What does the year 1976 make you think of? Let me guess: bell bottoms, playing outside, spending the night at your friend's house and carnivals. Lots of American families were still in tact and dads were working to provide for their families.
A man by the name of William Bradford Bishop was born on August 1, 1936. As the years went by, Bishop learned to love camping, fishing, swimming, tennis, skis, and motorcycles. He was also an amateur pilot. His personality was known to be very intense, self-absorbing, and a perfectionist. Bishop was a former high school football player who met a cheerleader by the name of Annette Weiss.
After graduating from high school, he ended up attending Yale University to take American Studies.
While at Yale, he struggled in college with his grades.
Bishop was known as an underachiever and he had a tough time paying for college. He had to leave his junior year and go work while digging ditches to save enough money for him to pay for his senior year.
Once Bishop graduated, he ended up enlisting in the military knowing that it could be a steady paycheck. He also married his high school sweetheart Annette. Knowing that he went to Yale University, he was allowed to come in as an officer in the military. Bishop was also very well known to be fluent in many languages and one in particular was Italian.
When Bradley was being shipped off to Italy to intercept transmissions, his first son was born and they named him after him. Bishop's wife and new son ended up moving to Italy. While in Italy, Bishop did postings in Verona, Milan and Florence. Once he left the Army, he ended up joining the US State Department and served in Foreign Service. He also joinedthe CIA after the Army.
While in the CIA, he ended up being a spy and doing secretive, mysterious missions through Yugoslavia and the Soviets. One of his jobs was working as a liaison for the CIA base in Germany. He got a ton of praise and he was put on the ground for spy work. Bishop was very intense and competitive but sometimes he would end up slacking off on looking up documents.
In between this time, there were two more boys that were born. One was named Brent and the other one was named Jeffrey.
During the spring of 1964, he decided to go on vacation for 16 days to Yugoslavia. This was a very unusual trip for Bishop but to this day they still don't know why he had gone there. Was he there spying?
In 1967, he ended up acting like a lunatic and the people at the CIA recognized that something was very wrong.
During this time, Bradley and Annette seem to be living above their means. Bradley started blaming Annette for their financial issues. She didn't know how to handle the money he said. Then, at the same time, Bishop was having an affair and he was starting to slack at work. Instead of going to work, he was going to play tennis.
In 1970, the Bishops ended up leaving Italy and went back to California. Bishop was having trouble getting other assignments and this put a strain on their marriage financially.
Bishop ended up getting another job in Botswana, so the whole family including his mother ended up moving there. He was struggling and he started seeing a therapist. Annette started having frequent panic attacks and Bishop hurt his back. The boys really missed the States.
During this time, Annette was starting to get sick and she was really struggling with Bradley. Her husband had referred to her as a chief slave. Annette was finally starting to make something of herself and Bradley was starting to lose control. He didn't get posted anywhere. Frank Caprio, who was a friend of Bradley, had said that he had had two more additional affairs. Bradley had started getting embarrassed because his mother was starting to help them financially and the family was audited by the IRS.
Eventually, this was going to catch up with Bradley.
One day, he was on his motorcycle and he had a feeling that maybe he was going to get fired. So, he went to the local bank and drained the last $400 that the family had.
This was the beginning of what was to come for the rest of the Bishop family.
To be continued...
On March 1, 1976, Bradley Bishop ended up leaving work early and saying he was sick. Bishop ended up going to the local ATM and taking out all of the last of the cash that they had in the bank which was $400.
Annette had just enrolled Jeffrey in kindergarten and the boys were at school on that day. Bishop ended up leaving in the family station wagon and he swung by a gas station. While at the gas station, he filled up a gas can and picked up a shovel and pickax. Also, he went to the hardware store where he bought a hammer.
Bishop was home by nine, and when he arrived, Pino, or William Jr., was talking to his girlfriend, somewhere between 9 and 10 PM.
From what investigators had gathered, Annette must've been killed first on the futon because her skull was caved in by a hammer. Next was Pino and he was beaten to death. After that, the brain autopsy report showed that Brent and Jeff were next. According to the local Sheriff Popkin, the last person to be murdered was his mother.
The neighbor had noticed that there was no sight of life in that house, so they went to visit but noticed that no one was home or that's what she thought. That neighbor alerted police about her intuition about something being off at the Bishop residence. That neighbor also gave the police the spare keys to the house.
Tons of investigators began canvassing the area and while driving up the driveway, which was covered by a lot of trees, they found blood in their path to the house. When the investigator's head opened up the door to the Bishop's house, it was full of blood and brain matter. Three of the bedrooms and the master had been the places where the murders had taken place.
