True Crime Campfire - Bishop's Gambit: A Story of Rage and Revenge

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Richard Rohr once wrote, “The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to failing or changing or dying.” And he was just talking about your garden variety, Joe Average ego. Not the supercharged, steroid-pumped kind that our villain today was cursed with. What’s at the core of an ego like that is a quivering little wad of insecurity, so fragile that the tiniest disagreement can feel like a humiliating slight. And all the ego can do to make its sad little wad feel better is get angry…or maybe take revenge. And if it decides to carjack the rest of the brain and go on a joyride, everybody within a hundred miles better run. Sources:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/02/11/a-loaded-gunhttps://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.htmlhttps://murderpedia.org/female.B/b/bishop-amy.htmInvestigation Discovery's "Fatal Encounters," episode "Deadly Genius"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Richard Rohr once wrote, The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to failing or changing or dying. and he was just talking about your garden variety Joe average ego, not the supercharged steroid-pumped kind that our villain today was cursed with. What's at the core of an ego like that is a quivering little wad of insecurity, so fragile that the tiniest disagreement can feel like a humiliating slight. And all the ego can do to make its sad little wad feel better is get angry,

or maybe take revenge. And if it decides to carjack the rest of the brain and go on a joyride, everybody within a hundred miles better run. This is Bishop's Gambit, a story of rage and revenge. So, campers, we're in Huntsville, Alabama, February 12, 2010, 3.30 p.m. The faculty of the biology department at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, were in the middle of their monthly meeting. It was an ordinary day, an ordinary meeting,

meaning probably about half of it could have been an email, and everybody was most likely looking forward to getting home. Biochemist Dr. Deborah Moriarty glanced overhead her colleague, Dr. Amy Bishop. Amy was usually a bit of a force during these meetings. She was opinionated and not shy about showing it, but today she was unusually quiet. She seemed like she was in her own world. It was odd, but Dr. Moriarty thought she knew what it was probably about.

For the past year, Amy had been fighting to overturn the university's decision to deny her tenure. It hadn't worked, and she wasn't going to have a job at UAH past the end of this semester. It was actually weird that she was even at this meeting, which was all about planning for the next semester. Dr. Moriarty figured Amy was just pissed that she had to be there, and she didn't really blame her. The two women had been friends until recently. They'd talked about their families, Amy's four kids, Moriarty's new grandbaby, but when Amy found out that Moriarty had voted against her getting tenure, the friendship hit the skids. Can you imagine that, by the way, like how much it would suck to have to vote against

a friend for tenure? Oh, God, yeah. I'm sure Dr. Moriarty didn't want to do it, but the undeniable fact was that it just was not working out between Amy and U.A.H. So Deborah Moriarty had taken a deep breath, put her university above her personal feelings, and did what she had to do. Amy later told her, My life is over. The meeting was starting to draw to a close, and people were starting to shift in their chairs and reach for their stuff when Dr. Moriarty saw Amy Bishop pull something out of her bag. Before she could react, she realized it was a gun. A 9-millimeter Ruger semi-automatic, it would turn out later. Moriarty watched in slow motion as her former friend extended her arm and calmly shot Dr. Gopi Padilla in the head at point-blank range. Gopi, a plant biologist in the head of the department, slumped to the ground, and the room

erupted into a chaos of screams. Chairs fell over as people rushed for what flimsy cover they could find under the table. Amy Bishop and her 9mm were blocking the only exit. The faculty were trapped. The next to be shot was staff assistant Stephanie Monticeolo, then Dr. Adriel Johnson and Dr. Maria Ragland Davis. Panicked, Deborah Moriarty threw herself at her old friend's legs and begged Amy, don't do this. Think of my daughter, my grandson. Amy gazed down at her. Her pale blue eyes like cracked ice, leveled the gun at her head. And then she pulled the trigger. And click. The gun wasn't working. Frustrated, Amy tried again. Nothing. Deborah Moriarty, running on pure adrenaline, didn't wait around. She scrambled past Amy,

who was still struggling with the gun and stumbled into the hallway. And like a horror movie villain, Amy Bishop turned, still trying to unjam the gun, and slowly followed her old friend into the hall. More click, click, clicks resonating off the walls. That noise must haunt Deborah's nightmares. Once Amy was out of the meeting room, Moriarty saw her chance. She flung herself back into the room where another colleague slammed the door and barricaded it with the heavy conference table. A prosecutor would later say that the room looked like a bomb went off, like a war zone. Dr. Moriarty surveyed the wreckage. Three of her colleagues were dead.

