Bloody Bishop

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Also, just go on whatever platform you listen to it and please rate and review it. It really helps us in getting discovered. And if you have a suggestion for anything, just reach out to us at our website, True Weird Stuff dot com. And thank you so much for listening. The FBI's 10 most wanted fugitive list went live on March 14th, 1950.

Once you make that list, the only way off of it is to die, be captured or have the charges against you dropped. They made an exception to that, though. Back in June 2018, William Bradford Bishop Jr. was dropped from the list. He'd never been captured. And so far as anyone knew, he was alive and well and in hiding, hiding from the law for just a few months short of 42 years.

The FBI dropped Bishop from the list to make room for someone even worse. But damn, how much worse would you have to be to bump a guy like Bishop? The guy who murdered his own mother, his wife, his three sons, who drove their bodies to a lonely swamp, dumped them in a shallow pit, set them ablaze. How do you even do that?

Much less get away with it. Bishop annihilated his entire family and then vanished. Maybe his army training helped. Maybe his years in the State Department taught him a few tricks about just how a man might disappear into a whole new identity. Or maybe he just got lucky. One incandescent act of violence. Murders committed before there was widespread video surveillance.

No cameras at cash registers to record him purchasing a gas can, a ball-peen hammer, a shovel. No license plate readers on the highway, no cell phones, so no way to track or triangulate a person's location. Just this suburban dad, tooling down the road in the family truckster, the battered bodies of his family cooling in the way back.

And then they got a small beam of light again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Truth. Weird. Stuff. March 2nd, 1976. At least four of the five persons whose bodies were unearthed in this rural peninsula county had been bludgeoned to death before they were set afire, state medical officials said today.

However, other details of the grisly incident remain locked in the pine forests, where the bodies of two women and two boys were uncovered. It was a forestry agent in Tyrrell County, North Carolina, Ronald Brickhouse, who discovered the bodies. Brickhouse was investigating a brush fire, never dreaming that the cause of the three-acre blaze was a pile of corpses doused in gasoline.

Horrific as it was, the burns were fairly superficial. Law enforcement expected to quickly identify the victims, though Tyrrell County Sheriff Royce Rhodes didn't think they were local. The boys, they were wearing pajamas. The two youngest had towels that were wrapped around their heads. The younger woman, she was dressed in dungarees.

She had a dungaree jacket. The older lady had an overcoat with a fur collar. I believe I'd have recognized them if they were from around here. And Sheriff Rhodes added, Well, there have been no reports of missing persons in this area. The area where the bodies were found was about 40 miles west of Nags Head. That's a town on North Carolina's Outer Banks.

The banks are a string of barrier islands separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Albemarle, Currituck, and Pamlico Sounds. Even now, 50 years after those bodies were discovered, it's still a heavily rural, sparsely populated part of the state. In fact, Tyrrell County remains the least populated county in North Carolina.

The kind of place you drive through on your way to the beach. Mile after mile of pine forests and swampland. It's home to red wolves and bobcat and black bears. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons patrol the skies. More than a third of the county is covered in water. It's lonesome country. The kind of place you might joke about being great for hiding a body.

Fire agent Brickhouse walked up on two of the bodies. They were just lying there exposed, just tossed into a trench that was only one to two feet deep in spots. The other three were covered by mucky peat. They call it pocosin soil. Wet, dense, rich in organic material. It took a team of sheriff's deputies to uncover those victims.

It was a grisly scene. That grave was a freshly dug hole. Brickhouse saw what he thought was a pile of discarded hogs. When you walk up expecting to see hogs and you find people, boy, your belly goes, he told reporters. Off to the side of the bodies was a shovel, a pitchfork, a five-gallon gasoline can, and a set of deep tire tracks.

What police would learn about those five burned bodies would make headlines around the world and kick off a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. March 9th, 1976. A U.S. State Department official is being sought by police for questioning in the blood and death of five members of this family whose burning bodies were found in a swampy grave near the eastern North Carolina village of Columbia.

That State Department employee was William Bradford Bishop Jr., who had failed to report for work for a week. The burning bodies of Bishop's mother, wife, and three children were discovered a week ago, piled in an open gasoline-soaked pit nearly 300 miles from their home in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. A neighbor of the Bishop family had gone to the police in Montgomery County, Maryland, worried that the family hadn't been seen in days.

No cars, no kids, no sign of life at all. When the cops arrived at the Bishop's home in the Pricene-exclusive Carderock Springs section of Bethesda, they weren't expecting to find a crime scene. But there were ominous dark trails leading from the house to the driveway, bloodstains in all four bedrooms of the split-level house.

Yet no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle anywhere in the home. No weapon was found on the scene. Police said it appeared the bodies were carried out the front door of the home, loaded into the family's 1974 station wagon, and then driven the 275 miles to the isolated eastern North Carolina burial site. The station wagon was reportedly seen near the grave site about 10 a.m. the next morning, shortly before the fire that led to the discovery of the bodies.

How does a person drive 275 miles with the battered bodies of his wife, children, and mother piled in the car? All that literal dead weight right behind you, concealed beneath a blanket or a tarp. But even so, the size, the shape. Is that foul bundle beginning to leak? Do you even dare to pull over to check? Are you in shock? Are you crying?

Are you queasy? Or are you strangely calm? The doing of it was terrible. You flinch and recoil from that memory. The oddly hollow crunch the skull makes as it's caved in. The stickiness of the blood. All that blood. But it's done now. It's done now. It's done now. It's done now. It's done now. Your wife, Annette, dead.

Your mother, Labilia, dead. Your sons, Brad III, 14, Brenton, 10, and Geoffrey, 5. They're all dead. This isn't the time to ruminate. This is the time to set sloppy emotions aside and act. There are things that need to be done. And so, Bishop steered that 1974 bronze-colored Chevy Malibu station wagon off Interstate 95 South and onto North Carolina's state roads, eventually turning onto Highway 64.

The spot he chose in Tyrrell County wasn't far from the road. He had to be careful. A station wagon isn't the best choice for a boggy, rutted dirt lane in the swamps. He came prepared, though, with a shovel and a pitchfork. In fact, it was that shovel, discarded at the crime scene, that gave North Carolina police their first clue that their unidentified victims might have come from the Washington, D.C. area.

That shovel had a sticker on it, the label of a hardware store in Montgomery County, Maryland, where it had been purchased, an example of one of the many tiny details that are so easily overlooked when a person is busy committing murder and hiding the bodies. Who was William Bradford Bishop? Brad, to his friends. Born in Pasadena in 1936, it was clear from an early age that Brad was a bright, bright kid.

He graduated from Yale, earned his first master's degree at Middlebury College, and his second master's at UCLA. He married his high school girlfriend, Annette Weiss. He joined the U.S. Army and served four years in counterintelligence. He was multilingual, a fluent speaker in four languages, Italian, French, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian.

He was handsome with a cocky grin, broad, high forehead, slightly crooked nose, strong jaw. He looked American in the way such men do, healthy and confident, with the good-natured ease that comes from the life of going about your business comfortably unchallenged. The very image of a successful man who had it all figured out, right down to the lovely home in a posh suburb, the supportive wife, the three sons roughhousing in the backyard.

Idyllic, as Bishop's story looked from the outside, it hadn't all come easily. Bishop had to drop out of Yale the first semester of his senior year. Money troubles. His father was a freelance geologist who was forever complaining about how big oil was so hard on him. So Brad, an above-average student who played football for Yale his freshman year and dreamed of becoming a doctor, quit school and spent a year digging ditches.