The coroner ended up cleaning up four out of five of the victims and took pictures except for Pino. His face was unrecognizable and it looked like it had been hit with the shovel that Bishop had bought at the hardware store.
At the time, the Bishop family car was spotted 300 miles away in Columbia, North Carolina somewhere between 930 and 10 AM. He was missing from the scene and they had found a fingerprint on the gas can. The investigators ended up taking a sample of that fingerprint and it matched Bradley Bishop's.
When the car was spotted 300 miles away, a man by the name of Ron Brickhouse spotted a fire in the area. He went to check it out where the house had smoke coming out of it, he came across a mass human grave. The bodies that were in that grave were the Bishop's family except for Bradley. They used dental records, jewelry, and clothing to identify them.
While, at the house, Bradley's PJs were found. It looked like he had cleaned himself up and then eventually loaded the bodies into his car. He kept his dog, Leo, alive, and the dog was in the front seat. Around 9 AM, he drove to Columbia, which was known as logging land, and it seemed to be an easy place to get lost.
The land where the bodies were found was across from Harvey Point near a CIA training facility. Bishop allegedly tried to dig a grave close to the ocean, where he dragged the bodies and then quickly started it on fire.
From there, Bishop drove to Jacksonville, North Carolina, where he was seen buying a new pair of shoes, with a woman of Caribbean descent.
Bishop's car was discovered on March 18 in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. Allegedly, there were clues left in his car that a search and rescue team had found.
The question was, did Bishop actually vanish out of the Great Smoky Mountains?
Eventually, this murder mystery was put on the FBI's top 10 most wanted on April 10 with a $100,000 reward for tips leading to an arrest. Again, William Bradford Bishop was thought to have killed his three sons, his wife, and his mother. What's ironic with all this was that there were no tips that panned out, and everything just seemed odd with this case.
There were plenty of sightings that people who had thought was Bishop and some had wondered if they had seen him in other countries other than the United States. There were a lot of hypotheticals that Bishop was actually dating a lot of different women, and that he had also traveled to California once the murders were done. There were plenty of conspiracies flying around about people who were helping Bishop from prison.
Two of those prisoners were known as David Paul Allen and Sunny.
The Investigator known as Ray Kight had reviewed the case in the 1990s. He had looked up Bishop's Social Security number and there were new hits that someone was using that number. It happened to be a man in California who was using the number and it was heavily looked into, but nothing panned out from this either.
In the meantime, there were two new investigators assigned to his case.
Ray Kight eventually finally retired. A new task force had been hired to keep new eyes on this case. This new task force had noticed that Bishop might've had a connection to a bike gang. There were rumors that the gang could've been involved with the killings of his family as well.
Again, so many accusations, but nothing turned up.
To some police, this case is closed. Friends of Bishop don't believe that he did it.
Going back to Ray Kight, who had done some investigating on Bishop, he was wondering if Bishop was involved in experiments where he was being used for experimental drug trials. The documents on his alleged experiments were destroyed on these American citizens and maybe even Bishop. Prisoners were also involved in this too.
Kight also thought the FBI was involved. It seemed like someone did not want Kight digging too much more into it. A woman by the name of Carolyn Banks wrote about Bishop. She was heavily inspired by the case, and she even wrote a book about it. She had to be very careful. Some drifter had shown up on her property for an exchange of housing. This drifter had directed her to the CIA, and the whole scenario was very odd.
Ironically, a strange letter popped up during the investigation of the Bishop murders. Allegedly, the letter came from a bank robber in prison and it was written to Bishop. The letter was written by A. Ken Bankston. That letter was postmarked on March 15, 1976. It was opened by the secretary and placed in the Bishops' files. In this letter, there was a passport for Bankston and how to hire a killer. Also, the two people, David Paul Allen and Sunny, who were said to have helped Bishop in the murder were involved in this letter. There was so much being stirred up about this letter and that Summy had been the leader of the Southern Mafia.
So many rumors about how these two were connected to Bishop.
Again, there was no proof and in 1983 Bankston died of cancer. Knowing that the investigators wanted to solve this crime, but now Bankston was dead, hopes of solving this case were slowly diminishing.Investigators had followed up on 480 leads. Many people came forward after Bishop was put on the FBI's most wanted list.
A grand jury indicted Bishop in 1976. The investigators who were on the case were hoping to move forward on this case, but that was not happening.
According to Steve Vogt, Special Agent in charge of the FBI Baltimore Division, "Nothing has changed since March 2nd, 1976 when Bishop was last seen, except the passage of time."
So many people thought this family was perfect.
Sheriff Popkin has been haunted by these murders for 48 long years. With all the information they had on Bishop, people were perplexed that he was still free. Hopefully, someone will come forward to help solve this case.
Written By: Heidi
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