Grim-Reality TV

Whenever I run on Lilly Stone Drive, a hilly, well-shaded street about a mile and a half from my house, I think of Brad Bishop. I wonder if he’s still alive, and which of the tidy suburban homes I’m passing had once been splattered with blood.

On March 1, 1976, Bishop was a 39-year-old officer in the US Foreign Service, stationed at the State Department in DC. A Yale man, he was fluent in five languages. He’d previously been posted in Italy, Ethiopia, and Botswana. On that late-winter day, however, he’d learned he would not receive a promotion he’d sought.

Subsequent events would suggest he took the news poorly. The sequence later pieced together by law enforcement started with Bishop leaving work early, then had him withdrawing several hundred dollars from his bank, next had him going to a hardware store to buy a ball-peen hammer, a shovel and gas can, and, finally, had him returning that evening to his Bethesda-area residence, where he bludgeoned to death with a blunt object his wife, mother, and sons (ages 5, 10 and 14).

The next day, a forest ranger 275 miles away in North Carolina responded to a smoke alert and found five partially burned bodies and a shovel that had been purchased, according to its label, at Montgomery Mall in Bethesda.

On March 18, 1976, the Bishop family station wagon was found abandoned in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, about 400 miles west of the site of the grisly pyre. The spare tire well was covered with blood. Among the items inside the car was a box of dog biscuits; the family’s golden retriever was missing when police searched the crime scene on Lilly Stone Drive.

On March 19, a grand jury indicted Brad Bishop on five counts of first-degree murder. But where the accused was by that time—or where he’s been anytime since, for that matter—is anyone’s guess. Given such factors as his one-week jump on police before the burned corpses were linked to Maryland, his diplomatic passport, and the easiness of inconspicuous travel in those days before electronic tracking and terrorist threats, escape really hadn’t been that difficult for Brad Bishop. (This isn’t legitimately analogous, but I always think about how Dr Richard Kimble, The Fugitive of 1960s TV, remained successfully on the lam all those years simply by dyeing his hair and mumbling his way through a succession of blue-collar jobs.)

There’s a Wikipedia page for “Bradford Bishop,” just as there’s a Wikipedia page for everything. It features an age-enhanced photo from 1986, copyrighted by NBC News, depicting what the accused might have looked like 10 years after his disappearance. It notes that the case has been featured over the years on America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries. It mentions that alleged Brad Bishop sightings included one by a former neighbor who could swear that was him on a train platform in Basel, Switzerland, in 1994.

Several years ago, the Washington Post interviewed the guy who then lived in the former Bishop home—without revealing the homeowner’s real name or the address on Lilly Stone. The guy said, essentially, that he’d gotten such a great price on the place, and that he liked living there so much, that he didn’t give a damn if the Holocaust had been perpetrated within the structure’s whitewashed walls. He allowed that he occasionally had to shoo away gawkers who knew the home’s history and wanted a look inside. (I never would be that rude. I’d just stare from the street. OK, and maybe ask the homeowner to pose outside for a quick snapshot, holding a hammer and shovel.)

Oh, here’s one other detail Wikipedia contributors turned up somewhere. Brad Bishop had complained to a co-worker that this wife and his mother constantly belittled him as a loser whose career was going nowhere. (So, case closed! Justifiable homicide, apparently.)

As you may have inferred by now, the Bishop case fascinates me—as do, to a lesser but still considerable degree, several other local crime scenes past which I run on a fairly regular basis.

There’s the idyllic Brookmont neighborhood off MacArthur Boulevard near the District line—a haven for kayakers that’s an easy walk to the Potomac River. That’s where Alison Thresher’s parked car was found in 2000. The 45-year-old divorcee had just started a new job as a Washington Post copy editor when she went missing without a trace. Police classified it a homicide. Years later she finally was declared legally dead, allowing her two daughters to collect Social Security survivors’ benefits.

A few miles south of there, on a handsome stretch of Reservoir Road NW across from the German Embassy, is a cute house I’d seen trimmed with crime-scene tape in 1999. It was the site of a murder-suicide in which an estranged husband blew out his romance-novelist wife’s brains (no wonder she took refuge in flowery prose) in front of the couple’s two young children. A “short time later,” according to a news account, the husband, a retired Marine, drove his jeep to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, put a shotgun barrel down his own throat and pulled the trigger.

Northwest, DC, in fact, for all its pricey real estate and leafy beauty, is fertile ground for tourists of headline-grabbing homicides. One of my frequent weekend runs, for example, takes me past not only the Rock Creek Park hillside on which former congressional intern Chandra Levy’s badly decomposed body finally was found more than a year after her 2001 disappearance, but also past the home near Chevy Chase Circle where, on July 16, 2003, a promising Indian-American poet named Reetika Vazirani stabbed to death with a kitchen knife her two-year-old son and then herself. That story was made even bigger by the fact that the home was owned by prize-winning novelist Howard Norman, for whom Vazirani had been house-sitting. (Presumably “No violent crimes!” subsequently was added to the tenant agreement, right after “Please do not use the good china.”)

