Welcome back to the Path with Chili. This week is just going to be myself and Jules because Ashley is just starting a new career as a school teacher, so she's quite busy right now, so we've had to do a couple episodes without her, but she'll be back in a couple of weeks to discuss another case. So in Ashley's absence, I'm going to follow our usual format where I tell Jeules the details about a case she's not familiar with and hasn't learned anything about before, and she
will give off her reaction. And this is going to be a unique one because this is a horrible crime where there's no real mystery of who the perpetrator was. We just don't know what happened to them, because we're going to be talking about one of the most notorious wanted fugitives in the history of North America who has still never been caught. So, Jules, do you know the name William Bradford Bishop.
I do. I know the basic details of this case, but I don't know like the ins and outs. So it'll be really good to hear from you and get the timeline how this thought happened. Who were the victims, so we can learn a little bit more about them and then learn about how William Bradford Bishop has managed to evade authorities for all these years.
Yes, in Kate, you're not familiar with them. William Bradford Bishop murdered his entire family and has not been found for nearly fifty years. And this is kind of different than your average wanted fugitive case because a lot of the time, there really isn't much mystery to talk about. You know, exactly what happened. The only unanswered question is
where the fugitive is now. But there are just so many weird details surrounding this entire case that we're definitely gonna have a lot to talk about.
I always find family annihilators to be the absolute worst. I mean, you can almost understand when somebody is in so much pain that they decide to end their own lives, and I don't get when they decide to take their families with them. But I find it even more egregious when somebody decides to annihilate their entire family and then they stay living like a Chris Watts for example.
Yeah, and that's the key difference with this is that Opinions are sharply divided about whether he might have killed himself shortly thereafter and has never been found, or if he's been living a new life somewhere for the past
fifty years. So the story itself begins in nineteen seventy six in Bethesda, Maryland, which is located just northwest of Washington, DC, and at the time, William Bradford Bishop Junior, who went by the name Brad, was thirty nine years old and was working for the State Department as the Assistant Chief in the Division of Special Activities and Commercial Treaties. His wife,
Annette Bishop, was thirty seven years old. They had been married for seventeen years at this point, and they had three sons of fourteen year old William Bradford Bishop the third who also went by Brad, ten year old Brent, and five year old Jeffrey, and they were also living with Brad's sixty eight year old mother, Lobelia Bishop, because Brad's father had died in nineteen sixty nine, so Lobelia volunteered to move in and help out with the family
because Brad was working so much and on the surface, they seemed like they were the ideal family because he had a good job. They were in a nice house. Brad was the only child of his mother and father, so of course he was quite close to his mother. And he spent some time working in the army and encounter intelligence and became fluent in like no less than five different languages, including English, Italian, French, Spanish, and Serbo Croatian.
And he had lived in a whole bunch of different countries over the years, because when you work with the State Department and the Foreign Service Program, they will post you in a whole bunch of different embassies in such countries as Italy, Ethiopia, and Botswana. But here you can kind of sense that Brad was becoming disenchanted because he had been living in Bethesda for the past two years.
He was still working at the State Department headquarters in Washington, d C. But you can tell there was some tension there because I think Annett was getting tired of moving around a lot and moving her children around. She was getting into this comfortable suburban life and wanted to stay put, whereas Brad was the type of person who wanted to move around a lot, keep going to new postings, and
he just wasn't having much luck. He was hoping to get a new posting somewhere soon in another country, but it wasn't happening, and some people can notice that his personality was changing and he was getting gradually more unhappy.
When you give his background as far as his employment goes, it sounds like a spy, but he's a polyglot. He's
worked in all these different countries. It sounds like there's an element of his personality that craves that intrigue and the dynamic nature of being able to move around to all these different places and to be able to communicate in all these different languages, and perhaps being stateside and the monotony of that and just the regular home life isn't what it was cracked up to be for him personally.
Yes, I think he was a guy who really wanted to give off the impression that he was some sort of spy and worked an espionage work, but that really wasn't the reality of his life. He mostly did work inside an office at a desk, and that was a lot, usually due to the fact that he was given some unflattering security evaluations early in his career because he would do stuff like fail to secure classified documents and just leave them around and would say, Oh, it's just too
much bother, I don't want to do it. So during one evaluation, he was graded as having being weak at judgment, flexibility, and an ability who apply common sense and good judgment. So while he was skilled at certain aspects of his job, it doesn't sound like he was skilled enough to do
any high security espionage work. It's almost like we did our episodes a few weeks ago about the disappearance of Justin Bergwinkle, another guy who liked to give off the impression to friends and family that he was doing this very important secret intelligence work with the army when he was actually nothing more than a cook.
