November 20, 2024 • 39 mins
On this episode of Status: Pending, we delve into the chilling case of William Bradford Bishop, a State Department official who vanished after allegedly murdering his wife, three sons, and mother in 1976. From his prestigious education at Yale to his clandestine career in counterintelligence, Bishop's life was extraordinary—but it took a horrifying turn one March evening.
Sources for this episode include reporting by Ruth Johnson for the Fredrick, Maryland News, The Cumberland News, the Associated Press.
The Cumberland Sunday Times.More info from the FBI: https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/murders/william-bradford-bishop-jr
Sources for this episode include reporting by Ruth Johnson for the Fredrick, Maryland News, The Cumberland News, the Associated Press.
The Cumberland Sunday Times.More info from the FBI: https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/murders/william-bradford-bishop-jr
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Welcome back to status pending. Scott Fuller and Heather Rights
back with you for two weeks in a row. How
do you guys like that? We're making progress, We're trying
thanks to I'm not sure who it was, can't remember
off the top of my head, but one of our
patreons supporters said, good to have you guys back, and
I thought, well, we're trying doing what we can.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
At least people are noticing.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
People are very forgiving. I mean for us to take
a seven year.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Absence or whatever, literally seven years out of the five
we've been doing it. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I think it's been more than five. I think time
has stuck up on us.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Twenty eighteen. I can't math. Yeah, you're right, shit, and
we are still trying.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
So we have a little bit of a different case
for you this week. If you're newer to the show,
which I guess we should expect. If since we've taken
that fourteen year hiatus research.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
What the heck you just keep increasing it.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Thirty eight years ago I met Heather when we started podcasting.
We generally try to focus on cases that are well.
We always try to focus on unsolved, unresolved and lingering questions.
That was kind of our mission statement from the beginning.
It's taken a lot of different forms over the years,
and we've settled on we like to bring light to
cases that don't receive a whole lot of national attention.
This doesn't fit that bill at all. In fact, I
(01:40):
don't think this is the murder side of This is
unsolved at all, and it's pretty prominent, but it's also old.
And I don't pretend to be up on infamous cases
beyond you know, the ones everyone knows like Zodiac and
et cetera. But I'd never heard of this. So I'm,
on the one hand, totally geeky out and thrilled to
(02:01):
bring you guys to this case today because part of
it is just amazing in like a DBI Cooper kind
of a way, but it also contains five of the
most grizzly murders that we could cover, including the murder
of three children. So trigger warning, there is the murder
(02:21):
of kids in this episode.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
And let me interject real quick too, and I'm reacting
to this as a listener today. Thank god Scott was
here to do this episode. But I wanted to shout
out Courtney because she actually suggested this among a few others.
So this is going to be part of a series,
I think.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So the reason we got on this is we'll talk
about I don't think fits, but I don't think it's
part of a series like we're discussing. But we'll talk
about that a little bit more. But it's definitely an
awesome case. At the same time, five people died in
the worst way possible, including three kids, so I do
want to caveat that, but it was the rest of
(03:01):
it was a lot of fun. We just have to
keep in mind as we go through this, mostly for me,
don't have too much fun because five people did die
as a result of right all this, So we're going
to get into the case of William Bradford, Bishop Junior
when we come back right after this. So, William Bradford Bishop,
(03:24):
had you heard of this before, Heather, I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
I have not not until I sent you that list.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
So this is backwards for us because again, the murders
here I don't think are in question in terms of
who committed them. We're just having a hard time finding
the murder the way it looks, and it's been that
way for like fifty.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Years, so we know who did it, but we can't
wa I.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Think it's fair to say who did it.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, okay, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, so we haven't done a case quite like this.
I can't remember a case quite like this one in total.
But we're starting an ending with William Bradford Bishop Junior
born August first, nineteen thirty six in Pasadena, California. Went
to South Pasadena High School, graduate of Yale, and possessed
two master's degrees from UCLA and another college in Vermont.
(04:12):
Smart guy, right.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Quite intelligent. Yeah. I couldn't even go to one of
those schools.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Probably no me either. After graduating from Yale in fifty nine,
Bishop married his high school sweetheart, a net Weiss was
her maiden name, and they had three sons together. He
joined the Army, spends four years working in counterintelligence, and
here in our show notes, I have a photo of
it's got to be like a government id photo of
(04:37):
William Bishop. Yeah, looks exactly kind of like you'd think.
He looks like a Yale graduate. He looks like a
smart guy in that nineteen fifties kind of stereotypical sort
of way, and into the sixties where our society kind
of diverged into the hippie flower children and these kind
of guys. He's the latter. He's the suit and tie
kind of guy with a closer.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
He looks a very distinguished honestly he does.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
He looks like you an ambassador or something like a politician.
Maybe well he wasn't. He was a bad dude as.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
A turn, I don't say that.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
The March twelfth, nineteen seventy six, his wife, his mother,
his three children of at that time a thirty nine
year old William Bishop were found murdered. Well, they weren't
found inside the home, but they had been murdered inside
their very nice rural Maryland apartment in the Bethesda area.
Adjusted for inflation, this is like a half million dollar
(05:31):
house at the time, and it became a murder scene
in one evening.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
This guy, this guy.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Murdered this guy.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah, okay, now I.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Just I mean, see now you're looking at it like
he killed his whole family. Now you can see like
his nose, the yeah, yes.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
No, his eyes his eyes are dead now like before,
he just looks very distinguished. And now it's like I
can see the dead.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Now he looks like a murder because you know.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
See, this is what happens. We talk about this all
the time, this bias that we get, and that's literally
what just happened. I have that photo.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
In the context of a mother of a twenty four
year old woman, you would probably say, he looks fine,
he looks great, please date and marry him. But in
the context of he's a murderer, you kind of see
evil in his way.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, you see the smirk. Now it's not just like
a I'm distinguished, I'm happy with my life. It's I
killed people like I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Let's all keep that in mind with mugshots and confirmation
bias and everything else. So very shortly after the death
of his wife, mom and three kids, a warrant was
sworn out for him by a judge. The murders are
believed to have occurred on March the first of seventy six.
That is pretty firm. I don't know where I got
(06:46):
March the twelfth that I just said. That may have
been a typo.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
We just added a numbers, yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Think I did, so ignore that. The timeline is actually
kind of interesting here. So March one is what we're
going with. It is eventually theorized after this case has
been looked into for years and years. Here's what happened.
Best guess that Bishop's wife had been beaten to death first.
He then, while this was happening, his mom was taking
(07:11):
the family dog for a walk. He kills his wife,
the mom returns from the dog walk, kills her, and
then kills all of his three kids one by one
as they're sleeping in their bedrooms.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Sorry, that's super cowardly too, it.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Is, I mean, and what's always gotten me. There's a
lot of disconnects I have with like the deep dark
criminal mind, and at what point in this whole process,
which is obviously planned out, and especially when it comes
to going into your kids' bedrooms one by one, right,
it's not like you get to do it all at once.
You have to go to the next.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Bedroom, great, and nothing stops you in between, like, oh
my god, what am I doing.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
I've ever been able to associate with that, and I
guess there is an argument that I did one. I
got to follow through the whole plan. Now, yeah, this
is It's not where the bodies were found, though they
were found by a forest ranger on March third in
very eastern North Carolina in Tyrrell County, very close to
(08:12):
kind of a Kittyhawk area. This is an area where
there's like no there's a lot of vegetation, marsh, and
not as much people. Even today, it's pretty sparsely populated.
And this is a ways from the Bishop family home.
They were burned with gasoline all the bodies and buried
in a shallow grave. Police found some fingerprints somewhere on
(08:34):
or around the grave site where the bodies were also
a gas can that was used to set the fire
on the bodies. Fingerprints were found there. Initially, the prints
on the gas can were revealed to be quote pretty
close to bishops end quote. Keep in mind as we
go through this is all nineteen seventy six in terms
of police procedure in criminal investigation. They also founded that
(08:56):
burial scene a shovel that was believed to be involved
in some kind of a farm tool that I wasn't
familiar with, like a potato picker or something along those lines.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
So he did all of this and then transported all
of the bodies five hours away to bury them, is
what you're saying.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
They were all very badly beaten, with the exception of
his mom, which is different. But god, yeah, he drove.