Then he returned to Yale and graduated, but he'd given up on going to medical school. Instead, he returned to California, and in 1959, he and Annette were married. Not long after, Bishop enlisted in the Army. He did his basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia, then was sent off to the Army's Intelligence School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore.

Bishop stayed in for four years, but he had bigger ambitions. He took the Foreign Service exam and passed it. Thanks to his strong language skills, he was soon posted overseas and working as a diplomat in the U.S. State Department. He and Annette spent four years in Italy, 1968 through 1972, Verona, Milan, and Florence.

The next two years were spent in Africa, Ethiopia, and Botswana. The family returned to the States in 1974, and Bishop accepted a position with the State Department in Washington, D.C. They purchased their home in Bethesda. Annette enrolled in art classes at the University of Maryland. For all appearances, an ideal American family.

But nothing is perfect, and the Bishop family sure wasn't. There was nothing bizarre or wildly dysfunctional, just life stuff. Brad Bishop had been passed over for a promotion, and that stung. He would have happily accepted another posting overseas, but Annette wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the idea. Their boys were getting older, and they needed stability.

Annette had just started school herself. Brad's mother, Lobelia, her full name, by the way, was just glorious, Lobelia Amaryllis St.. Germain Bishop, she was widowed now and had moved all the way across the country to join her only son's household. A solid career, a thriving family, a lovely home. There was nothing about Brad Bishop's life that even hinted at the violence to come.

Except for that one small detail about a promotion he didn't get. Was it that setback, coupled with his disappointment over Annette not wanting another international posting? Was that enough to trigger a bloodbath? Enough to drive the man to annihilate his entire family? On March 1st, 1976, Brad Bishop left work early.

Not feeling well, he told his secretary. According to the FBI, Bishop had ridden his motorcycle to work that day and left on it. But instead of going home to lie down or make a doctor's appointment, Bishop pulled into his driveway, and without even entering the house, swapped the motorcycle for his car. FBI agent Karen Cody reported that Bishop switched cars.

He didn't change. He got into this car, backed out, and then went to Montgomery Mall. His next stop was the bank where he withdrew several hundred dollars in cash. Then Bishop headed for the mall where he bought a gas can and a hammer. Those were stowed in the back of the station wagon, which he then pointed toward a nearby gas station.

Bishop filled up the tank of his car and his brand new gas can. There was just one more stop to make. The hardware store for a shovel and a pitchfork. Just another suburban dad running his errands. It was sometime between 7.30 and 8 p.m. that Brad Bishop turned back into his own neighborhood, through the front door of his home.

He didn't waste any time. Police believe his wife Annette was the first to die. A blood-spattered book found by her body suggested that she'd been attacked from behind, taken by surprise. Then he went upstairs to where his sons were sleeping and finished the job of slaughtering his family, the boys ages 14, 10, and 5.

It might be best to try to not imagine that, any of that. Best to stick to euphemisms and carefully worded phrases like passed away or because the reality of a father savagely attacking and murdering his children is a kind of horror that even the crappiest human recoils from. Finally, there was his mother, 68-year-old Labilia, who had taken the dog for a walk.

Bishop waited for her return. And when she came into the room, it's not clear if she even had a chance to register the sight of her battered and lifeless daughter-in-law before Bishop was on her, brutally swinging the hammer. She went down hard in a spray of blood and bone. The only living thing Brad Bishop spared that night was Leo, the family's golden retriever, who must have watched in silence as Bishop dragged body after body after body out to the station wagon.

When the last corpse was loaded and concealed, Bishop turned his attention to the dog. Opening the passenger door, Bishop waved the dog in. Then he turned the key in the ignition and carefully backed out of the driveway. It was the last time Brad Bishop would ever step foot in that house. From crime scene to crime scene, it was a drive of 250 miles or so, every bit of five hours or more, alone with his thoughts, with his dog, with the bodies of his wife, his mother, and his sons.

Brad Bishop drove through the night toward that swampy patch of ground in Columbia, North Carolina. He dug a hole wider and longer than it was deep. He layers the bodies of the youngest children. The smallest are on the bottom. FBI agent Cody explained, the wife and his mother, their bodies are on top. Bishop had had hours on that long drive from Maryland to strategize how best to eliminate the evidence of his crime.

His plan was a good one. There were just a few things he didn't anticipate. The first was accidentally starting a forest fire with his pile of burning bodies. The second was just plain bad luck. On March 2nd, 1976, someone just happened to be working up in the fire observation tower that overlooked Bishop's stretch of swamp, which meant it didn't take long for the blaze to be spotted.

By the time Ronald Brickhouse arrived on the scene and made his grisly discovery, Bishop was gone. Not far, as it turned out. He was spotted in a store, also on March 2nd, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, a city roughly 130 miles south of Columbia. According to FBI agent Cody, he actually made a purchase on a credit card, Converse Black Sneakers.

The store owner reported the sighting, describing him and recalling a dog. The witness told police that it seemed like Bishop was with a woman, though it was hard to be certain, which is fair. How much attention do we really pay to the person in front of us at the cash register? Who walks around thinking that any stranger might be a newly minted murderer?

Well, I mean, Max and I do, but we're talking about normal people now, regular people. In any case, those five bodies still remained unidentified. Back at the Bishop house in Bethesda, newspapers were piling up at the front door. Mail was spilling out of the slot. No one had been seen coming or going from the house. The boys weren't at school.

Neither was their mother, Annette. The dog never barked. Plus, the house had an odd emptiness about it, a vacancy that didn't feel like the folks who lived there were simply away. The silence was heavier than that. The Maryland police officers who showed up in response to a concern call from a neighbor didn't know that their counterparts in North Carolina were still frantically trying to identify the five victims removed from that burn pit in the swamp.

It was a process that ultimately took almost a full week, giving Brad Bishop a solid head start on the law. On March 8th, the victims were identified as the mother, wife, and three children of a missing State Department official, authorities said. North Carolina Attorney General Rufus Edmiston announced that they were searching for a member of the family as a suspect in the slayings.

A big break in the case finally came on March 18th, 1976, when police found a bronze-colored Chevy Malibu station wagon abandoned in a parking lot near a hiking trail in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains. A routine check on the license plates revealed that the car belonged to a person of interest in a murder. That was a shock that was more than backed up by the contents of the car.

Luggage, a shaving kit containing medication prescribed to one W.B. Bishop, a box of dog biscuits, a heavily bloodstained blanket, an axe, a shotgun. In the rear of the station wagon, the well that held the spare tire was full to the brim with congealing blood. FBI agent Robert Kelly said the 1974 Chevrolet with Maryland plates was definitely identified as Bishop's car.

The authorities assumed that Bishop had his diplomatic passport with him since a thorough search of his home and workplace failed to turn that up. Authorities also believed that Bishop was armed with a Smith & Wesson revolver. Park rangers said the car apparently had been in the lot used primarily by hikers for a week or ten days.

The car was towed to the park ranger station outside Gatlinburg where FBI agents planned to dust it for prints and search it for clues. A jacket, shotgun, and a suitcase were found in the vehicle. At this point, it wasn't clear what had become of Brad Bishop. The FBI said Bishop may have hiked up one of three trails leading from that unpaved parking lot and committed suicide.