I was hoping you were going to bring that up, because that's exactly what it triggered. He was going to go train at that language institute, so they have that parallel there, and then it's sort of like he needs to project this image into the world that he is more important and relied upon than he actually is. And it seems somewhat like Justin Bergwinkle, who was really impulsive. William Bradford Bishop, so he's really intelligent. We know that
he's capable of pretty much anything. But he isn't conscientious. The thing that it's like, oh, I'm too lazy to secure these classified documents when that is within the purview of my work. It just seems like you're going to do the bare minimum and then you aren't going to respect authority when it's told to you that this is what needs to be done. You're not willing to do it. You're going to set your own parameters. So I can see why he was flagged for security reasons early on.
Oh definitely. And we talked about that with Justin Bergwinkle, is that he did have some skills he was taking he was in the Korean language institute, but then he pretty much screwed up his entire career when he decided to shoplift at a video store, and they thought, yeah, that kind of shows that you're unreliable, you're impulsive, so you're never going to rise above the rank of private And I think it was the same thing with Brad, where it's like he just didn't do the little things
that are required. So even though he got some good jobs, he was never going to rise higher than he really was. And that's what they said about the State Department, is that it was pretty much your reputation back then that if you were in the same job for a couple of years and stopped moving around, that was pretty much it like you were never going to rise any higher. And I think he was going to become frustrated by that.
I can only imagine that knowing that you have this innate intelligence and this incredible potential to be able to do pretty much anything, but to know that you're only going to scratch the surface because of your own impulsive actions or inability to color within the lines in that job description has to be incredibly frustrating, and I think that would eat away at you over the years.
I think so. Yeah, And he was almost forty years old, so I think he was suffering from some sort of midlife crisis, and there was a lot of stuff going on in his personal life that not many people knew until after the crime took place. Brad had a history of insomnia and depression and had been seeing a psychiatrist twice a week who gave him the anti anxiety medication Syrax.
And I don't think his coworkers knew that because I'm sure back in the seventies they felt if you're having issues with your mental health, then we're not going to rely on you to do like top secretpionage work. And I'm sure he was paranoid that if anyone found out, he could potentially lose his job.
We've all seen the show Homeland where Carrie has to hide the fact that she has bipolar disorder because she's afraid that she would be looked at as unreliable and not be able to do her work at the CIA, and that was set in the two thousands, and we've got the nineteen seventies here where On one hand, I think it's incredibly brave that he's seeing a psychiatrist and that he's trying to deal with his issues that he has.
And I don't know if the anti anxiety medication helped him or didn't help him, but you can see how having insomnia and dealing with that level of anxiety can exacerbate any pre existing mental health condition, and it can almost create new ones, because if your brain can't rest and it can't detox, you're going to create a whole host of issues and that's going to bleed into every area of your life.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Homeland, because that was the first thing I thought of is that you watch the show and she has to cover it up for years because even though she's really good at her job, she knows that if anyone finds out about her bipolar disorder and her mental health issues, that she's going to lose her job. And that was probably the same type of thing with Brad. But there were a lot of
problems going on at home at the time. Because Brad was pretty old school he wanted to do all the work while Annette remained a stay at home mom. But so when his mother, Labelia, moved in, she pretty much says, oh, I'll help out with the household responsibilities. I'll do stuff like drive the kids to school so that Annette can
pursue her outside interests. And I don't think Brad liked that too much because she was doing stuff like studying art at the University of Maryland, and like I said earlier, she seemed very content to stay put and settle into the suburban lifestyle and not jump around from country to country, and Brad really didn't like that. And even though they looked like a successful family on the surface, it would later come out that they were suffering from financial problems.
