The Murderer Next Door: The Only Real Mystery is Why Nobody Stopped Her Sooner.

[James Hayman]

Like a lot of people who write mystery and suspense novels for a living, I regularly comb the news for true crime stories that might someday form the basis of either a down-the-road Mike McCabe thriller or
possibly a stand-alone. When I find one, I cut and paste it into something I
call my “What If?” file. When the news recently broke about the murders
recently committed by Dr. Amy Bishop, I thought to myself this might be the basis
of something interesting. Here was
an educated professor and scientist and a mother of four children who,
supposedly without warning, gunned down six of her colleagues at a University
of Alabama faculty meeting, killing three and wounding three others, two
critically.

The only problem with the story is that it wasn’t without warning. There was warning, lots of it, that Bishop was the kind of deranged person who would do almost anything to retaliate against people she felt had
wronged her. According to a report by Shaila
Dewan, Stephanie Saul and Katie Zezima. in the New York
Times, “Dr. Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights
could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according
to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her. Her life seemed
to veer wildly between moments of cold fury and scientific brilliance, between
rage at perceived slights and empathy for her students.”

In 1986, when Bishop was twenty-one, she shot and killed her eighteen year old brother with a shotgun in their home allegedly after a family argument. It’s been chargesd that
the incident was never adequately investigated by local police, possibly
because Bishop came from a locally prominent family in Braintree, MA. Eight
years later, in 1994, Bishop and her husband were suspected as the culprits in
a mail bomb plot against a doctor she worked with at Harvard Medical School.
The bomb failed to go off and no one was ever charged here either. In 2002 she
finally was charged, this time with assault, after punching a woman in the face
in an IHOP restaurant because the woman had taken the last child booster seat.
She was never convicted.

According to those who knew her, Bishop flew into frequent rages over perceived slights. And after the Huntsville shooting, some in the University’s Biology Department feared that she might have booby-trapped the
science building with some kind of “Herpes Bomb.” Apparently, she had threatened to do just that.

The real mystery is why nobody chose to say or do anything about Bishop before she finally exploded in a frenzy of gunfire. She’d been hired by the University of
Alabama without anyone questioning or even being aware of her history of
irrational behavior. Why? My guess is, as my fictional hero, Detective Sergeant
Mike McCabe puts it In The Chill of Night, “It’s
a familiar scenario. Citizens not wanting to get involved. Too polite. Too
fearful. Too lazy. It was a problem for police departments across the
country. It bugged the hell out of
McCabe but it was tough to figure out what to do about it.”

The Amy Bishop killings were a preventable tragedy. Could they ever become the basis of a future novel? Some sort of female version of American Psycho? Maybe.
Well-educated female killers with a few screws loose often make interesting
villains. Just look at Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell and Basic Instinct’s
Catherine Tramell for proof.
However, for now, the cut and paste on Ms. Bishop will remain in my “What
If” pile. Her crimes are too
recent and the pain they caused too raw for me to do anything with them anytime
soon

[Jon Loomis]

It's an interesting story, indeed, and I imagine lots of writers are probably mulling over various ways they might use some part of it in works of fiction. The part I hadn't been aware of, and that I find really weird and interesting, is the alleged plan to plant a "herpes bomb" in the science building. What, it would explode and give everyone herpes? How do you go from an idea that juvenile to shooting six people in the head?

[John McFetridge]

There was a similar tragedy at the university I attended, Concordia, in Montreal. This was a few years before the tragedy at the Université de Montréal.

There is probably a good story in how someone like this kept getting worse and no one doing anything about it, but there are also lots of people (sadly it's lots and lots of people) who act just like these people did before they committed their crimes and only a very small number ever actually act out like this.

Lots of material, to be sure.

[I. J. Parker]

I forget good ideas all the time and keep a notebook full of plot ideas that I consult when it's time to write another novel or story. From this, you may guess that I'm less interested in the plotting than in the characters who play the parts.

As for the Amy Bishop story: I had the same reaction: this will make a book. Not true crime, but rather a novel. For that matter, having been a university professor myself, I can testify to the fact that that sort of life can quite easily set off an unbalanced personality. :)