Keep Digging

The text popped up on my phone at 5:08 one morning last week. It read, simply but dramatically, “The body is not Bishop!”

It was from my friend Karen, who—when she’s not busy swing-dancing and waltzing and canoeing and hiking and seemingly redefining the phrase “live life to its fullest” (no mean feat for a single mother of three with a demanding full-time job, three dogs, a cat and a semi-long-distance boyfriend)—like me, worries a lot about the end of the world as we know it. Karen’s big thing right now is Ebola. She was up early that day scouring the Internet for the latest on confirmed deaths, government lies and obfuscations, hospital screw-ups, and cruise ship travel by possible carriers of the virus. While scrolling through a list of reasons it’s best never to read the news, she’d come upon an item in which she knew I’d be acutely interested.

I knew the text message meant that the question I’d asked atop my previous post, “The Truth Unearthed?” had been answered by the FBI’s forensics team in Quantico, Virginia. The “John Doe” who’d been buried in a cemetery in Jackson County, Alabama, after having been struck by a car on October 18, 1981, was not, in fact, the notorious fugitive Brad Bishop, aka the Bethesda Bludgeoner. (OK, that’s my aka for him. But I’ve noticed that the British tabloids have been all over this story. Given their me-like zeal for alliteration and indifference to taste and decency, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of them has employed the term. Damn the Washington Post and their “journalistic standards.”)

“We were hoping it was him, but we have other leads, the Post quoted an FBI spokeswoman in Baltimore as saying. Here in Montgomery County—where the 39-year-old multilingual State Department employee one spring day in 1976 went to a hardware store, purchased a small hammer, then infamously embarked on a fiendish home-improvement project that consisted of beating his wife, three sons and widowed mother to death—Sheriff Darren Popkin and County Police Chief Tom Manger echoed the FBI’s disappointment and optimism.

The case has been open for nearly four decades now, and even this latest “big break” consisted of nothing more than facial similarities between Bishop and the autopsy photo of the John Doe. But, what is law enforcement going to say? “We’ve got nuthin”? Bishop might, after all, have died under an assumed name overseas, his true identity unknown to anyone with whom he’d dealt. If he is still alive, he may be just another Alzheimer’s patient at an old folks’ home in Croatia, or a retired ski instructor in the Swiss Alps whose longtime companion, a distant relation of Eva Braun, will carry her lover’s secret to her own grave.

It seems hard to imagine, in this era of omnipresent cameras and instantaneous communication, that a still-living Brad Bishop could remain hidden for this long. Plus, does a guy who’s unhinged enough to murder his entire family then just settle down to a quiet life of clock-making? I don’t know. I’m not a criminal profiler, although I’ve watched plenty of them theorize on TV.

I’m more dubious than ever now that this coldest of cold cases ever will be thawed out and solved. Per my post previous to this one, what I’d most like to see at this point is Bishop’s comeuppance—a cold-blooded killer who’s certain he’s gotten away with murder being brought to justice, ideally interrupted mid-sip on a martini by a swarm of gun barrels pointed directly at this wizened face. That would be justice, inasmuch as the word possibly could apply to a killer who’s enjoyed decades of freedom while his family’s been skeletal in the ground.

I suppose I should clarify and concede, after having indicted Brad Bishop so many times over in this space, that he is an alleged killer. He is the Alleged Bethesda Bludgeoner. He never stood trial, after all. Perhaps it was just a monumental coincidence and a huge misunderstanding that Bishop disappeared at exact time of the murders, that items found at the northeast North Carolina site of the family’s half-burned bodies were traceable to him, that more evidence linking Bishop to the slayings were found in the family’s abandoned station wagon in the Smoky Mountains, and that no other suspects ever have been suggested or have emerged. It’s theoretically possible that a wrongly accused Brad Bishop is a latter-day Richard The Fugitive Kimble, still out there trying to ensnare the real killer while the stupid, misguided coppers persist in pinning the rap on him. (Although such efforts can be difficult even for acquitted and unpursued innocents, as OJ Simpson discovered during all those years he spent turning Florida’s golf courses and bars-upside down in a frantic-if-geographically-curious search for the killers of his ex-wife and her friend.)

So, to be fair, it was DNA from an alleged murderer that the FBI compared recently with DNA from that Alabama John Doe. And the 350 leads that the FBI says it’s received since attempting in April to revive interest in the case by placing Bishop on its Ten Most Wanted List are just part of an effort to touch base with a widower who’s got some serious ’splainin’ to do.

If that roadside drifter in Alabama had turned out to be Brad Bishop, however, the book would’ve been closed on him, and on a case of presumed guilt. Ebola still would be frightening, to be sure. Wars still would still rage all over globe, atrocities still would abound, environmental calamity would keep looming ever closer. But at least I could’ve run by that house on Lilly Stone Drive and thought, “So much for that alleged homicidal asshole.” Now I wonder if I’ll be able to say that anytime earlier than 20 years from now—when I’ll figure that Bishop probably didn’t live to be 100, and when I myself will be 76 years old.

By which time, if I’m still alive, I’m sure to find Bishop’s default death by old age to be pretty unsatisfying. Especially as I’ll be dealing with my own infirmities, and all the manifestations of impending Arageddon about which I’ve so cheerily written in this space. (If, that is, Karen’s fears prove unfounded and Ebola doesn’t wipe us all out first.)

So, one final note, and then I’ll drop this subject. I promise! Unless and until there’s bona fide news.

This morning I spotted a handmade sign at the entrance to Lilly Stone Drive, advertising a neighborhood Halloween “Spooktacular.” Not at the old Bishop place--despite its provenance, ghost potential, and suitability to Nerf-hammer party favors! Talk about an opportunity lost.