On the afternoon of February 12, 2010, Amy Bishop, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), sat through most of a routine department meeting without speaking. As it ended she stood, took a 9mm pistol from her handbag and shot the colleagues nearest to her. Three died: the department chair, Gopi K. Podila, and the professors Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. Three more were wounded. When she turned the gun on a fourth professor, Debra Moriarity, it jammed. The shooting lasted less than a minute. Bishop was arrested outside the building minutes later.
The next morning a police chief in Massachusetts phoned the sheriff's department in Huntsville with a message about the woman in custody: "she shot and killed her brother back in 1986." That shooting, in the family's kitchen in Braintree, had been ruled an accident, and no one had been charged. Within months a Massachusetts judge held an inquest and a grand jury indicted Bishop for the first-degree murder of her brother, Seth. She was never tried on that charge. In 2012 she pleaded guilty in Alabama to capital murder and was sentenced to life without parole, and Massachusetts prosecutors then withdrew the indictment, saying the penalty they would have sought was already in place.
The two cases stand on very different ground. The Huntsville killings are proven by her own guilty plea and a jury verdict. The death of Seth Bishop has never been decided by any court: she was charged and indicted, she has always said it was an accident, and her mother, the only other person in the kitchen, and her father have always said the same.
Amy Bishop was born in 1965 in Iowa City, where her father, Sam Bishop, was doing graduate work in fine arts at the University of Iowa, according to Patrick Radden Keefe's 2013 account in The New Yorker. Sam had been born Sotir Papazoglos and raised by Greek immigrants in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her mother, Judy, née Sanborn, came from an old New England family in Exeter, New Hampshire; the two had met at art school in Boston. The family returned to Massachusetts when Sam took a teaching job in the art department at Northeastern University, and in 1968 they settled in Braintree, a suburb south of Boston, in a Victorian house at 46 Hollis Avenue. Seth was born later that year.
Judy Bishop was active in town life. She served on Town Meeting, Braintree's elected representative body, and drew editorial cartoons for the local paper. Amy was asthmatic as a child and, by her own later account, was drawn to science by a wish to find a cure. Both children played the violin. Friends from those years told Keefe the siblings were close, and Bishop herself, speaking to him from prison, said that she and her brother had loved each other.
Seth Bishop was 18 in December 1986. Friends remembered him as curious and self-possessed: he built a model railroad in the attic, explored the region by bicycle with a map and a pen, and once silenced a group of middle-school bullies who mocked his violin case by taking out the instrument and playing it. Several of his friends, then men in their forties, wept when they spoke of him to Keefe. Amy, three years older, was studying at Northeastern.
In 1985 the family home was burglarized while they were at a wake. Sam Bishop then bought a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, which he kept unloaded in his bedroom closet, with shells nearby. Judy and Amy objected to having it in the house.
What happened in the kitchen on Saturday, December 6, 1986, is the part of this story that has never been tested in court. The following summarizes the accounts in the record.
According to the police reports released in 2010 and Keefe's reading of them, Amy was alone in the house that morning. Her mother had gone to stable a horse in Quincy, her father had left after what he described as a disagreement with Amy over a comment she had made, and Seth was out. Amy told police she had loaded the shotgun because she was afraid of burglars, that Seth had once shown her how to load it but not how to unload it, and that while trying to unload it in her bedroom she fired a shot into the wall. When her brother came home, she said, she went downstairs to ask for help. Her mother, who was in the kitchen, told her not to point the gun at anyone. Amy said she turned and the gun went off. The blast struck Seth in the chest. He was pronounced dead at the hospital that afternoon.
Amy left by the back door with the shotgun. According to the mechanics who were there, she walked into the body shop of a nearby car dealership, where a few off-duty workers were gathered on the closed Saturday, and demanded car keys. The men ran. Officers sent to find her came upon her outside the dealership. One talked to her while a second, Officer Timothy Murphy, approached from behind with his revolver drawn and shouted three times for her to drop the gun; on the third order she did. Police found a live round in the shotgun's chamber and another in her pocket. Because a pump-action shotgun must be worked by hand to chamber a new round after firing, Keefe concluded that she must have done so at some point after the shot that killed her brother.
