September 21, 2023 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Jeanne Bishop tells us the story of the brutal murders of her beloved family members… and how a change of heart changed her life and so many others. Read her book for the full story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And up next we bring you a story from Jean Bishop.
(00:30):
It's the story of a loving family shattered like gruesome violence.
Here's Jean Bishop.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I grew up in Oklahoma City with a mom and
a dad and two sisters. I'm the middle child of three.
I have an older sister, Jennifer, and a younger sister, Nancy.
It's five years younger than me. And we had this
kind of idyllic childhood, you know, nice neighborhood, great friends,
great school. And so when we all grew up and
(01:04):
ended up moving back to Chicago where I was born,
where my sisters and I were born, we all kind
of stayed together as a close family. Nancy got married
to the love of her life, Richard, at the age
of twenty three, and they started right away trying to
have kids. They wanted to have a big, happy family.
(01:28):
Even though Nancy was the youngest of us three sisters,
she was the first of us to get pregnant. She
was the first who was going to be a mom
and which she announced the news of this to me
and my older sister, my mom and dad. We were
all just over the moon with joy and happiness. We
went out to dinner to celebrate the great news. We
(01:49):
went to this Italian restaurant on Clark Street in Chicago,
and I brought a little baby gift, a little baby
sweater from a trip I'd just been on, and we
ordered pasta and we were laughing, and my parents were
so thrilled. This would have been their first grandchild. This
would have been my first little decent nephew. It was
(02:10):
a Saturday night, the night before Palm Sunday. We all
hud goodbye in the parking lot. That night, my mom
and dad went back to their big house in the suburbs.
I went back to my apartment in Chicago, and Nancy
and Richard went back to this townhouse. They were living
in Winnetka, Illinois, and Winnetka is the place I live now.
(02:33):
It's one of the safest, most affluent communities in the country.
When they walked through the door of their townhouse, the
killer was waiting for them. He had used a glass
cutter to break in the glass sliding door in the
back because he knew that breaking the glass would have
alerted the neighbors and they would have called the police.
(02:54):
He had a three fifty seven magnum revolver. He pointed
it at them. He handcuffed my brother law Richard. And
Richard was this gentle giant. He was this six foot three,
two hundred and thirty pounds former athlete that he was
completely disabled when he was handcuffed. He forced them down
into the basement. They begged for their lives. Nancy and
(03:16):
Richard both told him that she was pregnant, asked him
not to hurt her first. He put the gun to
Richard's head and he killed him execution style with one gunshot.
And I can't describe how awful that must have been
for Nancy, how surreal it must have been to see
this man she loved and wanted to have a family
(03:37):
with and grolled with, just just assassinated in that moment.
So then the gun was turned on her, she covered
up her own head with her hands just because of
what she'd just seen, and kind of huddled in a corner.
The killer fired twice instead into her pregnant side and abdomen,
(04:00):
and then he left her there to die. And when
we got the coroner's report later, we saw that she
lived for about ten minutes after that, and the blood
marks on the basement and the marks on her body
showed what she did. She tried to call for help
by banging on this metal shelf with a tool that
(04:20):
was in the basement. She was too weak to stand,
and so she was trying to make a noise that
someone would hear. And I just imagined that at some
point she must have known that no help was coming,
and that she was dying, and that the darkness was
kind of closing in around her. Her baby was dying
(04:40):
inside her. So she dragged herself by her elbows over
to where Richard's body was, and before she died, she
did this incredible thing that the police told us about later.
She had drawn in her own blood on the floor
next to Richard the shape of a heart and the
letter you love you. It's how she used to sign
(05:04):
her cards and letters to him. And when I learned that,
I was with my mom, and my mom burst into
tears and she said, it's true, isn't it. Love is
stronger than death, And when I heard it, I thought,
what but this incredible presence of God could explain the
(05:25):
kind of serenity and love and luminous grace that could
explain her being able to do those in her last moments,
This young woman who knew she was dying to have
this be her last word on her life, and that
changed everything for me. I was working at a big
law firm at the time, doing corporate law and doing
(05:48):
a terrible job of it because I wasn't putting my
heart into it. I didn't love it, it wasn't deeply
meaningful to me, and I was cheating my employer as
a result. I wasn't giving it my best. And I
realized when Nancy died at age twenty five, four years
younger than me, that life is short and it can
be taken from us at any moment, and we have
(06:10):
to spend our lives doing things that are deeply meaningful,
that do require our whole heart, and that do some
good for the world. And so I left the corporate
firm to be a public defender within months, and it's
a job that I've been doing ever since, a job
that I still do so after Nancy was killed, for
(06:32):
six months, the crime went unsolved. No one could explain
who would kill this happy, young couple with no enemies,
with everything in the world to live for. And I
was just stunned at the theories that were being floated
that maybe it was the drug runners that you were
(06:55):
trying to disguise drugs in the coffee warehouse where rich
A worked, and maybe he saw something you shouldn't have
seen and they killed him. Maybe it was some jealous
ex boyfriend of Nancy's. I mean, all these crazy things
that didn't make any sense and that led to nowhere.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
And you're listening to Jane Bishop, and what a story
she's telling us. When we come back. More of Janebishop's
story here on our American Stories. Folks, if you love
the great American stories we tell and love America like
(07:34):
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A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents
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And help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
(07:55):
our Americanstories dot Com. And we're back with our American
stories and with Jean Bishop's story about her sister Nancy
(08:18):
and their sister's husband, Richard's tragic death. Now let's return
to more of Jean Bishop and her story.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
One day, I got a phone call in my apartment
from the local CBS reporters who wanted to know my
reaction to the arrest in my sister's murder case. And
I said, you know what arrest And he said, there's
a teenage boy in custody in the one Atka police station.