Three more injured. Some people were crying, some just stunned into silence. The ones who were still standing were trying to help their injured friends. From the first shot to the last, Amy Bishop's rampage had lasted less than one minute. Now locked out of the meeting room where her terrified colleagues were, Amy calmly walked downstairs. She went into the ladies' room and rinsed the gun. under the tap, she took off her plaid blazer now covered in blood spatter, then she shoved both gun and jacket into the trash. From there, she wandered into a lab where she borrowed a cell phone

from a student. She called her husband Jim. I'm done. You can pick me up now. Jim had no idea anything was a miss. They had dinner plans that evening, and as far as he knew, that was the biggest thing happening in his world that day. He hopped into his car and headed to UAH to pick Amy up. A little while later, Amy tried to leave the building via a loading dock, but by then, her traumatized colleagues had managed to call for help. Officers were surrounding the building, trying to determine where she was, and as she emerged from the building, a sheriff's deputy spotted her and grabbed her up. Jim arrived right as Amy was being ushered into the back of a squad car. News cameras captured an officer asking her about the shooting and Amy saying,

It didn't happen. There's no way. They're still alive. I can only imagine what a surreal moment this must have been for Jim, and for their 18-year-old daughter, Lily, who was a student at U.A.H and was there for classes that day, poor kid. In the time it took police to locate Amy, the students had been instructed to hunker down in their dorms and classrooms as rumors flew about what had happened. I'm sure Lily was as scared and worried as all the other students during those tense moments. She had no way of knowing yet that her mom was at the center of it all. Unsurprisingly, the media was soon crawling all over the university campus. Mass shootings are always a magnet for the 24-hour news cycle. If it bleeds, it leads, after all.

But what really set this one apart was the perpetrator. Amy Bishop was a woman, first of all. That's unusual right out of the gate. Plus, she was a high achiever, a Ph.D. for God's sakes. and a wife and a mother, too. By all accounts, her marriage was stable, and she had no criminal record or history of drug or alcohol abuse. Understandably, Americans are obsessed with mass shootings.

We feel a need to figure out what we missed. What kind of person could plan something like this? What kind of person could conceal a heart this dark? At first glance, anyway, you don't expect it to be somebody like Amy Bishop. Who the hell was this woman and why did she do this? Former colleagues have described Amy as quirky, funny, and eccentric, all pretty common traits in academia. Yeah, I mean, I'm in academia and I'd say I'm probably all three of those things. She could be really quick and witty and friendly.

That was her good, neutral side. But Amy had a much darker side, too. For one thing, she always, always introduced herself as Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard Train. And campers, I swear we are not making this up. Dr. Amy Bishop Harvard Trained was the name on her birth certificate, as far as anybody knew. This bitch never shut up about Harvard. How people kept from laughing hysterically every time she did it, I can't imagine, but apparently they managed it.

Bless them. It reminds me of this massive turdlet of a guy I met once in college. This dude was a walking, breathing stereotype, a toxic masculinity gallum. He was basically the kind of absurd caricature you'd expect to see on a cartoon like Powerpuff Girls or something. So, first of all, he looked like a shaved gorilla from all the broids and free weights and whatnot. And I hadn't known the dude five minutes before he was telling me a story about some guy he'd owned in a bar fight the week before. In front of the dude's girlfriend, of course. And of course, he'd gone home with her afterward.

He was so ridiculous that I shit you not. My friend and I thought he was doing a character because we hung out with a lot of actors. and because, you know, like I was a theater major at that point. So we just kept laughing at everything he said and like watching him get like more and more confused and irritated until finally like slowly dawned on us that he was real. Like this was his real personality. Holy shit. And it took us a while because we really thought he was doing a character.

That's how ridiculous it was. So while some of her students admired Amy's intellect and appreciated her sense of humor, others just hated her freaking guts. Amy apparently never got the memo that a teacher's job is to, you know, teach. She preferred to just stand at the front of the room and wax eloquent about her own work at Harvard. And if a student was struggling, Amy tended to berate them rather than try to walk them through the problem. Y'all ever had a teacher like that? Learn much from them?

Yeah, I don't think so. I know this may seem like a radical notion, folks, but people do tend to learn better when they're not being made to feel like morons. And when they're not being expected to walk into class on day one, already knowing everything. At best, Amy was one of those professors who viewed teaching as the annoying sidework she had to do in order to pursue her own research, and at worst, she was just an abusive bully. Her students had formally complained about her several times, and there was even a petition at one point. Our girl, Amy, did not play well with others in the classroom or the lab. One former colleague told the investigation discovery show fatal encounter,

her as quote, most of the bad stuff that I heard about Amy Bishop came from the people that were interacting with her in the lab. Her former lab manager, Renee Gooch, says Amy fired her for no apparent reason, and she was by no means the only one. Amy was known as a key taker. One minute, everything would be fine in the lab, and the next Amy would be freaking out about something that most people would consider relatively minor or not notice at all, and she'd like demand your keys. She would often have bizarre outburst at meetings, bringing up stuff that wasn't even remotely relevant to the topic at hand, and her colleague said she sometimes seemed out of touch with reality. Yeah, sounds fun, right? What Whitney is getting across here is that

Amy was the worst kind of person, an entitled, smug, self-aggrandizing lunatic who thinks of normal people like you or me as little ants. I hate her so hard. She's a prime candidate for the TCC Lockers. Or indeed, the Trebyshe or the Woodchipper. Right? Maybe we could do like a giant food process or two. We need a new one. It's been a while. Yeah. And stories like these go back way before Amy joined the faculty at UAH. She's been winning friends and influencing people throughout her entire adult life, despite having what, at least according to most people who knew her, seems like a stable marriage and family life. She made her husband Jim Anderson in a Dungeons and Dragons Club in college, by the way, which just bums me out. It goes to show campers once in a while you get yourself a bad nerd.

Sad, but it's true. When they were handing out wisdom, Amy rolled a six. And even lower for charisma. But Jim was devoted to Amy despite her prickly personality and her Godzilla-sized ego, and they had four kids together from 1991 to 2001.

