On February 12, 2010, a biology professor, 44-year-old Amy Bishop, fatally shot three people and wounded three more, during a routine meeting of the biology department attended by approximately twelve people at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in Huntsville, Alabama, United States.
Bishop was charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder. On September 11, 2012, she pleaded guilty to the charges after family members of victims petitioned the judge against use of the death penalty. The jury heard a condensed version of the evidence on September 24, as required by Alabama law. The same day, Bishop was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In March 2009, Bishop had been denied tenure at UAH, making spring 2010 her last semester there, per university policy. Due to the attention she attracted as a result of the shooting, previous violent incidents in which Bishop had been involved or implicated were reevaluated. In 1986, Bishop had shot and killed her brother Seth in Braintree, Massachusetts, in an incident that was, at the time, officially ruled an accident. She was also questioned, along with her husband Jimmy Anderson, after a 1993 pipe bomb incident was directed at her lab supervisor.
Shooting
On the day of the shooting, Bishop taught her anatomy and neurosciences class at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). A student later said Bishop "seemed perfectly normal" during the lecture. Bishop then attended a biology department faculty meeting on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. According to witnesses, 12 or 13 people attended the meeting, which was described as "an ordinary faculty meeting". Bishop's behavior was also described as "normal" just before the shooting.
Bishop sat quietly at the meeting for 30 to 40 minutes before pulling out a Ruger P95 9mm handgun just before 4:00 p.m. A witness said that she "got up suddenly, took out a gun and started shooting at each one of us. She started with the one closest to her, and went down the row shooting her targets in the head." Another survivor said, "This wasn't random shooting around the room; this was execution style." Those who were shot were on one side of the oval table; the five on the other side dropped to the floor.
After Bishop had fired several rounds, Debra Moriarity, a biochemistry professor, said that she pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger, but heard only a "click", as her gun "either jammed or ran out of ammunition". She described Bishop as initially appearing "angry", then "perplexed". Joseph Ng, an associate professor, said Moriarity attempted to stop Bishop by approaching her and asking her to stop, and helped the other survivors push Bishop from the room and block the door. Ng said, "Moriarity was probably the one that saved our lives. She was the one that initiated the rush."
Investigation
The suspected murder weapon was found in a bathroom on the second floor of the science building. Bishop did not have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. She was arrested a few minutes later outside the building. Shortly after her arrest, Bishop was quoted as saying, "It didn't happen. There's no way." When asked about the deaths of her colleagues, Bishop replied, "There's no way. They're still alive."
Police interviewed Bishop's husband, Jimmy Anderson, after it was determined that she had called him to pick her up after the shooting; they did not charge him. The couple were seen leaving their home with duffel bags on Friday afternoon before the shooting. Anderson said that Bishop had borrowed the gun used in the shooting and that he had escorted her to an indoor shooting range in the weeks before the incident.
Shortly after Bishop's arrest, there was concern that she had "booby trapped the science building with a 'herpes bomb'" intended to spread the virus. She had worked with the herpes virus during her postdoctoral studies, and had written a novel describing the spread of a virus similar to herpes throughout the world. The police had already searched the premises, finding only the murder weapon.
Victims
Three faculty members were killed and three others injured. Only a few students were in the building at the time of the shooting, and none were harmed. A memorial service was held at UAH on February 19, 2010, with 3,000 people in attendance.
Perpetrator
Amy Bishop (born April 24, 1965; age 44 at the time of the shooting) grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts, attended Braintree High School, and completed her undergraduate degree at Northeastern University in Boston, where her father, Samuel Bishop, was a professor in the art department. In 1989 she married James (Jim) Anderson and they have four children.
Bishop earned her Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University in 1993, for the dissertation "The role of methoxatin (PQQ) in the respiratory burst of phagocytes". Her research interests included induction of adaptive resistance to nitric oxide in the central nervous system and utilization of motor neurons for the development of neural circuits grown on biological computer chips.
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Bishop joined the faculty of UAH's Department of Biological Sciences as an assistant professor in 2003; she was teaching five courses before the shooting. Previously, she was an instructor at Harvard Medical School. She and her husband's "portable cell incubator" came in third in a technology competition, winning $25,000. Prodigy Biosystems, where Anderson is employed, raised $1.25 million to develop the automated cell incubator. UAH president David Williams considered that the incubator would "change the way biological and medical research is conducted", but some scientists consulted by the press declared it unnecessary and too expensive.
Bishop, a second cousin of the novelist John Irving, had written three unpublished novels. One featured a woman scientist working to defeat a pandemic virus, and struggling with suicidal thoughts at the prospect of not earning tenure. According to The New Yorker profile, the novels "reveal a deep preoccupation with the concept of deliverance from sin". Bishop was a member of the Hamilton Writer's Group while living in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the late 1990s and was said to believe that writing would be "her ticket out of academia". Members said she "would frequently cite her Harvard degree and family ties to Irving to boost her credential as a serious writer". Another member described her as smart but abrasive in her interactions and as feeling "entitled to praise". Bishop had a literary agent but had not published any books.
