… “I think she’s wacko,” said Roy Miller, [Amy Bishop’s lawyer.] … “[S]he’s probably one of the nicest ladies you’d meet.” …

WHNT News

Boston Globe:

The professor who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said today.

… [Dr. Paul] Rosenberg was opening mail, which had been set aside by a cat-sitter, when he returned from a Caribbean vacation on Dec. 19, 1993…

Opening a long, thin package addressed to “Mr. Paul Rosenberg M.D.,” he saw wires and a cylinder inside. He and his wife ran from the house and called police.

The package contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries.

[Investigators] focused on Bishop, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow who was working [with Rosenberg] in the human biochemistry lab at Children’s Hospital at the time, and her husband, Anderson.

Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said. The official said investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had shot her brother to death in 1986…

The Globe interviews a woman who worked with Bishop at the time:

… Bishop had been in a dispute with Rosenberg shortly before the bombs were discovered.

Shortly after the attempted bombing, [Sylvia] Fluckiger said, Bishop told her she had been questioned by police one day in the lab. According to Fluckiger, Bishop said police asked her if she had ever taken stamps off an envelope that had been mailed to her and put them on something else.

“She said it with a smirk on her face,” said Fluckiger. “We also knew her husband was a tinkerer. We knew she had a beef with Paul Rosenberg. And we really thought it was a really unbelievable coincidence that he would get those bombs.”

Sergeant Mark Roberts, a spokesman for the Huntsville Police, said today that police in Alabama had been informed that Bishop was a suspect in the 1993 mail bombing case…

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We need to proceed with caution here.

But – let us assume that Bishop is guilty of non-accidentally killing her brother, and of trying to kill Rosenberg. There seems no doubt at all that she just killed three people and attempted to kill — I think there were sixteen in the room.

UD is now prepared to say something about Amy Bishop, and it’s got nothing to do with tenure.

When Amy Bishop perceives a problem in her life, a quandary or annoyance of some sort, she kills it. She takes it out. Bullets or bombs.

So… How does it come about that a veteran killer — if Bishop is indeed a veteran killer — has so thoroughly eluded capture?

Capture? How about thoroughly eluded being charged? In 1986, the Boston police let the little wisp of a twenty-year-old go home with Mommy the same afternoon she killed her brother. No charges. They can’t even find the case file. There probably isn’t one.

In 1993, authorities were apparently unable to make a case against her, their prime suspect.

No wonder Bishop ended up in Alabama. In Massachusetts, at least, she was beginning to gain something of a reputation… Prime suspect in a bombing… Shooting of her brother…

Poor University of Alabama. This isn’t a story about tenure. It’s a story about background checks.

Let me say something else about Amy Bishop. I think the reason she was denied tenure was that her colleagues were afraid of her.

[T]he most impressive achievement [Alabama Senator Richard] Shelby leaves behind is the military-industrial complex he supplied with lavish federal aerospace and defense contracts in Alabama’s 5th Congressional district, which sent [Mo] Brooks to Washington to chew off the “Big Government” hand that fed it. The local monument to the senator’s powerful career is the Shelby Center for Science and Technology at the University of Alabama Huntsville. The building is best known as the scene of the 2010 mass shooting in which Amy Bishop, a biology professor denied tenure, pulled a semi-automatic pistol out of her purse during a faculty meeting and executed three colleagues (she pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence).

On the bipartisan gun-safety bill recently signed into law, Shelby voted against even sending it to the Senate floor, leaving his A+ NRA rating unbloodied.

Shelby’s presumptive successor is of course a champion of the “God-given Second Amendment,” but she also sells herself as a “Mama on a mission.” To a future Senator [Katie] Britt, that means that “our children should be taught to love this country” — a nation so exceptional that our children die at their school desks in order to preserve our freedoms.

That’s what it looks like Amy Cooper harbors, now that a second instance of her calling the powers of the law down on a man who has angered her has surfaced.

[Martin] Priest said Amy developed a “fascination” with him when they worked together at Lehman Brothers and filed [an expensive] lawsuit against him in 2015 with “fabricated” claims. “I never had a romantic relationship with her, period. She purposely engineered false allegations against me. And she made up allegations targeting my family’s physical safety,” Priest told The [Daily] News. … The lawsuit was dismissed in March 2018 after all parties failed to appear at back-to-back hearings, online court records show.

Right, so she’d done her thing, made her point, scared the shit out of the guy, and now her work was done. No need to expose her lies to scrutiny in court.

Precedents? I’ll give you one real, and one fictional. Whenever another Amy — Amy Bishop — got mad, she went hard against the person who made her mad and then boohooed to the cops that a frail innocent well-bred person like her could never do anything violent. Even more crazily, there’s Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest — another highly educated, impressively employed urbanite who didn’t take it well when a man angered her.