And that the IRS was about to give them an audit. I know Brad was unhappy because the cost of living near Washington, d c. Was higher than the cost of living overseas, so he had a hard time affording his house and his lifestyle. And I know that Lobilia had even provided the family with a thirty thousand dollars down
payment to purchase their home. But the Moni was starting to run out because she had pretty much inherited her husband's sports and after he passed away, but she was not generating any income, and now they were reaching the point where Brad would have to financially take care of the entire family. And because he was living in a high cost of living area and he was not getting any promotions or any pay raises, it sounded like the whole facade was about to collapse.
We see this often in family annihilator cases. There's often that pressure point, and it typically is something financial. And we saw it with that guy in France, what was the name.
Xavier DuPont de Laganis, which was also on Unsolved Mysteries.
Yeah, that was on Unsolved Mysteries, and he murdered his entire family and it was over the fact that he was essentially destitute and he was some kind of like aristocrat or he came from like a long line of like moneyed and like what would you call him? Would he lear an aristocrat?
I think so?
Yeah, yeah, okay, so you see what you saw it. In that case, it's either that it's either money or love.
Right.
You see with Chris Watts, it's because he wants to start a whole new life with somebody new. And in this case, you see somebody who's not sleeping, who's got an incredible amount of anxiety, who I don't really understand. When you're having financial issues, if you're going to take issue with your wife wanting to pursue other interests, you would think that you would want her to go out into the workforce because you've got lubilia at home, who's
able to look after your children. Why not become a two income household rather than try to shoulder all of the responsibility yourself. It's like he wants to be this rock star jumping around from country to country, and he just wants a net to be his groupie and just follow him around from place to place.
Yeah, exactly, because it seems obvious in retrospect that he was a narcissist, and like you said, it would have been much easier just to allow a net to get a job contribute income to the family, but he wanted to be seen as the sole caregiver and a net to stay at home. And it's like if he had just adjusted his attitude, maybe what happened wouldn't have happened.
It's like you'd rather lose your house and lose your entire family than admit that you need help.
Well, we're going to talk more about this later on, but I'm sure you've heard of John List, the notorious family annihilator, right, yes, yeah, And it was the same type of thing where he got laid off from his job and he would spend months like leaving the house as usual in the morning, pretending he was going to work when an actuality, he was just going to try to get new jobs, but spend the day just sitting at the train station reading the newspaper and would not
tell his family he was unemployed. And then it reached the point where their money was running out, so he just decided to murder his entire family and go on the run and start over rather than try to seek help.
Yeah, it's wild when you see people do that. It's like all you needed to do was ask for help and to be honest. But admitting failure and asking for help seems much more out of reach than murdering those that you love most. It is just such an absurd concept to people that aren't narcissists.
Yeah, exactly. It's just so weird to the rest of the world. But for people who can do that, they just don't have the same thinking pattern them most people do. So it's believed that the big turning point took place on March the first, nineteen seventy six, because that's when the State Department's annual promotion list came out and Brad was hoping that he would receive a promotion and possibly a new posting in a new country. But when he looked at the list, his name wasn't on it, and
he was very disappointed. He soon told his supervisor that he was not feeling well and would leave work early, and while he was exiting the building, he crossed paths with a fellow co worker, a Foreign Service officer named Roy Harrell, where he once again expressed his frustration for not making the list and getting the promotion, and he told Roy that I believe I'm getting the flu. I'm just going to go home, and the two men parted ways.
But this is believed to be the last confirmed sighting of Brad Bishop before he committed a horrible crime, and it's believed that he was a taking time bomb. But seeing the promotion list and then seeing that his name was not on there was pretty much his breaking point.
I suppose that was it for him. It was like, well, I'm not there's no upward mobility where I am. And you'd think the thoughts that could enter his mind that would be more rational. And I mean he was already seeking help from a psychiatrist if he thought about ending his own life. I mean, I could understand that, But just the jump to I'm going to kill my entire family because of my perceived failure is just wild to me, Like it just doesn't even compute, like how that could
be the very next step. And I guess everything, like we said, it is just like a pressure cooker. He's not sleeping, he's taking the Santai anxiety medication. We don't know what kind of side effects it was or it wasn't having He's got an incredible amount of anxieties talking to a psychiatrist. He's frustrated that his wife is pursuing
interest studying art and that his mom is there. She contributed that money, but she's no longer able to contribute money because the money is running out and they probably can't afford the house that they're living in, and just the solution is, okay, well, I'm just going to kill my family and go on the run.