And I was shocked. It was the last thing in
(08:51):
the world I expected to find out that it was
this skinny sixteen year old who lived a few blocks
away from them, that had been one who killed them.
He had bragged to his friends, and nobody believed him.
They thought he was joking when he said that he
had done it, until one friend finally did believe him,
(09:12):
because by this time the trail had grown so cold
that the killer felt confident enough to show the gun
to his friend, to show the handcuffs like the ones
he'd used, to tell him in detail how he'd done it,
and the friend wasn't going to turn him in. At
first didn't turn him in, and then when he was
afraid that this young man might kill again and that
(09:34):
he'd be a kind of a accomplice to it if
he do, finally walked into the WINECA Police station and
turned him in. So the police had gotten a warrant,
had gone to this young man's home, had found the
gun under his bed, tested the ballistics, found it a
perfect match to the bullets that killed my family members,
(09:56):
found the glass cutter he'd used, found this notebook he
kept about killing them. With all the press clippings about
the murders, we even found out that he had gone
to Nancy and Richard's funeral. So he was arrested. He
was held without bond in the Cook County Jail, and
he went to trial about a year later, and he
(10:18):
took the stand and denied the crime, tried to blame
it on someone else, said he hadn't done it, that
a friend of his had come to his door the
night of the murder and knocked on it and handed
in the gun and said, here hide this sight. I've
just killed two people with it. The jury didn't buy it.
It contradicted all the physical evidence, It contradicted the details
(10:39):
of the crime scene. Only he would have known about
his own confessions to the crime. And so they found
him guilty. And when he was sentenced, he got the
mandatory sentence that you got at that time in the
state of Illinois for a multiple homicide, and that's life
in prison without the possibility of parole. And when he
(11:01):
got that sentence, my mom was sitting next to me
on these hard wooden benches where you sit in the
core room as a spectator, and she said to me,
we'll never see him again. And when she told me that,
I was glad. I thought, good, you know, I'll never
have to think about him again. I had decided very
early on that whoever had done it, I was not
(11:23):
going to hate him or her, because I knew that
if I had hate in my heart over the murders
of my family members, that there wouldn't be enough hate
in the world. It beat this vast, endless ocean of
hate that I would drift into. And so I had
to forgive that person. But the forgiveness that I had
(11:44):
given to him wasn't directed directly to him. I didn't
tell him. It was a forgiveness in my own mind
and heart, just to unchain myself from him. And it
was a forgiveness that wasn't really supposed to be about
him or for him in any way. It was really
for God, because my faith teaches me that we have
(12:04):
to forgive as we've been forgiven. And it was for
Nancy because I knew her. She was generous and loving
and kind and funny and warm, and she loved life,
She loved people. She was carrying life in her body
when she was killed. So that's when I decided to
(12:25):
work in her memory, against gun violence, against the death penalty,
against anything that shed more blood. And I forgave for
me because of this saying I love. I write about
it in my book that hating another person's like drinking
poison and expecting that other person to die. And I
(12:46):
knew that if I hire breed bitterness in my heart
towards him, it wouldn't affect him at all. In fact,
he might even want my hate. It would eat me alive,
and so I vowed not to do that. So he
was sentenced to life. He was taken to Minard Prison,
this dungeon like fortress in downstate Illinois, and for twenty
(13:08):
years I went on my way, not thinking of him
at all, but just trying to live my life in
a way that honored God and this gift of life
that I still had been given, and that honored Nancy
and her memory. So I did a lot of speaking
against the death penalty all over the country and the
world from my perspective as a murder victim's family member.