This was not nearby his house. He must have some
familiarity with that area North Carolina to know where he
was going because he's driving around in a family station
wagon maybe a dog with five dead bodies.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
My god, dude, In fact, I think the.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Dog was there. When you hear the timeline later, that's
wild already. Yeah, all of the four, the five victims
were very badly beaten. Again. The exception was his mother,
who had just very apparently very minor bruises on her forehead.
So weird was that they thought she may have, at
sixty eight years old, died of a heart attack and
not actually been beaten to death. So missing initially were
(09:58):
the bronze or burnt orange color family station wagon and
the family dog, which was a golden Retriever. The car
was seen in North Carolina on March the second, the
day after the murders. March the first, again, is when
this happened. He had a credit card that had been
used in I read Florida as well as North Carolina,
(10:19):
but for sure in North Carolina for fifteen dollars and
sixty cents at a sporting goods store in Tyroll County,
which is not far from where the bodies were found.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Oh Boys, Florida, Florida. Oh Owys, Florida.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, the sporting goods store doesn't. The owner didn't recall
the specific transaction. He also said at the time, for
some reason, he said, it's possible this guy's card was used,
but he's not the one that used it. Eventually, years
and years later, they sored out that the credit card
slip matched his handwriting. I guess he had to sign it,
but somehow not present on the slip was what he
(10:54):
had bought. Initially, I don't know why.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Well, I don't know. I can see that. I've seen
slips that are signed by the customer and given to
the merchant and it just kind of tells the total
and stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, they did eventually figure out it was a pair
of tennis shoes, but as of like the year of
they couldn't figure out what he bought at that store. Understood,
there are a lot of eyewitness sightings, like hundreds, maybe thousands.
Oh geez, it's hard to parse out who saw what
in this case, but an employee of the sporting good
(11:28):
store had told authorities that he was there with a woman.
The Bishop was at the store with a woman, and
what stood out was she was taking care of the
Golden retriever, like she was looking after it as he
was in the sporting good store.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Sounds like something I would do.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Make sure the dog's okay. Yeah, yeah, But now you're
hanging out with a like a quintuple murderer.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
But I didn't know that at the time. I just
saw the dog very possible.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
I could totally see running into somebody who had just
killed five people right becoming accessory.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
After that fact, I was told that the other day
by Jason and his nephew, there were like three dogs
wherever we went, and I stopped and pat every single
one of them, and one of them wasn't even on
a leash, and it was giant, like a giant Rottweiler.
And I was like, oh my god, you're so cute.
And they were like, she's gonna get killed one day,
all these dogs, and I was like, at least I'll
(12:20):
go out happy. I literally said that, speaking.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Of there's my large wolf dog in the.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Background, just got words to say too.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
So at this point Bishop has two warrants against him.
They charge him in absentia for these five murders of
his entire family. Not many. What's the term for this,
the criminalist term for this, some of you that kills
their whole family a familicide, Yeah, a family annihilator is
what they use a lot. And I'm not sure how
(12:49):
many of those there were before that. I'm aware, like
John List, which is earlier, but this is kind of
a new thing in seventy six.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I think I don't know who John List is.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
It's kind of a similar situation, actually very similar. List
was earlier too, I think those in the fifties. AnyWho. Bishop,
for a physical description, was six feet tall, one eighty
medium build, brown hair, brown eyes, medium white complexion, and
as you saw from his photo, from his I think
his ID photo, he looks he looks like what you know,
(13:20):
he's a guy in a suit. And that's about all
the distinguishing features that he really has. Has an interesting
nose in that smark, but aside from that, he looks
like a guy.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah, just sorrando. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
The initial search for him, because now they can't find him,
and they find the bodies a couple of days later,
so now they're pretty sure what happened to the rest
of his family, dog is missing, cars missing. They go
to Georgia, they go to Florida. They didn't really say why.
They called these places logical for him to have fled,
I don't know where that comes. It's not a distance logical.
He must have had some kind of connections already. There
(13:56):
are sightings of him from Washington State to Pennsylvania. Well,
of course there always are. There are a ton in
this one though. They check with the airports, they check
with ports of entry. One of the more promising sightings
came from three people who apparently saw him at a
pancake house in Wilmington, North Carolina. According to The Washington Post,
a waitress was quote pretty sure end quote the bishop
(14:18):
had been a customer that she'd been witnessing being very
drunk and aggressive toward the black customers. She was pretty sure,
but that's all she said. But there were other sightings
around the same town in Wilmington.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
So if it was him, if it was him, I
just annihilated my entire family. I'm on the run, and
now I'm just going to make an aggressive and drunk
scene so that people like literally like you're just spewing
hatred and you're calling attention to yourself when you're trying
to get away with murder.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Come on, all these sightings I don't need. Is it him?
Is it not? Where is he right? Here's where it
gets fun. William Bradford Bishop worked for the State Department.
Some say he was high ranking, some say he was
mid level. He left his work at the State Department
early in that day of the murders said he had
a flu or a cold, and he took four hundred
(15:10):
dollars out from a bank account on his way home.
They also think he stopped at a Sears to buy
a sledgehammer and a gas can on the way home.
His actual title was Assistant Chief of Special Trade Activities
for the State Department. This is nineteen seventy six to
this day. If you're in the CIA, your cover is
(15:32):
I do X for the State Department. That's what you
tell your neighbors and friends and your wife a lot
of times. So they go search his desk and they
find a phone number for CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,
and that only added speculation that this guy is somehow
a spy or he's involved in the CIA. It's very
common for undercover officers to have a file kept on
(15:53):
them that is a damaged assessment of sorts. And this
is so the CIA knows if this guy has ever
turned as a spy or if he's captured and tortured.
Let's say, how much damaging information does this guy know
against the US. He does have this file, Apparently it
came out years later, but it was the determination of
the CIA at the time that he is pretty average
(16:16):
in terms of knowledge, not very dangerous at all. Bishop's
secretary also said he had been angry of late because
he'd been passed over for a recent promotion and apparently
had been passed over for advancement before that, which I
think is a common link in the chain of family annihilators.
I'm not one hundred percent sure, but workplace frustration I
(16:38):
think does tie in to most cases. Shortly after the
national media gets on this, the Attorney General of North
Carolina says William Bishop may have stowed away on a
ship from a port in North Carolina, and so ports
around the world were given notice to be on the
look for this guy. He does have a diplomatic passport,
(16:58):
which gives you a lot of advantages when you're overseas,
but it doesn't really help you leave the country. He's
like some guy working for the quote unquote State Department
who is now on the run. The angle of this
case that initially brought it to our attention because we're
looking at a series of the Great Smoky Mountains right
(17:19):
around Tennessee and the people that go missing there, or
some kind of a series along those lines, and that's
where they find his car. They found the station wagon
in the parking lot of the Elkmont campground in very
rural Tennessee in the Smoky Mountains March eighteenth. That is
a ten hour drive from where the bodies were found.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Oh shit.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
They interview some people and say, yeah, I've seen that
station wagon park there since like March fifth. So the
first is the murders, third is when the bodies are discovered.
The fifth is where the car was at least seen
before it's officially discovered in this parking lot. So he's
got a day in between all those. Obviously, he's traveling
very large distances relatively, it's like six hours from the
(18:05):
house to the grave site, ten hours from the grave
site to where the car is found. So he's just I imagine,
like spree moving.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
He's just going filling up on a lot of gas sounds.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Like inside the car, they found a bloody axe handle,
also a bunch of blood that smeared around the car
inside twelve gate shotgun and shells, which were sent to
the FBI. But obviously, wherever he is at this point
when it's found much later it's found like twelve days
after apparently it had been parked there, he doesn't have
these items. But he did at one point. There are
(18:37):
a lot of trails that extend from that parking lot
into the smoky mountains, like six or eight paths that
he could have taken if he did walk away from
his car. But that search of that whole area yields nothing.
They brought in dogs. They trained some of these dogs
on some clothing that they found of his that was
still inside the family home to train the dogs on.
