We interrupt
our Blog Hiatus to issue this important update to a June 2, 2012, Lassitude
Come Home post titled “Grim-Reality TV.” In that account of my fascination with
the all-murders-all-the-time cable television channel Investigation Discovery,
I noted that I pass many known homicide sites during my runs through the outwardly
safe neighborhoods of Bethesda and Washington, DC.
So, my
update is this: As I wrote nearly two years ago, it’s been known for decades
that Brad Bishop left the building on March 1, 1976. But this week, thanks to
the FBI and the Washington Post. I
finally learned the building’s exactly location. And this morning, I saw the
building.
Or,
rather, I saw it with fresh eyes. Not as just another ‘70s-style split-level
set back from the road on leafy Lilly Stone Drive in Bethesda’s Carderock
Springs subdivision, but as the house where a 39-year-old officer in the US
Foreign Service on that late-winter day 37 years ago left his Foggy Bottom
office early, withdrew money from his bank, purchased a ball-peen hammer at a
hardware store, drove home, and bludgeoned to death his wife, three young sons
and widowed mother.
I’d
become aware of the case several years ago, when the Post ran a story about the home’s grim history from the quirky
angle of its subsequent longtime owner’s utterly unconflicted delight at having gotten such a great deal on the
cleaned-up mass-murder scene. That piece—which
maddeningly placed the homeowner’s right to privacy above my yen for a house number
on the named street— led me to the Internet, where I found other articles and
the inevitable Wikipedia page for William Bradford Bishop, which told the
complete story (but again, sans house number!) of the multilingual government
employee’s partially successful attempt to burn the bodies in a remote section
of northeast North Carolina and entirely successful escape from custody—his blood-stained
station wagon having been found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on March
18, 1976, and Brad Bishop himself having been found and brought to justice
never.
The
thinking back then, and now, was that a smart guy who spoke five languages
fluently might easily be living under an assumed name and an acquired tongue
somewhere in Europe. Indeed, there were a few alleged Bishop sightings in Sweden,
Switzerland and Italy in the early years by people who knew the fugitive and
were pretty damn sure it was he who they’d fleetingly seen. But even pleas for
pre-smartphone crowdsourcing help on such real-crime TV shows as America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries yielded no significant
leads.
For
years, I’d run down Lilly Stone Drive and wondered Which House It Was, my
Google searches having gotten me exactly as far at identifying the Death House as
international law enforcement had gotten at tracking down the Bethesda
Bludgeoner. I’d hoped forlornly for a momentarily icy wind, or a ghostly cry, or
a couple of dog-walkers just happening to point at a house and remark within my
earshot, “Who’d ever think five people would be pounded senseless with a
household tool there!” Somehow,
none of those things ever happened. The neighborhood pines whispered, but never
any words I could understand.
Then,
though, a few afternoons ago the Post’s
daily headlines e-mail popped up on my office PC, coaxing me to drop what I was
doing and to add a “hit” to the website’s numbers. This particular attempt succeeded, as one
of the headlines proclaimed that, in an effort to revive interest and prompt
new leads in this coldest of cold cases, Brad Bishop, now 77 years old (if
alive), had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.
While this
news of course was of great interest to me—beyond my grim fascination with the
case, I of course would like to see the cocky narcissist (as I see him) pay for
his crimes—the article itself told me nothing that I, voracious reader of all
things Bishop, didn’t already know.
Well, it did remind me that he is an “alleged” mass murderer—all devils leaving
blood-soak trails in their wake being innocent until proven guilty in a court
of law. But I’d long known all the other things. Like how Brad Bishop’s sons had
been ages 14, 10 and 5, his wife was 37 and his widowed mother was 68. And how,
in addition to speaking French, Spanish, Italian and Serbo-Croatian, Bishop was an “avid outdoorsman” who’d presumably be at home in the Black Forest or
the Pyrenees, not to mention the Smoky Mountains in which he might have lingered
if not for all the unfortunate notoriety.
But then
I saw it: a link from the FBI article to a much-earlier Post story. The piece,
dated February 22, 1977, was headlined, “Brad Bishop Home Sold Year After
Family of Five Slain There.” In the article, Carolyn Gneiser—wife of the
homeowner whose quotes I would read decades later—noted, “We renegotiated the
price a little bit” after learning from a neighbor the grisly details their
realtor had been loath to share. (No kidding!) The sentence that riveted my
attention, however, was this: “When the Robert H. Gneiser family moves into the
contemporary split-level house at 8103 Lilly Stone Drive next month, their
neighbors are hoping the event will remove the specter that has haunted the
Carderock Springs development in West Bethesda for the last year.”
Finally,
an address!
So,
after my Saturday run in Washington this morning, I drove to Lilly Stone Drive,
found the house, parked my car, and walked up the driveway to get close enough
to take a few pictures. Yes, if you’re wondering, I did feel like a ghoulish intruder and an insufficiently respectful trespasser.
I abashedly waited to take a photo of the front mailbox until the street had
cleared of traffic. As I neared the house itself, I mulled my possible
responses to the shouts of a furious and possibly gun-toting Bob Gneiser. I was
braced for him to run out the front door screaming, “The damn FBI, putting this
back in the news! Get the hell off my property!”
Only,
one of the first things I saw, after noting the utter blandness of the dated
home (you’re not missing anything from my technological inability to post a
photo here), was the diplomatic license plates on the lone car in the upper
part of the driveway. That, and the fact that today’s newspaper hadn’t been brought
inside, suggested to me that Bob Gneiser, too, has left the building, and that
the foreign renters who succeeded him might not even be home.
Emboldened
by the likelihood that I wouldn’t be chased off the premises at gunpoint, I
proceeded to walk right up to the house and took a few pictures. I even took
one at the back of the house. No one said “boo.” (Although under the
circumstances, that exact comment would’ve sent me running even more surely than
would have Bob Gneiser’s imagined gun.) I completed my reconnaissance work, got
back in the car and drove home, which took all of five minutes.
I of
course had to immediately share my best shot of the house with a few friends
who know well my preoccupation with lethal crimes, even though I consider
myself a pacifist and the National Rifle Association to be a terrorist
organization. In my texts, I repeated the same joke I’d used in the 2012 blog
post, about how I’d resisted the temptation to ring the doorbell and ask the
man or lady of the house to pose for me with a catsup-soaked hammer.
But why,
really, is my knowing Exactly Where It Happened so important to me? Why do I so
relish the fact that, on future runs on Lilly Stone Drive, I’ll know the
history of that one particular house?
I speculated back in 2012 that violence somehow is part of our DNA as Americans,
whether it manifests in sociopathic ways or just weirdly prurient ones. Anyway, it’s
probably a harmless interest on my part. I hope so. I think so.
But I
also know—and I’m not proud of this—that I’d have gotten a real kick out of that
red-hammer shot, had Sven the Diplomat materialized and been up for the gag.