The Smokies are bear country though. Was it possible that Bishop overestimated his skills and met with a violent ending of his own at the paws and claws of a bear? This theory didn't get much traction. Bishop was known to be an avid outdoorsman with army training to boot. Old home movies recovered by the FBI show Bishop loved the outdoors even as a kid.

He was described as athletic and adventurous, often camping, hiking, and skiing, and especially fond of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. The idea that he couldn't manage to blend in with other hikers on that stretch of the Appalachian Trail seemed laughable. Bloodhounds were used in the search, but the dogs failed to pick up any trace of his scent.

Doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies throughout the nation were alerted to watch out for Bishop. A 10-year veteran of the State Department who may need a refill soon of an antidepressant drug. George T. Quinn, special agent in charge of the Baltimore FBI office, said the FBI's 59 field offices were notified that Bishop had been under psychiatric care and was taking a drug known as Serax.

Agent Quinn said that based on past usage patterns, Bishop was due for a refill and might be suffering withdrawal symptoms that could include suicidal ideation. Because we come from a future that's at least marginally more informed about mental health, we know that family annihilation isn't a side effect of medications designed to treat depression.

The drug that Bishop was taking, Serax, is a benzodiazepine, sedating, and addictive. They still prescribe it some today for anxiety disorders and the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. On Bishop's day, Serax was often prescribed to treat not just depression, but irritability, agitation, and insomnia. It's a description that associates of the 39-year-old Brad Bishop say fit the man.

A description that might fit a lot of us. Yet how many times have you slaughtered your entire family with a hammer and then driven through the night as their bodies cooled and stiffened in the car seat behind you? Your hands gripping the steering wheel? Look, there's still blood caked under your fingernails. And the dog? He's such a good boy, isn't he?

He's near frantic from the smell of death and the confusion of this terrible night. But he trusts you. He wants to trust you. Can he trust you? He's always been such a good, good boy. The best boy. You're a good boy, Leo. A good dog. The kind of dog that you decide gets to live on the night your entire family will die by your hands.

People have a way of disappearing in the great, smoky mountains. It's unforgiving terrain, a deep, lush wilderness where even an experienced hiker can swiftly become disoriented and lost. Some of the disappearances in those mountains are enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck. Like Dennis Martin, who vanished in June 1969.

Family camping trip. The boy just six days away from his seventh birthday. In his bright red T-shirt, the child crouched behind a bush on the trail, planning to jump out and surprise the grownups. That was the last time anyone laid eyes on Dennis Martin. His disappearance remains unsolved even now. Bears, feral hogs, death by exposure, snatched by a stranger, interdimensional portal.

Pick one, pick them all, because no one knows what really happened to little Dennis Martin. And now police stood on that same ground, gazing into that same hazy, bluish white mist that blurs the ridgelines and softens the edges of the dense forest and gives the smoky mountains its name. If Brad Bishop was in those woods, the chances of finding him weren't great.

The law knew it. Bishop was no scared little boy. He had a dog, a gun and a wicked head start. And by this point, he'd been indicted for the five murders and was the subject of a nationwide manhunt. Something he could have learned simply by walking into a gas station to buy a candy bar. Not that Bishop would do anything as foolish as that.

Not after being identified in that sporting goods store in North Carolina. No. Brad Bishop was army intelligence trained and proving that he paid attention in class. His military background made him self-sufficient in the elements. Searchers combed the trails in that national park. But the simple truth is they never found even a fragment of evidence to suggest that Bishop and his dog had ever been there.

Park ranger Roger Miller said, We mounted a sizable search, but no clues whatsoever were ever found. There was never any conclusive evidence he was in the park. I think it's possible he may have managed to flee the country. A year went by and then another. In March 1978, on the second anniversary of the murders, Montgomery County police reluctantly acknowledged that while the Bishop case technically remained open, the investigation was no longer active.

As in, they were no longer actively seeking out evidence. Some new information had surfaced. The State Department said there was no indication that Bishop used his diplomatic passport to flee the country. But keep in mind that this was the mid 1970s. Travel was a pretty uncomplicated affair back in those days before computers and homeland security and TSA.

Bishop could have slipped out of the U.S. without setting off any red flags, depending on where, how he left. Bishop's job as a Foreign Service officer involved making passports. Perhaps in the weeks or even months leading up to the murders, Bishop had made a special passport for himself. Which makes you wonder, at what point did he move from toying with the idea of abandoning his life to plotting the deaths of his entire family?

An exhaustive search failed to produce any kind of motive for the killings. There was no evidence of infidelity or financial shenanigans. All anyone could point to was the disappointment over a promotion that failed to materialize. But there was one intriguing discovery. Unknown to his friends or colleagues, Brad Bishop had seen at least three different psychiatrists in the year or so leading up to the murders.

We just don't always know the people we work with and live with. Not really. A person can conceal so much until they can't anymore. Brad Bishop may have been the perfect candidate for that kind of snap, trained in both subterfuge and diplomacy. You can see how Bishop may have been able to hide his turmoil beneath a mask of unruffled confidence.

And all the while, was he carefully laying the groundwork for a new life, a life unencumbered by a marriage and a family? In January 1979, a former acquaintance claimed to have seen Bishop on a street in Stockholm, Sweden. Later that same month, a former co-worker said he saw the fugitive in Sorrento, Italy. Bishop reportedly fled into a rainstorm when asked about his identity.

By 1982, Brad Bishop was being described by law enforcement as the perfect mystery. North Carolina State Attorney General Rufus Edmiston declared that the only thing he could say for sure about Brad Bishop is that he believed the man was still alive. Montgomery County, Maryland, Detective Clem Orben said that it's still an open murder case.

But he admitted that authorities have no leads other than those alleged sightings in Italy and Sweden, not since the car was found. Mr. Orben calls the Bishop case one of the most bizarre and brutal in his memory and says it is very, very easy for people to disappear, even in the United States. March 2nd, 1986, the 10-year anniversary of the Bishop murders.

Annette Bishop's brother, Robert Weiss, told the press that he guessed time does heal wounds. It was hard for him to believe that a decade had passed. Investigators refused to accept the possibility that Brad Bishop was dead. His language and intelligence skills suggested that he'd have an easier time than most creating a whole new identity, building a whole new life in another country.

With no statute of limitation on murder, the authorities hung on, hoping that Bishop would make a mistake that they might yet pull off an arrest. As FBI agent Stanley Orenstein put it, You never give up. You can't. In a fugitive case, it is whole hog or no pig. You either find the person or you don't. In 1992, an official with Scotland Yard said that American mass murderer Brad Bishop was thought to be living under a false identity in the UK, possibly remarried.

When asked if Bishop might still be a threat, the detective responded like your classic dry as a cracker brick. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Wright said, I would call him dangerous purely and simply because he killed his own family and children and then tried to burn the bodies. If Scotland Yard was right, we'll never know, because Bishop continued to outwit the law.

This is the kind of story that haunts a place, haunts the people who brush up against it, like our very own Max. But Max wasn't the only kid growing up in the D.C. suburbs who locked in on this story and couldn't let it go. Steve Vogt was 11 years old when Brad Bishop murdered his family. He grew up to be an FBI special agent investigating the Bishop case.

If you're disciplined, you stay out of trouble. You don't get fingerprinted. You create a new identity. Don't talk to anybody you ever knew before. You won't get caught, especially in 1976. It was FBI agent Steve Vogt who helped put Brad Bishop on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. Vogt didn't think that Bishop was in Europe.