(13:31):
In the course of doing that, I met this law
professor named Mark Ostler. Mark Ostler is like me, a
really unlikely opponent of the death penalty. He is a
former prosecutor who doesn't believe in it, and he had
written a book about faith and the death penalty. And
I met him at this conference down in Atlanta, Georgia,
(13:53):
at Martin Luther King Junior's Church of Aneezer Baptist and
he gave me his book, and later he gave me
another one of one chapter written by a colleague of
his from where he used to teach, And this chapter
is written by Randal O'Brien. So Randall's this guy who
grew up in Macomb, Mississippi, veteran of the army in Vietnam,
(14:14):
first a teacher of religion at Baylor and then a
college university president in Tennessee, and he wrote this chapter
about forgiveness, which I was really interested in. And in
that chapter he wrote this that no Christian man or
woman is relieved of the obligation to work to reconcile
with those who've wronged them. And when I read that sentence,
(14:37):
I was so affronted. I was just completely indignant. And
I thought, you were telling me that even though this
killer of my sister is not sorry and hasn't apologized
and showed known remorse whatsoever, that it's my job to
walk out to him, hand out stretched and say, let's
(14:59):
make peace, you and I. And I was so angry
that I actually called Mark Ostler to yell at him
for giving me this book, and he said, you know,
don't be mad at me. I didn't write this. Call
the author, call Randall O'Brien, tell him what you think.
And so I did. I called the president of Carson
Newman University and I left a message that Jean Bishop
(15:20):
wanted to speak to him. And I thought, oh gosh,
he'll never call me back. I'm this stranger calling out
of the blue, but he did. I was sitting in
my car waiting to pick up someone from O'Hare Airport.
It was one of those freezing cold Chicago Knights and
the snow is swirling around and the heaters on full blast.
Did I get this phone call from this guy who
(15:42):
sounds just like Jimmy Carter's is Jean Bishop? And it
was Randall? And I told him this story about my
sister and the murder and this unrepentant murderer and this
thing he written, that's so, you know, upset me. And
I said to him, you know what, reconciling with this
remorseless person, what would this even look like? And he
(16:05):
said it would look like Jesus on the cross. And
I know that I'm speaking to an audience of, you know,
people of many faiths or maybe no faith at all,
but my Christian faith is how I was raised. And
so I know what he meant by that when he
said that. The Gospels record that when Jesus was dying
(16:27):
being crucified by people who are not sorry, who haven't
apologized to him, who showed no remorse, that he was
praying for them, that he said, Father, forgive them, forgive them.
They don't know what they're doing. And I was so
convicted in that moment because I'd never once prayed for
this young man who killed my family members. I'd never
(16:48):
even said his name. I went through my life saying
Nancy and Richard's name because I wanted their names to
live and the name of this killer to die. And
I realized that if I were going to pray for
this young man, I needed to say his name, because
you kind of make him a non person by not
saying it. So the first thing I did, what I
(17:11):
started praying for him, is to say his name. It's
David biro David Birou. He is a child of God.
My faith teaches me that God loves him every bit
as much as God loves me. And then I'm as
flawed and fallen as he is and in need of grace.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
And you are listening to Gene Bishop, what words to
try and live by? Not easy. Hating that other person
is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
This idea of how to reconcile with a remorseless person,
how to forgive, how to not carry hate in our heart.
More of Jean Bishop's story here on our American Stories
(18:08):
and we returned to our American stories, and you've been
listening to Jean Bishop's remarkable journey of forgiveness. Let's return
to Jane and the remaining parts of this remarkable story.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
What I'd done all those years is built this very
convenient wall between me and him, and on one side
of them all was him and you're the evil murderer,
and the other side was be the good, innocent victim's
family member. And I saw that God breaks down that wall,
and that instead of trying to shut him away, I
(18:48):
should try to bring him back, to bring him back
into community, into fellowship, into the grace of God. So
I wrote, I wrote him a letter, and I said
in that letter, I forgave you a long time ago,
and I never told you, and that was wrong, and
(19:10):
I'm sorry, and I've waited all these years for you
to apologize to be I'm going to go first. I
am sorry, and if you want me to come see you,
I will. And I mailed that letter, not knowing how
he'd react. I put it in the mailbox to Pontiac Prison,
where he was at that time, and I pictured him
(19:30):
getting it and maybe crumplating it up and throwing it
away or showing it to a cellmate and having a
good laugh of it, you know, over it, over this
this woman, in her lofty words about forgiveness or maybe
getting back some you know, smarmy, ingratiating, you know, letter,
trying to manipulate in some way. And so the last
(19:51):
thing in the world I expected was to get a
very thick envelope a few weeks later in my mailbox
at the Public Defender's office with his name Bureau up
in the left hand corner and the return address. And
for two days I couldn't open it. I was just
afraid to see what it would be. And so I
(20:11):
asked Mark Gosler to open it instead and read it
to me. And when he did, he said, it's good.
