When it comes to Amy Bishop, the Harvard-trained biologist accused of opening fire on a roomful of colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, nothing adds up.
She was 21 years old when she shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth, to death at their family’s home in Braintree in 1986. The death was ruled an accident.
Given that Amy Bishop fired the shotgun that killed her brother into her upstairs bedroom wall before she went downstairs and shot him in the kitchen, that was some accident. There were inconsistencies in what she and her mother, the only other witness to the shooting, told police, but she was never charged.
In 1993, Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, were questioned about a bomb in a package left at the Newton, Mass., home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg.
Amy Bishop and Rosenberg clashed when they both worked at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Neither Amy Bishop nor James Anderson was charged in connection with the bomb, which didn’t go off only because Rosenberg was cautious enough, in the middle of the Unabomber’s reign of terror, not to fully open the package.
And then last Sunday, three days after Amy Bishop was charged with murder — facing the death penalty in her husband’s home state, where they have considerably fewer qualms about executing people than in her home state — Anderson told Eric Moskowitz, the Globe reporter who knocked on his door, that he hadn’t bothered to learn the identities of the people his wife is accused of shooting, even though he assumes he knows them.
“I haven’t even looked to see who was killed,” he said. “Because I worked with those people.” Does that add up? If it was your spouse accused, wouldn’t you want to know who he or she supposedly shot?
Agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives say Dr. Rosenberg and his wife would have been killed if he had fully opened the package containing two pipe bombs. Instead, Rosenberg used a knife to cut around the top of the box and peer inside. He and his wife, an attorney, ran out of the house and called the police. The bomb didn’t detonate because the cardboard flaps that would have triggered the device were never raised.
Needless to say, with the Unabomber still running around at the time, terrorizing and targeting people who fit Rosenberg’s profile, not to mention the usual anti-Semitic loons out there, the investigation into who sent a bomb to the Rosenbergs was a serious one indeed.
But Anderson downplayed it, suggesting federal agents were on a fishing expedition. He told the Globe he considered it “being bothered, harassed,” when agents from the ATF questioned him and his wife about it.
Given that it was common knowledge at the lab at Children’s that Amy Bishop had clashed with Rosenberg, the questioning was to be expected.
Police in Alabama say Amy Bishop shot her peers in a dispute over having been denied tenure. James Anderson said his wife should have received tenure, in part because she was generating millions for the university. Why would the university reject such a money-maker?
This is shaping up as a real blame game. Everybody is going to be second-guessed on why they didn’t hold Amy Bishop accountable for something, anything, before the shootings on Feb. 12.
Nothing we know about Amy Bishop adds up, except the number six, because that’s how many people the cops say she shot last week, and three, because that’s how many of them died.