And I think they hit on the ranger station there
(18:59):
in the parking lot. And that's about it. March tenth,
ten days after the murders and five days after apparently
he left his station wagon, a gun shop owner in
Ruffefford County, North Carolina came forward to authorities with information
the bishop had tried to swap a gun he had
for a more powerful gun in the gun shop that
was about one hundred and fifty miles from the location
of his car. So I guess five days after he
(19:22):
had ditched his car, he had gotten one hundred and
fifty miles away somehow and was trying to swap guns
with this gun shop owner.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
I wonder if he still had his dog at that point.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
There's no mention of a dog since North Carolina and
the sporting goods store, I don't think so that's about
it for the next several months six months after the murders.
At this point, he could be anywhere in the world,
especially with his diplomatic passport. Authorities still don't know really
(19:54):
why he did this or any additional trace of where
he might be. In nineteen seventy nine, three years after
the murders, Baltimore Sun reports that a female family friend
of Bishops who knew him well. They had known each
other while he was living in Ethiopia from nineteen sixty
five to nineteen sixty eight. She says she reported seeing
(20:15):
him in Sweden in the summer of nineteen seventy eight,
that would have been a year and a half right
after the murders. She reported this to the embassy in Sweden.
The friend said this had only been a sighting of him.
While she knew him well, she didn't interact with this
person that she thought was Bishop and that she could
(20:36):
not be one hundred percent sure of even the sighting.
Six months after that siding in Sweden, there is a
quote seventy five percent sure sighting of Bishop that was
made by a former State Department coworker in the Italian
resort town of Sorrento. That time, this man that she
(20:58):
thought might have been Bishop was dressed shabbily, whereas in
Sweden that person had said that he was dressed well.
In both sightings, this man had a beard. They I mean,
this is now seventy eight and seventy nine, and that's it.
Until nineteen ninety they air an episode of Unsolved Mysteries
about this. I wonder you love this one, this Unsolved Mysteries. Yeah,
(21:21):
but how had I not hear of that? Because that
was my prime Unsolved Mysteries viewing time. I was around
six years old and that's that's all I was watching.
I don't want Saturday Morning Cartoons, I want Robert Stack
and Unsolved Mysteries.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
You fell asleep to his voice to submit it.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
In nineteen ninety seven they did an artist rendition, which
is a weird look and I put it in the dock.
It's aquick claymation almost of him. It doesn't seem very
helpful to me. It gets a better in two thousand
and the later they release all kinds of different composite
sketches of different ages and appearances. There are eventually two
hundred plus sightings of Bishop worldwide, from Africa to Russia.
(22:01):
They had even more American sightings than that. Some of
the more notable ones where I saw him in Alaska,
And there was one sighting that Bishop was posing as
a janitor in a southern California high school.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Posing as a janitor, so he wasn't actually working as
a channel.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
I think he was, Like the theory would be, he
got a job school, pretending to randomly he's mopping upside
down or something.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Yeah, literally mopping with the broom or something. No water.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Twenty fourteen, they have DNA and X ray evidence from
a body that was found way back in eighty one
on the side of a highway in Alabama that goes nowhere.
It is known that he received pilot training at one
of his many places that he lived overseas. At some
point people actually tended to speak of him kind of kindly,
(22:50):
that he was average and kind of a family man.
I think a lot of those comments died off after
he was basically proven to have killed his family.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
To say, after he murdered his family, yeah, and not
very family like.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Worth noting that at the time of the murders he
was being treated for depression. He had medication, which is
very notable in nineteen seventy nine. If you're diagnosed with
depression in seventy nine, that's not like being diagnosed with
depression now.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It is like seventy nine or seventy six.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Seventy six, Sorry, okay, seventy six. So they don't medicate
you for depression in nineteen seventy six unless it's the
equivalent of some of the most severe depressive cases that
we see today. I think is fair to say the
FBI still has a case open. He may still be
on the most wanted list to this day. The FBI
says Bishop was and may still be an avid outdoorsman,
(23:41):
camper and hiker. He had extensive camping experience in Africa.
He also enjoys canoeing, fishing, swimming, jogging, tennis, skiing, and
riding motorcycles. He enjoyed working out several times a week.
Also a licensed amateur pilot. He learned to fly in Boswana, Africa.
Who doesn't by the way, an American Studies degree from
(24:02):
Yale we mentioned the masters from from Middlebury College in Vermont.
He was an avid reader, kept a diary or a journal.
Long time insomniac, the FBI says, reportedly had been under
psychiatric care in the past and had used medication for depression,
drank Scotch and wine, and enjoyed eating peanuts and spicy foods,
which is a nice addition from the FBI. There Bishop
(24:24):
was described as intense and self absorbed, prone to violent outbursts,
and preferred neat and orderly environments. Were he alive today,
he would be eighty eight, still considered by the FBI
to be armed, dangerous, and possessing suicidal tendencies. And right
below that in our show notes is a more probably
accurate sketch of what he would look like later in life.
Ancies They said that in seventy six too, as one
(24:49):
of the first things they said is especially after killing
your whole family, you're going to go into the woods
and kill yourself. But they never found anything. And this
sketch they released looks like see more average, I think
than the younger version. Looks like a.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Yeah great, I feel like I've seen this guy. Yeah, yeah,
everywhere exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So that's it. That's what we have. Sources include the Frederick,
Maryland News, Ruth Johnson reporting, the Cumberland News, a lot
of work by the Associated Press, Baltimore Sun did a
great job with the story over the years, the Cumberland
Sunday Times, among others. And yeah, that's that's William Bradford, Bishop,
Family Annihilator and international man of Mystery.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
This guy, like his original ID photo, it literally reminds
me of an actor. And I can't think of his
name right now, but it's gonna come to me as
soon as we stop recording, I bet, and I know
you know who I'm thinking of. Yeah, the first the
black and white photo of him like young, like in
his college years. Yeah, it kind of reminds he's on
a sitcom right now.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Oh sure, I could see a couple of people if
I squint across. Yeah, there's kind of a just a
little bit of a Kevin Spacey maybe young.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Oh. I didn't see that before, but now I do.
What is his name?
Speaker 1 (26:08):
I don't know, But what's your favorite theory?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Oh, I don't know what happened to him? I mean, honestly,
he probably did end up just like living off the
land for a while and then probably just died.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Honestly, Well, first question, we think he did it, right.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Oh, one hundred thousand percent, yes, But I don't understand him.
Why and why? Why was his mom involved? Did his
mom live with them? Then he shit?
Speaker 1 (26:31):
I don't know, I mean clearly, yeah, I mean it's
it was actually interesting as years go on, Like as
we get into the two thousands, you start to see
quotes in the newspaper like if indeed he did do it,
which I think it's pretty cut and dry. I don't
like to speculate, but there's a little bit of seventies
(26:51):
forensic evidence with a fingerprints, his car's got blood all
over it, he's never seen again, just coincidentally at the
time where his whole face family is murdered and buried
right hundreds of miles away. See, I think that's fair
to say he's also has to I mean to be
diagnosed mentally ill and even seeing a psychiatrist in seventy
six is significant. So he's probably he's probably further gone
(27:15):
than we're imagining him to be.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
But there's no build up. Like that's my question too.
It's like a lot of times, you'll people will look
back and be like, oh, well, you know he was
saying these things or he was doing these things. He
was scaring the family. You know, they confided in me
about that, Like they'll come, you know, after the fact
and say stuff, and it just sounds like there was
none of that here.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
No, he and his wife would fight about how much
they had to travel and live around the world, and
then how much he had to travel for work more recently.
Oh no, but there is no So there's fighting, but
that's not murder your whole family kind of motive. I'm
not sure if they ever did establish a motive. And
if I'm right about like say John List, it was
(27:57):
a religious thing. It was kind of a saving them
from themselves kind of a outlook. There is none of
that here that I know of. Frustrations at work, frustrations
with his wife. Kids are fourteen, ten, and five years old,
so there's some family pressure. There probably money problems too.
(28:18):
That's an expensive house he lives in and state department
employees don't make a ton of money. Then there's the
whole CIA thing.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Can we can we back up just one second though,
you you said John List? Yeah, yeah, okay, So he
killed his wife, mother and three children.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah, then disappeared like they've left him in the house
and then disappeared. Was on the run for a long
time and was seventeen years. Yeah, it was caught because
of an unsolved Mysteries episode.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
I but like, is this guy trying to copy him?