And he read to me out the whole letter, and
it started like this, You and your family waited so
long to hear this. I am guilty. I did kill
your family members, and I'm so sorry. If I could
take it back, I would. And in the next fifteen
(20:34):
pages front and back in this letter, he traced his
whole trajectory over those twenty plus years of how he'd
gone from trying to get away with the crime to
getting to prison and seeing the people around him and
realizing that he didn't want to be like them, and
yet he was that he'd done this terrible thing that
(20:55):
he deserved to be there. When he'd see the news
on TV of some horrific crime, like a baby being
murdered or an old woman being raped, he'd think instinctively, Oh,
that person's an animal that did that, and then he thought,
wait a second, that's me. I shot a pregnant woman
in the stomach. He started reading, he started self teaching.
(21:22):
He had a friend who had come to visit him,
and then one day she just vanished. Never wrote him again,
never called him again, they ever came to see him,
never answered his letters to her, And he started just
wondering why, you know, was it something he had done?
Was it something that happened to her? And then he
started having great empathy for my family, thinking, gosh, I
(21:42):
bet the Bishop family, which is they knew why, like,
why had I done this to them? Why did I
kill their family members? And so he became very remorseful
and wanted to reach out to me, but didn't want
to do that unbidden because he was afraid of how
that would traumatize me or my family if if we
(22:03):
didn't want to see that name Berro on a on
an envelope to us. So the minute I had written
to him, he started writing back, and I did go
to see him. I'm seeing him still. It has been
incredibly healing to hear about Nancy's last moments, to learn
about things I didn't know. One thing I learned that
(22:25):
I loved was this Nancy was kind of like the
chatty talking one and Richard was like the strong, silent type.
And so I imagined that as they were talking to
the person who killed them, begging for their lives, that
she would have been the one during the talking. But
what David Biro told me is it wasn't her. It
was Richard that from the moment he saw again pointed
(22:47):
at his wife and child, he never stopped begging, finding ways,
trying to find any way that she would be let go,
that he would stay behind, and that she would be
let go and be able to live. And it was
incredibly healing to speak to David because I got to
(23:08):
have this one on one victim impact statement that I
never got to do. When he was sentenced to life
without parole, he didn't have these aggravation and mitigation proceedings
that usually have in a court case, because the sentence
was mandatory, so we never got to do a statement
that we could read out in court about how his
(23:29):
actions had hurt us, had hurt everyone who loved Nancy
and Richard, my mom, my dad, my older sister, Nancy's neighbors,
her coworkers, her classmates, everyone who loved them. And when
I talk about Nancy to him, this kind of shadow
comes across his face. He told me once, he said,
(23:51):
the more I get to know her through you, the
worse I feel about what I did. And that's the
only justice he can give me. He can't bring Nancy back,
or her baby, or her husband, but he can do
what he's done, which is to grasp the enormity of
what he did and to feel great shame and remorse
for it, and to do everything he can now to
(24:12):
live a quiet life in the prison where he's doing life,
because I told him that it's his job now to
do every bit of good in the world that she
can no longer do. So. I sing in a choir
at my church, and one day one of my choiry
members asked, me Gane, what is it like to go
(24:34):
and see the person who killed your family members. What
does it like to shake the hand that held that gun?
And I tell her it's like frozen earth that used
to be hard and barren where nothing would grow, becoming
soft and moist, where green shoots are springing up and
life is coming out of the ground that used to
(24:57):
be so barren. That's what it feels like. I feel
like my heart had been frozen, and now it's a
place where so many things can grow. This love, this forgiveness,
this mercy, this reconciliation. It's so healing, it's so helpful,
and it isn't just for me, It's for everyone, for
(25:19):
everyone within the sound of my voice, whether it's the
coworker who undermined you, of the business partner who betrayed you,
the family member that wounded you and abused you, the neighbor,
the friend, you name it. We've none of us gotten
through this life unscathed. Every single one of us has
(25:41):
something that we have to forgive, and every one of us,
I think, knows what it's like also to go to
another and say I am so sorry, I can't believe
I did that. I am so ashamed of it, and
I apologize. Will you take me back? Will you let
me back in? What I've learned from this tragedy, from
(26:05):
the loss of my sister, and from that message of
love that she wrote in those last moments, that love
is greater than our woundedness. Love is greater than hate
or bitterness or vengeance, and love is the way out
of this, of this hurt that we're in.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Love is greater than our woundedness. It's the way out
of their hurt we're in. You're listening to Jean Bishop
and for giving her sister's murderer. Her book, Change of Heart, Justice, Mercy,
and Making Peace with My Sister's Killer is available on
Amazon again. The book is Change of Heart. Go to Amazon,
get it, pass it to everyone you know. And by
(26:54):
the way, what I loved about this piece is she
wasn't asking that he not serve his time. For anyone
who's had a family member, it was a victim of
a crime. People need to be in jail and pay
the price for what they did. With this beautiful way
of dealing with it in the interpersonal level and through
the reconciliation model, well, it's simply beautiful. Jean Bishop's story,
(27:14):
her sister's story and her sister's husband's story, and David
Bureau's story too. Here on our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And up next we bring you a story from Jean Bishop.
