I briefly remember a case about a killer similar to John List in that he executed his entire family. I think he was a government employee and he ended up burning all the bodies after transporting them to a park in his station wagon. I think his surname may have been Bishop. Was any motive ever determined in this case? Any leads?

Thank you.

By the way: The other night on Cold case Files on A&E List was profiled. I got an intense chuckle at John List and John Walsh arguing (not face to face) about whether List is going to "heaven". List said he was indeed going to be in heaven and his family would forgive him there. Walsh said he is "100 percent sure, absolutely positive that John List will not be in heaven" in the same breath as he said that John List deserved to be executed for his crimes. This ridiculous diatribe was very humorous indeed!! :lol:

Yeah it was Brad Bishop. I should have used the search feature before I asked the question. The name "Bishop" didn't come to me until I was literally typing the message. Its funny how the human mind works, huh? Any details on this guy's motive?

This segment is airing right now. It is very similar to the List massacre I'm not sure if there was ever a motive, perhaps a not getting a promotion or a mental breakdown? That's not an excuse however for what Brad Bishop did though.

Definatley one of the more emotional UM episodes because on a base level a number of us might relate to Brad Bishop's insecurities. I mean honestly who among us haven't had a person in our lives who have made us feel sort of beneath them. The thing with Brad Bishop though when trying to determine motive for his slaying of his family we have to look deep into his mindset. As someone who has a bit of training in the field of psychology and tragically lost someone very close to me early on in life due to a percieved paranoia this case does take on some relevance for me.

Brad Bishop lived a life that many people dream of, having a cushy job with the state department, a beautiful family and a home in an upscale neighborhood. From the looks of it Bishop was also pretty well off and probably lived "the good life" so to speak. Were Brad Bishop's "demons" just percieved due to some mental imbalance or did they actually exist in the form of his wife and mother?

I think on a base level that his wife and mother probably got under his skin by chiding him about not moving up the ladder faster then he was. However Brad Bishop might have been the type of person who took even to most minor criticism and blown it up to ten times the size. It is hard to understand why a man could do this to his family and especially since this murder was so pre-meditated and it wasn't a crime of passion. This crime would have been far more understandable at least if Bishop arrived home after being denied the promotion and his wife or mother started in on him about it and he just snapped. The facts though indicate that this wasn't the case at all and when Brad Bishop pulled up to his house he had every intention of murdering anyone who came in his path.

Did Brad Bishop experience some sort of psychosis that made him do this? - He told his friend that he wasn't feeling well as he departed from work that day. It was obvious to me that Bishop for reasons known only to himself could not return home and face his family without that promotion "in hand" so to speak. However if we accept this we then got to consider the massive jump from "I can't stand my family" to "I'm going to murder my family". Although some of us may be able to understand why Bishop was so angry as his wife and mother why did he murder his three young sons who apparently had nothing to do with Bishop's mental problems.

Brad Bishop is a sick and sorry bastard for what he did to his family and I hope one day he is captured so we can know what happened. I do understand however why he is hiding out - this is one clean cut case that if Bishop is captured can only lead to the death penalty. Bishop would have trouble making an insanity defense due to the fact he purchased the sledge and the shovel with an intent to do in his family and this was obviously not a crime of passion but a pre-mediated slaying of his entire family. What could have caused a man to murder the people who were closest to him in the world?

I honestly don't know? Did his wife say something to him that morning that sent him over the edge? Did not getting the promotion confirm (in his mind) the things that his family had been saying to him likely for years which caused him to snap? - There is no justification for this type of crime but there is definatley a reason why it happened - Brad Bishop needs to be captured so we could find out that reason and maybe how it could have been prevented.

Later.

RENT "THE STEPFATHER"!!!

The writer based that film on the List case. Of course the film is a little different, but you will be blown away by some similarities. In seeing the List crime scene photos on A&E and thinking back to the film which I've seen a hundred times: the bodies are aligned EXACTLY the same. And the house is EXACTLY the same. And how List left every day for weeks to another city and returning at night under his family's nose. The big diff. was the STEPFATHER character *wanted* a family. So he married a widower with a daughter after killing his previous family because they "disappointed" him.