I don’t listen to an iPod when I run, so that may be one reason these crimes have gotten so deeply inside my head. Speculating on how Brad Bishop’s conscience is treating him at age 75—or whether Reetika Vazirani was a sad caricature of the tortured artist, or if the guy ultimately convicted of Chandra Levy’s murder entirely on circumstantial evidence really did it—is a welcome distraction from my own cardiovascular distress as I huff and puff my middle-aged way over hill and down dale. I’m not a violent person, and I don’t romanticize violence. I’m not merely in favor of gun control, but of repealing the Second Amendment right of private citizens to bear arms. I’m opposed to the death penalty, feeling strongly that state-sponsored killing of murderers is simply an ugly case of two wrongs not making a right.

But here’s my dirty little secret: I am addicted to ID. As in Investigation Discovery, a four-year-old cable television channel whose market niche is all murder and mayhem, all the time. They’re all events that really happened, and the vast majority of the programming is original—put together at low cost by pairing law enforcement and eyewitness accounts with historical footage and an abundance of cheesy reenactments in which the actors are more physically attractive than were the actual victims and criminals. (This is particularly true of the actresses who play unlucky wives and the voluptuous chippies who fueled hubby’s murderlust.)

Actually, if ID is news to you, the following list of selected show titles gets straight to the telltale heart of what the network is all about: Blood, Lies and Alibis, Nightmare Next Door, Unusual Suspects, Deadly Women, Disappeared, Scorned: Love Kills, Who the &!$/ Did I Marry?, Wicked Attraction. (My dream job once was writing headlines for the New York City tabloids—the all-time classic there having been “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” But now my ideal employment might be naming TV series on ID.)

To say that this lineup has been a winning formula for parent company Discovery Communications is putting it mildly. I’m far from the network’s only fan, abashed or otherwise. ID advertises itself as “America’s fastest-growing network,” a claim that is dead-seriously accurate. The channel has added 30 million new subscribers since its changeover in 2008 from something called Discovery Times (focused, damningly, on culture). As of this February, ID was the third-most-popular network among women in the coveted 25-to-54 age bracket. (Their allegiance being a reward, no doubt, for ID’s excellent guidance on who not to marry, and on which crazy-bitch dames to bar from the book group.)

I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a sociologist, so I can’t definitively say why I and so many other Americans (a lot of them women, apparently) have fallen so hard for ID. (Talk about your wicked attractions!) But I’ve got some theories.

I found an article online in which Paula Zahn, the bona fide investigative journalist who’s worked for ABC, CBS and CNN, discussed her initial skepticism when ID wooed her to lend the upstart channel some credibility. The economy was in the tank, the public was depressed, nobody in TV was spending money on programming, yadda yadda yadda. Well, exactly! as it turned out. Zahn signed on to host a show anyway, and ended up being happy she did. Bad economy? What better tonic for underemployed and unhappy Americans than to feast on shows with such takeaway messages “At least no one’s murdered me!”, “My no-account spouse may be a worthless shit, but no he’s killer,” and “Ha! No gambling debts requiring extreme remedies in this house!”  Little money to spend on high production values? Who needs it? America loves cheaply-produced reality television, and you can’t get more real than true-life crime stories.

Not that fascination with violence is a uniquely American phenomenon, but I also think there’s something in this nation’s history—from the Second Amendment through the Wild West, the gangster wars of the Depression era, the Manson Family, Jonestown, even that horrendous killing of Afghan civilians by a US Army sergeant earlier this year—that somehow makes violence part of our DNA. We may embrace it or reject it, arm ourselves or rail against arms, seek retribution or demand preventive measures. But violence, whether we like it or not, is part of who we are as a people. It’s seductive to most of us in some way, even if only as a foil or a perverse entertainment.

But I don’t know. Maybe I’m unjustly sullying the reputations of millions of peace-loving Americans who’d never give ID the time of day. Perhaps I should be ashamed of myself for watching these shows, rather than just a bit embarrassed. But, do you know what? I hope my friend Kathy will forgive me here for implicating her in my own search for absolution, but she is one of the kindest, most loving people I know. She radiates such Goodness that I sometimes feel blinded by her light. Kathy wouldn’t be satisfied with just giving you the shirt off her back—she’d go into debt, if necessary, to buy you exactly the shirt you really wanted. Yet when I mentioned ID to her in passing a few months ago, her eyes lit up. Her peepers told me she was a fellow addict before her mouth did.

Maybe, too, I’m over-thinking all this. There’s something inherently compelling about stories of crazy passion and fatal consequences that in no way resemble our daily lives, but that aren’t so very far-fetched, either. I write that as a guy who lives in the safe suburbs, yet who, in the course of a single not particularly ambitious run, can encounter an array of sites that are associated with murder most foul.

The nightmare next door, indeed.