(00:30):
It's the story of a loving family shattered like gruesome violence.
Here's Jean Bishop.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I grew up in Oklahoma City with a mom and
a dad and two sisters. I'm the middle child of three.
I have an older sister, Jennifer, and a younger sister, Nancy.
It's five years younger than me. And we had this
kind of idyllic childhood, you know, nice neighborhood, great friends,
great school. And so when we all grew up and
(01:04):
ended up moving back to Chicago where I was born,
where my sisters and I were born, we all kind
of stayed together as a close family. Nancy got married
to the love of her life, Richard, at the age
of twenty three, and they started right away trying to
have kids. They wanted to have a big, happy family.
(01:28):
Even though Nancy was the youngest of us three sisters,
she was the first of us to get pregnant. She
was the first who was going to be a mom
and which she announced the news of this to me
and my older sister, my mom and dad. We were
all just over the moon with joy and happiness. We
went out to dinner to celebrate the great news. We
(01:49):
went to this Italian restaurant on Clark Street in Chicago,
and I brought a little baby gift, a little baby
sweater from a trip I'd just been on, and we
ordered pasta and we were laughing, and my parents were
so thrilled. This would have been their first grandchild. This
would have been my first little decent nephew. It was
(02:10):
a Saturday night, the night before Palm Sunday. We all
hud goodbye in the parking lot. That night, my mom
and dad went back to their big house in the suburbs.
I went back to my apartment in Chicago, and Nancy
and Richard went back to this townhouse. They were living
in Winnetka, Illinois, and Winnetka is the place I live now.
(02:33):
It's one of the safest, most affluent communities in the country.
When they walked through the door of their townhouse, the
killer was waiting for them. He had used a glass
cutter to break in the glass sliding door in the
back because he knew that breaking the glass would have
alerted the neighbors and they would have called the police.
(02:54):
He had a three fifty seven magnum revolver. He pointed
it at them. He handcuffed my brother law Richard. And
Richard was this gentle giant. He was this six foot three,
two hundred and thirty pounds former athlete that he was
completely disabled when he was handcuffed. He forced them down
into the basement. They begged for their lives. Nancy and
(03:16):
Richard both told him that she was pregnant, asked him
not to hurt her first. He put the gun to
Richard's head and he killed him execution style with one gunshot.
And I can't describe how awful that must have been
for Nancy, how surreal it must have been to see
this man she loved and wanted to have a family
(03:37):
with and grolled with, just just assassinated in that moment.
So then the gun was turned on her, she covered
up her own head with her hands just because of
what she'd just seen, and kind of huddled in a corner.
The killer fired twice instead into her pregnant side and abdomen,
(04:00):
and then he left her there to die. And when
we got the coroner's report later, we saw that she
lived for about ten minutes after that, and the blood
marks on the basement and the marks on her body
showed what she did. She tried to call for help
by banging on this metal shelf with a tool that
(04:20):
was in the basement. She was too weak to stand,
and so she was trying to make a noise that
someone would hear. And I just imagined that at some
point she must have known that no help was coming,
and that she was dying, and that the darkness was
kind of closing in around her. Her baby was dying
(04:40):
inside her. So she dragged herself by her elbows over
to where Richard's body was, and before she died, she
did this incredible thing that the police told us about later.
She had drawn in her own blood on the floor
next to Richard the shape of a heart and the
letter you love you. It's how she used to sign
(05:04):
her cards and letters to him. And when I learned that,
I was with my mom, and my mom burst into
tears and she said, it's true, isn't it. Love is
stronger than death, And when I heard it, I thought,
what but this incredible presence of God could explain the
(05:25):
kind of serenity and love and luminous grace that could
explain her being able to do those in her last moments,
This young woman who knew she was dying to have
this be her last word on her life, and that
changed everything for me. I was working at a big
law firm at the time, doing corporate law and doing
(05:48):
a terrible job of it because I wasn't putting my
heart into it. I didn't love it, it wasn't deeply
meaningful to me, and I was cheating my employer as
a result. I wasn't giving it my best. And I
realized when Nancy died at age twenty five, four years
younger than me, that life is short and it can
be taken from us at any moment, and we have
(06:10):
to spend our lives doing things that are deeply meaningful,
that do require our whole heart, and that do some
good for the world. And so I left the corporate
firm to be a public defender within months, and it's
a job that I've been doing ever since, a job
that I still do so after Nancy was killed, for
(06:32):
six months, the crime went unsolved. No one could explain
who would kill this happy, young couple with no enemies,
with everything in the world to live for. And I
was just stunned at the theories that were being floated
that maybe it was the drug runners that you were
(06:55):
trying to disguise drugs in the coffee warehouse where rich
A worked, and maybe he saw something you shouldn't have
seen and they killed him. Maybe it was some jealous
ex boyfriend of Nancy's. I mean, all these crazy things
that didn't make any sense and that led to nowhere.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
And you're listening to Jane Bishop, and what a story
she's telling us. When we come back. More of Janebishop's
story here on our American Stories. Folks, if you love
the great American stories we tell and love America like
(07:34):
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And help us keep the great American stories coming. That's
(07:55):
our Americanstories dot Com. And we're back with our American
stories and with Jean Bishop's story about her sister Nancy
(08:18):
and their sister's husband, Richard's tragic death. Now let's return
to more of Jean Bishop and her story.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
One day, I got a phone call in my apartment
from the local CBS reporters who wanted to know my
reaction to the arrest in my sister's murder case. And
I said, you know what arrest And he said, there's
a teenage boy in custody in the one Atka police station.
