<p>I hope people are taking all of these articles with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>All of the comments by students, professors, etc. are so “after the fact.” </p>
<p>“Hey, btw, Amy Bishop killed 3 people…so, what did you think of her when you first met her?”</p>
<p>People are geared to say “Oh, yeah, well, now that I think about it she was pretty odd.” </p>
<p>Now we may never know who the “real” Amy Bishop was.</p>
<p>^^^To the contrary, these retrospective stories about Bishop are very different from those I usually read after someone commits some awful crime. Usually all the neighbors and relatives testify how the culprit seemed so friendly, so normal, just a nice quiet guy/gal, I just can’t believe it, who would have known? and so on.</p>
<p>I have an odd next-door neighbor…</p>
<p>She complains about everything. She was upset when we put a pool in because she said it would upset her dogs because they’re “water dogs” and would want to go in. When we recently had a new roof put on our home, she called and said that her dogs were upset at seeing men on my roof. Sometimes she’ll have her H come over and complain and she’ll stand in her upstairs window making sure that he says whatever she wanted him to say (that was the time when she wanted to provide “input” on what type of fence we were putting up for our pool. She didn’t want her dogs to be able to see thru our fence and see our pool.) </p>
<p>She’s known in the neighborhood as being “odd, weird, a complainer, etc.” However, I don’t expect to hear that she’ll kill someone someday. But, I guess if she ever did, the neighbors would all come forward with their tales of her oddness.</p>
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<p>About half of the people I work with on a daily basis have PhDs. I can’t see any difference from those who don’t with respect to their personal behavior.</p>
<p>Another PhD here. While most of my co-workers have PhDs, most of my relatives, friends, neighbors, and other associates do not, and most of them are not even particularly interested in science! Isolated? What a bizarre statement by the husband. </p>
<p>I have also read of three different people at whom Bishop pointed the gun after shooting her brother. The third was an employee of a newpaper distribution center in Braintree. I wonder whether we will ever find out exactly how this was covered up? Many of the people involved are now dead, and I am sure that some of the others suffer from selective amnesia.</p>
<p>From the accounts of the shooting, it seems that the only thing that saved the 5 uninjured professors from the fate of the 6 dead and injured was the fact that the gun only held 6 bullets. And the husband seems to believe that Bishop’s action was somehow justified by the behavior of her colleagues.</p>
<p>““I have worked around Ph.D.s before and they are pretty much the same,” Jim Anderson said. “Psychologically, they run hot and cold. That’s why we are asking the news media to investigate that whole world that no one knows of. We are referring to an isolated group, like monks, and no one knows what goes on there.””</p>
<p>H and I have Ph.D.s and have worked with Ph.D.s all our lives. No one, to our knowledge, has ever shot anyone else. We have not heard stories about co-workers demanding a booster seat, using their Ph.D. as an valid argument. Isolated? Cambridge, MA, is crawling with Ph.D.s. This is not a cloistered community. Anderson sounds almost as batty as his wife.</p>
<p>Not only that ^^^, as I mentioned upthread, even IF the people she worked with were awful and even IF she was treated extremely unfairly (not saying this is at all true but simply hypotethically speaking), who uses THAT as an excuse for murder? The husband’s comments are off the wall in this regard. I can see stating that they felt she was treated unfairly but to link that as some sort of “justification” is beyond the pale.</p>
<p>And thank god, she did not reloaded and went on to shoot others in the school. She just dropped the gun in the bath room and left as if nothing had happened, very strange.</p>
<p>On who covered up the Seth shooting, after reading all the pieces, it seems to me that the key figure here is Captain Buker (deceased). He was the lead investigator who seems to be the center figure in the dissemination of information. The state police report which I believe was the main source of information to the DA office cited over and over that the accounts of the events came from Buker and the biggest flaw in this is that somehow information about the events after Bishop left the house is completely missing and not relayed.</p>
<p>The most revealing document is the recent statement by Braintree current chief of police who said that the booking of AB was stopped:</p>
<p>“I spoke with the retired deputy chief, who was then a lieutenant and responsible for booking Ms. Bishop,” Frazier said. “He said he had started the process when he received a phone call he believes was from then-Chief Polio or possibly from a captain on Chief Polio’s behalf. He was instructed to stop the booking process. At some point, Ms. Bishop was turned over to her mother and they left the building via a rear exit.”</p>
