Yesterday’s crazy person with a PhD targeted students. But same deal: Both professors were pissed off with the school, and, this being the United States, both had zero trouble getting guns. And so it goes.
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Actually, no. Our most recent maniac with a gun also targeted professors.
Professor Bishop, like the Aurora mass shooter, opened fire shortly after she learned of her termination (at the University of Alabama); and like the Aurora shooter she did the deed during a meeting with colleagues. And like the Aurora shooter, she had quite the violence/mental illness history (she sent bombs to perceived enemies; she shot her brother to death) and should never have had access to a gun. How much of the scary criminal background of these two employees did the university and the factory know about?
… by reason of insanity is that her students reported she’d taught a class in her usual fashion – reading from the book, mainly, but nothing out of the ordinary – just before she opened fire on her colleagues.
(Click on the category of this post – Amy Bishop – for background.)
… who murdered three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama and tried to kill three more, faces the death penalty in her upcoming trial.
Among mitigating factors [in death penalty trials] are the defendant’s lack of a significant criminal history…
Bishop will also go on trial in Massachusetts for the 1986 murder of her brother.
… 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.
… will shortly appear at Inside Higher Education.
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“Murder in the Cathedral” is now up at IHE.
[I]t seems wise to ask if the authorities are taking a close look at [Amy Bishop’s] husband, James Anderson. His statements and observations about his wife don’t always compute, and he was also questioned, with her, in the matter of the pipe bomb mailed to a Harvard physician in 1993.
A blogger at The Hill agrees with UD (see this post) that authorities shouldn’t be as nonchalant about Bishop’s husband as they’ve long been about Bishop. Given her desperation and madness, and the couple’s possible tendency to commit atrocities together, UD believes investigators should consider putting their children in protective custody.
The Boston Globe quotes the official statement on what they found. Here’s the heart of it:
The analysis of the newly received documents, as well as the previously released March 30, 1987 State Police report indicate that probable cause existed at that time to place Amy Bishop under arrest charged with:
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon, Chap. 265 Sec. 15B
Carrying a Dangerous Weapon, Chap. 269 Sec. 10, 12D
Unlawful possession of ammunition, Chap. 269 Ch. 10 (h)
He talks like mad to the press although lawyers have told him not to.
He lies. First he said this:
The New York Times reported that Anderson said he did not know his wife allegedly had a gun when she went to the meeting Friday at the university. “I had no idea,’’ he told the paper. “We don’t own one.”
Well, but you have one. And you and your wife have taken it to shooting ranges very recently. From The Chronicle:
… James Anderson, told both The Chronicle and The New York Times on Sunday that the family did not own a gun. But in an interview with The Chronicle today, he acknowledged that she had borrowed a gun, though he wasn’t sure from whom. “She was very cagey and didn’t say,” he said.
Mr. Anderson said he had told his wife he didn’t want the gun around the house because of their children, who range in age from 8 to 18. “Get rid of it,” he recalled telling her. “I didn’t want to have it. I didn’t feel we needed it.”
Ms. Bishop, according to her husband, had borrowed the gun and was considering buying it. Last summer, he said, someone followed her across the campus. “She was worried about crazy students,” he said.
… Mr. Anderson said he had gone with his wife to an indoor shooting range once, a couple of weeks ago. He said she had been there at least once before with a friend.
Don’t believe any of the bullshit coming out of the husband.
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Update on the century’s great psychotic romance:
She’s on suicide watch. This was predictable, since now that her brilliant scheme has been carried out, she doesn’t feel better, but worse.
Not only did she fail to kill everyone. After ditching the gun and going out to dinner with her beloved, she was supposed to go undetected as the author of the crime.
But she got caught, and now it looks as though the state’s going to hold and then execute her! How dare they! Crappy little state! Absurd little Alabamians! She is so far above them all. And yet they seem to have some legal right to continue to hold, and then execute her. Why go on.
