Harvard Trained

Amy Bishop grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts. In December 1986, when she was 21, she shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth, in the chest with a shotgun in the family kitchen. She said the gun went off while she was trying to unload it. Even though she then left the house with the gun and tried to take a car at gunpoint, the death was ruled an accident and no charges were filed.

Bishop went on to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard and became a biology professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She had been denied tenure and was due to lose her job when she attended a biology department meeting in the Shelby Center for Science and Technology on February 12, 2010. Partway through, she drew a 9mm pistol and opened fire, killing department chair Gopi Podila and professors Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. Joseph Leahy, Stephanie Monticciolo and Luis Cruz-Vera were wounded. Police arrested her outside the building minutes later.

The shootings led Massachusetts to reopen Seth’s death, and in June 2010 she was charged with his murder. In Alabama she pleaded guilty on September 11, 2012, to capital murder and three counts of attempted murder, and on September 24 she was sentenced to life without parole. Massachusetts prosecutors then decided not to try her for Seth’s death.