According to Patrick Radin-Keefe's article, A Loaded Gun, quote, friends describe Amy as a loving if high-strung mother. She bought organic food, encouraged their children to play instruments and fretted over whether they were adequately challenged in school. Now, that all sounds pretty standard for a bougie suburban mom, right? Mm-hmm. But there were signs, if you were looking for them, that underneath Amy Bishop's professorly exterior was a deep well of angry insecurity and narcissism that only got worse with time.

Her career seems to have started strong and ended with a string of failures. At Northeastern, where she did her undergrad work, she excelled. But at her Ph.D. program and genetics at Harvard, she struggled a bit. Where she'd been a big fish in a small pond at Northeastern, at Harvard, she was average, at best. Perished the thought. In fact, someone who knew her at Harvard later said, quote, she should never have been awarded a degree. She was, though, and she began post-doc work, some of it at Harvard Med School.

And then campers, in 1993, Amy ran up against some trouble with her supervisor at a children's hospital neurobiology lab. The supervisor, Dr. Paul Rosenberg, was unimpressed with Amy's work. And when he gave her a bad evaluation saying she could not meet the standards required for the work, Amy resigned. She was so upset by the bad e-vail that friends thought she might have a nervous breakdown. Apparently, Jim was a little myth, too, because he told a witness he wanted to stab, shoot, or strangle Dr. Rosenberg for what he did to Amy. Yeah, Jim denied this later, by the way, but I don't know why this person would lie about that, so I believe it. Yeah, it's awfully specific. What with a threat to hit Rosenberg with the triple S treatment?

Stab, strangled. Shoot. Yep. So things were, let's say, a little bit tense between Amy, her husband, and this doctor who had the nerve. not to be enthralled with Ms. Bishops' mighty interrupt. Did he know she was Harvard-Train, though? Like, maybe she hadn't mentioned it. I don't know.

She had just gotten out. Maybe she was getting used to that introduction. I don't know. And then one afternoon, Dr. Rosenberg got a package in the mail. A package containing two pipe bombs, which, thank God, didn't explode. It didn't take long for Amy and Jim to become the prime suspects in the attempted bombing. The ATF investigated, but Amy and Jim refused to cooperate. They wouldn't open the door to the investigators, wouldn't give permission for a search of their house, and refuse to take polygraph tests.

Investigators discover that Amy had spoken to friends about the proper method of building pipe bombs. Primo coffee clutch convo, right? And she'd given one friend 10 pounds of potassium permanganate, a main ingredient in explosives. her friend in Amy's defense said it was a joke hilarious also weirdest white elephant gift exchange ever 10 pounds like I know like maybe one small vial or something is a joke 10 pounds is something else can you imagine me giving you 10 pounds of anything like I'm trying to think of something I could send you that would be 10 pounds whoop ass yeah chocolate but even then that's too much chocolate. That's too much chocolate. That's just weird.

Ultimately, though, the case stalled due to lack of evidence. It's still unsolved today. Was it, Amy and Jim? We don't know. But based on what comes later, it's definitely worth considering. Amy continued with her postdoc work in neurobiology, but she may not have been entirely happy in academia. In fact, she told some people that she had her eye on a way out. Fiction, writing. She'd been into poetry at Northeastern, and now she joined a writer's group and started writing thriller novels in her spare time. She wrote three, in fact, none of which was published, which I just, I want to read them so bad. I know so bad. Me too. But it was like stuff in the vein of Michael Crichton's, the end drama strain or state of fear. Her characters were brilliant scientists

with troubled pasts. Unsurprisingly, Amy wasn't exactly warm and cuddly to the other writers in the group. She did make one good friend in the group, but to most of them, she came across as high strong and egotistical. She told everyone she was being scouted by a literary agent. She bragged that she was related to the writer John Irving. And if you've ever taken a creative writing class, there's always one of these. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And just as she did with her students, she did a great job of taking the constructive out of constructive criticism. If she didn't like a passage or plot point in somebody's story, she'd just say, kill it. One of the writers who actually collaborated with her on one of her novels said she was always within striking distance of the edge.

It made people uneasy. And as always, she constantly brought up Harvard. It was a common thread all throughout her writing, and she introduced herself to everyone as Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard trained. It's never not funny. Remember how her former Harvard colleague says she never should have gotten a degree? Yeah, they also said it was scandal number one that they graduated her. Just thought we'd add that little nugget, because I'm sure Dr. Amy Bishop Harvard trained would want us to be as detailed as possible. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Katie, from now on, I want you to call me Master of the Fine Arts, Whitney last name, Fancy Pants Art School Train, okay? And you've got to put the the thaw in there, Master of the Fine Arts. All right? Good. I'm glad we got that settled. And if you forget, you should be real. careful checking any unexpected packages that show up at your door. Oh, my God, Camper, she's gone mad with power.