Is that what this is?
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Maybe? Because when was John List.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
November nineth, nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Bit it could be holy, like, this guy who has
no CIA training, does it imagine that I could just
start a brand new life in any country I wanted
to because I know how to do it, and John
List didn't. He ended up in denver A's as far
as he got, so, yeah, that's a good point. It
(29:18):
definitely could be. Was this an original idea because the
John List case was pretty famous at the time, or
was this something that he just saw and said, for
whatever reason, whatever my problems are, this is a way
out of it.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
That is just wild and.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
It's tough to square with the thing that is similar
to John List is kind of the profile of everything
has to be neat and orderly and self absorbed and antisocial.
They're kind of the same people that way. But like
John List would mowas his front yard and a suit
and tie. I sense a little bit of that here,
(29:57):
But I guess we'll never know if this was just
a copycat. And John List is way more well known,
I think than this case, and this guy never got caught.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah, this is bonkers to me. Like I didn't even
know obviously. I know that there are like family annihilators
out there, but I didn't even know about either one
of these cases. And you would think with this type
of information about it and how long they were able to,
you know, not be found, that there would be more
information about him out there. Insane to me. I mean,
(30:29):
and he was even living in a freaking mansion. Oh
my god, there's so many similarity similarities, Like he was
living with his wife, children and mother in Breeze Nole,
which was a nineteen room Victorian mansion.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, this wasn't a mansion. That's a mansion. This was Yeah,
this is a very upscale house, but it's not a
nineteen like in the John List thing. He left him
all in different rooms and left the radio on and
made arrangements with the school so they wouldn't be missed,
basically to buy time. This guy didn't try to buy
any time. He was just gone, Jesus Bury the bodies,
(31:03):
apparently randomly five hours away, immediately head to the Smoky
mountains where he ditches the car, and apparently he's seen.
Like the gun shop owner, he's seen hours one hundred
and fifty miles away from that location. So different ways
about hiding, I guess, but very similar. Yeah. And if
you look at a photo of John List and put
(31:24):
that initial photo of William Bishy side by side, they
look kind of similar.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
That's literally what I'm doing right now looking at both
of them, you.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Know, fifties, early sixties, clean cut, kind of a vibe.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
I don't like it. I don't like any of those.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
No, it's bad news, Jesus. So I think here is
that he's still alive somewhere in If I had to guess,
I'll bet he was fluent in like five languages, Spanish, Italian, English,
obviously German probably maybe, but the really random one was
(31:59):
Croatia and.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Like Bosnian, Oh Jesus okay.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
And I was trying to think back at this time
in the world, what was happening.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
I don't know. I wasn't born yet.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
There's a lot in the Middle East. There's Israel's getting nukes,
and around this time, Iran is being Iran, fitting the
whole Bosnia Croatia thing that he's fluent in that of
all these places, that would be the easiest to hide
with the turmoil of the Soviet Union happening at that time.
(32:33):
And if I had to guess if he were still
alive today, I would bet he was. He spent like
decades there and then may have moved on after that.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
And if he's eighty eight today, he's probably a fit
in shape eighty eight year old by the looks of it,
by everything that he did on a regular basis and
working out several times a week, Yeah he was.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah, so he may well be alive. But then again
there's cancer and being shot by the Soviet Union or whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
And Kara Karma's a big arma.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
If if karma is a thing, if anyone ever deserved it,
it's uh this guy, but I want to say he
was alive for a while if he is dead now.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
And if he is dead now, like did he now?
I have so many questions like did he find his
whole ass new family out there or did he say
something on his deathbed and they're holding that secret like
what happened? Or did he just live alone the rest
of his life?
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Is he ashamed? Like? I doubt that. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
I doubt he was ashamed. Having a family is a
great way to blend in anywhere, except he's white. If
he's worldwide and he's not, he speaks all these languages,
but he doesn't have a native dialect to it, so
he would stand out more. I don't think he was
in America. I think he did take off and get
out of the country somehow. If he's in America, he
(33:57):
died soon after and for some reason he was just
never found or it was never connected.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
And you don't think to see IA as part of this,
and like they're hiding him and they just made up
this whole story, right.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
They could, But I really want to know what he
was working on with that fake you know title of
his It just screams it wouldn't have at the time.
It was a great cover at the time, but now,
knowing everything we know about the CIA from the fifties
all the way up, it screams CIA and the world
was never is. But it was not a calm place
(34:31):
at that time. And the CIA was also very wild
West in the seventies. There wasn't a whole lot of oversight.
And I don't know. I'm torn because on the one hand,
you're sending this secret agent guy, if that's what he was,
to do these highly important things while he's medicated for
depression in nineteen seventy six, you would think he would
find a better agent, a more mentally stable agent who,
(34:53):
if they're captured, might hold up better.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
I will know, No, you probably send the mentally unstable
person out there because they don't care.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
The crazy one, so to speak, well.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Quote unquote yeah, like they don't care about anything, or
if they're already experiencing suicidal or homicidal ideations, then they're like, oh,
we'll send him, doesn't matter.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Maybe, And do you want to get into the you know,
the the uh, what's what's the CIA top secret stuff
that they're they're experimenting with how to turn birds into
bombs and with true serum and.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Well how birds are fake.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
It's along those lines, but it's a lot newer CIA.
Holy crap, mk ultra.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Oh dude, I was literally just thinking that, and I
was like, I'm totally wrong. I'm not going to sound
like an idiot right now.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
I just couldn't. I couldn't get the letters, mk ultra
if you throw that in there. He was made depressed
and clinically crazy by the CIA's experimenting on him, and
then they sent him off as a Manurion candidate and
it backfired and he killed this whole family. And nov
Aca is like, well, nope, okay, I'm not gonna do
that again. Oops. That's the fun side. The unfund side
(36:07):
is that these poor, unsuspecting family members of this man
were killed unexpectedly, and three of them were kids.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
That's why, why does anybody have family anymore? Like, I
can't do it. I told Jason, like, if anything ever
happens with us, I'm not going with anyone else. I
will literally just buy a bunch of dogs.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
So insert your favorite theory here. But I had a
lot of fun researching that because it's got everything.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
It has a little bit of a it's like a
goodie bag, honestly, but I'm probably gonna delve a little
bit more into this because it's super interesting and where
is he? I want to know.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
So all the stuff I did was like newspaper accounts
and that's basically it. So if you imagine if you
get on Reddit with this thing, there's problems.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
That was my first thought going there.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
I didn't get into any of that. So if there
are any worthy Reddit theories, please let us know. Status
Spending podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
If will you Bishop is listening right now, please out
say hi, tell me what happened?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah, Like, we don't care where you are right now,
we just need to know if uh, but we will trace.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
You if the CIA is listening to this right now.
I don't know. It's just one of those weird, really strange.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
It's a movie, right it is. They made movies about
John List, Like, there's got to be a movie about
this guy.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Never heard of this one. So thanks Courtney, I don't
know how much.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, thank you all about that.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
But I was expecting a lot less. I was expecting
he went for.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
A hike and the that's what I was expecting I was.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Never seen again and with yeah, fifteen minutes, I'm like,
this guy's a CIA officer.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
So that was a roller coaster. Okay, well, I appreciate
you digging into that one, Jesus.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
I just randomly picked it too, the ones that you
had selected. So the idea is a Smoky Mountain series,
and I'm all about that. Those tend to be really
tough to research, but as you see, and never know
what you find if you look into those, and I
think we can do that. This is not that though.
I'm gonna go ahead and say he did not wander
(38:09):
off into the woods and die. He might have shot
himself or something at that point. They just never found him,
but it seems way more likely that he was alive
well after they found the car there, I think. So
thanks to our Patreon sporters, we're gonna have some Patreon
exclusive contents coming up shortly. I believe I haven't watched
it yet, so we can't do its day. But Heather
watched did you watch some of the Unsolved Mysteries?
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I watched the first one, but I did not get
to the very end of it, so I have like
ten minutes left, all right.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
What was that Unsolved Mysteries season five, just so we
can give a tease of what it is.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
It is my case, it's the one about the bench.
It's called something two on a bench or something park
bench murders.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
So two people shot June on a Is that the one?