And I was shocked. It was the last thing in
(08:51):
the world I expected to find out that it was
this skinny sixteen year old who lived a few blocks
away from them, that had been one who killed them.
He had bragged to his friends, and nobody believed him.
They thought he was joking when he said that he
had done it, until one friend finally did believe him,
(09:12):
because by this time the trail had grown so cold
that the killer felt confident enough to show the gun
to his friend, to show the handcuffs like the ones
he'd used, to tell him in detail how he'd done it,
and the friend wasn't going to turn him in. At
first didn't turn him in, and then when he was
afraid that this young man might kill again and that
(09:34):
he'd be a kind of a accomplice to it if
he do, finally walked into the WINECA Police station and
turned him in. So the police had gotten a warrant,
had gone to this young man's home, had found the
gun under his bed, tested the ballistics, found it a
perfect match to the bullets that killed my family members,
(09:56):
found the glass cutter he'd used, found this notebook he
kept about killing them. With all the press clippings about
the murders, we even found out that he had gone
to Nancy and Richard's funeral. So he was arrested. He
was held without bond in the Cook County Jail, and
he went to trial about a year later, and he
(10:18):
took the stand and denied the crime, tried to blame
it on someone else, said he hadn't done it, that
a friend of his had come to his door the
night of the murder and knocked on it and handed
in the gun and said, here hide this sight. I've
just killed two people with it. The jury didn't buy it.
It contradicted all the physical evidence, It contradicted the details
(10:39):
of the crime scene. Only he would have known about
his own confessions to the crime. And so they found
him guilty. And when he was sentenced, he got the
mandatory sentence that you got at that time in the
state of Illinois for a multiple homicide, and that's life
in prison without the possibility of parole. And when he
(11:01):
got that sentence, my mom was sitting next to me
on these hard wooden benches where you sit in the
core room as a spectator, and she said to me,
we'll never see him again. And when she told me that,
I was glad. I thought, good, you know, I'll never
have to think about him again. I had decided very
early on that whoever had done it, I was not
(11:23):
going to hate him or her, because I knew that
if I had hate in my heart over the murders
of my family members, that there wouldn't be enough hate
in the world. It beat this vast, endless ocean of
hate that I would drift into. And so I had
to forgive that person. But the forgiveness that I had
(11:44):
given to him wasn't directed directly to him. I didn't
tell him. It was a forgiveness in my own mind
and heart, just to unchain myself from him. And it
was a forgiveness that wasn't really supposed to be about
him or for him in any way. It was really
for God, because my faith teaches me that we have
(12:04):
to forgive as we've been forgiven. And it was for
Nancy because I knew her. She was generous and loving
and kind and funny and warm, and she loved life,
She loved people. She was carrying life in her body
when she was killed. So that's when I decided to
(12:25):
work in her memory, against gun violence, against the death penalty,
against anything that shed more blood. And I forgave for
me because of this saying I love. I write about
it in my book that hating another person's like drinking
poison and expecting that other person to die. And I
(12:46):
knew that if I hire breed bitterness in my heart
towards him, it wouldn't affect him at all. In fact,
he might even want my hate. It would eat me alive,
and so I vowed not to do that. So he
was sentenced to life. He was taken to Minard Prison,
this dungeon like fortress in downstate Illinois, and for twenty
(13:08):
years I went on my way, not thinking of him
at all, but just trying to live my life in
a way that honored God and this gift of life
that I still had been given, and that honored Nancy
and her memory. So I did a lot of speaking
against the death penalty all over the country and the
world from my perspective as a murder victim's family member.