Yeah, that happened years ago. Try and keep up. I knew we shouldn't have gotten that PO box for the podcast. People start sending her Cheesecake Factory gift cards, and she thinks she's Vladimir Putin. Well, I do like horseback writing topless, but the similarity ends there. Anywho, Amy's writing also revealed a preoccupation with sin and forgiveness. At one point, the main character of her book Easter in Boston asks whether, quote, any amount of calling on the Lord Jesus would erase her sins. And in another of her books, The Martian Experiment,

the protagonist's friend tells her, Jesus loves you no matter what you've done. Interesting. I wonder what Jesus thought about this. One morning in 2002, Amy and Jim took the kids to IHop. Now, for our campers outside the U.S., that's International House of Pancakes, otherwise known as Hepglu or Heaven on Earth and Proof that God Loves us.

they have like six kinds of syrup on the table okay they have pancakes with whipped cream I hop and it was this sacred location that Amy was about to defile when they were seated and their waitress came up to greet them they asked for a booster seat for their little boy and the waitress said oh I'm so sorry it looks like we just gave the last one away now you know it was a busy breakfast rush

and they were just momentarily out of booster seats most of us would take this with a touch of maybe mild annoyance tops, you know, minor inconvenience, we'd just hold the kit on our lap or something until some other customers left, and a booster became available. This is not how Amy handled it. She glared at the waitress, but we were here first. And then before this poor ratress, who was not getting paid enough for this shit, could react, Amy got up from her chair, stormed over to this other customer, a young mother

eating breakfast with her children, and demanded she hand over the booster seat. Oh, my God. the booster seat that was currently occupied by a child who was just trying to sit there and eat his damn pancakes. So this bewildered mother who probably just thought she'd been transported to an alternate universe said, I'm sorry, my little boy's using it now. And Amy started screeching at her. In between expletives, she kept screaming, Do you know who I am?

I am Dr. Amy Bishop. It was full-bore bananas, y'all, like right in front of her kids. not to mention the terrified poor little kid in the booster seat. And after a few startled moments during which they were probably re-evaluating every life choice that had led them to this moment, the IHop management, blessed their hearts, implemented their strict no crazy bitches policy and asked Amy Lee. Finally. And she started to for like a second. She turned around, started to walk away.

But then, before anybody could stop her, she whirled back around and punched this poor woman in the head. Oh, my God, because nothing says elite education like throwing down in an IHOP at 9 a.m. If there's ever an acceptable time to punch someone in the head at IHOP, it's definitely not at 9 a.m. on a.m. on a.m. on a.m. on a. dot kid from your rival school steps to you and tells you your girl looks like a prep. And even then, you've got to be like 15 at most for that to work. Oh my God. So, of course, Amy was arrested, but the charges were dropped. I'm not sure why. I think, you know, for me, if some bitch punched me in the head in front of my kids, I would dedicate the next few months of my life to making sure they got to see her in an orange jumpsuit. But that's just me. And I certainly wouldn't blame this

poor woman if she just didn't want to have to deal with her anymore. So Amy's record stayed clean. Lucky Amy. I'm sure the University of Alabama Huntsville would have really liked to have known about some of this stuff before they hired her years later, but no such luck for them. Hi, I'm Darren Marler. Host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important. tool in my podcast belt. Spreaker is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to record,

host, and distribute your show everywhere from Apple Podcasts to Spotify. But the real game changer for me was Spreaker's monetization. Spreaker offers dynamic ad insertion. That means you can automatically insert ads into your episodes. No editing required. And with Spreaker's programmatic ads, they'll bring the ads to you, and you get paid for every download. This turned my podcasting hobby into a full-time career. Spreaker also has a premium subscription model where your most dedicated listeners can pay for bonus content or early access, adding another revenue stream to what you're already doing. And the best part, Spreaker grows with you.

Whether you're just starting out or running a full-blown podcast network, Spreker's powerful tools scale effortlessly as your show grows. So if you're ready to podcast like a pro and get paid while doing it, check out Spreker.com. That's S-P-R-E-K-E-R dot com. She may have been under a little stress. People who knew Amy and Jim at the time say Amy was the sole breadwinner for their six-person family, working in a historically male-dominated field and helping take care of four kids.

Jim was mostly either jobless or under-employed during their mom. marriage. When he did work, it was often at lab gigs that Amy got for him. Amy told people he was, quote, too smart to work, whatever the fuck that means, which makes it sound like she's defending him, but her writing may have betrayed her real feelings about Jim and his lack of initiative. In her novel, Eastern Boston, the heroine, Elizabeth, is married to a dude named Jack, a computer programmer who can't hold down a job in his field and ends up working at Radio Shack. She describes him as

ambition challenged, and I love this, a flaccid, bed-loving loser. Ooh, outch. Yeah. Autobiographical? We can only speculate, but it's clear that Amy was shouldering a lot

of responsibility. Combine that with an already tightly wound personality and you've got trouble. Amy's inner demons slithered out in all kinds of little ways. Neighbors would see her yelling at neighborhood kids for just, you know, playing, having the audacity to be outside like kids do. She could be really sweet sometimes, like when her friend's daughter had cancer and Amy sent her information about cutting-edge treatments and held her friend's hand to pray with her.

But more often, she was rude and overbearing, prone to mood swings and irritability. According to a New York Times article about the case, she also worked hard to massage the facts about her own scientific accomplishments, which weren't half as impressive as she liked to think. Amy had been pursuing her postdoc work for about 10 years now, and she wanted to move up the latter. Other neurobiologists felt she wasn't a good candidate to pursue tenure, at least not at a major school. Needless to say, Amy disagreed, and if somebody offered her a little constructive criticism, her response was, invariably to ignore it. What did those peons know anyway? They weren't Harvard trained.