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yes? And it's in Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Really, so there's your tea's if you become a patroonsporter
of a dollar or more. Heather and I are going
to do some analysis on Unsolved Mysteries, and that's really
because of me, because I love that stuff and I'm
making Heather do it, but I don't even care.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
That's fine, I like it. It's fine, all right.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Thanks to everyone for listening. Tell your friends, share your theories,
and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Bye,
Welcome back to status pending. Scott Fuller and Heather Rights
back with you for two weeks in a row. How
do you guys like that? We're making progress, We're trying
thanks to I'm not sure who it was, can't remember
off the top of my head, but one of our
patreons supporters said, good to have you guys back, and
I thought, well, we're trying doing what we can.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
At least people are noticing.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
People are very forgiving. I mean for us to take
a seven year.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Absence or whatever, literally seven years out of the five
we've been doing it. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I think it's been more than five. I think time
has stuck up on us.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Twenty eighteen. I can't math. Yeah, you're right, shit, and
we are still trying.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
So we have a little bit of a different case
for you this week. If you're newer to the show,
which I guess we should expect. If since we've taken
that fourteen year hiatus research.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
What the heck you just keep increasing it.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Thirty eight years ago I met Heather when we started podcasting.
We generally try to focus on cases that are well.
We always try to focus on unsolved, unresolved and lingering questions.
That was kind of our mission statement from the beginning.
It's taken a lot of different forms over the years,
and we've settled on we like to bring light to
cases that don't receive a whole lot of national attention.
This doesn't fit that bill at all. In fact, I
(01:40):
don't think this is the murder side of This is
unsolved at all, and it's pretty prominent, but it's also old.
And I don't pretend to be up on infamous cases
beyond you know, the ones everyone knows like Zodiac and
et cetera. But I'd never heard of this. So I'm,
on the one hand, totally geeky out and thrilled to
(02:01):
bring you guys to this case today because part of
it is just amazing in like a DBI Cooper kind
of a way, but it also contains five of the
most grizzly murders that we could cover, including the murder
of three children. So trigger warning, there is the murder
(02:21):
of kids in this episode.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
And let me interject real quick too, and I'm reacting
to this as a listener today. Thank god Scott was
here to do this episode. But I wanted to shout
out Courtney because she actually suggested this among a few others.
So this is going to be part of a series,
I think.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So the reason we got on this is we'll talk
about I don't think fits, but I don't think it's
part of a series like we're discussing. But we'll talk
about that a little bit more. But it's definitely an
awesome case. At the same time, five people died in
the worst way possible, including three kids, so I do
want to caveat that, but it was the rest of
(03:01):
it was a lot of fun. We just have to
keep in mind as we go through this, mostly for me,
don't have too much fun because five people did die
as a result of right all this, So we're going
to get into the case of William Bradford, Bishop Junior
when we come back right after this. So, William Bradford Bishop,
(03:24):
had you heard of this before, Heather, I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
I have not not until I sent you that list.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
So this is backwards for us because again, the murders
here I don't think are in question in terms of
who committed them. We're just having a hard time finding
the murder the way it looks, and it's been that
way for like fifty.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Years, so we know who did it, but we can't
wa I.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Think it's fair to say who did it.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, okay, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, so we haven't done a case quite like this.
I can't remember a case quite like this one in total.
But we're starting an ending with William Bradford Bishop Junior
born August first, nineteen thirty six in Pasadena, California. Went
to South Pasadena High School, graduate of Yale, and possessed
two master's degrees from UCLA and another college in Vermont.
(04:12):
Smart guy, right.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Quite intelligent. Yeah. I couldn't even go to one of
those schools.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Probably no me either. After graduating from Yale in fifty nine,
Bishop married his high school sweetheart, a net Weiss was
her maiden name, and they had three sons together. He
joined the Army, spends four years working in counterintelligence, and
here in our show notes, I have a photo of
it's got to be like a government id photo of
(04:37):
William Bishop. Yeah, looks exactly kind of like you'd think.
He looks like a Yale graduate. He looks like a
smart guy in that nineteen fifties kind of stereotypical sort
of way, and into the sixties where our society kind
of diverged into the hippie flower children and these kind
of guys. He's the latter. He's the suit and tie
kind of guy with a closer.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
He looks a very distinguished honestly he does.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
He looks like you an ambassador or something like a politician.
Maybe well he wasn't. He was a bad dude as.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
A turn, I don't say that.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
The March twelfth, nineteen seventy six, his wife, his mother,
his three children of at that time a thirty nine
year old William Bishop were found murdered. Well, they weren't
found inside the home, but they had been murdered inside
their very nice rural Maryland apartment in the Bethesda area.
Adjusted for inflation, this is like a half million dollar
(05:31):
house at the time, and it became a murder scene
in one evening.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
This guy, this guy.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Murdered this guy.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Yeah, okay, now I.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Just I mean, see now you're looking at it like
he killed his whole family. Now you can see like
his nose, the yeah, yes.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
No, his eyes his eyes are dead now like before,
he just looks very distinguished. And now it's like I
can see the dead.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Now he looks like a murder because you know.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
See, this is what happens. We talk about this all
the time, this bias that we get, and that's literally
what just happened. I have that photo.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
In the context of a mother of a twenty four
year old woman, you would probably say, he looks fine,
he looks great, please date and marry him. But in
the context of he's a murderer, you kind of see
evil in his way.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, you see the smirk. Now it's not just like
a I'm distinguished, I'm happy with my life. It's I
killed people like I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Let's all keep that in mind with mugshots and confirmation
bias and everything else. So very shortly after the death
of his wife, mom and three kids, a warrant was
sworn out for him by a judge. The murders are
believed to have occurred on March the first of seventy six.
That is pretty firm. I don't know where I got
(06:46):
March the twelfth that I just said. That may have
been a typo.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
We just added a numbers, yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Think I did, so ignore that. The timeline is actually
kind of interesting here. So March one is what we're
going with. It is eventually theorized after this case has
been looked into for years and years. Here's what happened.
Best guess that Bishop's wife had been beaten to death first.
He then, while this was happening, his mom was taking
(07:11):
the family dog for a walk. He kills his wife,
the mom returns from the dog walk, kills her, and
then kills all of his three kids one by one
as they're sleeping in their bedrooms.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Sorry, that's super cowardly too, it.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Is, I mean, and what's always gotten me. There's a
lot of disconnects I have with like the deep dark
criminal mind, and at what point in this whole process,
which is obviously planned out, and especially when it comes
to going into your kids' bedrooms one by one, right,
it's not like you get to do it all at once.
You have to go to the next.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Bedroom, great, and nothing stops you in between, like, oh
my god, what am I doing.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
I've ever been able to associate with that, and I
guess there is an argument that I did one. I
got to follow through the whole plan. Now, yeah, this
is It's not where the bodies were found, though they
were found by a forest ranger on March third in
very eastern North Carolina in Tyrrell County, very close to
(08:12):
kind of a Kittyhawk area. This is an area where
there's like no there's a lot of vegetation, marsh, and
not as much people. Even today, it's pretty sparsely populated.
And this is a ways from the Bishop family home.
They were burned with gasoline all the bodies and buried
in a shallow grave. Police found some fingerprints somewhere on
(08:34):
or around the grave site where the bodies were also
a gas can that was used to set the fire
on the bodies. Fingerprints were found there. Initially, the prints
on the gas can were revealed to be quote pretty
close to bishops end quote. Keep in mind as we
go through this is all nineteen seventy six in terms
of police procedure in criminal investigation. They also founded that
(08:56):
burial scene a shovel that was believed to be involved
in some kind of a farm tool that I wasn't
familiar with, like a potato picker or something along those lines.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
So he did all of this and then transported all
of the bodies five hours away to bury them, is
what you're saying.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
They were all very badly beaten, with the exception of
his mom, which is different. But god, yeah, he drove.
This was not nearby his house. He must have some
familiarity with that area North Carolina to know where he
was going because he's driving around in a family station
wagon maybe a dog with five dead bodies.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
My god, dude, In fact, I think the.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Dog was there. When you hear the timeline later, that's
wild already. Yeah, all of the four, the five victims
were very badly beaten. Again. The exception was his mother,
who had just very apparently very minor bruises on her forehead.