She was taken to the Braintree police station. The watch commander, Lieutenant James Sullivan, read her her rights and began to question her. He later testified that he had begun the booking sheet with the words "murder, assault with a dangerous weapon, two counts." Within about 20 minutes, the Boston Globe reported from the inquest transcript, she was released without charge in the company of her mother.
How that release happened has been disputed for years. Kenneth Brady, a retired officer who drove Judy Bishop to the station, testified in 2010 that she asked to see the police chief, John Polio, and that officers were soon told not to book Amy and to release her to her parents. Another officer, Ronald Solimini, testified that Judy Bishop repeatedly asked for the chief by his first name. Sullivan told Keefe that a captain informed him that Judy Bishop had spoken with Polio, that the chief had accepted her account of an accident and ordered the release, and that Sullivan was told to obey.
Polio, who had been chief since 1962 and retired in 1987, denied all of it. In February 2010 he told the Associated Press that he had not instructed anyone to release Amy, that he was not close to her mother, and that there had been "no coverup, no missing records." Judy Bishop also denied having any friendship with Polio and said she never asked for him. Polio died in December 2010. His widow, Ginny, who had been his secretary in 1986, later told Keefe that a captain had briefed the chief that day without mentioning the dealership, and that Polio had simply agreed to send the case to the state police and the district attorney.
A medical examiner ruled the death accidental pending investigation. The case passed to Brian Howe, a state trooper assigned to the office of the Norfolk County district attorney, William Delahunt. Howe testified in 2010 that he offered to go to the scene and the station but was told the evidence had been processed, that Amy had already been released, and that interviews would be arranged later. He interviewed the family at their home on December 17, eleven days after the shooting, and testified that he made five or six requests for the Braintree police reports and photographs and was rebuffed. His final report, dated March 30, 1987, concluded that Seth died from "the accidental discharge of a firearm." It said nothing about the dealership or the standoff with police, which Howe said he did not know about.
Delahunt, by then a congressman, said in 2010 that had his office known about the events at the dealership it would probably have sought weapons charges and asked a judge to order a psychiatric evaluation. His former first assistant, John Kivlan, blamed both the Braintree police and Howe. The evidence held by Braintree, Kivlan said in a 2010 statement, would have gone to a grand jury, and an indictment for murder "could have resulted at that time."
Amy received no counseling after her brother's death, according to Keefe. She went back to Northeastern, earned strong grades, and seldom spoke of Seth. In 1989 she married James Anderson, a fellow Northeastern student she had met through a role-playing games group, at the church where Seth's wake had been held. The couple had four children: three daughters and, in 2001, a son, whom Bishop named Seth.
Bishop entered Harvard's doctoral program in genetics in 1988 and received her Ph.D. in 1993, after revising her thesis. Keefe reported that she found the program difficult and that one person familiar with her graduate work considered her a weak candidate. She then held a series of postdoctoral appointments, including one in a neurobiology laboratory at Children's Hospital Boston and postdoctoral work at the Harvard School of Public Health. In her spare time she wrote three unpublished novels whose scientist heroines, Keefe noted, were troubled by the death of a child.
In 2003 she joined UAH as an assistant professor of biology. The family moved to Huntsville, a city built around NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the defense and research industries. With her husband she developed a portable cell incubator, known as InQ, meant to replace bulkier laboratory equipment, and in July 2007 the couple placed third in a statewide university business plan competition, winning $25,000 to start a company. She appeared on the cover of a local research magazine in 2009 and was described in the press as an inventor.
Her academic record was thinner. Keefe reported that she pursued patents rather than journal articles, ignored warnings that her publication record could cost her tenure, and in 2009 published a paper in an online journal listing her husband and three daughters as co-authors. Students' views of her teaching were divided. Some praised her; others said she struggled to explain difficult material, and one student told the Associated Press that a group had complained about her to a dean. The families of two victims later alleged in court that students had petitioned for her removal.
In spring 2009 the university denied Bishop tenure, which meant her appointment would end after the 2009 to 2010 academic year. She appealed through several channels and hired a lawyer. Colleagues said she spoke openly and angrily about the decision. William Setzer, chair of the chemistry department, told the AP that she raised it in committee meetings where it had nothing to do with the business at hand. A business associate told The New York Times that she blamed specific colleagues. Keefe reported that she became fixed on the example of a molecular biologist whose career had ended after he lost funding and who later saw collaborators win a Nobel Prize, and that she told her husband she feared the same fate.
