Alabama University Professor slays/wounds colleagues, claims no memory of it.

Boy Wonder · Feb 19, 2010

The scientist who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama had been a key suspect in an attempted bomb plot at Harvard in 1993, police officials told The Boston Globe on Sunday. Authorities questioned Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, in March 1993 after a bomb-laden package was delivered to a Harvard professor and doctor at Boston's Children's Hospital, the Globe reported.
The plot was the latest revelation linking Bishop to past investigations. Bishop is accused of shooting to death three colleagues during a faculty meeting on the University of Alabama's Hunstville, Ala. campus on Friday.

Bishop, who has four children, was arrested soon after the shooting and charged with capital murder. Other charges are pending. Her husband was detained and questioned by police but has not been charged.
In 1986, Bishop shot and killed her 18-year-old brother with a shotgun at their Braintree, Mass., home. She told police at the time that she had been trying to learn how to use the gun, which her father had bought for protection, when it accidentally discharged.
Authorities released her and said the episode was a tragic accident. She was never charged, though police Chief Paul Frazier on Saturday questioned how the investigation was handled.
Bomb sent to doctor
In the Harvard plot, a police official told the Globe that Bishop's name surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned about getting a negative evaluation on her doctorate work from Dr. Paul Rosenberg.
During the initial investigation, Rosenberg told police that he had received a thin, long package addressed to him and soon discovered that was filled with wires and a cylinder, according to the Globe.
The package had contained two pipe bombs, which were hooked up two nine-volt batteries, the Globe reported.
During a search of Bishop's computer, investigators discovered a draft of a story that Bishop had written about a female scientist who had killed her brother and was hoping to find redemption in life my becoming a great scientist, the Globe reported.
Bishop and her husband were never charged in the Harvard plot.
'It was just a normal day'
Back in Alabama, some of Bishop's colleagues, including William Setzer, chairman of the department of chemistry, told The Associated Press they did not know about Bishop's past.
Alabama police said the gun she is accused of using in Friday's shooting was not registered, and investigators don't know how or where she got it.
Just after the shooting, her husband James Anderson told the Chronicle, she called and asked him to pick her up. She never mentioned the shooting, he said.

Anderson said his wife had an attorney but would not say who it was. He declined further comment to The Associated Press on Sunday. However, he told the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier in the day that he had no idea his wife had a gun â€” nor did he know of any threats or plans to carry out the shooting when he dropped her off at the faculty meeting Friday. Even in the days and hours before the shooting, Bishop's friends, colleagues and students said she was acting like the intelligent â€” but odd â€” professor they knew.
UAH student Andrew Cole was in Bishop's anatomy class Friday morning and said she seemed perfectly normal. Kourtney Lattimore, 19, a sophomore studying nursing who had Bishop for anatomy and physiology courses, said she didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.
"She was fine. It was a normal day," Lattimore said.

Bishop had worked closely for three years with Dick Reeves, who had been CEO of BizTech, which had been working with her to market a cell incubator she invented to replace traditional equipment used in live cell cultures. Bishop often mentioned the issue of tenure in their discussions, Reeves said.
"It was important to her," he said.
Tenure denied
However, the two had spoken as early as Wednesday, and Reeves said she showed no signs of distress.
Tenure â€” a type of job-for-life security afforded academics â€” is often a stressful process for anyone up for review, Setzer said. Bishop was up front about the issue, often bringing it up in meetings where the subject wasn't appropriate.
"That was another thing that made her different," Setzer said. "In committee meetings she didn't pretend that it wasn't happening or anything. She was even loud about it: That they denied her tenure and she was appealing it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
Some have said the shootings stemmed from Bishop's tenure dispute, though authorities have refused to discuss a motive. Andrea Bennett, a sophomore majoring in nursing and an athlete at UAH, said a coach told her team that Bishop had been denied tenure, which the coach said may have led to the shooting.
Killed were Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and professors Adriel Johnson and Maria Ragland Davis. Three people were wounded. Two of them â€” Joseph Leahy and staffer Stephanie Monticciolo â€” were in critical condition early Sunday. The third, Luis Cruz-Vera, had been released from the hospital.
Sammie Lee Davis, Davis' husband, said in a brief phone interview that he was told a faculty member got angry while discussing tenure at the meeting and started shooting. He said his wife had described Bishop as "not being able to deal with reality" and "not as good as she thought she was."
Bishop was calm as she got into a police car Friday, denying that the shootings occurred. "It didn't happen. There's no way. ... They are still alive."
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HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Students said they signed a petition and complained to no avail about the classroom conduct of a University of Alabama-Huntsville professor accused of killing three colleagues and wounding three others in a shooting rampage at a faculty meeting. The students upset with biology professor Amy Bishop told The Associated Press they went to university administrators at least three times a year ago, complaining that she was ineffective in the classroom and had odd, unsettling ways.
The students said Bishop never made eye contact during conversations, taught by reading out of a textbook and made frequent references to Harvard University, her alma mater.

