On March 1, 1976, Foreign Service Officer William Bradford Bishop (08/01/36) killed his entire family down the street in Potomac: three sons (Billy 14, Brenton 10 & Geoffrey 5), wife Annette 37 and mother Lobelia 68. Only Leo the family dog survived the slaughter. The boys were part of the neighborhood and Brad played tennis with the other dads.
Driving home after track practice on March 8th there was a surreal scene in front of the Bishop residence: fire trucks, police and reporters crowding the street. Apparently, neighbors had finally called the police after not seeing the family for days. Police reports later described blood soaked sheets and mattresses with a scarlet trail leading from the front door to the driveway where Brad loaded the bodies of his family into the station wagon, wrapping them in a tarp. He apparently killed his wife with a sledgehammer first, then the boys in their beds. He killed his mother when she returned from walking the dog. It’s as if a dark cloud swept through the neighborhood: Beware the Ides of March.
He bought the mini-sledgehammer with which he killed his family and the can he filled with gas to burn them at Montgomery Mall. He bought the shovel and pitchfork to bury them at a Potomac hardware. After driving south through the night, Brad Bishop buried his entire family in a shallow grave just outside Columbia, N.C. and then set them alight. The fire attracted rangers who discovered the grisly scene on March 2nd. Dental records eventually identified the burned and bludgeoned bodies.
On March 18th Bishop’s ’74 Chevy wagon was found 400 miles away outside Elkmont, Tennessee in Smoky Mountains National Park, close to an Appalachian trailhead. No trace of Leo was ever found except for biscuits left in the station wagon. Also in the wagon was a shotgun and shells, a vile of the anti-depressant Serax and a spare tire well full of dried blood. It is one of the greatest disappearing acts of all time, although neighbors and colleagues have seen Brad across Europe over the decades: Stockholm, Sorrento & Basel in particular.
At the time of the murders, Brad was the Assistant Chief of Special Trade Activity and Commercial Treaties at the State Department. He graduated from Yale in 1959 then joined the Army for a four-year stint in counterintelligence. Brad joined the Foreign Service in 1963, serving in Addis Ababa, Milan, Verona, Florence and Gaborone before returning Stateside. He received a M.A. in Italian from Middlebury College (Florence) and was also sent to UCLA for a Masters in African Studies.
A colleague at the State Department, Roy A. Harrell, Jr., claimed in a Crime Watch Daily interview that he spoke with a distraught Brad as he was departing work after not making the promotion list on March 1st.
Brad said, “Well, I think I’m getting the flu.”
Harrell replied, “Well, go home, it’s a long weekend, let’s get together next week.”
Brad said, “Yeah, if there is a next week.”
Harrell concludes the interview by stating the obvious, “That was a very curious comment.” Harrell also mentioned Brad had a volatile temper, saying he once admitted, “Sometimes I just lose control.”
He added that Brad’s wife and mother did not want to go overseas and that the latter held the family’s purse strings. “He was resentful that they were retarding his career,” Harrell said.
Harrell is also one the individuals who had seen Brad in Europe. He described washing his hands in a Sorrento men’s room in 1994 when a disheveled, bearded man entered. “Hey, you’re Brad Bishop aren’t you,” he said, recognizing him immediately.
“Oh God, no,” Brad responded before running off into a driving rainstorm.
Harrell said, “I followed him and I caught myself, I thought you are dealing with a man who is charged with murder,” so stopped his pursuit.
Harrell reported the incident to the authorities, but they did nothing.
Brad Bishop had been taking Serax (a benzodiazepine) for a year at the time of the murders. His third psychiatrist prescribed it for the depression, anxiety and insomnia that had apparently plagued him since an initial doctor’s visit while attending UCLA from 1970-71. Some of the side effects of Serax are hallucination, confusion, aggression and anger. When questioned by a Honolulu Advertiser reporter why he had closed his practice and returned to military service following the murders, Brad’s last psychiatrist answered: “If he turns up, he could sue me.” A piece in the New American published on 10/5/2017 states: “According to the 2015 World Psychology Study of 960 Finnish people convicted of homicide, the odds of killing are higher in individuals on benzodiazepines.” It continues: “The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International notes that at least 36 school shootings have been committed by those either taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs.”
Brad’s diary turned up in a Greensboro flea market in 2000, having been included in an estate sale just months after the murders. A woman bought it and brought several of his passages to the attention of authorities, one of which from February 2nd, 1967, reads: “Toxic, degenerative psychosis, chronic low-level mania, involutional megalomania,” seemingly describing the mental illness he’d experienced as an adult.
Apparently Brad first tried to hire someone to murder his family before doing the deed himself. In 2010 the FBI released several letters between Brad and an incarcerated bank robber named Albert Kenneth Bankston, who died in 1983. The letters are from the months leading up to the murders and discuss the killing of the Bishop family in exchange for a clean passport. After reading the letters, Montgomery County Sheriff Ray Kight spoke with two of the individuals mentioned. One of them, David Paul Allen, was interviewed over the phone from prison, stating Bradford had paid him and others in cash and jewelry. The plan was for the killers to act as repairmen in order to murder his family while Brad was on a business trip to Geneva from January 27th to February 6th, 1976.
One of the riddles of the crime was why he chose to bury his family in woods five miles south of Columbia, North Carolina, almost three hundred miles from Bethesda. A clue may lie in the Bankston letters. The bank robber cryptically replied to a Bradford question: “Now, in answer to your question, yes, I am most sure she is in the North Carolina State Penitentiary.” Coupled with Jacksonville Outside Sports owner John Wheatley’s description of Brad and a 5’6” dark-skinned woman of medium-heavy build entering his store to purchase a new pair of tennis shoes with a credit card the morning after he buried his family, it appears he may have had help. Leo the dog was also with him at the sports store.
There is speculation Brad was an undercover CIA agent given his career began in Army intelligence following graduation from Yale. After learning Serbo-Croatian at the military’s Monterey language school, his first assignment was running sensitive missions to Communist Yugoslavia in the early sixties. An early resume states he was a liaison officer between the Army and CIA in Germany. In a 1998 Fred Francis Today Show piece investigating the murders, Nicky Ray, a former colleague at the US Embassy in Gaborone, Botswana, states emphatically that Brad was CIA.
In the same investigative piece, Sheriff Kight claims he found a State Department document mentioning the CIA produced a damage assessment of the murders on March 25th, 1976. He filed a FOIA request with the CIA seeking a copy of the damage assessment but, “They denied having any knowledge of Mr. Bishop.” Sheriff Kight’s theory is, “Someone assisted him to escape justice in this case. He’s had some help from very high up people in the CIA and they are possibly hiding him out.”
The Harvey Point Defense Testing Facility is a joint national security facility across Albemarle Sound from Columbia, historically used by the clandestine service for training. A paragraph from the New York Times from March 9, 1976 suggests Brad Bishop was quite familiar with the area: “Their bodies were found the next day in a shallow grave near Columbia, N.C., where the family once lived.”
Fred Francis concludes his piece by asking, “The CIA lied to you Sheriff?”
“In my opinion, yes,” Sheriff Kight replied.
© 2021 James B. Angell All Rights Reserved
Grisly! Would CIA protect one of their own, even after such a crime? And if so, why?