(13:31):
In the course of doing that, I met this law
professor named Mark Ostler. Mark Ostler is like me, a
really unlikely opponent of the death penalty. He is a
former prosecutor who doesn't believe in it, and he had
written a book about faith and the death penalty. And
I met him at this conference down in Atlanta, Georgia,
(13:53):
at Martin Luther King Junior's Church of Aneezer Baptist and
he gave me his book, and later he gave me
another one of one chapter written by a colleague of
his from where he used to teach, And this chapter
is written by Randal O'Brien. So Randall's this guy who
grew up in Macomb, Mississippi, veteran of the army in Vietnam,
(14:14):
first a teacher of religion at Baylor and then a
college university president in Tennessee, and he wrote this chapter
about forgiveness, which I was really interested in. And in
that chapter he wrote this that no Christian man or
woman is relieved of the obligation to work to reconcile
with those who've wronged them. And when I read that sentence,
(14:37):
I was so affronted. I was just completely indignant. And
I thought, you were telling me that even though this
killer of my sister is not sorry and hasn't apologized
and showed known remorse whatsoever, that it's my job to
walk out to him, hand out stretched and say, let's
(14:59):
make peace, you and I. And I was so angry
that I actually called Mark Ostler to yell at him
for giving me this book, and he said, you know,
don't be mad at me. I didn't write this. Call
the author, call Randall O'Brien, tell him what you think.
And so I did. I called the president of Carson
Newman University and I left a message that Jean Bishop
(15:20):
wanted to speak to him. And I thought, oh gosh,
he'll never call me back. I'm this stranger calling out
of the blue, but he did. I was sitting in
my car waiting to pick up someone from O'Hare Airport.
It was one of those freezing cold Chicago Knights and
the snow is swirling around and the heaters on full blast.
Did I get this phone call from this guy who
(15:42):
sounds just like Jimmy Carter's is Jean Bishop? And it
was Randall? And I told him this story about my
sister and the murder and this unrepentant murderer and this
thing he written, that's so, you know, upset me. And
I said to him, you know what, reconciling with this
remorseless person, what would this even look like? And he
(16:05):
said it would look like Jesus on the cross. And
I know that I'm speaking to an audience of, you know,
people of many faiths or maybe no faith at all,
but my Christian faith is how I was raised. And
so I know what he meant by that when he
said that. The Gospels record that when Jesus was dying
(16:27):
being crucified by people who are not sorry, who haven't
apologized to him, who showed no remorse, that he was
praying for them, that he said, Father, forgive them, forgive them.
They don't know what they're doing. And I was so
convicted in that moment because I'd never once prayed for
this young man who killed my family members. I'd never
(16:48):
even said his name. I went through my life saying
Nancy and Richard's name because I wanted their names to
live and the name of this killer to die. And
I realized that if I were going to pray for
this young man, I needed to say his name, because
you kind of make him a non person by not
saying it. So the first thing I did, what I
(17:11):
started praying for him, is to say his name. It's
David biro David Birou. He is a child of God.
My faith teaches me that God loves him every bit
as much as God loves me. And then I'm as
flawed and fallen as he is and in need of grace.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
And you are listening to Gene Bishop, what words to
try and live by? Not easy. Hating that other person
is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
This idea of how to reconcile with a remorseless person,
how to forgive, how to not carry hate in our heart.
More of Jean Bishop's story here on our American Stories
(18:08):
and we returned to our American stories, and you've been
listening to Jean Bishop's remarkable journey of forgiveness. Let's return
to Jane and the remaining parts of this remarkable story.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
What I'd done all those years is built this very
convenient wall between me and him, and on one side
of them all was him and you're the evil murderer,
and the other side was be the good, innocent victim's
family member. And I saw that God breaks down that wall,
and that instead of trying to shut him away, I
(18:48):
should try to bring him back, to bring him back
into community, into fellowship, into the grace of God. So
I wrote, I wrote him a letter, and I said
in that letter, I forgave you a long time ago,
and I never told you, and that was wrong, and
(19:10):
I'm sorry, and I've waited all these years for you
to apologize to be I'm going to go first. I
am sorry, and if you want me to come see you,
I will. And I mailed that letter, not knowing how
he'd react. I put it in the mailbox to Pontiac Prison,
where he was at that time, and I pictured him
(19:30):
getting it and maybe crumplating it up and throwing it
away or showing it to a cellmate and having a
good laugh of it, you know, over it, over this
this woman, in her lofty words about forgiveness or maybe
getting back some you know, smarmy, ingratiating, you know, letter,
trying to manipulate in some way. And so the last
(19:51):
thing in the world I expected was to get a
very thick envelope a few weeks later in my mailbox
at the Public Defender's office with his name Bureau up
in the left hand corner and the return address. And
for two days I couldn't open it. I was just
afraid to see what it would be. And so I
(20:11):
asked Mark Gosler to open it instead and read it
to me. And when he did, he said, it's good.