"We could tell something was off, that she was not like other teachers," said nursing student Caitlin Phillips. Still, they said, they saw no sign she might turn violent.
Bishop is charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder in the shootings Friday in a campus conference room where members of the biology department were meeting.
She is being held without bond and does not yet have an attorney. Police have not revealed a motive, but colleagues say she was vocal in her displeasure about being denied tenure in March of last year. Her appeal was denied in November.
Past run-ins with police
There have been revelations since the shooting that she killed her brother with a shotgun in Braintree, Mass., in 1986 but was never charged because police said at the time it was an accident.
Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating on Tuesday said that he reviewed the case files and concluded that probable cause existed in 1986 to charge Bishop with assault and weapons crimes. However, Keating said, the statute of limitations has run out on any possible charges.
Bishop and her husband were also scrutinized in 1993 after someone sent pipe bombs to a Harvard professor she worked with. The bombs did not go off and no one was ever charged in that case either.
In 2002, Bishop was charged with assault, battery and disorderly conduct after a tirade at the International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. Peabody police Capt. Dennis Bonaiuto said Bishop became incensed when she found out another woman had received the restaurant's last booster seat. Bishop hit the woman while shouting, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop," according to the police report.

"The whole incident was just stupid," Bishop's husband, James Anderson, said Wednesday.
Asked if he was referring to his wife's actions, he said: "Everything."
"It was way overblown," he said. "Someone trying to make something out of nothing."
He also defended his wife's teaching, saying the "vast majority" of students were happy with her. He said his wife taught the "cut course" for nursing students, who would either go on toward a degree or quit the program based on how they did in her class.
"If they didn't make it through, they didn't make it," he said. "So it's natural for some to be unhappy."
He said classroom performance was not an issue in her tenure file, which has not been made public.
Tenured denied
Bishop's students said they first wrote a letter to biology department chairman Gopi K. Podila â€” one of the victims of Friday's shooting â€” then met with him and finally submitted a petition that dozens of them had signed.
"Podila just sort of blew us off," said Phillips, who was among a group of five students who met with him in fall 2008 or early 2009 to air their concerns.
After students met privately with Podila, Phillips said, Bishop seemingly made a point in class to use some of the same phrases they had so they would know she knew about it.
"It was like she was parroting what we had said," Phillips said.
University President David B. Williams said Tuesday that student evaluations were one of many factors in the tenure evaluation process, but he was unaware of any student petition against Bishop.
Other tenured professors in the department made the decision not to grant her tenure, a type of job security given to academics, but the votes of the committee were not made public. Podila was supportive of her, Williams noted.
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HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - An Alabama college professor accused of killing three colleagues during a faculty meeting is likely insane and can't remember the shootings, her attorney said.
Roy W. Miller, the court-appointed attorney for Amy Bishop, told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday that his client has severe mental problems that appear to be paranoid schizophrenia.
Miller discussed the case hours after hundreds of mourners attended the first funeral and memorial services for Bishop's slain co-workers.