So weird was that they thought she may have, at
sixty eight years old, died of a heart attack and
not actually been beaten to death. So missing initially were
(09:58):
the bronze or burnt orange color family station wagon and
the family dog, which was a golden Retriever. The car
was seen in North Carolina on March the second, the
day after the murders. March the first, again, is when
this happened. He had a credit card that had been
used in I read Florida as well as North Carolina,
(10:19):
but for sure in North Carolina for fifteen dollars and
sixty cents at a sporting goods store in Tyroll County,
which is not far from where the bodies were found.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Oh Boys, Florida, Florida. Oh Owys, Florida.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, the sporting goods store doesn't. The owner didn't recall
the specific transaction. He also said at the time, for
some reason, he said, it's possible this guy's card was used,
but he's not the one that used it. Eventually, years
and years later, they sored out that the credit card
slip matched his handwriting. I guess he had to sign it,
but somehow not present on the slip was what he
(10:54):
had bought. Initially, I don't know why.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Well, I don't know. I can see that. I've seen
slips that are signed by the customer and given to
the merchant and it just kind of tells the total
and stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, they did eventually figure out it was a pair
of tennis shoes, but as of like the year of
they couldn't figure out what he bought at that store. Understood,
there are a lot of eyewitness sightings, like hundreds, maybe thousands.
Oh geez, it's hard to parse out who saw what
in this case, but an employee of the sporting good
(11:28):
store had told authorities that he was there with a woman.
The Bishop was at the store with a woman, and
what stood out was she was taking care of the
Golden retriever, like she was looking after it as he
was in the sporting good store.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Sounds like something I would do.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Make sure the dog's okay. Yeah, yeah, But now you're
hanging out with a like a quintuple murderer.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
But I didn't know that at the time. I just
saw the dog very possible.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
I could totally see running into somebody who had just
killed five people right becoming accessory.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
After that fact, I was told that the other day
by Jason and his nephew, there were like three dogs
wherever we went, and I stopped and pat every single
one of them, and one of them wasn't even on
a leash, and it was giant, like a giant Rottweiler.
And I was like, oh my god, you're so cute.
And they were like, she's gonna get killed one day,
all these dogs, and I was like, at least I'll
(12:20):
go out happy. I literally said that, speaking.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Of there's my large wolf dog in the.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Background, just got words to say too.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
So at this point Bishop has two warrants against him.
They charge him in absentia for these five murders of
his entire family. Not many. What's the term for this,
the criminalist term for this, some of you that kills
their whole family a familicide, Yeah, a family annihilator is
what they use a lot. And I'm not sure how
(12:49):
many of those there were before that. I'm aware, like
John List, which is earlier, but this is kind of
a new thing in seventy six.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I think I don't know who John List is.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
It's kind of a similar situation, actually very similar. List
was earlier too, I think those in the fifties. AnyWho. Bishop,
for a physical description, was six feet tall, one eighty
medium build, brown hair, brown eyes, medium white complexion, and
as you saw from his photo, from his I think
his ID photo, he looks he looks like what you know,
(13:20):
he's a guy in a suit. And that's about all
the distinguishing features that he really has. Has an interesting
nose in that smark, but aside from that, he looks
like a guy.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah, just sorrando. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
The initial search for him, because now they can't find him,
and they find the bodies a couple of days later,
so now they're pretty sure what happened to the rest
of his family, dog is missing, cars missing. They go
to Georgia, they go to Florida. They didn't really say why.
They called these places logical for him to have fled,
I don't know where that comes. It's not a distance logical.
He must have had some kind of connections already. There
(13:56):
are sightings of him from Washington State to Pennsylvania. Well,
of course there always are. There are a ton in
this one though. They check with the airports, they check
with ports of entry. One of the more promising sightings
came from three people who apparently saw him at a
pancake house in Wilmington, North Carolina. According to The Washington Post,
a waitress was quote pretty sure end quote the bishop
(14:18):
had been a customer that she'd been witnessing being very
drunk and aggressive toward the black customers. She was pretty sure,
but that's all she said. But there were other sightings
around the same town in Wilmington.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
So if it was him, if it was him, I
just annihilated my entire family. I'm on the run, and
now I'm just going to make an aggressive and drunk
scene so that people like literally like you're just spewing
hatred and you're calling attention to yourself when you're trying
to get away with murder.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Come on, all these sightings I don't need. Is it him?
Is it not? Where is he right? Here's where it
gets fun. William Bradford Bishop worked for the State Department.
Some say he was high ranking, some say he was
mid level. He left his work at the State Department
early in that day of the murders said he had
a flu or a cold, and he took four hundred
(15:10):
dollars out from a bank account on his way home.
They also think he stopped at a Sears to buy
a sledgehammer and a gas can on the way home.
His actual title was Assistant Chief of Special Trade Activities
for the State Department. This is nineteen seventy six to
this day. If you're in the CIA, your cover is
(15:32):
I do X for the State Department. That's what you
tell your neighbors and friends and your wife a lot
of times. So they go search his desk and they
find a phone number for CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,
and that only added speculation that this guy is somehow
a spy or he's involved in the CIA. It's very
common for undercover officers to have a file kept on
(15:53):
them that is a damaged assessment of sorts. And this
is so the CIA knows if this guy has ever
turned as a spy or if he's captured and tortured.
Let's say, how much damaging information does this guy know
against the US. He does have this file, Apparently it
came out years later, but it was the determination of
the CIA at the time that he is pretty average
(16:16):
in terms of knowledge, not very dangerous at all. Bishop's
secretary also said he had been angry of late because
he'd been passed over for a recent promotion and apparently
had been passed over for advancement before that, which I
think is a common link in the chain of family annihilators.
I'm not one hundred percent sure, but workplace frustration I
(16:38):
think does tie in to most cases. Shortly after the
national media gets on this, the Attorney General of North
Carolina says William Bishop may have stowed away on a
ship from a port in North Carolina, and so ports
around the world were given notice to be on the
look for this guy. He does have a diplomatic passport,
(16:58):
which gives you a lot of advantages when you're overseas,
but it doesn't really help you leave the country. He's
like some guy working for the quote unquote State Department
who is now on the run. The angle of this
case that initially brought it to our attention because we're
looking at a series of the Great Smoky Mountains right
(17:19):
around Tennessee and the people that go missing there, or
some kind of a series along those lines, and that's
where they find his car. They found the station wagon
in the parking lot of the Elkmont campground in very
rural Tennessee in the Smoky Mountains March eighteenth. That is
a ten hour drive from where the bodies were found.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Oh shit.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
They interview some people and say, yeah, I've seen that
station wagon park there since like March fifth. So the
first is the murders, third is when the bodies are discovered.
The fifth is where the car was at least seen
before it's officially discovered in this parking lot. So he's
got a day in between all those. Obviously, he's traveling
very large distances relatively, it's like six hours from the
(18:05):
house to the grave site, ten hours from the grave
site to where the car is found. So he's just I imagine,
like spree moving.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
He's just going filling up on a lot of gas sounds.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Like inside the car, they found a bloody axe handle,
also a bunch of blood that smeared around the car
inside twelve gate shotgun and shells, which were sent to
the FBI. But obviously, wherever he is at this point
when it's found much later it's found like twelve days
after apparently it had been parked there, he doesn't have
these items. But he did at one point. There are
(18:37):
a lot of trails that extend from that parking lot
into the smoky mountains, like six or eight paths that
he could have taken if he did walk away from
his car. But that search of that whole area yields nothing.
They brought in dogs. They trained some of these dogs
on some clothing that they found of his that was
still inside the family home to train the dogs on.
And I think they hit on the ranger station there
(18:59):
in the parking lot. And that's about it. March tenth,
ten days after the murders and five days after apparently
he left his station wagon, a gun shop owner in
Ruffefford County, North Carolina came forward to authorities with information
the bishop had tried to swap a gun he had
for a more powerful gun in the gun shop that
was about one hundred and fifty miles from the location
of his car. So I guess five days after he
(19:22):
had ditched his car, he had gotten one hundred and
fifty miles away somehow and was trying to swap guns
with this gun shop owner.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
I wonder if he still had his dog at that point.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
There's no mention of a dog since North Carolina and
the sporting goods store, I don't think so that's about
it for the next several months six months after the murders.