Keefe described one episode from an affidavit Bishop later wrote in prison: she drove to the administration building, phoned the president's office and said she was coming up to discuss her case, was told not to enter, and then saw the president, David Williams, and the provost, Vistasp Karbhari, leave the building with police officers. The victims' families later relied on that affidavit and a call log in their lawsuit. The university said no credible evidence supported a claim that any of its officials was responsible.
A week before the shooting, according to Keefe, Bishop and her husband went to a firing range on the edge of Huntsville with a 9mm Ruger that James Anderson had acquired in Massachusetts more than a decade earlier. A federal judge later noted that prosecutors used the visit to the range as evidence that the shooting was planned. Huntsville police said the pistol was not registered and that Bishop had no permit for it. Her husband told reporters that the family did not own a gun and that he did not know she had one.
Gopi K. Podila, in his early fifties, chaired the Department of Biological Sciences. A native of India, he was a plant biologist with more than 90 publications whose research interests included biofuels and the partnership between fungi and the roots of trees, and he was well known in Huntsville's Indian community. Colleagues told The New York Times he was the "glue" of a small department. He was married with two teenage daughters. According to Keefe, Podila was among the faculty members who had voted in favor of Bishop's tenure. His family held a private funeral on February 18, 2010.
Maria Ragland Davis was 50, a molecular biologist and plant geneticist who had earned her master's degree (1985) and doctorate (1992) at North Carolina State University and had taught at UAH since 2002. She was a breast cancer survivor and a keen gardener who hoped to help farmers in poor countries by developing crops that could grow in poor soil. A graduate student called her a source of inspiration and said she would always be her role model. Her stepdaughters, LaTasha and Melissa Davis, said she came into their family after their mother's death and became a calm, gentle presence who never left the house without telling them she loved them. Her family asked that gifts in her memory go to a graduate scholarship at NC State.
Adriel D. Johnson Sr. was 52, an associate professor of biology who studied cell biology and nutritional physiology, including diabetes. He earned his doctorate in animal science at NC State in 1989 and went straight to UAH, where he taught for more than 20 years. He advised the Minority Graduate Student Association, directed the campus program of the National Science Foundation's Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, and pushed students who wanted careers in medicine to ask themselves hard questions. He was a Boy Scout leader who had received the Silver Beaver, the organization's top volunteer award. A former professor from NC State remembered that when Johnson babysat for his family he would never take a nickel. Johnson and Davis had helped found the university's Council for African American Faculty. He was married to Dr. Jacqueline U. Johnson and had two teenage sons.
Three others were shot and survived. Joseph Leahy, an associate professor, was shot in the head, spent weeks in intensive care and months in rehabilitation, lost the sight of one eye, and returned to full-time teaching and research in fall 2012; WAFF reported in 2020 that he had died suddenly of a heart attack in 2017. Stephanie Monticciolo, the department's staff assistant, was also shot in the head, spent more than a month in hospital and later retired. Luis Cruz-Vera, an assistant professor, was released from hospital within days and went back to teaching.
The meeting began at about 3 p.m. in a small, windowless conference room on the third floor of the Shelby Center. Twelve or thirteen faculty and staff members sat around a crowded table; the agenda ran from a spring open house to plans for the next fall. Bishop's husband had dropped her off. She sat beside Podila, near the only door. Moriarity, a biochemist who had become her friend and who had voted against her tenure, later testified that Bishop was unusually silent for the nearly hour-long meeting.
Shortly before 4 p.m., as the meeting was ending, Bishop stood and fired. She shot Podila first, then Monticciolo, then Johnson, then Davis, who was killed while still seated. Leahy was the fourth to be hit, by his own later account, and Cruz-Vera was also wounded. Moriarity testified that she was looking directly at Bishop when Davis was shot and that Bishop never said a word. Moriarity dropped under the table, seized Bishop's legs and shouted at her to stop, reminding her of her daughter and grandson. Bishop pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The pistol had jammed. Moriarity crawled into the hallway; Bishop followed, still trying to fire, and then tried to clear the gun. Moriarity got back into the room, colleagues pushed the door shut and braced the table against it, and they called 911. A colleague used napkins to try to stop the bleeding from Leahy's head. Another professor, Joseph Ng, credited Moriarity with starting the rush that drove Bishop out.