She just got a little creative with the old resume, claiming she'd worked at Harvard for two years more than she really had, for example, and kept on looking for a 10-year track job. And in 2003, she found one at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Amy was excited. In one of her books, the main character had described U.A.H. as the MIT of the South. And I can't speak to that, but I can speak to the fact that my tiny thousand student university was deemed the Stanford of the Midwest by their admissions people when Northwestern is like right there. So take that phrasing with a grain of salt.

And I'm a firm believer that the education you receive is the one you earn. Absolutely. You can get a shitty education at Harvard like Amy and a great education at the local community college. 100%. Don't let losers like Amy Bishop, Harvard trained, tell you other. Otherwise. Anyway, back to Amy's job search. A tenured position would mean job security and a lot more money. And at first, everything went pretty well. She was on her best behavior for a little while, and most people thought of her as funny and gregarious and smart. Part of the reason she was well received at first was because the head of the biology department, Dr. Gopi Padilla, had supported her candidacy. And Dr. Padilla was the best. He was a brilliant scientist. He hoped to win a Nobel Prize someday, and he was chasing that dream as fast as he could. But for all his brilliance and ambition, Dr. Padilla was also an incredibly warm, generous person.

His students loved him for his kindness and his knack for making them feel encouraged and supported. He was never too busy to help a student, the kind of professor who kept an open-door policy. I'm sure having his endorsement helped Amy a lot. And we have the anti-Amy endorsing Amy. Yeah. Even better, Amy and hubby Jim soon began working together to develop an automated cell incubator. It was designed to keep cells alive longer, making it easier to conduct experiments on them. There was a lot of buzz about the incubator.

President of UAH told a local paper that it would change the way biological and medical research is conducted. Other colleagues weren't so sure. They felt like it was too pricey to be practical. But overall, Amy and Jim were getting a lot of attention. Prodigy biosystems raised $1.2 million to try and help develop the incubator. UAH was helping market it. Amy got to be on the cover of the Huntsville R&D report, R&D meaning research and development, of course. I'm sure she lapped up all that acclaim like a kitten with a bowl of cream.

Problem was, Amy was so busy hustling for patents and whatnot that she wasn't spending enough time on the number one most important thing for any professor who wants to score tenure. Publication. Publish or perish, the old saying goes, and anybody who's ever gone up for tenure knows that the pressure to publish and publish and publish is brutal. And in typical Amy fashion, when anybody tried to warn her that she wasn't doing enough,

she'd ignore them. They probably weren't even Harvard trained or nothing. Not only that, but one of the few times she did publish, she lost it on her collaborator because they hadn't listed her as the first author on the paper. And when I say lost it, I mean wild-eyed, spit-flecked, white-hot rage. The people who witnessed it said they had never seen anybody go off like that in their entire lives? So this didn't bode well for her tenure bid, but Amy seems to have ignored that little

inconvenient truth, and things were starting to sour for her in other ways, too. Students started a petition against her, and here's just a small sampling of their grievances. Amy would wig out over nothing. Amy would often tell them they weren't as smart as her students at Harvard. That's my favorite one. I love that one. Amy would put stuff on the exams that she hadn't gone over in class, and then if they complained, she'd say, well, my daughter took it and she got an A.

Okay, well, good for her. What hell does that have to do with me? One student filed a grievance saying that not only was Amy a lousy teacher, she also had, quote, odd unsettling ways. Some people have better radar than others, campers. It's always eerie to me to see these little flashes of foreshadowing like that, you know, in these cases, where people will sort of figure it out. Another time, Amy called the campus police on a grad student who had just forgotten to bring back a few notebooks in a key ring, for God's sakes. She called the police. So, unsurprisingly, grad students dropped like flies from her lab. Either she would fire them or they just begged to get transferred to somebody else's lab.

And Amy's reaction to all of this was anger. It never seemed to occur to her that the common denominator in all this was her. You know, anytime something didn't go her way, it was always because the other people involved were idiots. In the spring of 2009, Amy got a nasty shock when her tenure was denied. So who could have possibly foreseen? Oh, everybody but you? Yeah.

Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with the strange ways of academia, this is actually kind of rare because normally a university will hound the living crap out of you if you're on the tenure track just to make sure you're doing everything you're supposed to be doing. And if you're not, they will make damn sure you hear about it. And, of course, that's what happened with Amy, too. It's just she didn't listen. But my point is, getting your tenure bid rejected is probably pretty humiliating for anybody. And for somebody with Amy's personality type, just whew, not good.

She was furious. And even more so, when she found out that one of her committee members had voiced concerns about her mental health. Actually, what he said was, she's crazy, and he wasn't exaggerating. Like, he really meant it. But, I mean, I can see why she would be offended by that. I would be, too. He wasn't using very sensitive language. But the guy said he'd been concerned about her mental state since the day he met her.