Yeah, that was pretty much it. Like I'm sure he was probably thinking of something like that for a while, but it's just a weird that a switch would go off where you get up one morning, go to work and are just having an ordinary routine morning. Then you see that your name's not on a promotion list and says, well, that's it for my life Like this, I'm just gonna kill my family and then I'm gonna start over somewhere. Like most normal people just cannot fathom a thought like that.
So us was the last time anyone heard from anybody from the Bishop family for an entire week, and it was March the eighth, exactly seven days later, when the Montgomery County Police Department were called to the residents after receiving a concerned call from the bishop's next door neighbor. The neighbor agreeted the Lieutenant Joe Sergeant and said that I noticed that the family. They have two vehicles, but they're nineteen seventy four Chevrolet Malibu station wagon is gone.
The entire family is gone, and their family dog, a Golden Retriever named Leo, was also nowhere to be found. And the neighbors said that it wasn't uncommon for the bishops to sometimes leave on vacations, but if they did so, they would contact their neighbors to say, could you collect our newspapers? Could you collect our mail? But she noticed that the newspapers were piling up at the house the mail was piling up at the mailbox, so she thought
something was seriously wrong. So Lieutenant Sergeant decided to go check the residents and then immediately notice blood droplets on the front step and when he went inside, there was like blood everywhere, like in multiple rooms that made it look like a massacre had taken place, but there was
no sign of the family anywhere. And this case was once featured in an Unsolved Mysteries and the Reenactment where Lieutenant sargent walks into the house, they play the ominous music, and then he just sees like a blood stained hallway. I remember as a kid watching that on TV and thought it was one of the creepiest, most disturbing things that ever seen. But right away they didn't assume that something really bad happened to the entire family.
I can only imagine being an investigator and walking into that. You don't know what you're gonna find, but you know what you're gonna find isn't good. And so you know that this is a house where a family lives, so there's a potential that there could be children. There's three children. That's something that I don't think any investigator ever wants to come across, is children that have been murdered or
dead kids. And so I can imagine the apprehension once you see that blood everywhere, and you're just hoping and that that's not what you're going to find, But in your heart of hearts, you would likely know that there's a massacre here because of this sheer amount of blood.
Oh yeah, Like Lieutenant Sergeant was interviewed on Unsolved Mysteries and said something like, I've been a cop for twenty five years, and this is the most amount of blood I had ever seen at a crime scene. And what was particularly disturbing is that the bedrooms where the children slept had pretty much more blood than any other rooms. So that was pretty much a sign that they probably
were the victim of an horrific crime. But at the time, because Brad wasn't there, they didn't initially suspect that he was the one who did it. They figured that maybe
the entire family was wiped out by an outside intruder. So, but it wasn't long before they kind of figured out what really happened, because it turned out that on March the second, which was the day after Brad left the State Department building for not making the promotion list, at around twelve forty pm that day, a park ranger responded to a brush fire in a densely wooded swamp area in Tyrrell County, North Carolina, which is about two hundred
and seventy five miles southeast of Bethesda, and when they arrived, they realized that was coming outside of a freshly dug hole, and when the fire was put out, the ranger was horrified to discovered that there were five bodies inside, and even before they identified he was able to tell that because three of them were smaller than usual, that three of the victims were children. And they also found a whole bunch of items next to the hole, including an
empty gas can, a pitchfork, and a shovel. So whoever did this made no attempt to cover up their crime, And at the time, there were no missing persons reports in the area and the bishops had not been reported missing, so they could figure out who these victims were. But after the bishop's residence was discovered to be soaked in blood on March the eighth, that's when they put two and two together and discovered and realized that the victims in the hole were Annette, Lubilia and the three boys.
It seems odd that you would even bother to take them off the premises, to leave them kind of out in the open like that.
Yeah, that is what I've always wondered about this, is that if Brad had buried his entire family and put them in a hole, then it would have taken a lot longer for anyone to figure out what happened, Like people would have initially thought that maybe Brad was a victim too, But because he was the only person not in the hole and they were able to discover the bodies immediately, they instantly figured out that he was the perpetrator.
