Amy Bishop [has] been charged with first-degree murder in the [1986] death of her 18-year-old brother, Seth.

Associated Press

Debra Moriarity, the courageous University of Alabama Huntsville professor who confronted Amy Bishop as she tried to kill everyone in the room, will replace the murdered chair of the biology department.

… for the murder of her brother twenty-four years ago.

… [P]rosecutors are presenting evidence to a grand jury that will decide whether criminal charges should be brought in the case, according to several people involved in the probe.

The decision by Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating to take the case to a grand jury signals that a judicial inquest, which ended recently and issued a sealed report to the prosecutor, found there was enough evidence to potentially warrant charges against Bishop, now 45.

UD’s blogpal Barney sends her this moving article about the aftermath of Amy Bishop’s killing spree at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

… “There are times when you feel very, very empty,” says [Joseph] Ng, who has carried out research in structural biology in the department for 12 years.

… “The adrenaline is gone,” he says. But the sadness has moved in. “You go into the building and you are really missing these people.”

[Professor Debra] Moriarty feels much the same. “I told somebody a week ago that I felt worse than I have the whole time,” she says. She also sees similar signs in her students. “I have had a number of good students who are not doing well at all now. They come in to me and say, ‘I just can’t get my mind on it’. I send them all to counsellors.”

… Now that the initial shock has worn off, a new species of desolation has set in. The once-collegial third floor of the Shelby Center, where [a graduate student] used to enjoy hanging out, has become a lonely place that she leaves as soon as she can. “Every time you are in the building you are thinking about it,” she says. “On Fridays, when the clock strikes three or four, you are thinking about it.”…

The university news focus is now on the University of Virginia, and Yeardley Love’s killing. Perhaps the aftermath of that crime will be similar there. Weeks after the memorial events and the adrenalin, perhaps the emptiness, loneliness, and desolation of which the UAH faculty and students speak will begin to seep in — a sad, weak, distracted feeling that makes it hard to do your work.

Amy Bishop’s prick is her husband, of course, James Anderson, who lies and lies and lies.

He initially told investigators the family didn’t own a gun, though his wife had a borrowed one in the house.

“Get rid of it,” he recalled telling her. “I didn’t want to have it. I didn’t feel we needed it.”

During Bishop’s first hearing today, a police investigator reported that

[T]he gun used in the shooting, found in a bathroom trash can on a floor below, was purchased in 1989 for [Bishop's] husband, James Anderson, through a man in New Hampshire identified as Donald Proulx.

Gray said Proulx told federal agents Anderson, who was living in Massachusetts, asked him to buy the gun because Anderson was having problems with a neighbor and New Hampshire didn’t have a waiting period for gun purchases.

From an interview with Bradley Henry in the Patriot Ledger:

If it turns out that the 1986 investigation of Amy Bishop’s brother’s death was botched, could the families of the victims of the Alabama shooting sue police or prosecutors here?

You can bring claims, but they may be very short-lived. There are so many barriers against a successful claim – starting with prosecutorial immunity. You can’t sue prosecutors for deciding not to pursue a criminal charge.

But even if you could line up all the facts to try and show that, if she’d been convicted here, she wouldn’t have been hired in Alabama and so wouldn’t have committed the alleged Alabama shooting, it’s still stretched so distant (legally) in time, space and circumstance.

It’s too far away. It fails to meet the legal requirements of “proximate cause.” It would make no sense for anyone (in Alabama) to even try to sue.

So who could the families sue?

Bishop. Or the university, if it could be shown that they had sufficient information about her instability, her potential for dangerous action, and should have taken some action. That would at least survive a motion to dismiss.

The Simon’s Rock case makes a good comparison. The school had specific awareness of a student who was making threats, who got an unusual package (of gun-related items) the same day (of the shooting).

Unlike what seems to be the circumstances with Amy Bishop and the Alabama school, the Simon’s Rock shooting was close in time, and even though there wasn’t a specific target, the school knew he was going to shoot someone. But they didn’t take any steps to try and stop him.

Sam Thomas, a history professor at UAH, where Amy Bishop taught (he, like a number of people on that campus, knew her to be violently unstable before she began shooting), corrects one of the several destructive misintepretations of this event:

…[B]y linking Amy Bishop’s insanity to workplace frustration, [people] are implicitly pathologizing all women. If the shooting were simply an extreme reaction to a common frustration (as opposed to the most deadly spasm of violence from a severely unbalanced individual), the logical conclusion is that all women are capable of (or even prone to) this kind of violence. Given that, why in God’s name would I ever hire so unbalanced a creature as a woman?

… about the survivors of the Huntsville shootings.

Stephanie Monticciolo, the department staff assistant, has had her condition upgraded to good.

Although Joseph Leahy, a professor, is still in critical condition, he seems to be improving.

From al.com:

… Leahy’s family has set up a blog to keep friends and family updated. He also has a head wound and had reconstructive surgery Wednesday morning to make repairs to his cheek and jaw.

In blog updates, the family has described how Leahy is able to respond to commands. Nurses have created a yes/no board. Doctors are trying to wean Leahy off the ventilator.

Leahy is a microbiologist who teaches many of the UAH nursing students, and some of his former students have been his caregivers in the intensive care unit.

Leahy’s sister posted, “At one point Joe shared with a colleague that he wanted to give all of his students the best education possible because ‘one never knows if one of your former students will some day be taking care of you.’ Eerily prescient but a grace-filled moment as well.”

[Jimmy Anderson Sr.] called his son “a very docile guy, a little too docile.’’