Vogt thought it was more likely that he managed to find a quiet life for himself somewhere in the southern United States. Montgomery County Police Detective Brian Stafford disagreed. Look, we never got the revolver back. He walked off into the Great Smoky Mountains and shot himself. 10 years, then 15, 20, and 30 years later, March 2006.

Bob Niss, retired radio and TV newsman, has no qualms about living in a murder house and grudgingly tolerates the reporters and camera crews who still show up at his door in the Carderock Springs section of Bethesda, Maryland. Niss was philosophical about living in a murder house, acknowledging that while it didn't bother him a bit, others were uncomfortable, including his own brother, who flatly refused to even visit the place for the 30 plus years Niss and his family lived there.

30 years have flown by since that terrible night in the gray shingled split level when Brad Bishop beat his family to death with a hammer. Sightings of Brad Bishop, or someone people think is him, are common around the world. People who see Wanted posters and America's Most Wanted seem to believe they've spotted him in car washes, libraries, and even posing as a janitor at a Southern California school.

America's Most Wanted and Season 3 of Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack. March 2, 1976, Columbia, North Carolina. A state park ranger responded to an urgent report of a brush fire in a remote wooded area. Did Brad Bishop brutally murder his own family? If he did, we can only speculate about what could have possibly caused him to commit such an unspeakable crime.

Montgomery County Sheriff Raymond Kight believed that not only was Brad Bishop still alive and at large, he was convinced that a big clue may have gone overlooked back in March 1976. The store in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where Bishop purchased a pair of black Converse sneakers on a credit card? He wasn't alone. There was a woman with him.

The store owner insisted. Holding Leo the dog's leash, she was wearing a beautiful dress. He said he described her as dark-skinned and Caribbean. Montgomery County Police Detective Robert Kiefer agreed with Kight that identifying that woman might just break the case wide open. Kiefer uncovered a clue as to her whereabouts in 1992 when, while digging through Bishop's old files at the State Department, he found a March 15, 1976 letter sent to Bishop from a convicted bank robber that made a vague reference to a woman, passports, and the area where the bodies were discovered.

The numbered letter, apparently the sixth in a series, indicates Bishop may have been planning his family's murder for months. Now, in answer to your question, yes, I am most sure she is in the North Carolina State Penitentiary, wrote the bank robber, A. Ken Bankston. But he does not name the woman. Bankston died in 1983.

Perhaps if the letter had not languished for 16 years in State Department archives, investigators may have been able to sort out any connection between Bankston and Bishop. If Bankston was in some way involved in the planning of the murders, he took that knowledge to his grave. There were rumors of CIA involvement, and why not?

Bishop had military intelligence and diplomatic training and experience, a CIA wet dream if there ever was one. But Sheriff Kight, who pursued the CIA angle with the same dogged relentlessness he'd applied to every other scrap of information in his path, hit yet another dead end. In his letters to the CIA, the sheriff mentions a clue found in Bishop's desk at the State Department, a matchbook with a telephone number of a CIA office at the agency's Langley headquarters.

He also cites a document found in Bishop's security file at the State Department, which stated that the CIA had done a damage assessment of Bishop's knowledge of its activities after he disappeared. But the CIA concluded that it does not consider Bishop as a possible espionage target, the report said. Sheriff Kight even filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA, and that's an unusual step for a law enforcement agency to take.

The CIA's reply? No records responsive to your request were located. Now more than 50 years have passed since that March evening in 1976 when Brad Bishop strolled through his own front door, hammer in hand. How much rage would a person have to be holding to do what he did? There was nothing swift about it. No way to have any distance from the violence, the sheer savagery of bringing hammer down on flesh.

The effort of it, his own sweat mixing with the blood of his wife, his sons, his mother. A man capable of beating five people to death. The blood was everywhere. Floor, walls, even the ceiling was splattered in gore. Brad Bishop's intellect, his fluency in multiple languages, the carefully polished demeanor of the career diplomat, all a mask concealing a deep well of fury and resentment to bludgeon another human being to death.

That's close up, intimate, personal. Perpetrators who kill this way are often guilty of overkill, violence driven by unrestrained anger, inflicting trauma far beyond what's necessary to cause death. This is what Bishop did to his family, turning the bodies of his wife, his sons, and his mother into mangled, brutalized flesh.

Even seasoned detectives shuddered at the thought of driving through the night with that gory cargo. How could anyone manage it? And the fact that in all that mad, wild carnage, Brad Bishop spared only the family dog. 50 years, and Bishop, who would be 89 years old if he's still alive, well, he got away with it. He got away with murder, and the thing that has haunted investigators for half a century?

The why. FBI agent Steve Vogt believes it all comes down to money. A promotion and raise that didn't happen. A missed mortgage payment. Bishop was unhappy with his desk job in Washington. He wanted out of the suburban dream and back to a posting overseas in the Foreign Service. That his wife, Annette, could be satisfied with this dull life in Bethesda?

That she would hold him back for her own selfish reasons. The more Bishop dwelled on it, the more enraged he became. It was so unfair. The way they just expected him to carry on like a robot, like an automaton. As though all he was, was a provider. Providing for the lives of others while his own dreams slipped farther and farther out of reach.

Was this it then? Was this all there would ever be for him? Like the song goes, this is not my beautiful wife. This is not my beautiful house. How did I get here? 50 years. Will it ever be over? FBI agent Steve Vogt. When's it over? When everybody that knew Brad Bishop is gone. Is no longer on this earth. And nobody cares anymore.

That's when it's over. I mean, for me, obviously, when I'm no longer here, it's over for me. But, hey, it's just a mystery that you'd like to solve. Brad Bishop could still be alive. At 89, he might be that elderly gentleman one booth over at Panera. A little hint of a tremor in the hand, carefully faring a spoonful of soup from bowl to mouth.

Or, perhaps he sits in a nursing home somewhere. His memories stolen by dementia. A man who'd be shocked to learn that once upon a time, he slaughtered his entire family. Or, maybe he and Leo, the golden retriever, set out that afternoon in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park with a plan. A plan that was solid and well-considered and absolutely doable.

As long as nothing went too terribly wrong. No falls, no accidents, no unexpected encounters with wildlife. Bishop knew he couldn't risk the well-traveled paths. Couldn't risk encounters with curious tourists or observant park rangers. He and Leo would have to bushwhack it. Navigating by compass, not by established trails.

You need real skill to maneuver through wilderness that way. But you also need luck. It's amazing how fast a good day can turn bad out there in the wild. How quickly mistakes can snowball into tragedy. It's possible that Brad Bishop and his dog entered the Smokies that March day in 1976 and never left. Possible that they've been dead for over 50 years too.

Time and the elements scouring their flesh to the bone. The heavy rains and dense humidity melting their bodies away. The high peaks of the Smokies are actually a temperate rainforest. The wettest region in the country outside of the Pacific Northwest. A body left exposed in the woods can become a skeleton in as little as three weeks.

Factor in the time of year, early spring. It's possible that the bodies of Bishop and his dog were nothing but bones by summer. Just two more ghosts in that hazy and already haunted forest. Even if that turned out to be true, it might be closure, but it wouldn't be justice. Because in this case, justice, like Brad Bishop himself, is something we're probably never, never going to find.

Next time on True Weird Stuff. From Samson and Delilah to the Broadway musical called Hair, human beings are obsessed with the stuff. And what is it really but strands of dead protein hanging out the top of your head? But there are people with such a fetish, such a fascination, such a need to touch the hair of others, that they're willing to come through your window at night.