<p>I believe the captain in this context is probably captain Buker. I suspect that there is a connection between Captain Buker and Amy Bishop mother somehow that compelled him to convince Chief Polio to order the release and eventual stop of the follow up investigation of the many of the obvious problems with accidental shooting story from the Bishop family. Chief Polio should not get out lightly too here also, many of his own officers had doubts and the full report is there for anyone to see. To make the order without knowing the facts about a case involving shooting death is inexcusable.</p>
<p>Re: IHOP incident: The Massachusetts judge who heard the case ignored prosecuters requests that Amy Bishop be sent to anger management classes despite the fact that the IHOP manager testified that she “acted like a crazy person”. The judge didn’t think it was necessary.</p>
<p>[Alabama</a> victims’ kin, cops ‘very angry’ at Massachusetts - BostonHerald.com](<a href=“http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100218alabama_victims_kin_cops_very_angry_at_massachusetts_look_how_many_lives_were_taken/srvc=home&position=0]Alabama”>http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100218alabama_victims_kin_cops_very_angry_at_massachusetts_look_how_many_lives_were_taken/srvc=home&position=0)</p>
<p>Anyone know how the two people still in the hospital are doing? The third one went home right? I assume he wasn’t shot in the head and she missed or something?</p>
<p>MA judges are known to be lenient to the point of being frustrating for police.</p>
<p>It appears that the IHOP case resulted in a continuance with no finding. I think that this is similar to diversion programs for teenage offenders - if they don’t get into trouble for a certain amount of time, then the arrest and charges go away.</p>
<p>There is an undercurrent in many of the news stories that I find disturbing. It goes along the lines, academics are weird, but Amy Bishop was beyond the pale. One news story had a statement to the effect that anyone who chose to spend his life in libraries and laboratores was, by definition, strange. In my view, it is the greatest of fortune to be able to spend your life doing what you find most interesting.</p>
<p>[In</a> Academe, Mental-Health Issues Are Hard to Recognize and Treat - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/In-Academe-Mental-Health/64246/]In”>http://chronicle.com/article/In-Academe-Mental-Health/64246/)</p>
<p>The shooting strikes emotionally close to home for me, and I continue reading about it with wonder.</p>
<p>I’m a Harvard grad with a doctorate who was denied tenure at a second tier college due to what many observers believe was internal politics that had nothing directly to do with me. I was told by a friend who was high up in the college’s administration that I probably could successfully sue, but I didn’t because I don’t want to sue anyone. I’m one of those, “when a door closes, a window opens” people.</p>
<p>I remain friends with people in the department where I used to work, a department where my colleagues had to my knowledge unanimously supported my tenure application. I’ve even consulted for the college since.</p>
<p>Although I was devastated when I was denied tenure because I had loved my job, since then I’ve moved on to new ventures that to my great surprise have brought me more fulfillment than did my previous work. I now think that not getting tenure was one of the best things that ever happened to me.</p>
<p>I never thought of slaughtering the people who denied me tenure. …</p>
<p>However, in real life, I have to watch my back because two unbalanced people who didn’t get the roles they wanted in the community theater that I work with have stalked on-line people --including me-- who are connected with the theater, and have posted on-line semi veiled threats to shoot cast members and burn down the theater. The threats are of the order of, “I dream that I am a gun and am shooting people who make me angry.” The theater now has to have security.</p>
<p>One of these people has a doctorate and is a biology researcher at a local university.</p>
<p>One of the two people has a mental illness; bipolar. </p>
<p>Campus security and the local police and lawyers have been consulted, but they have said that not enough has been done yet to charge the people with anything.</p>
<p>So…I watch my back. I also am very glad that the members of the community theater listened to me when I said, “No, we do not need to meet with them to try to resolve this situation. Those people are crazy and dangerous and might attempt to kill us at a meeting.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I know plenty of other academics who are scientists who are not weird or dangerous!</p>
<p>I am still of the belief she is a sociopath. Had she lost touch with reality? Who knows. Sociopaths are adept at manipulation. She may be trying to play that card by acting as if she is unaware of what she did. I might buy that scenerio except that she did get a gun, practice using it and brought it with her to the meeting. So this was not an impulsive action at the time.</p>
<p>Perhaps at the time of death of her brother she was really running the household by frightening her parents into submission. Sociopaths can be very frightening. They can have you walking on eggs so as to not bother them so you can stay out of their radar.