And he didn't attempt to cover it up because his fingerprints were found on the gas can found at the hole, so he left the evidence behind. So people have always speculated that, yes, even though I'm going to become a wanted fugitive and everyone will know as a murderer, I want these bodies to be found. I want them to be set on fire and for the whole world to
know what I've done. So until he has captured someday, we may never know his reasoning for doing this, Why he would take his family two hundred and seventy five miles, put them in a hole, and then set their bodies in fire for the entire world to see.
It almost feels like he had further plans. Maybe he planned and to plan to light them on fire towards all of the evidence and then bury them. But then perhaps he was interrupted and somebody came upon the site where he was doing this, and he got spooked and
so he left. Because I just can't think that you would take these bodies so far away, just leave them out in the open and exposed, when that seems like a great deal of effort because it exposes you your fingerprints are there, when you could have just left them at the house and got a head start. Because this just takes extra time hauling dead bodies into a vehicle and like going through the process of them taking them out driving this distance. I don't understand what his motivation
was there. I have to think that he was interrupted somehow.
That's what I'm thinking, because I know that when the park ranger arrived, he sensed that someone had been He saw the fire almost immediately, so he missed bishop by like only minutes before he left. So it makes me wonder if someone else passed by and then he decided, oh, I better leave before I figure the job, before I'm found. But he technically was not seen at the murder scene. But because the station wagon was missing, it seemed obvious
that he had used them to transport the bodies. But when you look at the timeline, you realize that he had to murder his entire family, put their bodies in a station wagon, and pretty much drive two hundred and seventy five miles all night without any sleep before he wound up at this location and then just decided to dig a hole and set them on fire. And it's like,
that's just something that most people can never process. How you could drive that long with your the murder, with the bodies of your wife, your mother, and your three children in the back of your car.
I mean, I would think that committing murders in that manner would be like, do you remember that show with Chason Statham that came out years ago, Crank the movie?
Yeah, yeah, And.
So they like keep on having to hit him with things that are going to like raise his adrenaline and to keep him alive. I feel like it's a life for death thing here. You know that in order to survive, I need to get rid of these bodies, and I
need to dispose of them. And I would think that his original plan would be what you said, bury the bodies, get rid of them, and then if he's missing as well, they're going to assume that he's wherever the rest of the family is, and they're not going to assume that he's the perpetrator. So it would give him, it will least buy him some time, but it just doesn't. It doesn't make sense to me.
So after the bodies were discovered and they put two and two together, they started to trace Brad's movements after he left the State Department headquarters on March the first, and once they did this, it became obvious that he was the perpetrator because that afternoon he went to a bank and emptied out his family's account by withdrawing four
hundred dollars. Then they tracked his credit card and found out that he had gone through an apartment store to purchase a ballpeen hammer and an empty gas can, and he also stopped at a gas station to fill up his fuel tank and the gas can, presumably, and then he went to a hardware store to buy the pitchfork and the shovel. And once they looked at the bodies, it was apparent that all five family members have been
bludgeoned to death with the ballpeen hammer. Based on the evidence of the crime scene, they suspected that Brad killed Annette first while she was reading in the study, because there was a lot of blood there, and there was blood on a notebook she had been writing in at the time. That night, witnesses had recalled seeing Lobilia out walking the family dog. So they suspected that Brad killed Annette while Lobelia was gone, and then when she walked into the house, she might have been cornered in a
bathroom and was killed second. And this detail has always
disturbed me. But they have said that Lobilia's injuries were not as severe as the other victims, so they have suspected that Brad may have actually smothered her to death, or alternatively, that she might have literally been frightened to death, that she was in such shock from seeing her son trying to kill her with a ballpeen hammer that she may have literally died of fright suffered a fatal heart attack before he can bludgeon her too many times.
Oh my god, that is horrific, this poor woman said. No mother should ever experience their son as a killer. But to know that your son is annihilating his entire family and he's coming at you with a hammer. Even if she was smothered, she had to know in her last moments what he was trying to do to her. And I can't imagine what that must have felt like to die like that at the hands of your own son.
Exactly like I'm sure she was aware that her son had problems and that there were issues in the marriage, but she probably never thought that he would do something as extreme as annihilate his entire family. So it could have been a thing where she returned home with the dog and discovered and that's bloody body in the study and then decided to go into the bathroom to hide from him, and while he was attempting to attack, or she just suddenly died of fright and suffered a fatal heart attack.
If I remember correctly about this case, isn't there something with the dog like that we find out later?