The hair phantom on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents, Erin Cox, Kevin Nash, Lamar Richardson and Kary "Doc" Bowser. Sherry, you know, each of our episodes are like a child. Which do you love the most? Let me say, not only do I love this the most, but I also know the most about this. And part of the reason, and I think you talked about it during the narration, is I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area.

I was about, I could have been Bradford Bishop's son. I was about his children, his son's age. And it was all over the media and the newspapers. You could not escape it. Now you have to understand, I was such a weird child. I'm going to the library and my favorite books are books about the Manson murders, the Kennedy assassination, the Lincoln assassination, and there was another murder that happened up in Ohio that I became fascinated with as well.

The name is escaping me right now. Anyhow, I would go to the point that I would go in. I was ignoring schoolwork to go through the microfilm of newspaper accounts about some of these murders. I was so obsessed with them as a child. I think my parents just didn't care as long as I was reading and going to the library. They didn't care the fact that I was interested in this very bizarre, macabre stuff.

But this story fascinates because it's possible that he did continue to live. I think that this happened in your backyard. Stories like this shape us, especially in childhood. And so when I look at you and the FBI agent Steve Vogt, he's like your age. You would have been old enough to be Brad's youngest, right? So as little boys, you're looking at a family that looks a lot like yours.

Brad Bishop, he doesn't look like your dad, but it's that same gray suit, slicked back hair. It's that same handsome of that era. Right. A mom, a dad, a lovely suburban home, three children. I just described your family. I just described Steve Vogt's family. Right. Go ahead. Well, as a child, as children, we believe certain things about the world.

That's what makes childhood magical is that we believe that we are safe and loved and protected and that our parents are our protectors. And so when we have a story like what happened with the Bishop family, as children, we realize, uh-oh, the monster might live inside the house. And I think that that is really traumatizing for some kids.

Clearly for you, clearly for Steve Vogt. You know, I come at this, I never, I didn't know about the Brad Bishop case. I would have been a little kid in Wyoming. This kind of news, while it made it out west, I wasn't paying attention to it. But I lived with a monster. I fully expect it. I am amazed to be sitting here because I fully expect it.

I expect my father to murder my mother and my brothers and I before I turn 21. So stories like this sink their teeth into people like us. Well, there's a, there was another murder, and I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole with this, but there was one in New Jersey with a guy by the name of John List. And John List murdered, so there are parallels between these two stories.

John List also married, excuse me, murdered his three children, his wife and his mother, as did Brad Bishop. We don't know what happened to the John List dog, though. That was never discussed. The only difference between the two of these, John List was caught by America's Most Wanted many years after the fact. I want to say that it was like 19, 20 years after the fact because they did a bust of what he would look like and they put it on and all of a sudden there were people going, I know who this guy is, and that's how he got arrested.

And he was an old man when they popped him. Yeah, he was. Right, yeah. So you were like, how could, so how could Bradford Bishop do all this and then not have any thoughts about it as he went through it? When they interviewed John List, John List said, once I made the decision, this took on a life of its own. And so I was almost disassociated from it.

So I'm wondering if perhaps that was the case with Brad Bishop, where he said, OK, fine, I have made the decision, I'm going to do this. And once it did, it just rolled like a snowball down the hill. That was my best guess, too, because the simple truth is the man is such an enigma even now, all these years later, right?

Because, OK, you didn't get your promotion. I mean, as motives for murdering five human beings go, that one seems thin, right? But it's when you start adding it up, he, I think that something was broken in Brad early on that just wasn't detected because he was such an overachiever. I can tell you from experience as like a parent and as a person that, boy, you can be just coming apart at the seams.

But if you're on the honor roll, nobody notices. And that's kind of like that's kind of where Brad was. Let's pause here. So one of the things that's fascinating to me about this murder is, on the one hand, he seems like he's organized. But on the other hand, he seems like he's not. We assume that he knew where he was going to take these bodies.

But I don't believe that he did. I think that he made the choice to do the murders. And, of course, at that time, we didn't have ring doorbells or, as you said, in the narrative, we didn't have that license plate, none of that stuff. So because if he had better planned this part of it, he would have not tried to burn bodies, which is a terrible way to dispose of bodies, as we have found many times over.

He would have done that in a different way. So I think that on the one hand, it seems like he's organized. But on the other hand, he didn't think through what he was going to do next in this situation. Completely agree. And let's look at it. He may have been daydreaming about this crime, but he left work, went home, swapped vehicles.

Let's go through that afternoon because when you really go through that afternoon, it's so fucking cold and scary. He tells his secretary at the State Department that he's not feeling well. He thinks he might be coming down with the flu. And he gets on his motorcycle and he goes home. He pulls the motorcycle into the garage and gets out and gets into the station wagon and backs it up.

He doesn't go in to say hello or anything. That's the first place for me. The decision has been made. On the ride, either in the office or on the ride home, he's made some decisions. He gets in the station wagon and he goes and he gets cash. And he buys the hammer, the gas can, the shovel, the pitchfork. He's doing all of these things moments before committing the murder, which tells you that it's premeditated, but it hadn't been super well premeditated.

A real sinister cold mofo would have been acquiring these items over time and not gone and loading up the wagon that night. Then he comes home and it's like he's on autopilot. He walks in and he beats Annette. This is someone he's been with since they were teenagers. He beats her to death with a hammer. Now, in for a penny, in for a pound.

But now he goes upstairs and he's got his three boys. He killed the oldest. Then he killed the two youngest and wrapped their heads in towels. Classic FBI criminal forensic profiling moment here. This is someone who knew the victims. This is why their faces were covered. Even the famous mine hunter, FBI profile guy, was involved in this case in building Bishop's Most Wanted profile.

So the faces of the youngest children being concealed were a clue to the sheriff in North Carolina that I don't know who these people are, but their killer did. Then he waits. He stands in the living room, covered in the gore of his family, holding the hammer. The dog, you can only imagine what the freaking golden retriever is doing.

The golden retriever is with his mom. Lobelia and Leo come through the front door together. You know the dog smells blood and adrenaline, and the dog freezes, and Bishop is on his 68-year-old mother like an avenging angel, beating her to death with the hammer. So let's talk about the method of murder. The way he is killing these people is not just killing.

It's anger. It's punishment. I'm sorry to go back to John List, but John List shot all these people, and he did it as they all arrived home. There's a way he can be sort of disconnected from what he's doing. Exactly, exactly. Because when you are up that close to killing somebody, you are right up in their personal space.

You can smell their perfume or cologne or anything like that. You're so close to them when you do it. It's so personal, and that is one of the most haunting things about this, that he said, I'm going to kill everybody, and I'm going to do it with a hammer. This is where I really locked in on Brad Bishop, and I pictured his youngest son.

You know how you give your kids a bath, and you put their jammies on, and you put them in bed and read them stories. That wet shampoo smell of a child. I pictured him bludgeoning that little five-year-old precious boy, who was probably screaming. They were all screaming. I mean, it's horrific. But I locked in on Brad Bishop as the child of an angry, violent father, because I feel like there's a kind of a person who is so narcissistic, so self-involved.

I need you to take off the all-American boy overachieving lens when you look at Brad Bishop now. I want you to see someone who always had to be the first and the best, who was the apple of everyone's eye and a superstar at everything he did. This was a man who was used to hearing his name called out with accolades, and he did not want this desk job in Washington.

I can only imagine how exciting it is to live in Milan and Botswana and London and the Foreign Service and glittering cocktail parties at the embassy. It's like something out of a book. That's what he wanted. He had that. He and Annette had that, and he wanted to go back to it. Annette is like, these kids are going to school.