Bishop went downstairs to a restroom, where, according to Keefe, she rinsed the gun and pushed it and her bloodstained blazer into a trash can. Police later found the pistol there. She borrowed a student's phone in a lab and called her husband. Accounts of that call differ: Keefe reported that she told him "I'm done"; Anderson told the Chronicle of Higher Education that she asked him to pick her up and said nothing about a shooting, and told ABC News she said they were still on for their Friday date night. A sheriff's deputy took her into custody as she left the building through a loading dock.
The campus was locked down. The university's emergency text alert went out late, which the campus police chief, Charles Gailes, attributed to the fact that the people who activated it were responding to the shooting. Classes were cancelled for the following week.
As officers placed her in a patrol car that night, Bishop was heard to say: "It didn't happen. There's no way. ... They are still alive." A Huntsville police investigator, Charlie Gray, testified in 2012 that she denied any part in the shooting, repeatedly saying, "It didn't happen. I wasn't there. It wasn't me." She was charged that night with capital murder, and three counts of attempted murder were added over the weekend. Her husband was detained and questioned but never charged with any crime.
From the jail, according to Anderson, Bishop called and asked whether the children had done their homework. The university suspended her retroactively to the day of the attack and said she would be fired. Early television reports that she had been denied tenure that very morning were wrong; the university said the meeting was not about tenure, and her denial dated from the previous year.
On Saturday, February 13, Braintree's police chief, Paul Frazier, who had been a young patrolman in 1986, held a news conference. He said Bishop had shot her brother after an argument, that she had been released on the orders of the chief at the time, John Polio, before she could be booked, and that the department's reports on the case had been removed from its files. Several of those statements were later contradicted or corrected. Frazier gave her age as 19 when she was 21; the reports did turn up within days; and Keefe later found that every other piece of evidence placed the morning's argument between Amy and her father, not between Amy and Seth.
On February 16 the Norfolk County district attorney, William Keating, released the 1986 Braintree reports. They described the dealership, the standoff and the arrest. Keating said they gave probable cause in 1986 to charge Bishop with assault with a dangerous weapon, carrying a dangerous weapon and unlawful possession of ammunition, but that the statute of limitations on all of those had long expired, as it had on manslaughter. He added that the reports did not necessarily contradict Judy Bishop's account that the shooting was an accident. The state police opened a review of their own 1986 investigation, which the state's public safety secretary then folded into Keating's review; Governor Deval Patrick said that where mistakes had been made, they must not be repeated.
On February 25, 2010, Keating announced a judicial inquest. Bishop's parents, he said, had declined through counsel to talk with state troopers who came to their home, and an inquest would let a judge compel them to testify. He also disclosed a new detail. Investigators had enlarged a crime-scene photograph of Amy's bedroom from 1986 and found a publication on the floor with an article about the killing of the parents of the actor Patrick Duffy in Montana in November 1986, committed with a 12-gauge shotgun by young men who then tried to take a getaway vehicle. Keating said the parallel could bear on her state of mind. Keefe identified the publication as an issue of the National Enquirer; early AP reports described it as a newspaper clipping.
Judge Mark Coven of Quincy District Court heard the inquest behind closed doors from April 13 to 15, 2010. Nineteen witnesses testified, by the AP's count (Keefe gives twenty), among them Sam and Judy Bishop, the mechanics Tom Pettigrew and Jeff Doyle, retired Braintree officers, Brian Howe, John Kivlan, and John and Ginny Polio. Under a Massachusetts inquest the judge investigates a death and reports whether any person's unlawful act appears to have contributed to it; the findings are not a verdict. Coven filed his report and the transcript on May 25, 2010.
Sam Bishop testified that the morning disagreement had been minor and that his daughter, frightened after the burglary, "made a terrible mistake in acting on that fear." Judy Bishop testified that Seth had reached for the gun as Amy turned, that Amy had one hand on the barrel and one on the stock, and that "she didn't even have her hand on the trigger." The firearms examiner testified that the shotgun normally needed about five pounds of pressure on the trigger to fire, and that he had shock-tested it without a misfire. Sam Bishop had found an Army report suggesting a military version of the same shotgun could misfire if dropped on its muzzle.