Sociopaths can pretend to be your best friend if it helps them get what they want and then turn on you in an instant if you get in their way.This may have been an odd way of self preservation by her mother. Maybe her mother was afraid she would be next.</p>
<p>note: I spent years working in emergency psychiatric crisis centers as a front line therapist. I have seen it.</p>
<p>No empathy, no moral compass.</p>
<p>NSM: you have every right to be frightened</p>
<p>““I have worked around Ph.D.s before and they are pretty much the same,” Jim Anderson said. “Psychologically, they run hot and cold. That’s why we are asking the news media to investigate that whole world that no one knows of. We are referring to an isolated group, like monks, and no one knows what goes on there.””</p>
<p>the above is crazy… Yes, there are areas in Huntsville where “black projects” are being developed - and everything is “cloistered” and people’s badges don’t say where they work, but that doesn’t lend itself to this kind of thing. </p>
<p>Huntsville has one of the highest (if not THE highest) concentrations of PhDs in the nation (because of Cummings Research Park, Redstone Arsenol, NASA, & UAH), and she’s the only one to go on a shooting rampage. And, I doubt the others are hitting people in restaurants or demanding that the ice cream truck not go down their street because their “lactose intolerant children can’t have any.” (Guess no one told her that the ice cream truck has dairy-free items, too.)</p>
Deleted for privacy reasons.
<p>"I am still of the belief she is a sociopath. Had she lost touch with reality? Who knows. Sociopaths are adept at manipulation. She may be trying to play that card by acting as if she is unaware of what she did. I might buy that scenerio except that she did get a gun, practice using it and brought it with her to the meeting. So this was not an impulsive action at the time.</p>
<p>Perhaps at the time of death of her brother she was really running the household by frightening her parents into submission. Sociopaths can be very frightening. They can have you walking on eggs so as to not bother them so you can stay out of their radar.
Sociopaths can pretend to be your best friend if it helps them get what they want and then turn on you in an instant if you get in their way.This may have been an odd self preservation by her mother."</p>
<p>I agree with all of this.</p>
<p>It’s also very possible that even though Amy Bishop’s mother witnessed Amy kill her brother, Amy was able to convince her mother that her mother’s memories were wrong.</p>
<p>Think about it: If one of your kids shot the other in front of you, how would you react? Would you really believe that you saw it? Would you believe that your child deliberately shot their sibling? You would be in a state of panic and disbelief including trying to save your child’s life as your child died before your very eyes.</p>
<p>For all we know, Amy Bishop may even have planned to kill him just as she apparently planned to kill the faculty members…</p>
<p>I can not blame her parents. I feel very sorry for them. They have lost two children in unimaginably tragic ways.</p>
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<p>I wonder if she was jealous. Obviously, they were both gifted, but I wonder if this was about eliminating the competition in a really extreme way. I mean, how do you fire 3 shots “accidentally”?</p>
<p>Or like previous posters said, her mother probably did not want to lose both children and try to salvage the situation instead of sending her daughter to prison for a long time before graduating from college. The recovered police report had the mother testimony on the day of the shooting before Amy was captured that portrayed the whole thing as accidental shooting. 2 days later the local newspaper had quotes from her and captain Buker that said it was an accident. 11 days later the same story is retold by the Bishop. I don’t know what happened but it could easily have been a story initiated by the mother.</p>