And he read to me out the whole letter, and
it started like this, You and your family waited so
long to hear this. I am guilty. I did kill
your family members, and I'm so sorry. If I could
take it back, I would. And in the next fifteen
(20:34):
pages front and back in this letter, he traced his
whole trajectory over those twenty plus years of how he'd
gone from trying to get away with the crime to
getting to prison and seeing the people around him and
realizing that he didn't want to be like them, and
yet he was that he'd done this terrible thing that
(20:55):
he deserved to be there. When he'd see the news
on TV of some horrific crime, like a baby being
murdered or an old woman being raped, he'd think instinctively, Oh,
that person's an animal that did that, and then he thought,
wait a second, that's me. I shot a pregnant woman
in the stomach. He started reading, he started self teaching.
(21:22):
He had a friend who had come to visit him,
and then one day she just vanished. Never wrote him again,
never called him again, they ever came to see him,
never answered his letters to her, And he started just
wondering why, you know, was it something he had done?
Was it something that happened to her? And then he
started having great empathy for my family, thinking, gosh, I
(21:42):
bet the Bishop family, which is they knew why, like,
why had I done this to them? Why did I
kill their family members? And so he became very remorseful
and wanted to reach out to me, but didn't want
to do that unbidden because he was afraid of how
that would traumatize me or my family if if we
(22:03):
didn't want to see that name Berro on a on
an envelope to us. So the minute I had written
to him, he started writing back, and I did go
to see him. I'm seeing him still. It has been
incredibly healing to hear about Nancy's last moments, to learn
about things I didn't know. One thing I learned that
(22:25):
I loved was this Nancy was kind of like the
chatty talking one and Richard was like the strong, silent type.
And so I imagined that as they were talking to
the person who killed them, begging for their lives, that
she would have been the one during the talking. But
what David Biro told me is it wasn't her. It
was Richard that from the moment he saw again pointed
(22:47):
at his wife and child, he never stopped begging, finding ways,
trying to find any way that she would be let go,
that he would stay behind, and that she would be
let go and be able to live. And it was
incredibly healing to speak to David because I got to
(23:08):
have this one on one victim impact statement that I
never got to do. When he was sentenced to life
without parole, he didn't have these aggravation and mitigation proceedings
that usually have in a court case, because the sentence
was mandatory, so we never got to do a statement
that we could read out in court about how his
(23:29):
actions had hurt us, had hurt everyone who loved Nancy
and Richard, my mom, my dad, my older sister, Nancy's neighbors,
her coworkers, her classmates, everyone who loved them. And when
I talk about Nancy to him, this kind of shadow
comes across his face. He told me once, he said,
(23:51):
the more I get to know her through you, the
worse I feel about what I did. And that's the
only justice he can give me. He can't bring Nancy back,
or her baby, or her husband, but he can do
what he's done, which is to grasp the enormity of
what he did and to feel great shame and remorse
for it, and to do everything he can now to
(24:12):
live a quiet life in the prison where he's doing life,
because I told him that it's his job now to
do every bit of good in the world that she
can no longer do. So. I sing in a choir
at my church, and one day one of my choiry
members asked, me Gane, what is it like to go
(24:34):
and see the person who killed your family members. What
does it like to shake the hand that held that gun?
And I tell her it's like frozen earth that used
to be hard and barren where nothing would grow, becoming
soft and moist, where green shoots are springing up and
life is coming out of the ground that used to
(24:57):
be so barren. That's what it feels like. I feel
like my heart had been frozen, and now it's a
place where so many things can grow. This love, this forgiveness,
this mercy, this reconciliation. It's so healing, it's so helpful,
and it isn't just for me, It's for everyone, for
(25:19):
everyone within the sound of my voice, whether it's the
coworker who undermined you, of the business partner who betrayed you,
the family member that wounded you and abused you, the neighbor,
the friend, you name it. We've none of us gotten
through this life unscathed. Every single one of us has
(25:41):
something that we have to forgive, and every one of us,
I think, knows what it's like also to go to
another and say I am so sorry, I can't believe
I did that. I am so ashamed of it, and
I apologize. Will you take me back? Will you let
me back in? What I've learned from this tragedy, from
(26:05):
the loss of my sister, and from that message of
love that she wrote in those last moments, that love
is greater than our woundedness. Love is greater than hate
or bitterness or vengeance, and love is the way out
of this, of this hurt that we're in.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Love is greater than our woundedness. It's the way out
of their hurt we're in. You're listening to Jean Bishop
and for giving her sister's murderer. Her book, Change of Heart, Justice, Mercy,
and Making Peace with My Sister's Killer is available on
Amazon again. The book is Change of Heart. Go to Amazon,
get it, pass it to everyone you know. And by
(26:54):
the way, what I loved about this piece is she
wasn't asking that he not serve his time. For anyone
who's had a family member, it was a victim of
a crime. People need to be in jail and pay
the price for what they did. With this beautiful way
of dealing with it in the interpersonal level and through
the reconciliation model, well, it's simply beautiful. Jean Bishop's story,
(27:14):
her sister's story and her sister's husband's story, and David
Bureau's story too. Here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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