Several colleagues had expressed concern over Bishop's behavior. They described her as a "strange" and "crazy" person who interrupted meetings with "left-field kind of stuff". One of these colleagues was a member of Bishop's tenure review committee. After her tenure was denied and she learned that this colleague had called her "crazy", Bishop filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging sex discrimination, citing the professor's remark as possible evidence.
The professor was given the opportunity to back off the claim, or to say it was a flippant remark. But he didn't. "I said she was crazy multiple times and I stand by that", the professor said. "This woman has a pattern of erratic behavior. She did things that weren't normal ... she was out of touch with reality."
Bishop was reportedly a poor instructor and unpopular among her students. She dismissed several graduate students from her lab, and others sought transfers out. In 2009, several UAH students said they complained to administrators about Bishop on at least three occasions, saying she was "ineffective in the classroom and had odd, unsettling ways". A petition signed by "dozens of students" was sent to the department head. The complaints did not result in any classroom changes. Also in 2009, Bishop published an article in International Journal of General Medicine, "widely regarded as a vanity press", listing her husband and three eldest children as co-authors. The article was later removed from the journal website.
Tenure denial and appeal
As explained by the university president Williams, because Bishop had been denied tenure in March 2009, she could not expect to have her teaching contract renewed after March 2010. She appealed the decision to UAH's administration. Without reviewing the content of the tenure application, the administration determined that the process was carried out according to policy, and they denied her appeal. The routine faculty meeting at which Bishop opened fire was unrelated to her tenure.
Bishop's husband said the denial of tenure had been "an issue" in recent months, and described the tenure process as "a long, basically hard fight". He said that it was his understanding that Bishop "exceeded the qualifications for tenure," and that she was distressed at the likelihood of losing her position, barring a successful appeal. Bishop approached members of the University of Alabama System's board of trustees and hired a lawyer who was "finding one problem after another with the process". One point of dispute was whether two of her papers had been published in time to count toward tenure. Bishop, who gave more weight to obtaining patents than publishing papers, reportedly received several warnings that she needed to have more publications to receive tenure.
Previous incidents
Brother's shooting
On December 9, 1986, Bishop, then 21 years old, murdered her 18-year-old brother Seth at their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. She fired two shots from a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun (one into her bedroom wall upstairs and one into Seth's chest in the kitchen). Later, she pointed the gun at a moving vehicle on the adjacent road and tried to get into the vehicle.
Bishop and her mother told police the shooting had been an accident. Police found a live round in the gun's chamber, meaning that Bishop must have racked its slide after shooting her brother. After a brief inquiry into the incident by the Massachusetts State Police in 1986 (reported in 1987), they repeated the Braintree police department's initial assessment that the shooting was accidental. Then-Norfolk County District Attorney Bill Delahunt, later elected to the United States House of Representatives, did not file charges. Detailed records of the shooting had disappeared by 1988. Braintree police chief Paul Frazier said on February 13, 2010, "The report's gone, removed from the files."
After speaking with officers involved with the case in 1986, Frazier called the "accident" description inaccurate. He and others said that then-chief John Polio had ordered Bishop released to her mother Judy, who was allegedly a political supporter of the chief as a member of the Braintree town meeting. They said that Bishop had demanded to meet with Polio personally after the arrest instead of being charged for the shooting. Frazier was not on duty during the incident but recalled "how frustrated the members of the department were over the release" of Bishop.
Other officers, Frazier said, believed that Polio had "fix[ed] a murder", resulting in "a miscarriage of justice. Just because it was a friend of his." The retired Polio denied that there had been a cover-up. Frazier's 2010 account and the 1987 Massachusetts State Police report differ in several key details, including saying that Bishop had been arguing with her brother before the shooting when the rest of the family testified it was her father.
On February 16, 2010, Braintree officials announced that the files previously missing had been found. Then-Norfolk County District Attorney Bill Keating – himself elected to the House of Representatives later that year to replace Delahunt – concluded that probable cause existed in 1986 to arrest and charge Bishop for crimes committed after she fled the house. She had taken the shotgun to a nearby auto dealership shop and brandished it at two employees in an attempt to get a car. Bishop could have been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, carrying a dangerous weapon, and unlawful possession of ammunition. The statute of limitations had expired on these charges.
The most serious charge considered in 1986 was manslaughter. Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick ordered the state police to review their investigation, saying, "It is critical that we provide as clear an understanding as possible about all aspects of this case and its investigation to ensure that where mistakes were made they are not repeated in the future." An investigation was opened in which the state cooperated with the Norfolk County District Attorney's office to assess the handling of the case by the state, the local police, and the then-district attorney.