At this point, he could be anywhere in the world,
especially with his diplomatic passport. Authorities still don't know really
(19:54):
why he did this or any additional trace of where
he might be. In nineteen seventy nine, three years after
the murders, Baltimore Sun reports that a female family friend
of Bishops who knew him well. They had known each
other while he was living in Ethiopia from nineteen sixty
five to nineteen sixty eight. She says she reported seeing
(20:15):
him in Sweden in the summer of nineteen seventy eight,
that would have been a year and a half right
after the murders. She reported this to the embassy in Sweden.
The friend said this had only been a sighting of him.
While she knew him well, she didn't interact with this
person that she thought was Bishop and that she could
(20:36):
not be one hundred percent sure of even the sighting.
Six months after that siding in Sweden, there is a
quote seventy five percent sure sighting of Bishop that was
made by a former State Department coworker in the Italian
resort town of Sorrento. That time, this man that she
(20:58):
thought might have been Bishop was dressed shabbily, whereas in
Sweden that person had said that he was dressed well.
In both sightings, this man had a beard. They I mean,
this is now seventy eight and seventy nine, and that's it.
Until nineteen ninety they air an episode of Unsolved Mysteries
about this. I wonder you love this one, this Unsolved Mysteries. Yeah,
(21:21):
but how had I not hear of that? Because that
was my prime Unsolved Mysteries viewing time. I was around
six years old and that's that's all I was watching.
I don't want Saturday Morning Cartoons, I want Robert Stack
and Unsolved Mysteries.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
You fell asleep to his voice to submit it.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
In nineteen ninety seven they did an artist rendition, which
is a weird look and I put it in the dock.
It's aquick claymation almost of him. It doesn't seem very
helpful to me. It gets a better in two thousand
and the later they release all kinds of different composite
sketches of different ages and appearances. There are eventually two
hundred plus sightings of Bishop worldwide, from Africa to Russia.
(22:01):
They had even more American sightings than that. Some of
the more notable ones where I saw him in Alaska,
And there was one sighting that Bishop was posing as
a janitor in a southern California high school.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Posing as a janitor, so he wasn't actually working as
a channel.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
I think he was, Like the theory would be, he
got a job school, pretending to randomly he's mopping upside
down or something.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Yeah, literally mopping with the broom or something. No water.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Twenty fourteen, they have DNA and X ray evidence from
a body that was found way back in eighty one
on the side of a highway in Alabama that goes nowhere.
It is known that he received pilot training at one
of his many places that he lived overseas. At some
point people actually tended to speak of him kind of kindly,
(22:50):
that he was average and kind of a family man.
I think a lot of those comments died off after
he was basically proven to have killed his family.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
To say, after he murdered his family, yeah, and not
very family like.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Worth noting that at the time of the murders he
was being treated for depression. He had medication, which is
very notable in nineteen seventy nine. If you're diagnosed with
depression in seventy nine, that's not like being diagnosed with
depression now.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It is like seventy nine or seventy six.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Seventy six, Sorry, okay, seventy six. So they don't medicate
you for depression in nineteen seventy six unless it's the
equivalent of some of the most severe depressive cases that
we see today. I think is fair to say the
FBI still has a case open. He may still be
on the most wanted list to this day. The FBI
says Bishop was and may still be an avid outdoorsman,
(23:41):
camper and hiker. He had extensive camping experience in Africa.
He also enjoys canoeing, fishing, swimming, jogging, tennis, skiing, and
riding motorcycles. He enjoyed working out several times a week.
Also a licensed amateur pilot. He learned to fly in Boswana, Africa.
Who doesn't by the way, an American Studies degree from
(24:02):
Yale we mentioned the masters from from Middlebury College in Vermont.
He was an avid reader, kept a diary or a journal.
Long time insomniac, the FBI says, reportedly had been under
psychiatric care in the past and had used medication for depression,
drank Scotch and wine, and enjoyed eating peanuts and spicy foods,
which is a nice addition from the FBI. There Bishop
(24:24):
was described as intense and self absorbed, prone to violent outbursts,
and preferred neat and orderly environments. Were he alive today,
he would be eighty eight, still considered by the FBI
to be armed, dangerous, and possessing suicidal tendencies. And right
below that in our show notes is a more probably
accurate sketch of what he would look like later in life.
Ancies They said that in seventy six too, as one
(24:49):
of the first things they said is especially after killing
your whole family, you're going to go into the woods
and kill yourself. But they never found anything. And this
sketch they released looks like see more average, I think
than the younger version. Looks like a.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Yeah great, I feel like I've seen this guy. Yeah, yeah,
everywhere exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So that's it. That's what we have. Sources include the Frederick,
Maryland News, Ruth Johnson reporting, the Cumberland News, a lot
of work by the Associated Press, Baltimore Sun did a
great job with the story over the years, the Cumberland
Sunday Times, among others. And yeah, that's that's William Bradford, Bishop,
Family Annihilator and international man of Mystery.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
This guy, like his original ID photo, it literally reminds
me of an actor. And I can't think of his
name right now, but it's gonna come to me as
soon as we stop recording, I bet, and I know
you know who I'm thinking of. Yeah, the first the
black and white photo of him like young, like in
his college years. Yeah, it kind of reminds he's on
a sitcom right now.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Oh sure, I could see a couple of people if
I squint across. Yeah, there's kind of a just a
little bit of a Kevin Spacey maybe young.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Oh. I didn't see that before, but now I do.
What is his name?
Speaker 1 (26:08):
I don't know, But what's your favorite theory?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Oh, I don't know what happened to him? I mean, honestly,
he probably did end up just like living off the
land for a while and then probably just died.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Honestly, Well, first question, we think he did it, right.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Oh, one hundred thousand percent, yes, But I don't understand him.
Why and why? Why was his mom involved? Did his
mom live with them? Then he shit?
Speaker 1 (26:31):
I don't know, I mean clearly, yeah, I mean it's
it was actually interesting as years go on, Like as
we get into the two thousands, you start to see
quotes in the newspaper like if indeed he did do it,
which I think it's pretty cut and dry. I don't
like to speculate, but there's a little bit of seventies
(26:51):
forensic evidence with a fingerprints, his car's got blood all
over it, he's never seen again, just coincidentally at the
time where his whole face family is murdered and buried
right hundreds of miles away. See, I think that's fair
to say he's also has to I mean to be
diagnosed mentally ill and even seeing a psychiatrist in seventy
six is significant. So he's probably he's probably further gone
(27:15):
than we're imagining him to be.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
But there's no build up. Like that's my question too.
It's like a lot of times, you'll people will look
back and be like, oh, well, you know he was
saying these things or he was doing these things. He
was scaring the family. You know, they confided in me
about that, Like they'll come, you know, after the fact
and say stuff, and it just sounds like there was
none of that here.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
No, he and his wife would fight about how much
they had to travel and live around the world, and
then how much he had to travel for work more recently.
Oh no, but there is no So there's fighting, but
that's not murder your whole family kind of motive. I'm
not sure if they ever did establish a motive. And
if I'm right about like say John List, it was
(27:57):
a religious thing. It was kind of a saving them
from themselves kind of a outlook. There is none of
that here that I know of. Frustrations at work, frustrations
with his wife. Kids are fourteen, ten, and five years old,
so there's some family pressure. There probably money problems too.
(28:18):
That's an expensive house he lives in and state department
employees don't make a ton of money. Then there's the
whole CIA thing.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Can we can we back up just one second though,
you you said John List? Yeah, yeah, okay, So he
killed his wife, mother and three children.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah, then disappeared like they've left him in the house
and then disappeared. Was on the run for a long
time and was seventeen years. Yeah, it was caught because
of an unsolved Mysteries episode.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
I but like, is this guy trying to copy him?
Is that what this is?
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Maybe? Because when was John List.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
November nineth, nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Bit it could be holy, like, this guy who has
no CIA training, does it imagine that I could just
start a brand new life in any country I wanted
to because I know how to do it, and John
List didn't. He ended up in denver A's as far
as he got, so, yeah, that's a good point. It
(29:18):
definitely could be. Was this an original idea because the
John List case was pretty famous at the time, or
was this something that he just saw and said, for
whatever reason, whatever my problems are, this is a way
out of it.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
That is just wild and.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
It's tough to square with the thing that is similar
to John List is kind of the profile of everything
has to be neat and orderly and self absorbed and antisocial.