The dog is still an unsolved mystery. It's suspected that Brad took the dog with him when he left, but what ultimately happened to him we still don't know. But that's kind of another disturbing detail that he has no qualms about murdering his entire family, but he apparently was very fond of Leo the dog, so he likely took him with them when he left. Just one of those weird cases we see sometimes where murderers have no qualms about killing people but will draw the line at harming animals.
I mean, I guess if you look at it from the perspective of you can have dominion over an animal in a way that you couldn't over another human. The humans will fight back, whereas dogs people treat them horribly at times, but they still love you and they will still be loyal. And so somebody who is clearly a narcissist, we see this in his behavior, Obviously we're not diagnosing him,
we're just basing it off of his behavior. Then we're going to see somebody who is going to like that constant attention that he's going to get from the dog, and the dog will never criticize him. The dog will
never make him feel like he isn't enough. So from that perspective, I can understand how he would spare the dog and end the lives of his family because he obviously felt like a failure, and he was probably projecting those feelings onto everybody around him, so that he was saying, oh, they're making me feel this way, but the reality was he was making himself feel that way.
Oh yeah, that is what everyone has always assumed. That he probably got criticized by his mother and his wife or for having these financial problems and for not doing better at work and for not allowing anet to get a job. But he probably thought to himself, well, the dog will never criticize me like this, It will never talk back to me. So I got no problems with taking him with me.
And do you know anything about his spending habits? Like we know we had financial issues, but did he like overspend in certain areas because it just seems like they have this normal life And the mom gave him this thirty thousand dollars for a down payment. So at the time, I'm thirty thousand dollars in the nineteen seventies, that's a lot of money that would be like, I don't know what, like eighty thousand dollars now one hundred thousand dollars now probably one hundred.
I think so. Yeah, because his salary at the State Department I think was twenty five thousand dollars a year, which doesn't seem like much now but was probably worth a lot more then. I don't know a lot about his spending habits, but I think he probably overpaid for the house and got too much financial assistance from his
mother and couldn't make the mortgage payments. And he would sometimes leave to go to places like Europe on business trips, and I usually if you're employed by the government, you get reimbursed expenses, but I'm not sure if maybe he
was still spending lavishly over there. But when you find out that he withdrew his emptied out his entire family's entire bank account, and it was only four hundred dollars, and you're like, yeah, that's not an awful lot for a guy who's got three children and has a government job.
No, And you also have to wonder if he was going solo on these trips to Europe, and we know that he liked to project this image of success and that you know, potentially he was a spy. Maybe he was meeting women when he was overseas, or entertaining clients or entertaining business associates and paying for everything, trying to look like he was a big shot when in reality
he wasn't. And these types of things that maybe the government wouldn't reimburse because he would likely have a stipend where you know, you can spend X amount of dollars per day on lodging, on food, on entertainment. I don't know what his setup was, but I think there is a very real possibility that he could have been overspending in that capacity, trying to live this life and be this big shot that he truly felt like he deserved to be, but it wasn't it wasn't materializing in his own life.
Yeah, that would make sense to me because I work for Global Affairs Canada for the government, and I don't go on these business trips, but I know plenty of lawyers who do, and I can tell you that they ought it. Everything that you do over there that if you want to be reimbursed expenses, you have to provide receipts and justifications for why you spent so much. So if Brad was spending beyond his means, he definitely would
not be reimbursed everything. So another disturbing detail is that it's believed that his three children were sleeping at the time that Brad killed Annette and Lobelia, because they found massive amounts of blood in their bedrooms. Brad Junior, the oldest one, had his own room, and Brent and Jeffrey, the two youngest, shared a room and had bunk beds.
And one of the most disturbing details of the crime scene is that they found marks from the ballpeen hammer in the ceiling above the top bunk bed where one of his sons slept, So that meant that he probably killed him in such a fit of rage that he swung his hammer so high that he actually was hitting the ceiling while coming down to bludge in one of his children. And people just see that detail and were like, what drives a father to do something like that to his own son.
It's absolutely horrific. And I mean, I guess it depends on how high that bunkbed is, because I'm trying to think of like friends who had bunk beds when I was a kid, and like some of them are higher so that you might not be able to get an adult arm to swing backwards to hit without hitting the ceiling. So I think that that is also possible that it's
just a regular swing. But either way, it doesn't really matter the fact that you were able to do this to your small, sleeping children while they're in their bunk beds and not think twice about it and just go through with this like this is a normal action. It's so chilling.