On June 16, 2010, Keating announced that a Norfolk County grand jury had indicted Amy Bishop for first-degree murder in the death of her brother. "Jobs weren't done, responsibilities weren't met and justice wasn't served," he said, adding that if the 1986 case had been handled properly the three people in Alabama might not have died. Because murder was the only charge without a time limit, it was the only charge possible. Keating said she would have to face trial in Alabama first.
Sam and Judy Bishop issued a statement. "We cannot explain or even understand what happened in Alabama," they wrote. They added that they knew what had happened to Seth 23 years earlier "was an accident." Through their lawyer they called the review "an enormous waste of public resources." Two days after the indictment was announced, Bishop cut her wrists with a razor blade in the county jail in Huntsville. A guard found her; her lawyer, Roy Miller, said that four more minutes would have been fatal.
The Boston Globe sued for the inquest materials the day of the indictment. On December 13, 2011, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that such records become presumptively public once a grand jury acts, subject to a showing of good cause to keep them sealed. Bishop's public defender in Massachusetts, Larry Tipton, argued that release could tip an Alabama jury toward a death sentence. In February 2012 Justice Kenneth Fishman of Norfolk Superior Court released more than 300 pages of transcript but withheld the judge's report itself and redacted large parts, including all of John Polio's testimony. The Globe reported that the released pages showed an investigation "systematically mishandled at several levels" but left unanswered what happened in the 20 minutes before Bishop was let go. What Coven's report itself said was not reported.
A Madison County grand jury indicted Bishop in March 2011 on one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder. The district attorney, Rob Broussard, led the prosecution himself and sought the death penalty. Her court-appointed lawyers, led by Roy Miller, prepared an insanity defense. Miller told Keefe that Bishop had at first asked to be executed, and that her parents persuaded her otherwise. On September 22, 2011, she pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Circuit Judge Alan Mann set a trial date and warned both sides against delay.
Bishop told Keefe that she had no memory of the killings, that she heard voices and that she had been treated for paranoid schizophrenia; Miller said she had no such firm diagnosis and that the defense's psychiatric testing had proved inconclusive. A federal judge later recorded that, on the basis of an examination by a clinical psychologist, the parties stipulated that at the time of the shooting she was able to understand the nature, quality and wrongfulness of her actions.
About two weeks before the trial was to begin, Miller approached prosecutors. On September 11, 2012, Bishop, then 47, pleaded guilty to one count of capital murder involving two or more people and three counts of attempted murder; prosecutors agreed not to pursue the death penalty. She signed the plea agreement with a barely legible scrawl and, asked whether she agreed to plead guilty and to give up her right to appeal, answered "Yes." Miller told Keefe there would have been a "one per cent chance" of persuading a jury she was insane. Moriarity, by then chair of the department, said she was glad the plea recognized the crimes rather than "trying to get out of something through claiming a mental defect." WHNT later reported that relatives of some of the victims had opposed a death sentence.
Alabama law at the time required that even after a guilty plea to capital murder, the state prove its case to a jury. That abbreviated trial took place on September 24, 2012, and lasted less than two hours. Moriarity described the meeting and the shooting. Gray, the investigator, testified that police believed Bishop had acted out of anger over the tenure denial. Bishop, in a red jail uniform and leg shackles, put her head down on the defense table and wept as photographs of the dead were shown, and shook her head whenever the killings were described as intentional. Her lawyer, Robert Tuten, told the jury, "She has admitted she did these terrible things." The jury deliberated for about 20 minutes. Judge Mann sentenced her to life without parole for capital murder and to consecutive life terms on the three attempted murder counts.
Leahy, in court, said he felt fortunate to be alive and that Bishop had "just sort of ceased to exist" for him. Broussard said: "You can't take a loaded 9 mm and hold it inches away from human beings' heads and tell me you didn't mean to do that."