So he didn't really, you know, he was, he didn't mean to be flippant. Now, for y'all who aren't in academia, if you accept a tenure track position, the deal is that you have X amount of time to apply for and be granted that tenure. And if you're turned down, that means your time at that university is up. It's just bye-bye, time to look for another job. But as we've seen already, our girl Amy is not one to let other people's realities impinge upon her goals. So instead of shopping her CV around and preparing for the next chapter in her career, Amy filed a whole string of appeals trying to get the university to reverse the

decision. She bothered the hell out of any and everybody in the biology department trying to find support for a revote. So I guess her run-in at IHop had soured her on the idea of just punching somebody in the head. This time she was trying to go through more traditional channels, so I guess good for her for that at least. It's character growth, Whitney. Yeah. Amy had never been able to handle anything that threatened her view of herself as the brilliant Harvard-educated, highly sought-after scientist. Plus, their family finances weren't in great shape, and she'd been counting on a tenured professor's higher salary to resolve that. And she kept obsessing about another biologist she knew who had lost his research funding when his tenure

bid looked to beyond shaky ground. Frustrated, the guy had given up science completely and started working at a car dealership. Wow. Yeah, and a decade or so later, two of his former colleagues, people he'd been collaborating with before he left the field, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And, of course, their work had been partly based on his research. Oh, no. So here he was working at a Toyota dealership while his former colleagues were snatching up a Nobel Prize using his work. Isn't that Walter White's backstory in Breaking Bad?

God, yes. It is, right? Yeah, that's what I thought. Maybe it was based on this guy. Maybe this guy's going to turn into Walter White. Oh, geez. I'd watch my back in you, I was going to Alabama or wherever this dude live. I was going to say we can we can only hope for another show like Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad 2, Electric Bugaloo. Anyway, Amy couldn't get this guy out of her head. She couldn't stand the thought of ending up like him with some little key stealing grad student taking credit for her brilliant work. But Amy's appeals didn't seem to be going anywhere. Eventually, she hired an attorney and filed a discrimination grievance against U.A.H.

I think this had something to do with that committee member who had expressed concerns about her mental health, but I'm not 100% sure. Yeah, I couldn't find out for sure. And right around the time she hired the lawyer, she started visiting a shooting range to practice her marksmanship. Oh, boy. Her family back home had stopped hearing from her, which was really, out of character for Amy.

Later, Amy told a writer for the New Yorker that she was hallucinating on and off the weeks leading up to the shooting. We have no way of knowing whether that's true, of course, but we can be pretty sure that this woman was under a towering amount of stress. Which she had not developed any coping mechanisms

to deal with. Yep. And this is really interesting because it goes back to what our boy, Gavin DeBecker, talks about in his book, the gift of fear, that our intuition will usually warn us when we're in danger. Doesn't mean we're going to listen, but the warning will be there nonetheless. One afternoon, Amy sat in her car outside the admin building and called the university

president's office to tell his secretary that she was coming up to talk about her case. The secretary apparently was pretty alarmed. She told Amy that the president wasn't available to meet with her. She even told her, do not come into the building. A couple minutes later, as she was still sitting out front in her car, Amy saw the university president and the provost scurrying out the front door with a police escort. Obviously, she'd scared them. Now, this might have seemed to some like an overreaction, given the bare facts of the situation.

A professor wants to come upstairs and talk to the president. But there must have been something about the way she said it, or the fact that she hadn't made an appointment. Or something that alerted the secretary to take this seriously. That's intuition, man. and good for her for listening to it, and this is creepy. Amy later called her friend Deborah Moriarty, remember her from the beginning of the story, and said, they act like I'm going to walk in and shoot somebody. According to some of Amy's friends who spoke to the New Yorker reporter Patrick Radden Keefe,

her husband Jim, may have been egging her on rather than trying to calm her down. Based on what they said, it sounds to me like Amy and Jim fit a pretty classic pattern of narcissists slash enabler. I mean, if Jim really did help Amy send that mail bomb, in the 90s, that would certainly support this theory. Amy's friends said that whenever Amy would be in a rage about something that hadn't gone her way at work, Jim would work her up into a lather instead of trying to reassure her. Now, of course, Jim may have realized early on in their relationship that this was the only response Amy would accept, that either you're with me or you're against me type mentality.

And this may help explain why Jim had such bafflingly poor judgment as to go with his stressed out, angry, possibly hallucinating wife to the shooting range. a week before the killings. The gun they had with them was the 9mm Ruger that Amy would use to gun down her colleagues a week later. It was Jim's gun, and he owned it illegally. A friend of his had bought it for him in New Hampshire 10 years earlier while he and Amy were living in Massachusetts.

Apparently, Jimbo didn't want to have to abide by the mandatory state waiting period. Now, why he thought it was a good idea to put a firearm into Amy's hands at this moment in her life, I cannot imagine. But, you know, in fairness, we weren't there. I mean, maybe she was doing a better job of hiring. her feelings than we think. But at any rate, on February 12th, the Bio Department had a meeting to plan the next semester, and you already know the rest.