Yes. This rings true to my sense of him, as I follow the Amy Bishop story. While everyone describes Amy – all her life – as verbally and physically aggressive, as sure of, and loud about, her political and social views in public settings, her husband consistently emerges as her worshipful wimp, her useful tool, as Prufrock says of himself. Anderson’s an attendant lord to Amy’s archbishop.

Watch for Anderson’s father to make his implicit attacks on his son’s mad mate more explicit as time goes on; but don’t expect Bishop’s enabler – and in some cases probably her co-conspirator – to change, unless it’s in the direction of yet greater appreciation of her genius.

From NECN.com:

[Police reports confirm that in the 1986 killing of her brother, two officers] cuffed [Amy] Bishop and brought her back to the police station. [O]nce there, [she was] presented … to the booking officer.

“At that point Amy Bishop’s mother comes storming into the station, hollering I wanna see John V, I wanna see John V, I demand to see John V. John V. was the police Chief John V. Polio.”

[An officer present says that] Judith Bishop then went down a hallway in the direction of the office of former Braintree Police Chief John Polio.

“While standing at the booking desk, [the booking officer's] phone rang and he picked it up and he put it down and says … Chief says no charges, release her.”

… in the New York Times.

… When she reportedly discharged her 9-millimeter handgun, [Amy Bishop] also punctured longstanding assumptions, or illusions, about women and violence — particularly as a fuller picture of her past begins to emerge, much of it indicating a possible record of previous violent episodes, including the shooting death of her brother in 1986, and her suspected role in assembling a pipe bomb mailed to a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School in 1994, when Dr. Bishop was studying there.

… [T]he landscape of unprovoked but premeditated female violence remains strangely unexplored [by artists and intellectuals]. Women who kill are “relegated to an ‘exceptional case’ status that rests upon some exceptional, or untoward killing circumstance: the battered wife who kills her abusive husband; the postpartum psychotic mother who kills her newborn infant,” Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology, noted in “The Female Serial Killer,” an essay included in the anthology “Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation” (1994).

… [T]he topic of women and violence — especially as represented by women — remains more or less in a time warp [among comtemporary artists], bound by the themes of sexual and domestic trauma…

…[W]hat artist might do justice to Dr. Bishop and her complex story, as its details have so far been reported: the privileged upbringing; her stable marriage to a uxorious husband, who was also her collaborator on scientific inventions; their four children, some of whose homework Dr. Bishop is monitoring from her jail cell? And what of the accounts given by associates and neighbors of her personal qualities — assertive, bristling with sharp opinions, vocal on the subject of her brilliance, harboring fierce resentments?

The uncomfortable fact is that for all her singularity, Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st-century America…

… “Everything is about power,” Patricia Cornwell, whose best-selling Scarpetta series is thick with forensic detail, maintained in an e-mail message, when asked what she made of the Bishop case. “The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.” Also: “Firearms are the great equalizer. You don’t have to be 6 foot 2 and weigh 200 pounds to kill a room full of people… People kill because they can. Women can be just as violent as men.”

*******************************

Much of this is what I was trying to get at in my latest Inside Higher Education piece about the Bishop case. It’s titled Murder in the Cathedral. This is how it ends:

[Bishop] knew, from murdering her brother and then terrorizing several people on the streets of Braintree, that holding and shooting guns can generate an intensely pleasurable sense of power. With a gun in her hand pointed at terrified human beings, Dr. Amy Bishop, world-historical genius, is exactly where she should be relative to the world — not inferior to anyone, but vastly, awesomely superior. With a gun in her hand, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

In killing people who make the mistake of making Amy Bishop feel inferior, Amy Bishop sets things right again.

She’s a lot like the guys Truman Capote wrote about in In Cold Blood. They celebrated for hours after systematically, cold-bloodedly killling four people. They said they killed them because at some point Herbert Clutter made them feel small, made them feel he thought he was better than they were. In killing him they put things back where they were supposed to be, and that made them euphoric. They showed him but good.

Bishop taught a class that day, before she started shooting. One of her students told an interviewer that Bishop had “a lazy left eye… But in the class just hours before the shooting, it no longer seemed lazy. It seemed fixed.” As she shot, reported a survivor of the massacre, Bishop had “intense eyes, a set jaw.”

All the depletion of godlike being Bishop had suffered since her colleagues disrespected her, all the enervation of charisma and brilliancy and focus, had finally come to an end now, in this triumphant fulfillment.

As Cornwell says of these events, everything is about power. Power and – pathetically enough – status.

… Dagblog, and she thanks Dagblog for its kind words about UD’s coverage of the Amy Bishop story.

Note that University Diaries has a category – amy bishop – which collects all of my posts about this ongoing criminal case.

More and more attention gets paid to James Anderson, the bizarre, prevaricating, threatening husband of Amy Bishop.

New information on the pipe bomb mailing in 1993.

Bishop must have learned from her remarkable success in the 1986 shooting that refusing cooperation with investigators is the ticket.

“Both suspects have retained an attorney and have refused to participate in further interviews, have declined to give consent to a search of an unattached garage to the rear of their house, and have refused to take a polygraph,’’ according to the documents [about Bishop and her husband].

The professor targeted, Paul Rosenberg, told police that “weeks before the attempted bombing, he played a role in Bishop’s resignation from her job as a postdoctoral research fellow in the hospital’s neurobiology lab because “he felt she could not meet the standards required for the work. …Rosenberg said Bishop’s co-workers felt she had “problems with depression,’’ that he thought “she was not stable,’’ and that there had been growing concerns because she had “exhibited violent behavior.’’

———————–

Boston Globe

_____________________

And Washington Post.

… will shortly appear at Inside Higher Education.

**************************

“Murder in the Cathedral” is now up at IHE.