Killer professor who was always on the edge

Not long after Amy Bishop was identified as the professor who had been arrested in the shooting of six faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on Feb 12, the campus police received a series of reports even stranger than the shooting itself.

Several people with connections to the university’s biology department warned that Amy, a neuroscientist with a Harvard PhD, might have booby-trapped the science building with some sort of ‘herpes bomb’, police officials said, designed to spread the dangerous virus.
Only people who had worked with Amy would know that she had done work with the herpes virus as a post-doctoral student and had talked about how it could cause encephalitis. She had also written an unpublished novel in which a herpes-like virus spreads throughout the world, causing pregnant women to miscarry.

By the time of the reports, the police had already swept every room of the science building, finding nothing but a 9 mm handgun in the second-floor restroom.
But the anxious warnings reflected the fears of those who know Amy that she could go to great lengths to retaliate against those she felt had wronged her.

Over the years, Amy had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her. Her life seemed to veer wildly between moments of cold fury and scientific brilliance, between rage at perceived slights and empathy for her students.

Her academic career slammed to a halt with the shooting rampage nine days ago against her colleagues. Amy, 45, is accused of killing three fellow biology professors, including the department’s chairman of Indian origin, Dr Gopi Podila, at a faculty meeting. Three others were wounded.

Her lawyer says she remembers nothing of the shootings and that he plans to have her evaluated by psychiatrists.

Depression
The shootings took place after Amy learned that she had lost her long battle to gain academic tenure at the university. But they were hardly the first time that she had come to the attention of law enforcement because of an outburst or violent act.
In 1986, not long after a family argument, Amy shot and killed her brother, Seth, 18, with her father’s 12-gauge shotgun, putting a gaping hole in his left chest and tearing open his aorta, according to the police report. She was 21 years old and, like her brother, a student at Northeastern University.

But Amy was not charged with a crime, and the shooting was never fully investigated by the police. She and her family said it was an accident, and the authorities accepted their version.

And in 1994, she and her husband were questioned in a mail bomb plot against a doctor at Harvard, where she obtained her PhD and remained on and off for nearly a decade to conduct postdoctoral research.

In each brush with the law until this month, Amy emerged unscathed, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville never knew of them. But she left behind a trail of neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances who were mystified by her mood swings and volatility.
She yelled at playing children, neighbours said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities.

She was known to have cyclical ‘flip-outs,’ as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory. On the day she shot and killed her brother, she ran out into the street with the shotgun and demanded a car at a local dealership.

Even those who worked with her on fiction writing in Massachusetts described the experience as painful and said they always had a feeling she was about to explode.
“When I worked with her, I found she was always within striking distance of the edge,” said Lenny Cavallaro, a writer who said he collaborated with Amy on ‘Amazon Fever,’ the unpublished novel about the virus.

On the morning of Dec 6, 1986, there was an argument at the home of Judith and Samuel Bishop, a Victorian house among the grandest in Braintree, Massachusetts, a middle-class suburb of Boston.

Experiment
Judy, active in local politics and well known around town, was out horseback riding. Seth was outside washing his car. Amy went upstairs to her room and would later tell the police that she had decided to load her father’s shotgun. She wanted to learn how it worked, she said, because there had been a break-in at the house not long before.
She loaded it and a blast went off in her room. Police later found evidence that she had tried to conceal the results of that blast, using a Band-Aid tin and a book cover to hide holes in the wall.

Carrying the shotgun, she descended the stairs to the kitchen, where her brother and mother were standing.

“I was at the kitchen sink and Seth was standing by the stove,” Mrs Bishop told the police. “Amy said, ‘I have a shell in the gun, and I don’t know how to unload it.’ I told Amy not to point the gun at anybody. Amy turned toward her brother and the gun fired, hitting him. Amy then ran out of the house with the shotgun.” Mrs Bishop said the shooting had been an accident.

The area’s prosecutor, William R Keating, district attorney of Norfolk County, was highly critical of the handling of the shooting 24 years ago, particularly because it appears that Amy’s actions after her brother’s shooting — demanding a car at gunpoint and refusing an officer’s orders to drop the gun — were not conveyed to state authorities who investigated the case. “It’s not a minor thing that would be omitted,” Keating said.
In March 2009, however, Amy received word that her bid for tenure had been denied because her research and publication record were not strong, colleagues said. Such denials are rare, faculty members said, because the university reviews tenure-track professors annually, alerting them to areas that need improvement.

Increasingly expressing concern about her family’s finances, Amy hired a lawyer, her husband said, and filed a discrimination complaint against the university. He said she also began going to a firing range. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, he told reporters, he had gone with her to the range once. He said she claimed to have borrowed the gun she used.

Her lawyer said that she did not remember what happened next. But the police and witnesses say that on Feb 12, Amy went to a routine faculty meeting with a plan. And a loaded handgun.