Amy Bishop

PhD, Harvard University

Amy Bishop was born in 1965 in Massachusetts. She attended the unpleasantly-but-perhaps-appropriately-named Braintree High School and obtained her undergraduate degree at Northeastern University. She then went on to acquire a PhD in genetics at Harvard. That can’t be easy—and, indeed, Bishop was rather proud of her accomplishment. Perhaps too proud; she frequently introduced herself to strangers as “Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard-trained.” The “Dr.” part would have been off-putting enough. The “Harvard-trained” part opens a door to a world of crazy.

So it was that, on February 12, 2010, Harvard-trained Dr. Amy Bishop was attending a routine meeting of the biology department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). She had, months earlier, been informed that she had been denied tenure, which meant that the university would soon be letting her go. Perhaps for this reason—or who knows?—she pulled out a 9-millimeter handgun and started shooting. In the end, three people were killed and three others wounded. When apprehended, Bishop murmured that she didn’t know what had happened and “wasn’t there.”

Of course, she was there, just as she was there, in her family’s home in (again) Braintree in 1986, when she was twenty-one and killed her brother Seth with a shotgun. She fired the gun twice, once into her bedroom wall, and once into Seth’s chest. She and her mother claimed it was an accident, and so it was ruled—although eyebrows were raised when it was discovered that after the shooting she had racked the weapon, ejecting the spent shell and feeding a new one into the chamber. (We don’t know about you, but when we accidentally shoot someone, the first thing we do is drop the weapon in dismay. We don’t reload.)

Bishop, a second cousin of writer John Irving, was also an amateur novelist with three (unpublished) books to her credit. She was in a writers’ club in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, where fellow club members described her as being smart but “abrasive,” apt to invoke her Harvard degree to boost her novelist bona fides and constantly insisting that she was “entitled to praise.”

It’s all terrible. But surely, between the brother and the three UAH victims, that’s all… right?

Well… there’s also the Pipe Bomb Incident.

In 1993, Paul Rosenberg was a professor at Harvard Medical School. He was also Bishop’s supervisor at the Children’s Hospital neurobiology lab. Bishop was concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg. On November 30 she quit her position as Rosenberg’s researcher. On December 19, opening the mail, Rosenberg came upon a package bearing six suspiciously uncanceled stamps. Having recently attended a seminar on letter bombs (discussing, among other Harvard grads, The Unabomber), Rosenberg summoned the bomb squad, which determined that the package would have exploded in the scientist’s face had he opened it.

Was this Bishop’s doing? Perhaps, aided by her milquetoast-nerd husband, James (called “Jimmy Junior” by everyone except his hoity-toity wife) Anderson? According to case notes at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Anderson said that he wanted to get back at Rosenberg, to “shoot him, bomb him, stab him,” or perhaps “strangle” him. But talk is cheap, and due to lack of evidence, no charges were filed.

“Okay,” you find yourself thinking, “This poor woman was obviously mentally or emotionally damaged—a borderline personality, maybe—and it’s enough already. Just don’t tell me she punched a woman in the International House of Pancakes.”

Sorry. That, too. In 2002, in Peabody, Massachusetts, Bishop grew outraged when another customer got the last booster seat,* stormed over to her, and began to rant and scream and curse. When that proved unavailing, she slugged the lady in the head, screaming, “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” Bishop pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct. She received probation.

Eight years later she changed her plea in the Alabama murder case from not guilty to guilty when relatives of the UAH victims indicated that they opposed the death penalty. On September 24, 2010, Harvard-trained Dr. Amy Bishop was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.