At the end of Amy's rampage, three of her colleagues lay dead. Dr. Maria Raglan Davis, Dr. Adriel Johnson, and the man who'd sponsored her candidacy at U.A.H, Dr. Gobi Padilla. And three others were injured, Stephanie Monticello, Dr. Joseph Leahy, and Dr. Luis Cruz-Vera. They all spent time in the hospital, and I'm sure they and the other colleagues who managed to escape without any injuries have had to deal with the trauma and survivors' guilt that comes from watching three of your colleagues be murdered in front of you. It didn't take long for investigators to find the gun and bloodstained blazer Amy had thrown in the

restroom trash, and with multiple eyewitnesses to her crime, the prosecution didn't anticipate a ton of trouble bringing her to justice. As one investigator put it at the time, this wasn't a whodunit. The only question was why? Several people in the wake of the shooting talked about Amy starting arguments over trivial matters. Her father-in-law said, I've seen the devil in her eyes. A trustee at the university said, people kept sweeping her bad behavior under the rug and now we're paying a tremendous price. Even her attorney, Roy Miller, said something is wrong with this lady. Her history speaks for itself. Wow. You don't want any of those quotes on a movie poster about your life.

Definitely not. The media quickly uncovered that Amy actually fit the mass shooter profile a little better than originally thought. They dug up the I-Hop incident, of course, and the ATF investigation, and then things got a little more interesting. The day after the shooting, as Amy languished in a prison cell and American stayed glued to the TV, the sheriff received a call from the chief of police of Braintree, Massachusetts, Paul Frazier. The woman you have in custody, I thought you'd want to know. She shot and killed her brother in 1986. Yeah. Did y'all think this story was about to wrap up? Not so much. Hang in there with us.

December 6, 1986, Braintree, Massachusetts. That's an appropriate name for Amy Bishop's hometown, don't you think? A 911 dispatcher got a call from a distraught Judy Bishop. My daughter just shot my son. First responders rushed to the Bishop's beautiful, restored Victorian House to find 18-year-old college student, Seth Bishop, still alive, but bleeding bad, from a gunshot wound to the chest. His 21-year-old sister Amy was not at the scene.

Judy Bishop told the police that Seth had gotten home from the grocery store and that she'd been helping him put stuff away in the kitchen when Amy came in, carrying her dad's shotgun. She said Amy told her she'd taken the gun out because she was worrying about robbers. Okay. Why would she be worried about robbers in the middle of the day? The family was burglarized the year before, but still, Seems like a dubious reason to be playing around the shotgun.

Amy told her mom she'd had a little mishap upstairs. She'd apparently realized at one point that, you know, robbers weren't coming to get her right at that moment. And she'd tried to unload the gun. And when she did, it went off and shattered the vanity mirror in her bedroom. She told her mom, I have a shell in the gun and I don't know how to unload it. Judy said she'd told her daughter not to point the gun at anybody, But as Amy swung the weapon around to show it to her brother, she said, it went off. And no sooner had her brother's body hit the floor, then Amy whirled around and ran out the back door, taking the shotgun with her.

I saw the whole thing. It was an accident, Judy insisted. EMTs worked on Seth while officers fanned out around town to try and find Amy. Right about that time, Tom Pedigrew, a mechanic at a local Ford dealership, noticed a days-looking young woman, walking around the lot, carrying a shotgun. Hey, what are you doing? he asked her. Amy raised the gun and said, put your hands up. Tom did as he was told, as you tend to do when somebody's pointing a shotgun at your face.

He asked her again, what are you doing? I need a car, Amy told him. I just got into a fight with my husband. He's looking for me. He's going to kill me. Fortunately for Tom Petigrew and everybody else within shooting distance, a couple of officers walked up on the scene right about then and spotted Amy. They said she seemed scared and confused, but when an officer ordered her to drop the gun, she refused to do it. It was only after a second officer managed to come up behind her and put the grabass on her that the tense little scene was resolved. On the drive to the police

station, Amy said something that took the officers back. She said she'd had a bad argument with her dad earlier that morning, before the shooting. It was the first indication that there had been any tension in the house that day. At the station, they found one shell in the gun and one more in Amy's pocket. Seth Bishop died at the hospital later that day, leaving his parents, Judy, and Sam, completely gutted. Seth was a great kid, bright and loving and fearless, and a virtuoso violinist. He and Amy were both students at Northeastern at the time of his death. It was a huge loss to those who had loved him. At the police station, Amy was cooperative with the interviewer, but according to the official report, she was impossible to question because of her highly emotional state. They released

her into her parents' custody that same day, and Seth's death was ruled an accident. The weird thing about her story, though, was that she'd already fired the weapon once, and anyone that knows that anyone that knows that in order to pull the shotgun shell into the chamber, you have to rack the weapon, like in an action movie, that ch-ch-ch-chunk sound? Pump-action shotguns can only load one shell into the chamber at a time. So if Amy had already fired the gun once at the wall and the vanity, she would have had to rack the gun again in order to chamber the round that would eventually kill her brother. Now, why would she do that if, as Judy had told the police, she'd just been trying to unload the gun?

Yeah, I consulted two experts while researching, and by that, I mean, I texted my dad and his friend Troy, because I have no idea how guns work and I wanted to make sure I didn't sound like an idiot when we talked about the shooting. And speaking of idiots, Amy's whole excuse is that she didn't know how to unload the gun, but in order to unload a shotgun, you just have to rack the gun again without pulling the trigger and it ejects the live round. Endlessly intelligent Amy Bishop, not yet Harvard train, couldn't figure that out. Like, I didn't even have to consult my experts for that one. Yeah, so this was murder, campers, plain and simple. So why didn't she get charged? Well, her mom, Judy Bishop, was friends with the police chief at the time,

John Polio, which is just a weird name, and she was involved in local politics. Judy had helped chair of Polio's political career quite a bit by helping him raise the required retirement age for police officers. Shortly after her daughter was brought in on the day of Seth's shooting, Judy had arrived at the station and demanded to speak with John privately. And as the door closed, a deal was struck. A debt repaid. And as that Hamilton quote goes, no one else was in the room where it happened. At least, according to people who were there that day.

