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Exhumed body in Alabama could be notorious Bethesda fugitive Brad Bishop Exhumed body in Alabama could be notorious Bethesda fugitive Brad Bishop
(about 2 hours later)
Authorities in Alabama on Thursday exhumed the body of a man believed to be a notorious fugitive who has been missing since being accused of killing his family in Bethesda nearly 40 years ago. For nearly 40 years, the legend of Bethesda fugitive Bradford Bishop carried an air of not just evil brutality but refined sophistication.
The subject of a 1981 coroner’s photograph resembles Bradford Bishop, a one-time diplomat who has been wanted since he viciously attacked his mother, wife and his three young sons. They were all beaten to death with a small sledgehammer. This was a man suspected of killing his family with a small sledgehammer in 1976 and setting their corpses on fire. Then he vanished, taking with him fluency in five languages, the experience of a world traveler for the State Department and a fondness for playing tennis, flying airplanes and drinking Scotch.
But the man in the photograph has long been unidentified. On Oct. 18, 1981, he was walking down Highway 72 in Scottsboro, Ala., when a car hit and killed him, according to court filings. He had no identification and was assigned the name John Doe. A coroner took a photograph of the man before he was buried. There were alleged sightings: a public park in Stockholm, a restroom in Sorrento, Italy, a train station in Basel, Switzerland.
That photo got investigators’ attention because it bears a striking resemblance to Bishop, who had a cleft chin, thin lips and sideburns, according to authorities. Now, in a potentiality stunning development in the case — centered in a municipally owned cemetery in the northeastern corner of Alabama — remains that were exhumed Thursday may tell a different story. Bishop could be the heretofore unidentified man called John Doe, who was struck by a car while walking down a highway in 1981, a person who appeared to homeless, who’d worn several layers of heavy, dirty clothes and weighed just 155 pounds.
Paul Daymond, a spokesman for the FBI office in Birmingham, Ala., said he expected forensic comparisons to take at least two weeks. “After all these years,” said Montgomery County Sheriff Darren Popkin, “if we can confirm this is him, there is some irony with the fact he was run over by a car without a penny in his pocket.”
After killing his family, Bishop loaded the bodies into the family’s maroon Chevy station wagon, police say, drove 275 miles to a swampy and wooded part of North Carolina, dug a shallow grave and set the corpses on fire. Bishop’s station wagon was later found in North Carolina at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) — some 207 miles from Scottsboro. Workers used shovels and machinery to lift a vault and casket out of the ground in Scottsboro, Ala. They took the casket to a funeral home. Forensic experts opened it and saw bones, a small amount of hair and pieces of clothing, said Lt. Erik Dohring of the Scottsboro Police Department. They took samples and will send them to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., for DNA comparisons. Results are expected in two to four weeks.
“Bishop was an avid outdoorsman and had extensive camping experience in Africa and could have avoided being seen,” court records state. “The GSMNP encompasses 522,419 acres and has 850 miles of hiking trails. Bishop could have remained in the North Carolina/Tennessee/Alabama area for many years without being discovered.” The story of how John Doe might be Bishop involves a reopened missing persons case, DNA extracted from Bishop’s shaving kit, the CNN show “The Hunt With John Walsh” and a 32-year-old TV viewer in Scottsboro who works for a sign company and has an uncanny memory.
On Tuesday, law enforcement officials filed an affidavit and an exhumation request in Jackson County, Ala., for John Doe’s body. For years, a weather-battered headstone sat in the Cedar Hill Cemetery.
The tip about John Doe came after the airing of a recent CNN episode about the Bishop case on “The Hunt with John Walsh,” which produced numerous leads. “UNKNOWN WHITE MALE
Authorities said they want to compare John Doe’s DNA to a sample of Bishop’s DNA, which was taken from evidence originally collected in the case. DIED OCT. 18, 1981
John D. Jordan, the coroner in Jackson County, Ala., who is not directly involved in the case, said he has looked at the 1981 photograph of John Doe and compared it with a photograph of Bishop. DUE TO ACCIDENT ON HWY 72 E.
Jordan was particularly struck by similarities in the size of the heads and other features. “The receding hairline and eyebrows just look so clear and so much alike,” he said. SCOTTSBORO, ALABAMA
Those similarities, coupled with John Doe being struck by a car in the same part of the country where Bishop’s car was found, adds to Jordan’s sense that the body is that of Bishop. “To me, there’s really too many coincidences,” he said. BURIED NOV. 11, 1981
Jordan served as chief deputy coroner in Jackson County for 20 years and coroner for nine years. The photo of John Doe, he said, indicates that the body was very well embalmed, which made the facial features clear. WITHOUT BEING IDENTIFIED.”
“If I was putting a percentage on it, I’m 90 percent sure this is going to be the guy,” he said. The nearly four-week period between death and burial reflected police efforts to identify the man.
As of noon Central time, Daymond said, the body of John Doe was taken to a funeral home in Scottsboro. Officials from the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences will also try to take samples for dental comparisons and fingerprint comparisons. “It all depends on the decomposition of the body,” Daymond said. Late last year, officials at the Scottsboro Police Department decided to make another push to identify the man, using a photograph of John Doe taken by a county coroner.
The samples will be sent to a FBI lab in Quantico, Va., Daymond said. The image was published in the Daily Sentinel newspaper, which was read by Jeremy Collins, who works as a salesman for his family-run sign company. Months later, Collins and his wife sat down to watch TV and flipped their way to “The Hunt,” a new show that was airing a special on the Bishop case.