Oh man, I've seen Stepfather, and even Stepfather II, on numerous occasions. Talk about not being able to sleep after seeing a movie. The actor who plays the father does a fantastic job, the epitome of sinister. But he keeps emphasizing what a family man he is to the point of obsession. Only the stepdaughter figures him out. But she sends away for a picture of the killer and he intercepts the mail and substitutes someone else's picture. Plus he kills not only his family, but in at least one of the movies he smashes his stepdaughter's counselor to death after he figures out the guy is suspicious of him. He also kills the brother of the wife he already killed, when the brother won't give up and finally tracks him down. I may be mixing up details of the two movies. One major difference from the John List case is this guy moves a very short distance after the initial massacre of his family, and even begins cultivating his new family before doing away with the previous family. Hope I didn't give anything away.

Nope pretty much got all the plot points right. Yeah I was surprised List went from back east to Colorado, then back east again. The STEPFATHER killer was somewhere in the Northwest like Oregon and moved to Washington in the movie.

Was Brad Bishop the one who was spotted by a friend somewhere in Europe?

Was Brad Bishop the one who was spotted by a friend somewhere in Europe?

Yes, in Italy.

I found this article about people who purchase infamous homes, knowingly or unknowingly. Included is a mention of the man who bought William Bradford Bishop's home 30 years ago, not long after the murders: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002800210_haunted12.html

"On a night three decades ago, a charming, 39-year-old State Department foreign-service officer, William Bradford Bishop Jr. — a multilingual Yale graduate and former Army intelligence officer — went home from work and clubbed his family to death with a ball-peen hammer, police said.

They said he loaded the bodies in a station wagon (his mother, his wife, his three young sons), drove them to North Carolina, piled them in a shallow hole and set them on fire. Then he vanished. Why it happened, and what became of him, are anyone's guess.

Later that year, while house hunting, Gneiser and his wife, Carolyn, saw a Bethesda split-level that they loved. "I had covered the story like everyone else, but I had never been to the scene," Gneiser said. "So it didn't register with me."

Their real-estate agent broke the news: It was the Bishop place, put up for sale by estate lawyers. Carolyn Gneiser didn't care. "It wouldn't have mattered if you told her Ghengis Khan and Adolf Hitler lived there," Gneiser said. "She wanted that house."

They wound up paying $106,000, a stigma bargain. A smaller house next door had sold recently for $113,000.

"It's been a great home for 30 years," said Gneiser, now a widower. "I know some people get upset at these things," he said of the house's history. "In fact, my brother — he lives in Florida — he has refused to come up here and see me." But so be it.

"The only way I'm leaving," Gneiser said, "is in a box."

I think with the Bishop and List cases that the issue is the need to control. Both of these men were highly authoritarian and couldn't stand the notion of their families doing anything that might remotely disappoint them. List's authoritarianism was fed heavily by his religious views and the notion that his kids were on the road to sinning was too much for him to bear. I don't recall Bishop being as religious. What's fascinating is how often people like List and Bishop don't think they did anything wrong! If anything, they focus on how their families made them feel "hemmed in." I get the impression that List felt he "saved" his family from going to hell by killing them.
I remember seeing a t.v. special about List (can't remember the show's name, but it wasn't the famous Frank Bender Forensic Files episode) and at the very end of the show, the announcer mentioned that there was an antique Tiffany skylight window in the List ballroom. The irony is that he killed his family, supposedly due to a lack of money, when all along he could have sold that valuable window! Just shows that there was way more problems with this guy!
By the way, does his second wife still think he's innocent?

2 thoughts on the Bishop affair.

First, for reasons I don't completely understand, I have found it plausible that the friend/co-worker who was the last to see Bishop prior to the killings also spotted him in a water closet in Italy years later. If this incident occured in a fictional story, everyone would think it was totally unbelievable. Yet, for whatever reason, I find the friend/co-worker's account believable and I don't think he was making it up. Maybe it was his demeanor during the UM interview. If his account is true, the coincidence is freakish.

Second, given Bishiop's background (former Army intelligence officer, and foreign service employee for the State Dept.) I always suspected that he might have gone over to the other side (e.g., the Soviet Union). The Soviet intelligence service would view him as an extremely valuable source of info. I believe that his ability to evade capture for so long has been due to a state-sponsorship of some sort (first the Soviets, now the Russian intelligence service). If I'm not mistaken, he was spotted in the late 80's early 90's in the Yugoslavia. I think the most recent sighting occured in Switzerland, not a location where an American fugitive (even one with experience in foreign affairs) would tend to hide-out.