They're playing Little League. What are you talking about? He was so angry about not getting his way that I think by the time he raised his arm for that first hammer blow, he was convinced that he was the victim of these people and not the other way around. Does that make sense? So you said there was something else in the narrative where you talked about he went to three psychiatrists leading up to this.

He knew. He knew something was real wrong with him. He knew. He did, and I'm wondering if there's a possibility he may have been doing a little doctor shopping in order to get the medication that he was getting because it's an addictive substance. Yes, Serax is like Xanax. I mean, it's a Benzo. So this is in 1976, which was a far cry better than 1966, but still not great in terms of mental health, and it was still heavily stigmatized.

He was seeing these psychiatrists in private. He may have been pill shopping. The idea that he couldn't function without his Serax, Benzos are very, very habit-forming. He would experience some withdrawal, but at no time was a guy like Brad Bishop going to be taken down by a prescription medication. I never saw that as anything that we needed to worry about.

I think that he was furious. I think he had the furious, impotent rage of the narcissist, of the child that's been told, you can't have that toy, and everyone is going to pay for it. And he was so... You can't be anything other than blind with rage to bludgeon five human beings to death, one after the next in your home.

You just can't be. Do you remember Robert Hansen, the guy that worked for the FBI who was a spy? There was a similarity because he had a slight, as far as a promotion was concerned, and he fueled his spying for the Russians and getting all this money because of that. Because it wasn't about the money. It was about, if I can't get this, I'm going to get back at you.

You're all going to pay. You realize that for a lot of people, it is their only thing in life. Everything else is a prop. Their own accomplishment is the only thing that is important. How they're thought of, their prestige, all of this sort of stuff. And it's interesting how Robert Hansen funneled it into spying and Bradford Bishop funneled it into murdering his entire family.

We once had a charming sociopath in our studio. We did. On our radio show. And we won't identify this individual because they would love that attention. But we had a very charming sociopath in the room who explained to us that the way the world worked was it was like a movie. And he was the star. And everything in the movie, the story, all the characters revolved around him and served him.

And everyone else, wife, kids, employer, friends, family, background characters, easily interchangeable, easily replaced. And the way he explained it, he was so charmingly persuasive. I mean, it was crazy bullshit. But you saw inside this person's head. It was so crazy that it almost seemed like it was parody. It was like you're joking, right?

But then you do realize that that is how this particular person actually thought. Can we talk about the inmate and the woman? Because my feeling about this always has been that there was some sort of help along the way, that somehow, some way, he was able to get some kind of help. Because if he has—so they recalled, as you said in the narrative, about the woman holding the leash of the dog when they went to the store and that they did identify that there was this woman.

And then there is this inmate who died in 1983 connected with this. I've often felt that, yes, he may have perished with the dog in the Great Smoky Mountains, but I believe that someone drove him from Tennessee where he left his car in a park. I agree with you. I think that this woman appears in this sporting goods store in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and then never again.

We have no—she appears and disappears. But she's clearly integral to this plot in some way. I mean, unless he literally turns to a complete stranger and says, hey, can you hang on to my dog while I get my wallet? That doesn't seem likely, right? It doesn't, but do you remember when the Oklahoma City bombing happened, there were pictures of a couple people that they said were possible suspects, and one of them was Timothy McVeigh, and the other person was just somebody who happened to be in the rental car place at the time.

So that is possible, but I think there's more to that story. I really do. It's wild because the implication would be then that he was having an affair with this woman. There was no—this is the thing about Brad Bishop. He's such a zero for law enforcement. There was no evidence of an affair. There was just no indication that he was anything other than what he appeared to be.

That doesn't mean that he didn't cheat and was getting away with it. We just had less ways to track it back then. Yeah, we just don't know. So I think it's one of two things. The reason I agree with you that someone picked him up in that parking lot in Tennessee and the car was a red Herring that worked beautifully, by the way, here's why I agree with you.

We could do an entire episode called The Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Be careful, y'all, because from a terrain and climate standpoint, it's no damn wonder there are so many stories and legends and there's so much lore around the place. You can basically leave a body out there and it ain't nothing to find three weeks later.

Between climate and insect and animal activity, it's a great place to dump a body. FYI for anyone looking for that. But, but, but, but, they sent in bloodhounds and even the dogs couldn't pick up a trace of the man sent. Now, if he had gone to—so the murders were committed on March 1st. He was spotted in Jacksonville, North Carolina on March 2nd.

If he drove all night, he could get to that parking lot sometime on March 3rd. The car was found on March 18th. Has enough time and weather activity happened to wash away the man's scent on the trail? Yeah, probably. I don't know. I don't know how bloodhounds work. But they didn't find anything, which does make you think he was never there.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So he did have some kind of help. He had such a head start on them, too, that anything is possible. I mean, he could have ended up in Canada and flown out of Canada to go somewhere or anything. The kind of passport he had. So he had a diplomatic passport. We'll talk about that for a second because you did talk about how he worked in— So diplomatic passports mean when you go to the airport, they go, OK, just going through.

You're not going through a lot of the same BS as the cops have to. Even now. Even now. Even now. So I have to remind you that in 1976, you didn't need a passport to go to Canada or Mexico. You could just drive. That's right. So he could have been riding shotgun with that unknown woman and Leo the dog, and they crossed into Mexico or Canada, and then he gets on a flight with his diplomatic passport.

There are no computers back then. Somebody wrote down that this man, but under a different name because he was in the business of making passports, right? Let's say he made himself a passport, John Smith. John Smith departs out of Mexico City for Brussels. How is that tracked? Right. How is that tracked? There's no computer.

Somebody wrote it down somewhere. But as you and I both know, just looking at the missing MK Ultra files should get written down. Doesn't mean anything. And and if you let's just say you are a border guard or you're somewhere and you go, that guy looks like Bradford Bishop, but he's with a woman and a dog. Do you see what I mean?

If he was traveling by himself, you would say that that might be him. But it might jump out at you because it doesn't jump out at you if you've got if you are you're with a woman and a dog. And of course, at that point, I don't know at what point along the line the information about the woman that he was with came out.

I don't know. But you would be less likely to see them as suspicious if that were the case. I'm just going to put this out here. So, again, March 1976. He's all over the news. So he's all over, you know, NBC Nightly News. Whoever and the newspapers, there are reports on the radio, but there's no Internet yet. There are no cell phones.

There's no news feed alerting in your pocket. Right. There were people that were avidly following the case. But the chances that somebody avidly following the case sees him and recognizes him and makes the connection. Do you see how remote and unlikely that is? America's Most Wanted. So when they found John List, they made a bust of what he might look like now and put the glasses on him and everything else.

And that's how they caught him. They did the same thing with Brad Bishop because they went, well, it's successful with this. Let's try it with this one as well. So but let's look at let's look at what you just said. How many years had passed before America's Most Wanted rolled up on the scene? Brad Bishop had this huge head start on law enforcement and a diplomatic passport at a time when there were no computers, no surveillance.

And nobody really paying attention to somebody driving into Mexico and taking a flight out of Mexico City. Like he by the time anybody knew that it was Brad Bishop they were looking for. He was gone. He was gone. So America's Most Wanted got their hands on Brad Bishop like they did John List and Unsolved Mysteries did.