More violent than Cooper? Sure. But who knows what a cop might have done if Cooper had stayed at the scene and continued to make her hysterical claims against Christian Cooper?

She killed both of her adult children – and then herself – with a gun (or guns) she had in her house. Why did Marsha Edwards have guns? The police are saying very little – not about guns, or a final note, or substance abuse issues, or psychiatrists… With the exception of one neighbor who apparently called her a “very, very unhappy woman,” we got nuthin. We got lots of the use of the word “tragedy,” and lots of Give God the Burden, which UD finds mighty odd for a double murderer. Of her own children.

What is it about some women who kill? UD‘s reminded of ol’ Amy Bishop, who shot her brother to death and was sent home to mommy. I understand you can’t do anything to Marsha Edwards now (Bishop, decades later – after she mass-murdered her University of Alabama colleagues – was indicted for the fratricide), but we should at least find out why a murderously deranged mother was able to buy a gun and kill her kids with it. She lived in a wealthy, ultra-safe, gated community… Why the gun? Can we ask when she bought it, or if she got it from a friend, or whatever? It’s the thing that ended three lives – shouldn’t we know something about it?

As the Marsha Edwards story vanishes into that tragic woman plus the cosmic mystery, it leaves the stink of the normalization of a household appliance able to be used with stealth, ease, and one hundred percent fatality.

… this one at at Purdue, where a teaching assistant sought out and shot a fellow teaching assistant to death, are unknown. Both worked for an engineering school professor. The killer apparently walked calmly to the classroom where he knew the victim would be, shot him multiple times, and then walked around a bit, waiting to be arrested.

Let us speculate.

The dead man was dating a woman the killer wanted to date.

The dead man was impressing the professor more than the killer was, and this enraged the killer.

The victim had ridiculed or put down the shooter in some way.

The victim and the shooter had had an earlier altercation, and this was payback.

The killer is a psychopath. (Very unlikely. They either kill themselves after they finish killing, or, like Amy Bishop, they drop the gun in a trash bin and proceed to go out to dinner with their husband. Bishop considered herself far too clever ever to be caught.)

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UPDATE: Hints begin to emerge:

[B]oth a Purdue professor who worked with him and a Purdue student say he could be rude and disliked being told he was wrong…

Purdue Professor Thomas Talavage describes Cousins as intense and aggressive about his projects. He says Cousins “didn’t like to be told he was wrong.”

UD is reminded of another university workplace murder: Annie Le’s killing at Yale. Some of the people who knew her murderer, who worked with Le, “described him as a ‘control freak’ who was competitive in sports, compulsive about his work habits and controlling in his romantic relationships.”

UD has covered similar professor meltdowns, but usually they’re about alcohol or drug use. This one, a math professor at Michigan State who paced his classroom, slammed his head into the window, shouted obscenities at his students, shouted about there being no God, and then stripped naked – looks to have been a pretty classic psychotic break.

Students madly dialed 911; they claim police took too long (fifteen minutes) to arrive, but there seems to be some controversy about that. What’s not controversial is that these students were badly traumatized (some feared the professor might have a weapon).

It’s hellishly difficult to identify mad or dangerous or badly addicted people on campus. I’ve only had one student, in years of teaching, who was immediately identifiable as mentally ill by her class behavior and comments (I told someone in administration about it; the student later withdrew to get treatment). Privacy rights; a tolerance for oddness; denial; fear — lots of factors play into our tendency to avoid doing anything about unsettling behavior. And things are often mixed: Amy Bishop’s students report that she taught quite normally only hours before the faculty meeting during which she murdered three of her colleagues.

Given this difficulty, response time is key.

… are set to start. On Monday, George Huguely goes on trial for the murder of Yeardley Love; and next month Amy Bishop will be tried for killing three, and injuring another three, of her colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

UD suspects the Huguely trial will be straightforward, and that he will be convicted on the charge. Amy Bishop appears to be a madwoman, and that makes her sentence harder to anticipate (she will certainly be found guilty).

UD will follow both trials.

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.

“None of this went reported. We were able to confirm there were no restraining orders, no reports. But just sort of the campus buzz — just the buzz, the campus grapevine — if you’re coaching a team and a player is assaulting a sleeping teammate, wouldn’t you prod around? There were just too many episodes that were almost foreshadowing this.”

A CBS reporter pulls together the latest reports of George Huguely’s violence – toward Yeardley Love and toward others – leading up to her murder.

Having covered, on this blog, quite a lot of on-campus and off-campus violence, I’d like to speculate a little here, about this case.