Yeah, And we'll probably never know if these children were aware of what happened, if they were still sleeping, or if they were woken up by the noise downstairs of him killing a Natin lobelia. But it's very possible that they were just sleeping and then we're just like taken by complete surprise when their father just stood over them and decided to bludgeon them to death.
I would think that the first one that he killed likely didn't know what was coming, but whatever child that he killed second, I would think would have been aware of the disturbance. They might not have heard a cry, they might not have heard anything specific, but they would have noticed a presence. And I would think that you
couldn't just like kill one kid in the bunk. I don't know which one you would do first, if that was like what your objective was, if you would go to the higher bunk and then go to the lower bunk, or kill the elder of the two and leave the younger one because it would be easier. I don't know what his thought process was, but I would think that the second one who was killed would have been awake for it.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well, that there's no way that one of the kids stayed awake while he was killing the other one. In the bunk beds. So it's just an horrific thought to think that they were aware of their own father doing that.
Poor little babies.
So they kept checking Brad's credit card and the last official transaction took place on March the second, after he had stopped in Terrell County to bury and burn his family's bodies, he drove one hundred and thirty miles south to a sporting goods store in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and used his credit card to buy a pair of tennis shoes.
And because his signature was on the credit card receipt and a match Brad's handwriting, and the store owner looked at a photo and said that, Yep, this was definitely the guy who made the purchase. And technically this is the last confirmed eyewitness sighting of Brad. There will be other sidings of him later on, but this is the first time where you could say that, yes, he was
definitely alive at this particular point. And what's interesting is that the owner said that he saw a woman whom he described as dark skinned, standing outside the store with a dog on a leash, and even though the owner thought that the dog was an Irish setter, and the Bishop family dog, Leo, was a Golden Retriever. Leo also had a dark red coat, and so it's been suspected that the owner could have mistaken a Golden Retriever for
an Irish setter. And the owner can't be be a one hundred percent convinced that Brad and this woman worked together, but he said that he saw them interacting and got the impression that they were a couple. But to this day, no one has been able to figure out the identity of this woman or say with absolute certainty that she was with Brad at that time.
It really wouldn't surprise me if there was a woman involved in the mix, because like we saw with Chris Watts, and you see it with a lot of other family annihilators, usually financial or to do with a woman or both, I would think that it would be an even stronger motivator. But I think what this does show us is that maybe he was thinking about doing this for a long
period of time. But he's a really smart guy. And even back then, it's known that you can be traced through credit card payments, So the fact that he didn't buy all of this stuff before he left, that he waited until days after those bodies were discovered, and then he used his credit card. Tells us that he didn't pre plan this all.
Well, pretty much, yeah, because he could have just gotten the shoes while he was still in Maryland or Washington. We don't know why he did it. It's possible that maybe he had blood on his shoes and just needed a change before anyone noticed, but he does eventually. His car is eventually found in a national park, so maybe he wanted the tennis shoes to go hiking. We still don't know. But you mentioned the Chris Watts case, and now he had a mistress who was completely unaware of
what I know. A lot of people like to accuse her of being complicit in the murders, but they've never found any evidence of that. And because we don't know the identity of this dark skinned woman seen in Jacksonville, we have no idea if she knew at the time if Brad had murdered his family. But there's the possibility though, that if she did find out that Brad could have killed her too, possibly disposed of her body somewhere. And no one has been able to put two and two together.
But no one has ever found any evidence that Brad was conducting any affairs at that point. But he did go on a business trip to Switzerland about a month or two before the murders and was apparently seen on the ski slopes with a woman. No one has been able to establish if it was the same woman scene in Jacksonville, but I do think there is a possibility he was conducting an extramarital affair and no one ever found out about it.
That would definitely line up with my idea that he was over spending money, potentially on women and trying to be this big shot, and that was one of the things that was a major contributing factor to his financial problems, because everything on paper looks like they live a fairly simple life and that you know, the kids are just doing regular kid things and they're supporting a household. But he has a good job, makes good money, there's a good down payment on that house, which means that his
mortgage payment shouldn't be that high. That he has to be spending money somewhere, so him, you know, coorting around the slopes in Switzerland with some mystery woman would seem to line up with the picture that is slowly forming of William Bradford Bishop.