And they age progressed him and they did all of the things. But the same thing that you need to survive in the wilderness, no matter how skilled you are, luck, is the very same thing you need to catch a guy like this. You need luck. Somebody needs to be watching the TV show at exactly the moment that that image hits the screen.

And they need to realize that that guy lives next door. And I can't think of anybody who would be better prepared for a life on the run internationally than him. Oh, he was engineered for this. I need you to think about this. First of all, golden boy since childhood. Really, really smart. Probably by the time he raised that hammer he was on his way to his third master's degree.

And we're talking Yale and UCLA and Middlebury. I mean we're talking really big hard schools. The Army sent him to Army Intelligence School. What do you think they teach you there in Army Intelligence School? All their secrets. One of the things they teach you is how to lie. Because in order to spot a liar you got to know how a lie is built.

Right? Right. And then of course he was also at Fort Benning where he's sliding on his belly through the poison ivy as part of his training. This was not a regular person. Brad Bishop was an engineered ghost. Then he's in the Foreign Service. He's so multilingual. He's in the Foreign Service. His ability to speak multiple languages was matched by his ability to be a chameleon in multiple different kinds of environments.

That's part of his diplomatic training in the State Department. So we've got a guy that's been trained how to build and break down a lie. Trained how to survive in the woods. And trained how to seamlessly blend from one environment into the next. Acquiring information, not releasing it. The perfect. You just built the perfect killer.

Also, he was spotted overseas by some people. Perhaps in Sweden. Perhaps in Italy. Perhaps in the UK. What was interesting about when he would be approached, somebody said, Are you Brad Bishop? If somebody came up to me and said, Are you Brad Bishop? I'd say, No, I'm sorry. You got the wrong person. I wouldn't run the other direction.

Which is really weird and kind of makes you look really guilty. Oh, and by the way, the people that spotted him weren't people that had seen his picture in the newspaper. They were co-workers in the State Department. They were former military and government people. So I think they actually spotted him. That's why I think he's not a moldering pile of minerals in the Great Smokies.

I think he got away with murder. I think he did, too. And I think he had help. I think he had help. A guy like Brad Bishop, and this is the part that's so chilling, is you just don't know if you're lying next to that person. You don't know, Max. No, you don't. Because so many times you and I have talked about murder cases where the people seem like they're living these everyday suburban lives and then do something horrific like this.

And you absolutely don't know what's going on in somebody's head. You think you might, but you really don't. There are aspects of this story that I have to shy away from them because if I spend too much time looking into that abyss, that abyss looks back to quote Nietzsche. And one of them is this. So his wife Annette, they'd known each other since they were young teenagers.

Do you think that Annette ever once said to herself, I bet Brad could murder us all in cold blood? Do you think Annette, can you imagine the shock, the disbelief, the betrayal, the pain of Annette in that moment seeing this man that she's known most of her life coming at her in violence? Do you know something that when I listened to the podcast Father Once Is Dead about the John List murder, you introduced me to that.

I think one of the most haunting aspects of that was the fact that these people that were killed, that he killed, not only did it affect them, but those, his sons, had friends. And how that affected the friends in the John List murder, how that affected them at that time and how they were so spooked by it, the person became a phantom.

Are they there? Are they not there? And that all of them, almost to a person, were so affected by what had transpired. All of these years later, like 50, over 50 years later, they're still haunted by this. These crimes, they ripple. And they're never really done. They're never really over. Like, when you think about what Brad Bishop did, you know, he killed all three of his children.

And his mother. And his wife. And his mother. I mean, the neighborhood, the school, the schools where his children went, the University of Maryland where Annette was studying, it was her turn, you know. She'd been the dutiful Foreign Service wife. She had the babies and, you know, gotten the kids all into school. It was her turn to go back to school.

And he hated it. He was pissed. He wanted to move to Croatia or what have you. But you think about all of the people that were touched by this. Annette's brother. The family that moved into the home after they finally, you know, put it up for sale. Bob Nice, a legendary Washington, D.C. radio news guy. Which is probably why he was able to live in the house.

Because he had some distance from it, you know, as a reporter. But his own brother would never set foot in a place that was so freaking haunted. Are you surprised they didn't tear the house down? They've done that in other cases. The list home burned down. And I'm thinking about John Wayne Gacy. They just tore the house down.

I'm surprised that they didn't just tear the house down. They had a bit of a tough time selling it. And the family that bought it got a discount. They got a murder discount. But the people that were affected by this. Ronald Brickhouse, the fire agent in North Carolina who found the bodies. Do you think he ever really got over that?

Do you think he didn't see that every time he closed his eyes? It was horrifying. You're right about that. And his bishop's co-workers at the State Department who'd gone to backyard cookouts with his family and knew Annette. They were devastated. Guys that had, you know, hey buddy, let's get a beer. Realized that they were in fellowship with a mass murderer.

They were devastated. The cops who worked on this case. Never. This is one of those instances where like when you're watching a dateline and the detective is retired and he's a thousand years old but he's still got a manila box full of manila folders because he's trying to solve it before he dies. Every FBI agent, every sheriff, every deputy, every beat cop, everyone in Maryland and North Carolina and Tennessee who even touched this case is haunted by it.

Yeah, because for them it wasn't just a job that they forget about. I mean they lived this. They lived this day and night. And when you become obsessed with it, if you're in law enforcement, it's bad for your family. For a lot of them that I've heard talk about. This case in particular. I want to circle back to luck for a minute.

I want to talk about how lucky Brad Bishop was because he made a couple of really big mistakes. He didn't even bother, by the way, to obscure the crime scene in Bethesda. I mean literal trails of blood out of the house. He made zero effort to tidy that mess up at all. But here's where he made a mistake. There was a shovel and there was a sticker on that shovel and that sticker is what broke this case open.

He didn't see it. He wasn't looking for it. Who would be, right? But the second, that was sloppy and it was bad luck that that sticker was on that shovel. Just bad luck. Here's the next piece of bad luck. The odds of someone being in that particular fire observation tower on that particular day were about 1,000 to 1. That was an unmanned fire observation tower.

But there were some things. They were working on some projects in the county and someone just happened to be there to see the smoke. That's it. That's the only reason that Ronald Brickhouse was sent to find those bodies. You were right. Burning bodies is a terrible way to dispose of evidence. It's the worst way. Don't even try it.

But he might have gotten a little further along had that observation tower been unmanned as it would have been on any other day. And also a bit of sloppiness on his part because when John List did his murders, he stopped the mail. He stopped the newspaper. He stopped the milk. He wrote letters to the school. The kids were going to see a sick relative.

So he had all that so he gave himself a little bit more of a head start. Now he did not have the diplomatic passport like Bradford Bishop did. But he didn't get as much of a head start as he perhaps could have. Everything you just said, does that not persuade you that Brad Bishop didn't have a fraction of the planning or premeditation that List did?

See, that's the thing about this. I think once he made the decision, he went ahead and did it. But I don't think he thought terribly long about it. But I do believe that somewhere along the line he said, I need some help with something. I'll pay you a few bucks and paid somebody to help. I just try to imagine what it would be like.

I'm very grateful that I didn't inherit my family's curse because I literally cannot get my imagination to go to the place where I didn't get something I wanted at work. I'm a woman in radio. Not getting something I want at work is my entire life. My whole career can be summed up with, she didn't get what she wanted from this job.

But let's say, and you know, Max, pick one of our many, many, many, many, many defeats. And I go home and I go, all right, that's it, man. That's how that's going to be? I'm going to drive to Lowe's. I'm going to get some equipment. I'm going to go home and murder my entire family. You see how you can't really get there?

