House of Kill Repute

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.