People who knew the Bishop family said that although Seth and Amy were close as kids, their relationship had always been tinged with Amy's extreme competitiveness. Seth had been a rising star at Northeastern. He was better than she was at the violin. Was that enough to bring out the monster inside the sister he loved so much? Now, decades later, we had three people dead and three injured. And the current police chief of Braintree, Massachusetts, was disgusted by how the Seth Bishop case had been handled back in 86. He said, it was a miscarriage of justice, just because it was a friend of his, meaning Judy was a friend of the sheriffs.

Well, yeah. And according to those in the know, the case had poisoned the Braintree PD for years. It was an open secret that Sheriff Polio had let Judy Bishop's daughter get away with murder, and the other cops resented him for it. Their attitude was, hey, if he can fix a murder, I can sure a shit fix a parking ticket. Yeah, because what helps with corruption is, you know, more corruption. Great call, guys. For his part, the now Octogenarian former sheriff denied that he'd made any deal with Judy Bishop

and claimed he hadn't told anybody to release Amy that day. Uh-huh. Sure, bud. The guy who'd served as the DA at the time of Seth's death has since since, said that he hadn't even been made aware of the incident, and if he had, he'd have charged Amy to the fullest extent of the law. And the current prosecutor was horrified to learn that the incident at the Ford dealership where Amy had held a mechanic at gunpoint and then refused to drop her weapon for police, that wasn't even reported to the detectives in charge of the case. That's the kind of info you kind of need if you're a homicide detective, you know, but they

weren't told. So in a nutshell, campers, this was one heck of an epic fuck-up. And as a result, the citizens of Huntsville, Alabama, now had this horrific mass shooting to deal with. Consequences. They're a thing. But apparently nobody in authority ever got that memo when it came to Ms. Dr. Amy Bishop Harvard trained. She skated on everything her entire life, and look where it got us. After the story of Seth's death hit the media, the governor of Massachusetts ordered the state police to review the case. She was indicted. She was charged. And for a while, it looked like Amy was going to go to trial for Seth's murder. At first, she said she wanted to go to trial to clear her name.

But the fact that she attempted suicide soon after sort of makes me doubt that. But the trial never came about. Seth's case was dismissed in 2012, and to be fair, there are still a couple people involved with the original case who think it was an accidental shooting. Yeah, I don't. Me either. Obviously, Amy's parents and friends still insist it was an accident, and according to the New Yorker, one of her friends even had the nerve to refer to the UAH shootings as the accident in Alabama.

Excuse the hell out of me? No, sir, just, just no. And her mom can say what she likes about Seth's death being an accident, but here's a little detail y'all might find interesting. After the UAH shootings, Judy called Amy's husband Jim and said, Jim, did you have a gun in that house? Now, if you didn't think your daughter was a potential danger, why would you be upset with him about that? Exactly. Amy's initial plan was to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. She claimed not to remember anything about the shootings, but her attorney's team of psychiatrists had failed to prove that she was legally insane.

And she was still continuing her pattern of smug and superior behavior in jail. Yeah, she told her attorney that the other inmates' inferior IQ scores were affecting her. hers negatively. Just holy absolute shit. How is this a real person? Oh my God. It's literally infuriating. Do you hear the words that just came out of your mouth? Obviously not. Like, I'm not saying bullying is a good thing, right? And the only reason it's not a good thing. This is like the Mark Twain quote about lightning and idiots is that like the right people are never bullied, you know? Right. Yeah. So that's why I'm taking it a pun. myself to bully the shit out of Amy Bishop. Yeah, we're taking up the slack on that.

The original plan was for the state to pursue the death penalty, but once they received letters from the families of Amy's victims, all expressing a preference for life in prison instead, the prosecution decided to offer Amy a deal. And apparently having decided that she didn't want to die anymore, Dr. Amy Bishop Harvard trained agreed to plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for life without parole. So she was sent to Tettweiler prison, to live out her days, and she is cooling her heels there as we speak. I'm sure she's a holy tear, and I really wonder if she tries to make the prison guards call her by the full title. Like, I would pay money to see that.

Okay, I hope they do it, but only ever refer to her as doctor sarcastically. Okay, doctor. Doctor, it's time for your shower. Amy may have had some untreated mental health issues, for sure. And if that's the case, then it's a damn shame. she didn't seek help for them before four people were dead, three injured, and even more traumatized for life, including, I suspect, her own four children. Yeah, who we have nothing but sympathy for, obviously. I mean, she's their mom. I'm sure they love her. But going back to her mental state,

I think it's important to remember that Amy started going to that shooting range to practice her marksmanship weeks before these murders. So this is one of the reasons why you won't hear me say she snapped, because she didn't snap. This was premeditated and deliberate. I mean, it was a pure revenge killing. So that, I think you'll agree, was a wild one, right campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send two shoutouts today. First, thank you so much to all of you who've sent cards and gifts. We checked our PO box for the first time the other day and we were both so excited we practically piddled in our

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