On September 28, 2012, four days after sentencing, the Norfolk County district attorney, Michael Morrissey, announced that he would not seek to bring Bishop back for trial. "The penalty we would seek for a first degree murder conviction is already in place," he said. His office entered a nolle prosequi, withdrawing the indictment "without prejudice," meaning it could be brought again if circumstances changed, for example if the Alabama conviction were overturned, which he considered unlikely. He said he had consulted Broussard and that, with Bishop serving life in Alabama, there was no public safety issue.
Bishop objected. On October 1, 2012, Tipton filed papers saying she wanted a trial to prove that she had a "loving and caring relationship" with her brother and that the shooting was accidental, calling the inquest and grand jury "one-sided" and the shotgun prone to misfire, and describing the withdrawal as an abuse of authority. Morrissey's spokesman called the objection "legally meaningless," and the office moved formally to end the case. Miller said Alabama would never release her to Massachusetts. As of reports in The Patriot Ledger in 2022 and WHNT in 2025, she had never been tried for her brother's death, and the indictment remained withdrawn.
Despite the waiver, Bishop filed a notice of appeal in November 2012, and her trial lawyers asked to withdraw. In the appeal she argued that her plea had not been voluntary; the state attorney general's office called her claims "meritless" and noted that she had signed and initialed two forms acknowledging what she was doing. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the appeal and, in late May 2013, denied rehearing. On August 16, 2013, the Alabama Supreme Court declined to review the case, ending her direct appeal.
In July 2014 she filed a petition under Alabama's Rule 32 for post-conviction relief, claiming that her plea was involuntary, that prosecutors withheld favorable evidence, that her lawyers were ineffective, that her psychiatric evaluation was inadequate and that she had new evidence. A Madison County judge denied it in October 2014. In 2018 she filed a federal habeas petition arguing that she had suffered "steroid psychosis" from allergy medication, had blacked out during the shooting and could not have formed the intent to kill. On February 5, 2021, Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala of the federal district court in north Alabama denied it. The judge pointed to the stipulation about Bishop's mental state, the evidence that she visited a firing range a week beforehand and hid the gun afterward, and her own sworn answers at the plea hearing; the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit declined to hear an appeal.
In 2023 she filed a second Rule 32 petition, relying on a 2022 study in the British Medical Journal about the effect of steroid medication on the brain. The Alabama Supreme Court declined to review the denial of her appeal in July 2024 and rejected a further effort in January 2025. In her filings she wrote that her allergies had flared during the tenure process, "causing blackouts and hallucinations," and that after one such blackout she was told of her crime. A second federal petition was dismissed in May 2025 because she had not obtained permission to file it; on June 30, 2025, the Eleventh Circuit refused that permission, finding the steroid claim was the same one already rejected. She then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court directly for a writ of habeas corpus. The Court denied it on October 14, 2025, and denied rehearing on January 12, 2026.
On January 14, 2011, the families of Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson filed wrongful death suits against Bishop, her husband and the provost, Vistasp Karbhari, alleging an "inexcusable failure" to follow life-safety rules that required a colleague in psychological crisis to be referred for a threat assessment. "Nothing will ever bring her back," Sammie Lee Davis said. Jacqueline Johnson said the families hoped to teach universities how to respond to staff in severe distress. Moriarity, Leahy and Monticciolo filed separate suits against Bishop and her husband. The university, which could not be sued directly, called the shooting a random act no one could have predicted.
The litigation was bitter. In 2013 the families accused the university of trying to "price plaintiffs out of the litigation" after it estimated that producing the documents they sought would cost between $1 million and $6.8 million, and they sought to add the former president, David Williams, using Bishop's affidavit about seeing him leave the building with police. On January 15, 2014, Madison County Circuit Judge Ruth Ann Hall dismissed the claims against Karbhari, ruling that he had no legal duty to protect the victims and no specialized knowledge that Bishop would harm them. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed without an opinion in February 2015. The reports do not say how the claims against Bishop and her husband were resolved.
Bishop was moved after sentencing to the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka. WAFF reported in 2020 that she was in medium security, sleeping in an open dormitory, and that she declined an interview. Her husband told the station they remained married for financial reasons. Speaking to Keefe from prison, she said the worst thing about it was being separated from her children. In April 2022 her son, Seth Bishop Anderson, 20, died after being shot in Huntsville; police charged an 18-year-old man with reckless murder. His obituary remembered him as a goofy, adventurous young man who loved hikes, old movies and borrowing books from his older sisters.
