On Friday Huntsville, a city of rocket scientists and brainy inventors, was stunned when a neuroscientist with a Harvard PhD was arrested in the shooting deaths of three of her colleagues after she was denied tenure, write Shaila Dewan and Katie Zezima for The New York Times. But that was only the first surprise in the tale of Amy Bishop, who was regarded as fiercely intelligent and had seemed to have a promising career in biotechnology.

Every day since has produced a new revelation from Dr. Bishop's past, each more bizarre than the last. On Saturday, police said the University of Alabama Huntsville academic had fatally shot her brother in 1986 and questioned whether the decision to dismiss the case as an accident had been the right one.

On Sunday, a law enforcement official in Boston said she and her husband, James Anderson, had been questioned in a 1993 case in which a pipe bomb was sent to a colleague of Bishop's at Children's Hospital Boston. Anderson firmly defended his wife in an interview at their home in Huntsville, saying that she had been completely cleared in the pipe bomb case and that her brother's death had been accidental.
Full report on The New York Times site

Three new charges of attempted murder were added on Sunday against Bishop, already under arrest for capital murder in the shooting of faculty members, reports The Huntsville Times. Bishop is charged with killing three colleagues during a meeting last Friday, and wounding three more, two of them critically. Bishop was arrested without incident soon after the shooting at 4pm. She was booked into the Madison County metro jail on Friday and charged with a single count of capital murder. Her husband was detained and questioned by police, but was not charged. She is being held without bond.
Full report on The Huntsville Times site

More than 23 years before a college professor was accused of shooting six of her colleagues, her teenage brother died from the blast of a shotgun she held in the kitchen of her family's home in Massachusetts, reports Associated Press. The 1986 shooting was ruled accidental and no charges were filed against Amy Bishop. The case could get a closer look as authorities try to explain why they believe she opened fire on Friday, killing three.
Full report on the Associated Press site

As authorities searched for clues into what could have sent Bishop on an alleged killing spree, friends and family on Sunday described her as an awkward introvert on the brink of losing her teaching job, reports the Boston Herald. Bishop's husband said he wife had been fighting the university for over a year about a tenure denial, and several months ago received a final decision. She was upset, but not overly emotional, approaching her appeal "like a game of chess," he said.
Full report on the Boston Herald site

Meanwhile, a former auto-body worker told the Boston Herald that Amy Bishop put a gun to his chest and demanded a getaway car just minutes after she shot her brother to death 24 years ago in a controversial case that is now being reviewed. Tom Pettigrew, 45, said he working at an auto repair shop in South Braintree, near the former Bishop home, when he saw the gun-wielding woman run into the dealership with what he thought was a BB gun.
Full report on the Boston Herald site



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