And how will she end it all? In the great Wagnerian tradition of their long love affair, she will do it with the help of her adored James. She will stage a liebestod. He will smuggle in the drugs that will dispatch her before she has to undergo the degradation of being handled by people so contemptibly beneath her.
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Some speculation about future events.
Bishop may ask her husband to kill her children. He is almost as crazy as she is. They should be in protective custody.
It hasn’t appeared on the site yet, but should soon. As always, check the LATEST UD BLOGS AT IHE column on the right of this page.
It includes this latest piece of information:
University spokesman Ray Garner said Saturday that the professor had been informed months ago that she would not be granted tenure.
He said the faculty meeting where she is accused of gunning down colleagues was not called to discuss tenure.
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Mug shot. That’s a bullet-proof vest she’s got on.
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More details. Husband was not on the scene.
A professor used a 9 mm pistol to shoot six people, killing three, before ditching the weapon in a second-floor bathroom at UAH, police say. She then called her husband for a ride.
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Blog, AL.com, Huntsville Times:
A Massachusetts police chief is now saying that UAH shooting suspect Amy Bishop shot and killed her brother during an argument, and the case may have been mishandled by the police department more than two decades ago when the fatal shooting occurred.
… Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier is now offering a different account of the shooting to The Globe: “Bishop had shot her brother during an argument and was being booked by police when the police chief at the time ordered the booking process stopped and Bishop released to her mother,” the paper reports on its Web site. Records from the case have been missing since 1987.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘coverup,’ but this does not look good,” Frazier said.
Another newspaper, The Boston Herald, is reporting that Bishop also pointed the gun at a passing car after her brother’s shooting.
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My Inside Higher Ed post is here.
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Update: More on the tenure-made-me-do-it thing:
Even without tenure … Bishop would retain a share of the fruits of her research. [The CEO of the company promoting her work] said whatever happened on Friday wasn’t related to financial concerns.
“My opinion is no,” [he] said, “and that’s an educated one.”
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Yet more on tenure-made-me-do-it. This is from a Decatur Daily interview with a psychology professor who was also a friend.
… “It’s not like she would never have another job,” [Eric] Seemann said. “With the research she did, there are other universities that, if she threw her hat in the air, they’d be lining up to hire her.
“She’s not some random schmuck. She’s Harvard educated. She could have doubled her salary going to these other schools. For whatever reason, she was so ego-invested that not being here was intolerable.”
I’ve already written a long post tracking the Amy Bishop story. As more details emerge, I’ll post them. Here are a couple of things worth noting.
The first isn’t about her, but about her university. Just last year, another UAH professor was convicted of murdering his wife.
As to Bishop: The Boston Globe reports:
The University of Alabama biology professor accused of slaying three of her colleagues fatally shot her brother in an apparent accident in Massachusetts more than two decades ago, a local police chief said.
Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed the 1986 shooting in his town and slated a news conference this afternoon to discuss the incident.
She was twenty, he eighteen. While trying to “unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun,” she shot her brother in the abdomen.
The Globe article comes close to suggesting it might not have been accidental.
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As details of Bishop’s earlier killing emerge, things get a bit stomach-churning:
The Braintree police chief said today the woman accused of gunning down three in an Alabama shooting rampage shot and killed her brother during an argument in 1986 – but no police report exists and she was never charged.
Chief Paul Frazier said Amy Bishop shot her brother in the chest, fled the house, pointed the shotgun at another car, then fled into woods.
Police found her and arrested her, but during the booking process the former police chief called and interceded, Frazier said. No investigation took place after that and the incident report was lost or discarded.
“This would never happen in this day and age,” Frazier said.
Frazier has forwarded the case to the Norfolk DA’s office for investigation…
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Another account:
She fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall, before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.
Before Bishop could be booked, the police chief back then told officers to release her to her mother, Frazier said.
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.
[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.
More and more attention gets paid to James Anderson, the bizarre, prevaricating, threatening husband of Amy Bishop.
Amy Bishop’s Lawyer Expresses Regret For Calling His Client “A Wacko”