When the Alabama Department of Corrections inmate record was checked on October 16, 2026, it listed Amy Bishop Anderson, AIS 00285694, at Tutwiler Prison, medium custody, admitted September 24, 2012, serving life on one count of murder (capital) and three consecutive terms for attempted murder from Madison County case CC2011-001131, with no parole hearing. The U.S. Supreme Court's denial of rehearing on January 12, 2026, is the latest court action found. The Massachusetts murder indictment remains withdrawn without prejudice.
The university closed for a week. Memorial services began on February 18, 2010; the Council for African American Faculty, which Davis and Johnson had helped found, held one on campus. Moriarity led the biology department after the shooting. A colleague who had been mentored by Johnson proposed a memorial garden, and a living garden along the campus greenway now stands as a reminder; on the tenth anniversary in 2020 the university held a day of remembrance there. The conference room where the shooting took place was turned into office space, and a new glass-walled conference room was built across the hall.
The shooting changed university practice. UAH had not run background checks on new faculty when Bishop was hired; it does now, though its associate provost said in 2020 that a routine check would not have found anything in her past. WAFF reported in 2020 that it had added a real-time emergency notification system and set up a Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment (BETA) team to respond to reports of faculty, staff or students showing worrying behavior. Moriarity, by then retired, said in 2020 that she was disappointed the university still offered no automatic counseling to faculty denied tenure. She also said she forgave Bishop as a person while hating what she had done. Joseph Ng, who was in the room, said he had developed post-traumatic stress disorder and had come to see the event "less as a crime and more as a disease."
In Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court's 2011 ruling in the Globe's suit set out when inquest records become public, a question the court had last addressed after the 1969 death of Mary Jo Kopechne. In Braintree, the town's mayor, Joe Sullivan, told Keefe that the 2010 inquiry "wasn't just about a shooting that happened twenty-three years ago. It was about Braintree today."
The case has been the subject of long-form journalism, most fully Keefe's "A Loaded Gun" in The New Yorker in 2013, which he later collected in his book Rogues, and of several television documentaries.
Proven and final: the capital murder of Gopi Podila, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson and the attempted murder of three colleagues on February 12, 2010, by her guilty plea and a jury's verdict, upheld on appeal and in federal habeas review.
The death of Seth Bishop (charged, never tried): no court has decided whether the shooting was intentional. In 1986 and 1987 the medical examiner, the Braintree police and the state police treated it as an accident. Her mother, the only other witness, and her father have always said it was an accident, and Bishop says so too. After 2010 a district attorney said there was evidence of murder, a judge held an inquest whose report has not been made public in any source found, and a grand jury indicted her. The indictment was withdrawn without prejudice in 2012. The facts that drew suspicion, all of them from police records and inquest testimony, are the shot fired in her bedroom, the live round chambered after the fatal shot, the demand for car keys at gunpoint, the standoff with police, the 1986 article about a shotgun killing and getaway in her room, and the firearms examiner's testimony that the trigger needed about five pounds of pressure and that the gun did not misfire when shock-tested. On the other side are the parents' testimony, the same examiner's answer that the gun could have gone off accidentally if someone was trying to pull it from her hands (which fits Judy Bishop's account that Seth reached for it), the absence of any known motive toward Seth, the loss of almost all physical evidence including the shotgun, and the defense claim that the gun had a history of misfiring.
A theory about intent (speculation): Keefe reported that a friend of Judy Bishop recalled being told on the day of the shooting that there had been a "terrible fight" at the house, and that she and another friend, now dead, privately wondered whether Amy had come downstairs thinking it was her father, with whom she had argued, who had come home. Keefe presented this as one more unproven story. Bishop told him the argument with her father was trivial.
The 1986 release (disputed): former officers testified that the chief's intervention, sought by Judy Bishop, led to the release; Polio, his widow and Judy Bishop denied it. The redacted transcript did not resolve it.