Yeah, they would not surprise me at all. And there's going to be another revelation later on in this episode which shows that he was capable of cheating on his wife. So it would not surprise me in the least if
he was having an affair at that time. So they would eventually discover the abandoned Bishop family station wagon on March the eighteenth, which was about seventeen days after the murder took place, and they found traces of blood still inside, and they also found the anti anxiety medication brad had been taking at the time, called Seirax, which some people have taken as a sign that maybe he was planning suicide, because you would think that if he wanted to go
on the run, he would still want his medication with him. So it was found in a parking lot of the Elkmont Campground near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and it was a part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was about five hundred miles west from the spot where the Bishop family's bodies have been found. And even though the car was abandoned, there are no confirmed sightings of Brat from any eyewitnesses who could recall having seen him in the park.
And this can be interpreted in different ways because when they checked the bishop residence, they found out that the family, because they traveled a lot, all of them had diplomatic passports, so Brad's was missing. So some people have taken that as a sign that he was planning to skip the country and go somewhere to start a new life. But on the other hand, they found out that a gun Brad owned was missing as well from the house and
has never been found. So opinions are still sharply divided about whether he skipped the country or because he had been to Smoky Mountains National Park before, he seemed to like it. People have wondered if he just decided to go into the woods, into a remote area and complete suicide and they still have not found his remains because the park is so large.
I mean, that's entirely possible. You could say that he brought the gun because it was his objective to eventually end his own life. But I think if he wanted to end his own life, he could have done it at the house after he killed his entire family. I personally don't believe that that was his j active I think that he wanted to continue to live and continue to do things. Whether or not he used that passport,
he kept it as an option by grabbing it. If he was just like, I'm going to go end my own life, why bring your diplomatic passport?
Exactly? I mean, that's the thing is that, like you said, if he wanted to kill himself, he could have just done it at the house, or he could have done it at the spot where he buried his family's bodies. And it also makes no sense for him to go and purchase tennis shoes if he's planning to go end his own life a short time later. And I do personally think he was too narcissistic in order to end
his own life. And because he had a lot of experience traveling overseas and he was fluent in different languages, he pretty much fits the profile of a fugitive who would be capable of like disappearing into a new life in a new country on the other side of the world.
March the nineteenth, the day after the station wagon was discovered, a grand jury finally indicted Brad on five counts of first degree murder, and he became he wanted fugitive, but at this point, he pretty much had an eighteen head start, and because traveling overseas back then was so much more loose than it is now, I think it would have been perfectly easy for him to escape the country and already been somewhere else by the time he became a fugitive.
I agree. I think that there's a strong likelihood that he used his knowledge, his ability to you know, speak several different languages, and all of his training to his advantage. And the thing is, if it was today, the technology would so easily be able to find him right away if he used that passport. But back in the nineteen seventies,
we're looking at like pre Internet era. There's no computers connecting everything, So if he used that passport, I guess we'll just never truly know, Like they can't go back. I guess in every single country, you would have to go back and go through records manually, would you not.
Oh yeah, definitely. Back in the nineteen seventies, and he had a diplomatic passport, so he was known for travel, so if he went to another country, it wouldn't arouse any suspicion at all. And the news of the murders didn't make it out there until weeks after the fact, so they're not going to know that he's a wanted family annihilator. They're just going to see he's a State Department employee who travels a lot and has a diplomatic passport. So they'll pretty much say, sure, go on in, We're
not going to question you at all. There's nothing to arouse suspicion at all.
I would think that if he planned to kill his family, that he thought that he deserved the best. That he deserved this life where he was mistering, you know, kind of James Bond and living this glamorous lifestyle, and he was unencumbered and getting to achieve these heights of success,
and he wanted to project that into the world. I can't imagine that if he was going to go to I'm sure what he would think of to the trouble, to murder his entire family and to go on the run, that his objective would be anything different than getting to live the life that he thinks that he deserved.
So that about brings an ind to part one of our series on the Bishop family murders. But be sure to join us next week for Part two, Robin, do you want.
To tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which are not featured on the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon and if you join our highest tier tier three,
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Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy