His friends had figured that it exacerbated his depression and frustration.

He was turning 40 then, and perhaps, intensely felt that life was passing him by while his career remained stagnant. For someone ambitious, self-absorbed and driven by self-imposed high expectations, it was too much of a bruise for Bradford's ego. He had become a walking time bomb, and it didn't take long for it to detonate, and it cost the lives of five people closest to his heart. For the many employees at the Washington State Department, March 1st, 1916, 76 was just another hectic Monday. Bradford reported to work that morning.

He immediately checked a listing of recent promotions and learned that he didn't get the position he was eyeing. Upset, he then told his supervisor he wasn't feeling well and would take three days off. He left the office and withdrew $400 from the American Security Bank at 2 p.m. Then he drove to a Texaco station at the Montgomery Mall, where he purchased fuel for his 1974 Chevrolet Malibu station wagon using his credit card.

Four hours later, he bought a two-and-a-half gallon can of gas and a two-and-a-half-pound mini-mall sledgehammer at Sears. Before heading home, Bradford also bought a shovel and a pitchfork from Posh's hardware and a Potomac shopping center. After nightfall, he went home and executed his sinister plan that only he knew of. Bradford first killed his wife Annette, who was at the time reading a book on the floor by hitting her over the head with a hammer. Next, he went for his mother, who had just returned from walking the family dog named Leo.

Autopsy showed that she also had other injuries, perhaps from falling. His three sons were already asleep in their pajamas, with two of them sharing a bunk bed. Bradford then murdered his boys, saving the most savage and violent blow to his eldest and named sake, William Bradford III. His autopsy revealed that he was hammer-hit with an extraordinary amount of fury for whatever reasons. Bradford then wrapped the dead bodies in blankets and towels, dragged and shoved them in his station wagon's back compartment. He hurriedly drove out of the neighborhood with the family dog. If only Leo, the golden retriever who survived Brandon's wrath, could talk. A more graphic and clear picture of the murder scene would have been documented.

That evening, the once home of the seemingly perfect Bishop family was stained with blood from multiple murders that jolted the entirety of America. Bradford didn't stop there, though. Yes, his plan didn't just involve a sledgehammer. He drove the lifeless bodies to a densely wooded swamp about five miles south of Columbia to a little town in North Carolina's smallest county. The next day on March 2nd, the frustrated diplomat, dug a four-foot-deep bathtub-sized hole where he hastily threw his son's mother and wife. He then set them ablaze using the can of gas trying to get rid of any evidence. That afternoon, someone noticed smoke rising from the woods

and called local forestry service ranger Ronald Brickhouse, who investigated the fire off Burton Shell Road. What he saw next was something he had never seen before. As brick house walked over a pile of dirt, he saw burned bodies piled up inside a hole. He also found the gasoline can still burning, the shovel and pitchforth nearby. What he missed was the possible perpetrator, as he spotted fresh tire tracks as well. That same afternoon, witnesses saw Bradford with a dark-skinned woman and a dog, buying a new pair of tennis shoes in Jacksonville, North Carolina,

which was confirmed through his credit card transactions. When the local police arrived at the scene, they were horrified with the bodies of the two women and the three boys they were retrieved from the hole. They couldn't be identified because of the burns and their fingerprints weren't on file. Also, no one was reported missing in Columbia so police believed the victims weren't local residents.

Yet the state's chief medical examiner performed autopsies for eight hours was astonished with the multiplicity of the blows on the victims, especially on the children, who suffered many bruises. While the older woman's injuries were less severe, she possibly died of emotional trauma. All the bodies were soaked in gasoline and two were slightly scorched by the fire. Moreover, there were no signs of a struggle,

and the multiple head wounds confirmed the cause of their deaths. Montgomery County Sheriff, Dan and Popkin said, the anger that he showed when he committed these murders, he took the hammer to each one of them is beyond comprehension. Despite the massive investigation, establishing the identities of the victims went slow. It took a torn price tag on a new shovel found next to the pit for the investigators to have a good lead.

They were able to trace it to the Porsche's hardware in Bethesda where Bradford had bought it. Then on March 8th, almost a week after the homest, A neighbor of the bishops reported not seeing the family for a while. Detectives who investigated the bishop home reported the presence of bloodstains all over the house and the driveway indicating that something terrible had happened. They didn't find any weapon nor signs of struggle, but Bradford's bloody fingerprints were found in the bathroom. The Maryland murders were soon linked to the discovery of the burned bodies in North Carolina,

which had been identified as the wife, mother, and sons of Bradford. 17 days after the killings, Bradford's station wagon was found abandoned at an isolated campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a few miles from the Appalachian Trail, and about 400 miles from where the dead bodies were found. The car contained dog biscuits, a bloody blanket, a shotgun and axe, a shaving kit with medicine, and a bloody spare tire. The following day, a grand jury indicted Bradford and absentee. on five counts of first-degree murder. And thus began the unending search for the diplomat-turned-killer. Bradford was placed by the FBI on its list of the ten most wanted fugitives.

However, his capture has been most elusive, and the closest thing to have happened were alleged sightings of him in different parts of the world. As a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, Bradford may have had traveled and escaped to other countries using his diplomatic passport. But since his wallet, nor passport, has ever been found, it speculated that he used fake passports

for how come a highly notorious fugitive have been supposedly spotted in Belgium, England, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Greece, among many other European countries. Sometime in July of 1978, he was allegedly seen twice in a Stockholm public park in Sweden by a local woman who had worked with him in Ethiopia. She was sure it was Bradford, but hadn't known yet he was wanted in America, so she didn't notify police.

The following year, more plausible Bradford Bishop's sighting took place in Sorrento, Italy, when his former U.S. State Department colleague presumably saw Bearded Bradford and asked him point-blank, Hey, you're Brad Bishop, aren't you? The man, alleged to be Mr. Bishop, replied in a distinct American accent, Oh no, and was in panic mode while fleeing. The next probable citing of the fugitive was in September of 1994 when a neighbor of the bishops in Bethesda saw Bradford on a train platform and Basel Switzerland looking well-groomed.

Despite these worldwide search efforts to arrest Bradford have remained futile. Authorities in 2010 believed the Maryland murderer was living in Europe or possibly in California, working as a teacher or engaging in criminal activities. In 2011 and 2014, a man who died in a road mishap in Alabama and the other who died in France were assumed to be Bradford, but DNA test and fingerprints proved otherwise. Although the FBI is still actively pursuing the ex-diplomat, the Bureau removed Bradford from its list of most wanted fugitives and replaced him with another dangerous fugitive. In the decades of investigating the circumstances and Bradford's unidentified motive for killing his family,

more information cropped up that painted him as one deeply troubled man, despite his success as perceived by many people. It was found out that even before he had studied at Yale, he was already battling depression and suffering from insomnia. He had seen three psychiatrists, undergone hypnosis, and taken medications for the treatment of his conditions, Entries in his diary revealed his dark moods, yearnings, deep-seated anxieties, and fears particularly about not fulfilling his aspiration of becoming an ambassador by the age of 50. Most likely, the pressures of proving his worth, providing for his family, and maintaining a prominent status in society, pushed him to the brink.

Thus, killing his family was the only way to break free. In return, he gained notoriety and has become one of the oldest, most wanted fugitives on the run for 44 years. How can one live with such misfortune for so long? I highly doubt that Bradford Bishop would want to answer this, even if he still is alive today. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. If you're interested in hearing more creepy stories that are currently happening in our world, and make sure to check out our Scary Mysteries podcast and YouTube channel. channel where each week we cover topical stories in our twisted news segment and every month we have

the strange and scary mysteries of the month and those are all about what's happening right now all around us. Please subscribe and email us at info at new dawn film.com to let us know if you have any stories you'd like us to cover and tune in next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories about every town out there. And who knows? Maybe your town will be next.