The 1993 pipe bombs (never charged): after Bishop left her postdoctoral post at Children's Hospital Boston, partly because of a poor assessment by Dr. Paul Rosenberg, two pipe bombs wired to batteries were mailed to his home in Newton; he saw the wires and fled, and the devices did not go off. Federal agents identified Bishop and her husband as suspects and searched their home and office, but could not tie anything they found to the bombs. A witness told agents in 1995 that Anderson had said he wanted to get back at Rosenberg. Anderson said they were among a dozen people questioned and were innocent. The federal statute of limitations ran out in 1998. In September 2010 the U.S. attorney in Boston, Carmen Ortiz, reviewed the case and said there was not enough evidence to charge anyone. It remains unsolved.
The 2002 restaurant assault (charged, then dismissed): at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Massachusetts, Bishop learned another family had been given the last booster seat, berated the mother, shouting "I am Dr. Amy Bishop," and struck her. She was charged with assault and battery and disorderly conduct. Peabody police said she admitted the assault in court; the AP reported that the charges were dismissed after six months of probation and that the judge declined to order anger management. Keefe reported the charges were dropped and never appeared on her record.
Her mental state (disputed by her, settled in law): Bishop has claimed blackouts, hallucinations, schizophrenia and steroid psychosis. Her lawyers found no evidence that would support an insanity verdict, the parties stipulated that she understood the wrongfulness of her acts, and every court that has considered the steroid claim has rejected it.
1965: Amy Bishop is born in Iowa City, Iowa.
1968: the family settles at 46 Hollis Avenue, Braintree, Massachusetts; Seth Bishop is born.
1985: the house is burglarized; Sam Bishop buys a 12-gauge shotgun.
December 6, 1986: Seth Bishop, 18, dies of a shotgun wound in the family kitchen; Amy is detained at gunpoint outside a car dealership and released to her parents the same day.
December 17, 1986: a state trooper interviews the family at home.
March 30, 1987: the state police report rules the death an accidental discharge of a firearm.
1988: Bishop enters Harvard's genetics doctoral program.
1989: marries James Anderson.
1993: receives her Harvard Ph.D.; two pipe bombs are mailed to Dr. Paul Rosenberg; she and her husband are questioned and never charged.
2002: charged after an assault at a Peabody restaurant; the charges are later dismissed.
2003: joins UAH as an assistant professor of biology.
July 2007: she and her husband win $25,000 in a state business plan competition for their cell incubator.
Spring 2009: denied tenure; appeals follow.
February 12, 2010: shoots six colleagues at a faculty meeting, killing Gopi Podila, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson; arrested at the scene and charged with capital murder.
February 13, 2010: Braintree's police chief discloses the 1986 shooting.
February 16, 2010: the Norfolk County district attorney releases the 1986 police reports.
February 25, 2010: inquest announced.
April 13 to 15, 2010: closed inquest before Judge Mark Coven in Quincy District Court; report filed May 25.
June 16, 2010: Norfolk County grand jury indicts Bishop for first-degree murder of her brother.
June 18, 2010: she attempts suicide in the Madison County jail.
September 30, 2010: federal prosecutors decline to charge anyone in the 1993 bombing.
January 14, 2011: Davis and Johnson families file wrongful death suits.
March 2011: Madison County grand jury indicts her for capital murder and three counts of attempted murder.
September 22, 2011: pleads not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
December 13, 2011: Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules on access to the inquest records.
February 2012: part of the inquest transcript is released; the judge's report is withheld.
September 11, 2012: pleads guilty to capital murder and three counts of attempted murder.
September 24, 2012: jury returns guilty verdict; sentenced to life without parole plus consecutive life terms.
September 28, 2012: Norfolk County district attorney withdraws the Massachusetts indictment without prejudice; she objects on October 1.
August 16, 2013: Alabama Supreme Court declines to hear her direct appeal.
January 15, 2014: claims against the former provost dismissed; affirmed February 2015.
October 2014: first Rule 32 petition denied.
2017: Joseph Leahy dies of a heart attack.
February 5, 2021: federal habeas petition denied.
April 2022: her son, Seth Bishop Anderson, 20, is shot dead in Huntsville.
July 12, 2024 and January 10, 2025: Alabama Supreme Court rejects further state appeals.
June 30, 2025: Eleventh Circuit refuses leave for a second federal petition.
October 14, 2025: U.S. Supreme Court denies her habeas petition; rehearing denied January 12, 2026.
October 16, 2026: listed by the Alabama Department of Corrections at Tutwiler Prison, serving life without parole.