Authorities said three more people were hurt when Bishop pulled out a handgun and started shooting during the routine meeting with colleagues last Friday. Charged with capital murder and attempted murder, she is being held without bond.
Miller said Bishop's failure to obtain tenure at the University of Alabama in Huntsville was likely a key to the shootings. Bishop, who has a doctorate from Harvard University and has taught at the University of Alabama in Huntsville since 2003, apparently was incensed that a lesser-known school rejected her for what amounted to a lifetime job.
"Obviously she was very distraught and concerned over that tenure," Miller said.
"It insulted her and slapped her in the face, and it's probably tied in with the Harvard mentality. She brooded and brooded and brooded over it, and then, 'bingo.'"
'Very cogent'
Miller said Bishop seems "very cogent" in jail, where he has spent more than three hours with her over two days, yet she also seems to realize she has a loose grip on reality.
"She gets at issue with people that she doesn't need to and obsesses on it," Miller said. "She won't shake it off, and it's really (things of) no great consequence."
Bishop, who claims an IQ of 180, can't explain the shootings, he said.
"She says she does not remember anything about it," said Miller.
The chief prosecutor in Huntsville said he would not oppose a mental evaluation for Bishop, 45.
"In this case as in all cases, if they want to start talking about a mental defense, then have at it. We'll be ready when it comes to court," said Madison County District Attorney Robert Broussard.
Miller said he expects prosecutors to seek the death penalty, but Broussard said his office hasn't decided whether to seek Bishop's execution or a sentence of life without parole if she is convicted.
"We'll wait until we have every piece of evidence in front of us to decide on that," said Broussard. He said investigators had yet to review evidence about Bishop's troubled past, including her fatal shooting of her younger brother in 1986 in a case authorities in Massachusetts ruled accidental.

In Bishop's only public comments since the slayings, the teacher said the shootings "didn't happen. There's no way."
"What about the people who died?" a reporter asked as she was led to a police car hours after the killings.
"There's no way. They're still alive," she responded.
Department decimated
The shooting decimated the biology department â€” of 14 members, six were killed or wounded, one is jailed, and the rest are dealing with the shock and loss of colleagues. Two of those shot were hospitalized in critical condition Thursday, while another who was shot in the chest has been released.

Mourners hugged and cried Thursday at a memorial service for biology department chairman Gopi K. Podila. A long line of mourners moved slowly from the funeral home lobby, down a hallway and before an open casket in the sanctuary.
He was remembered as a father figure who cared deeply about his students, the kind of professor who kept his office door open in case they needed to talk about personal problems. Former student Joy Agee recalled that he helped her overcome her anxiety about a speech to a community group by showing up in the audience.
"He told me if I got nervous during the speech to just look at him and just talk to him," she said.
Podila had supported Bishop's tenure application.
After the service for Podila, more than 100 people attended a service held by the Council on African-American Faculty for slain biology professors Adriel Johnson and Maria Ragland Davis.
Johnson had organized the council at UAH in 2004, while Davis helped promote it in recent years. The two were among seven black faculty members at the school at the time, a number that had grown to 14 prior to their deaths. Overall, the school has 340 full-time faculty members.
"We have not only lost two founding members of our group but we have also lost two of our biggest advocates," said Sonja Brown-Givens, the council's current president.
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Long story short: Students complain about a professor, they get shrugged off. Professor has history with the police including "accidentally" killing her brother with a shotgun and hitting a woman at a restaurant for taking the last booster seat while claiming "I am Dr. Amy Bishop!", among others. Professor gets denied tenure and during a faculty meeting, shoots and kills three colleagues (including one who supported her) and wounds three others. Now she claims she has no memory of it and says the shooting "didn't happen" and the others are "still alive." Oh, and she was linked to a bomb threat in Harvard several years back.

Peace and War · Feb 19, 2010

Wow...
"I am Dr. Amy Bishop!"
She reeks of a superiorty complex, how has she not been diagnosed before, I don't know... If I didn't know any better I would say she has a split-personality, most 'amensiac' events happen when your personality switches with your alter ego.

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Alabama University Professor slays/wounds colleagues, claims no memory of it.

Boy Wonder Dark Phoenix in Training

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Peace and War Bianca, you minx!

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