Cold Case: ‘Family Annihilator’ evades justice for 42 years - Daily Reflector
A swamp fire in 1976 led an eastern North Carolina park ranger to a grisly mass grave.
The prime suspect — the only suspect — has been running or hiding ever since.
Bradford Bishop lived the American Dream. He worked for the U.S. State Department earning a respectable salary; owned a home in Bethesda, Maryland; and had a wife, three sons and a golden retriever named Leo.
But on March 1, 1976, Bishop, 39 at the time, learned he wouldn't receive a promotion he'd been expecting. He told his secretary he didn't feel well and left work early. He went to his bank and withdrew his life's savings. He then bought a sledgehammer, pitchfork, shovel and gas can. He filled up the gas can and the family's 1974 Chevy station wagon, according to archived news reports.
Bishop went home after his three sons were asleep. He killed his wife in the living room, striking her several times with the sledgehammer, splitting her skull. He waited, covered in blood, for his mother to return from walking Leo. After beating his mother to death, trailing blood all over the walls, Bishop went upstairs into his sons' bedrooms. He hit each of them in the head several times while they slept, all according to alleged charges leveled in five first-degree murder grand jury indictments.
With five bodies in the trunk of the station wagon, Bishop drove through the night about 300 miles south to a rural spot in coastal Tyrrell County, about an hour from Elizabeth City, according to court records.
Bishop dug a hole, dumped the bodies inside and set them on fire. Later that day, he stopped at a sporting goods store and used a credit card to purchase a pair of sneakers. He had Leo with him on a leash.
Two weeks later, Bishop's abandoned car was found in an isolated area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. Inside the car were dog biscuits, a bloody blanket, a shotgun, an ax and a shaving kit with Bishop's medication. The spare-tire well in the trunk was full of blood, according to authorities.