Your inability to get there shows you that Brad Bishop had been there all along. It was Brad Bishop's movie and everybody else was just background. And when the plot did not favor Brad Bishop, it was time to change the movie. Yep. So whatever happened that day, and somebody knows and it's known and it's not in the public record.

Something happened that day at the State Department. And it may be something that looks pretty benign to an outsider, but it was enough to snap him, to break him. So, yeah, I don't think he had a fraction of lists premeditation. I think it was a more impulsive decision. I think he thought about it for a long time, but I don't think he thought about the specifics of it for a long time.

And something happened that day to flip the switch to that white hot rage. And you know, and okay, so if we're honest, we all know that you can talk yourself into that white hot rage in the car on your way home. Have you ever worked yourself up into a real state? Sure, I've had imaginary arguments in the car just in case the argument were to happen and I'm all prepared.

Yeah, yeah. Don't we know what it's like to work ourselves up into such a state? But here's the difference. If you're a reasonably sound person mentally and emotionally, your state that you've worked yourself into is not going to end in a bloodbath. That's the difference between you and him, between me and him. And here's what we don't know.

Here's what Annette didn't know or Labilia or the boys. You didn't know that that was inside that man. You, the surface that he presented, the handsome, charming, accomplished, talented surface, you believe that was the whole thing because he was so good at that. There's no, there's no, you can't. How could you ever anticipate that your husband that you've known since he was 13 years old is going to kill you with a fricking hammer?

How do you anticipate that? There's just no way. And the other thing about Brad Bishop that is pretty special, and in the Rogues Hall of Fame in hell, he's going to, they're going to toast him with this. Part of the reason people don't get away with murder is because they leak. I think we just found Leo the dog. He's here.

Let him in. He's been on the road a while. They leak. They're guilt leaks. One of two things. They're leaking guilt or they want you to know they got away with it. They leak. They talk. Like BTK. He wanted you to know. He was as leaky as a spaghetti strainer. Bishop never leaked, clearly. He was able to do this thing and then wash the blood off and start over.

And he didn't need you to know how clever he was or cunning. He didn't need to brag about the details of his escape. He didn't need to tell you the stories about how tricky it was getting out of the Smoky Mountain National Park without being seen. He didn't need that attention. He literally amputated the part of his life that was married to Annette, the son of Lobelia, the father of those three boys.

He amputated that in a moment and started a whole new life. And that's why he got away with it. How many of us would have the willpower to shut up? Never, as far as we know, never went back to the scene. That's the other thing. Law enforcement, they keep watch on places and funerals and people because they know that there's a strong possibility that the guy who set the building on fire is standing in the crowd watching.

That the guy who committed the murder is in the very back of the funeral watching it go down. They waited to see if Brad Bishop would ever loop back through his old haunts in California or Maryland, his former military buddies. Would anybody brush up against him? Nothing, which is why some people think he's dead in the Great Smokies.

I think he's just as cold as ice. I think he was alive and well. But he didn't have the need to do any of that. As far as we know. I'll say that. As far as we know. As far as we know. A lot of your former Maryland County detectives and some of the FBI agents who work this case. Because it's so rare to be taken. I can't express to you how significant it is that he was removed from the 10 most wanted list without dying or being caught.

That just doesn't happen. They get their man. They don't take people off that list. They all believed that he was alive and probably remarried. And I want you to imagine that. I want you to imagine that this husband that you think you know so well, that's in his past. And you have no idea. Just like the, you know, because John List went on, right?

He went on and he lived a whole second life. People never knew. They never knew. I saw like one time I learned through an old photograph that my husband once left the house in a pair of red, white and blue striped bell bottoms and a macrame vest. Now, granted, he was in middle school, but I almost divorced him just on general principle right there.

But you never know, do you? My boy, I thought I knew you. And apparently you're the kind of man that that went to a middle school dance in a macrame vest. I'm hiring a lawyer. What would you do if you found out that the person you live with was a mass murderer? Well, you know, John List did remarry. And she's still alive, by the way.

And, you know, she stood by him at first. I would never. And he told her in jail, sell it to the tabloids so you can make some money. Oh, my God. Can I I mean, it probably doesn't say anything good about me that I could not stand behind you. Well, she did. She did initially because she couldn't believe it. But ultimately, you know, she didn't.

So let me ask you a question, Max. These people that say I just can't believe he would ever do that or she would ever do that. Tell me the truth in all seriousness. It's not that as soon as I find out it happened, I can I believe it. I can believe it. I totally believe it. We've had we you and I have had discussions about certain people where we go.

If I heard this about that person, I would believe it that they did something really horrific, that I would believe it. Absolutely. Like like I'm pretty sure I know my husband very well. And I'm like besties with his ex-wife, so I know he didn't murder her. She's I mean, I know where she is right now. I can find her. But if if the police came to me and showed me compelling evidence that Kevin was a mass murderer.

So I'm sorry. We had a good we had a good run, but you are on your own for this. Yeah. All right. Well, so I desperately want it. I know this is haunted you since childhood. I desperately want it for us to put some of this to rest for you. But I don't know that anyone can do that. You just started up again because I believe there's somebody in an assisted care facility is going, hey, Brad, they're doing another podcast about you.

They're talking about you again. You know, it would be such an interesting experience to, you know, not everybody. He's not a household name for normal people the way he is for us. Because we're weird. He's not, you know. So there's somebody who like, you know, like every once in a while. Just recently, I did some volunteer stuff in a memory care facility.

And people say wild things. One of the patients, one of the clients there was a retired FBI agent. Very charming. Interesting gentleman. But of course, he's lost in dementia. He could have said anything to me and I wouldn't have. I would have dismissed it. Probably. Right. Yeah. You know, a guy like Brad Bishop, somebody could be wiping, you know, his lunch off of his cheeks.

And he's saying things like, I killed them all. Oh, Mr. Johnson. Don't be. You would never hurt a fly. Yeah. Like he could be just spilling it every which way and not be taken seriously. Do you know, Sherry, you know the problem with us? We think people are built like us that it would leak out. Some of these people are so adept at being psychotic or sociopathic that it doesn't.

That's why I think with Bishop, I think maybe there was a psychic, a psychological amputation. There was the life before and there was the life after. And there in between was like a no man's land, like a DMZ where he didn't go. Because why would we want to revisit those memories? They're so terrible. I think people that have that ability to do that are terrifying and lucky.

Because they don't carry the past. It goes into a little box. They lock the box and they slide it under the bed and it's gone forever. Yeah. So in our next True Weird Stuff, there's a name for people who have a hair fetish. They're trichophiles. And a hair fetish can look all kinds of different ways. These are people, as I've been working on this one, I've been thinking about how the Pantene shampoo commercials must drive these folks out of their minds.

You know what I'm talking about. Those glossy curtains of hair just whipping past the camera, cascading and flowing. Don't even get me started on the movie Rapunzel. So there's an infamous case of a man. They called him the Phantom Barber in Mississippi. His hair fetish was such that he could only achieve his pleasure, his satisfaction, by getting his hands on the hair of a sleeping, unwitting stranger.

Now I feel bad for you if that's your fetish. Boy, that's tough, isn't it? Because if you have a hair fetish, I can work with you. There's lots of ways we can help you get that thing satisfied. But if the only way you can achieve any kind of satisfaction is by coming through an open window in the middle of the night with a pair of scissors.

And that's on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. Now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2026, Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.

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