“They’ll work it as expeditiously as possible,” Daymond said, adding, “It’s not ‘CSI Miami.’ ” Collins was struck by the savagery of the crime.
Daymond said he, too, was struck by the similarities between the photograph of John Doe and the photograph of Brad Bishop. “There’s certainly a striking resemblance to Mr. Bishop, and that’s why we’re here,” Daymond said, speaking by phone from Scottsboro. Bishop, a Foreign Service officer, had for no apparent reason allegedly slaughtered his family in their Bethesda home, sneaked the bodies into a station wagon under darkness, drove to North Carolina, dug a shallow grave, dumped the bodies inside and ignited them. The car was found about three weeks later at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park along the North Carolina-Tennessee border.
News that John Doe could be Bishop came as a surprise to Roy A. Harrell Jr., a retired State Department Foreign Services officer who has long said he saw Bishop at a public restroom in Sorrento, Italy, in the late 1970s. And something else struck Collins: The photo of Bishop taken in the 1970s.
Reached at his home in Ozona, Tex., on Thursday, Harrell said the best conclusion he could draw — if John Doe turns out to be Bishop — is that Bishop must have come back to the United States, perhaps across the Canadian or Mexican border. “You know,” he remembers telling his wife, “that looks like the guy who was in the Daily Sentinel.”
Harrell, who knew Bishop from work, said he remains “85 to 90 percent” sure he saw Bishop in the Sorrento restroom. Harrell said he was washing his hands when he saw a bearded man next to him drying his hands. He turned on his computer, called up the story and had his hunch confirmed. He called the number given out by the CNN program and, the next day, with printouts of the two photographs in hand, paid a call to Scottsboro Police Chief Ralph Dawe. “You can see the resemblance, can’t you?” Collins asked him.
“I just stripped off the beard in my mind’s eye,” Harrell said, recalling how he was convinced it was Bishop and that he had grown a beard. The chief could, and called Popkin, the Montgomery sheriff.
Harrell said he told the man, in English, “Hey, you’re Brad Bishop.” “The similarities were incredible,” Popkin recalled, noting what appeared to be matches of the hairline, nose, chin, some kind of growth above an eye and the earlobe.
To which, the man responded, in English, “Oh God, no.” Popkin called Stephen Vogt, the FBI agent in charge of the Baltimore field office.
Then he dashed out into a rainstorm, Harrell, now 79, recalled. FBI agents in Alabama began probing what they could about John Doe. Records were incomplete, but an agent was able to speak with a funeral home worker who remembered the case — the mangled legs, the layers of clothing, the appearance of homelessness.
Over the years, Harrell said, he has told that story at least 15 times to law enforcement officers and reporters. The match between John Doe and Bishop isn’t perfect.
Harrell is convinced that Bishop murdered his family. He said that if Bishop is the person who was run over by a car, that would be a fitting ending for him: “I would be thrilled and delighted myself. I think it would be good riddance.” When Bishop, 40, disappeared, he was described as 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds, with brown eyes. John Doe was estimated to be 55, 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds, with blue eyes.
Harrell said he knew Bishop in the 1960s and recalled eating dinner with Bishop and his mother and family in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1965 or 1966. His mother was telling Bishop that he would get his comeuppance for his rude treatment of others. But the difference in height could have been because of John Doe’s crumpled legs from the highway incident. The blue-eye report could have been a false assumption made in 1981. As for the age difference, according to the FBI, it could have been related to the man’s lifestyle.
Regarding the possibility of Bishop being run over by a car, Harrell said, “I would think that is what his mother referred to as his comeuppance.” “If John Doe spent several years living on the streets and running from authorities, he likely would have appeared older than his actual age,” agent Pamela Hanson wrote in an affidavit. “The difference in weight, 155 lbs. verses [sic] 180 lbs., could also be explained by John Doe spending years living on the streets.”
At the Montgomery County Police Department, detective Brian Stafford has spent two years on the Bishop case. In recent months, he said, authorities looked for Bishop in Michigan, Mexico and Cambodia. Tipsters had been struck by the similarity between someone they’d seen and “age-enhanced” images, including a sculpture, of what Bishop might look like today.
What’s appealing about the Alabama case, Stafford said, is that the photograph was taken only five years after a known image of Bishop.
“That’s what makes this a little bit stronger,” he said.
That John Doe was hit by a vehicle 200 miles from where Bishop’s car was recovered doesn’t strike Stafford as a big deal. There is an indication that John Doe had been hitchhiking, and five years is a long time for him to have covered a lot of distance.
Bishop was an avid outdoorsman who liked to hike and camp. He could have survived in the Smoky Mountains area.
Stafford said that earlier this year, detectives were able to get a good DNA sample lifted off a shaving kit and razor found in Bishop’s station wagon. The problem: It could have been someone else’s DNA. But detectives had blood cards from the Bishop family members whose bodies were found in North Carolina. They used that evidence to confirm the shaving kit/razor DNA was Bishop’s, and are confident they know his DNA profile.
“It might be him. And we’re going to know in about two weeks,” Stafford said.
The detective said he will have mixed reactions if there is a match.
The case will be solved, so that’s good, he said. But if it is a match, Bishop never had to face trial and never had to answer for what happened to his family.
“If this is him, he didn’t get punished,” Stafford said. “It’s too quick and too easy.”
Dana Hedgpeth contributed to this report.
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