They're kind of the same people that way. But like
John List would mowas his front yard and a suit
and tie. I sense a little bit of that here,
(29:57):
But I guess we'll never know if this was just
a copycat. And John List is way more well known,
I think than this case, and this guy never got caught.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah, this is bonkers to me. Like I didn't even
know obviously. I know that there are like family annihilators
out there, but I didn't even know about either one
of these cases. And you would think with this type
of information about it and how long they were able to,
you know, not be found, that there would be more
information about him out there. Insane to me. I mean,
(30:29):
and he was even living in a freaking mansion. Oh
my god, there's so many similarity similarities, Like he was
living with his wife, children and mother in Breeze Nole,
which was a nineteen room Victorian mansion.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, this wasn't a mansion. That's a mansion. This was Yeah,
this is a very upscale house, but it's not a
nineteen like in the John List thing. He left him
all in different rooms and left the radio on and
made arrangements with the school so they wouldn't be missed,
basically to buy time. This guy didn't try to buy
any time. He was just gone, Jesus Bury the bodies,
(31:03):
apparently randomly five hours away, immediately head to the Smoky
mountains where he ditches the car, and apparently he's seen.
Like the gun shop owner, he's seen hours one hundred
and fifty miles away from that location. So different ways
about hiding, I guess, but very similar. Yeah. And if
you look at a photo of John List and put
(31:24):
that initial photo of William Bishy side by side, they
look kind of similar.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
That's literally what I'm doing right now looking at both
of them, you.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Know, fifties, early sixties, clean cut, kind of a vibe.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
I don't like it. I don't like any of those.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
No, it's bad news, Jesus. So I think here is
that he's still alive somewhere in If I had to guess,
I'll bet he was fluent in like five languages, Spanish, Italian, English,
obviously German probably maybe, but the really random one was
(31:59):
Croatia and.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Like Bosnian, Oh Jesus okay.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
And I was trying to think back at this time
in the world, what was happening.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
I don't know. I wasn't born yet.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
There's a lot in the Middle East. There's Israel's getting nukes,
and around this time, Iran is being Iran, fitting the
whole Bosnia Croatia thing that he's fluent in that of
all these places, that would be the easiest to hide
with the turmoil of the Soviet Union happening at that time.
(32:33):
And if I had to guess if he were still
alive today, I would bet he was. He spent like
decades there and then may have moved on after that.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
And if he's eighty eight today, he's probably a fit
in shape eighty eight year old by the looks of it,
by everything that he did on a regular basis and
working out several times a week, Yeah he was.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah, so he may well be alive. But then again
there's cancer and being shot by the Soviet Union or whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
And Kara Karma's a big arma.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
If if karma is a thing, if anyone ever deserved it,
it's uh this guy, but I want to say he
was alive for a while if he is dead now.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
And if he is dead now, like did he now?
I have so many questions like did he find his
whole ass new family out there or did he say
something on his deathbed and they're holding that secret like
what happened? Or did he just live alone the rest
of his life?
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Is he ashamed? Like? I doubt that. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
I doubt he was ashamed. Having a family is a
great way to blend in anywhere, except he's white. If
he's worldwide and he's not, he speaks all these languages,
but he doesn't have a native dialect to it, so
he would stand out more. I don't think he was
in America. I think he did take off and get
out of the country somehow. If he's in America, he
(33:57):
died soon after and for some reason he was just
never found or it was never connected.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
And you don't think to see IA as part of this,
and like they're hiding him and they just made up
this whole story, right.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
They could, But I really want to know what he
was working on with that fake you know title of
his It just screams it wouldn't have at the time.
It was a great cover at the time, but now,
knowing everything we know about the CIA from the fifties
all the way up, it screams CIA and the world
was never is. But it was not a calm place
(34:31):
at that time. And the CIA was also very wild
West in the seventies. There wasn't a whole lot of oversight.
And I don't know. I'm torn because on the one hand,
you're sending this secret agent guy, if that's what he was,
to do these highly important things while he's medicated for
depression in nineteen seventy six, you would think he would
find a better agent, a more mentally stable agent who,
(34:53):
if they're captured, might hold up better.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
I will know, No, you probably send the mentally unstable
person out there because they don't care.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
The crazy one, so to speak, well.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Quote unquote yeah, like they don't care about anything, or
if they're already experiencing suicidal or homicidal ideations, then they're like, oh,
we'll send him, doesn't matter.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Maybe, And do you want to get into the you know,
the the uh, what's what's the CIA top secret stuff
that they're they're experimenting with how to turn birds into
bombs and with true serum and.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Well how birds are fake.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
It's along those lines, but it's a lot newer CIA.
Holy crap, mk ultra.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Oh dude, I was literally just thinking that, and I
was like, I'm totally wrong. I'm not going to sound
like an idiot right now.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
I just couldn't. I couldn't get the letters, mk ultra
if you throw that in there. He was made depressed
and clinically crazy by the CIA's experimenting on him, and
then they sent him off as a Manurion candidate and
it backfired and he killed this whole family. And nov
Aca is like, well, nope, okay, I'm not gonna do
that again. Oops. That's the fun side. The unfund side
(36:07):
is that these poor, unsuspecting family members of this man
were killed unexpectedly, and three of them were kids.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
That's why, why does anybody have family anymore? Like, I
can't do it. I told Jason, like, if anything ever
happens with us, I'm not going with anyone else. I
will literally just buy a bunch of dogs.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
So insert your favorite theory here. But I had a
lot of fun researching that because it's got everything.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
It has a little bit of a it's like a
goodie bag, honestly, but I'm probably gonna delve a little
bit more into this because it's super interesting and where
is he? I want to know.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
So all the stuff I did was like newspaper accounts
and that's basically it. So if you imagine if you
get on Reddit with this thing, there's problems.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
That was my first thought going there.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
I didn't get into any of that. So if there
are any worthy Reddit theories, please let us know. Status
Spending podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
If will you Bishop is listening right now, please out
say hi, tell me what happened?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah, Like, we don't care where you are right now,
we just need to know if uh, but we will trace.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
You if the CIA is listening to this right now.
I don't know. It's just one of those weird, really strange.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
It's a movie, right it is. They made movies about
John List, Like, there's got to be a movie about
this guy.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Never heard of this one. So thanks Courtney, I don't
know how much.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, thank you all about that.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
But I was expecting a lot less. I was expecting
he went for.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
A hike and the that's what I was expecting I was.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Never seen again and with yeah, fifteen minutes, I'm like,
this guy's a CIA officer.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
So that was a roller coaster. Okay, well, I appreciate
you digging into that one, Jesus.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
I just randomly picked it too, the ones that you
had selected. So the idea is a Smoky Mountain series,
and I'm all about that. Those tend to be really
tough to research, but as you see, and never know
what you find if you look into those, and I
think we can do that. This is not that though.
I'm gonna go ahead and say he did not wander
(38:09):
off into the woods and die. He might have shot
himself or something at that point. They just never found him,
but it seems way more likely that he was alive
well after they found the car there, I think. So
thanks to our Patreon sporters, we're gonna have some Patreon
exclusive contents coming up shortly. I believe I haven't watched
it yet, so we can't do its day. But Heather
watched did you watch some of the Unsolved Mysteries?
Speaker 2 (38:32):
I watched the first one, but I did not get
to the very end of it, so I have like
ten minutes left, all right.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
What was that Unsolved Mysteries season five, just so we
can give a tease of what it is.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
It is my case, it's the one about the bench.
It's called something two on a bench or something park
bench murders.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
So two people shot June on a Is that the one?
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yes? And it's in Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Really, so there's your tea's if you become a patroonsporter
of a dollar or more. Heather and I are going
to do some analysis on Unsolved Mysteries, and that's really
because of me, because I love that stuff and I'm
making Heather do it, but I don't even care.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
That's fine, I like it. It's fine, all right.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Thanks to everyone for listening. Tell your friends, share your theories,
and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Bye,
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