It has been nearly 35 years since William Bradford Bishop Jr. bludgeoned his family with a sledgehammer, but the former State Department official remains an international fugitive.
The crime is the most mysterious and oldest of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office fugitive files.
It happened March 1, 1976, in their Bethesda home.
Authorities say Bishop learned that afternoon that he was passed over for a promotion. They say he withdrew $400 from the bank and bought a sledgehammer at the local hardware store.
First Bishop used the recently purchased sledgehammer to kill his wife, Annette, 37. He waited for his mother, Lobelia Bishop, 68, to return from walking the family dog, and then smashed her with the same weapon. He then went upstairs to the bedrooms of his three sleeping sons, killing William, 14, Brenton, 10, and Geoffrey, 5.
He hauled the bodies to a swamp near Columbia, N.C., where their burned corpses were found in a pit weeks later. His blood-stained station wagon was found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park near the Tennessee-North Carolina border.
Officials say he could have gone anywhere. He was trained as a spy, is fluent in several languages and has been stationed around the world.
He was last seen in September 1994 in Basel, Switzerland, by a neighbor who knew Bishop and the family in Bethesda, according to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office. That investigation led nowhere.
Bishop would now be 73 years old.
Anyone with information regarding Bishop can call the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office at 240-777-7022, your local Interpol Office, or your local police department. Or send e-mail to: [email protected].