Let’s start with the coach. It’s contemptible that, knowing Huguely was dangerously violent, the coach said nothing to anyone about it. But it is unsurprising. Why?

1.) Coaches go to incredible trouble, and get paid large sums of money, to recruit and retain aggressive young men. These men are rewarded for their aggression on the field, and rarely punished for that same aggression off the field. Sports heroes like Huguely have been rewarded all their lives for being rude and crude. Their coaches are part of the reward system.

2.) From the coach’s point of view, Huguely is part of a crowd. There are several pretty wild drunks on the team, and it’s going to be hard to single any of them out as not merely wild but pathological.

3.) Coaches tend to have intensely paternal relationships with their boys. They think like fathers, and fathers don’t report their sons, or call the police on them.

4.) The coach is unlikely to come from same the privileged background as his players. If he did, he’d be a lawyer, not a coach. He will perhaps, when considering action against a player, be intimidated by the money and power the player’s parents have.

5.) He will also be intimidated by thoughts of fans and alumni who expect victories and who adore Huguely as a big part of the team’s victory delivery system. A coach’s job is always very shaky — recall that Duke unloaded its lacrosse coach long before the innocence of his players was finally established.

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What about Yeardley Love herself? She was obviously being bombarded by threatening emails and by escalating physical violence from Huguely. She must have known about his jealousy-fueled attack on a male friend of hers on the team. Why did she do nothing, beyond locking her bedroom door?

1.) She might have done something. She might have talked about it. She might even have lodged a complaint — something short of a restraining order, let’s say, but maybe something. We don’t know yet.

2.) She might have thought along the same lines as the chair of Amy Bishop’s department: Yes, this is a scary person, but the school year is almost over. If I can just get to the end of the semester, she’ll have to go away, because she didn’t get tenure. Love might have thought We’re a few weeks away from graduation. If I can just wait that out, he’ll go his way and I’ll go mine.

3.) The crowd thing again. She saw him as one of the guys, part of a very close-knit team. Maybe he was crazier than most of the other guys, but they embraced him, loved him, didn’t throw him off the team. He could be seriously shitfaced, but so could they. He could also probably be charmingly apologetic about his obnoxiousness the next morning.

4.) Finally there’s pity and fear.

She wanted to help him. She understood he was a terrible drunkard about to enter an unforgiving world of work, and she wanted to help him. She pitied him, not just because he was an alcoholic, but because he loved and needed her so much. He roused her compassion.

Just as much, though, he roused her fear. He was a powerful man, and a very mean drunk. His love was sick and obsessive, and now that she’d rejected him, it was all wounded ego and vicious rage. Perhaps like his coach she deluded herself that Huguely was under it all still a little boy given to tantrums, rather than a man capable of murder.

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.

This short paragraph from a Wall Street Journal profile of one of the world’s worst financial criminals allows UD to say to you once again (she says it all the time, most recently in this discussion of Amy Bishop) that being highly intelligent and getting a great university education has little – sometimes nothing – to do with morality.

Clifford Orwin, a professor of political philosophy, makes the point:

[G]ive me Mr. Madoff for one, two or three courses of ethics instruction and he would still be Bernie Madoff. Would he have learned anything from the experience? Yes, he’d talk a much better game of ethics. Thanks to my teaching, he’d be an even greater menace to society.

This year, I’m teaching 500 students about justice, and I’m not making a single one of them a better person. Those who already aspire to justice may refine their understanding of what it is. (They may also come to see that everything has its problems, even justice.) Those already minded to be good citizens may become more thoughtful ones. I believe strongly in what I do – I just don’t think that what I do is to improve the moral character of my students.

Students indifferent to justice just aren’t going to be won over to it by anything that I could say. Or that anyone else could say. A university course is not a revival meeting. I don’t cure palsies and I don’t plead with students to come forward to declare themselves for ethics. And if I did – and if they did – it wouldn’t mean a thing. Talk is cheap. Talk consisting of high-minded oaths and declarations of one’s moral seriousness is even cheaper.

By the time a student arrives at university, and a fortiori several years later when he ambles on to his MBA, his ethical character is already firmly set. Whether virtue can ever be taught was already a thorny question for Plato. Whether it can be taught to adults, in a classroom, shouldn’t be a thorny question for anyone.

Stanley Fish overstates the case, but he gets at it too:

Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. [Humane] texts [are] concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

One of the corollaries of these truths is that business schools waste all sorts of money and generate all sorts of cynicism among their students by adding ethics courses to their curricula.

Business school catalogues should title these courses what they are: sops.

SOP 101
ADVANCED SOP
STUDIES IN SOP
CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SOP
ADVANCED INDEPENDENT STUDY: SOP

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?

… 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.