Bradford Bishop Family

Case background and investigation

Five members of the Bishop family were killed at their home in Bethesda, Maryland, on the night of March 1, 1976. According to a Montgomery County Police release issued with the FBI in 2014, the victims were Lobelia Bishop, 68; her daughter-in-law Annette Bishop, 37; and Annette's sons William, 14, Brenton, 10, and Geoffrey, 5. Police said the family had been beaten to death.

The following day a forest service worker in Tyrrell County, North Carolina, near the town of Columbia, found five bodies in a shallow grave in a wooded area where a fire had been set. Wikipedia's account, drawing on contemporary reporting, says the remains were confirmed as the Bishop family through dental records. The site was roughly a six-hour drive from Bethesda, CBS News reported.

Investigators focused on William Bradford Bishop Jr., then 39, Annette's husband and a Foreign Service officer at the State Department. CBS News reported that he is alleged to have bought a small metal mallet at a Sears store before the killings, and that he spoke several languages and had long experience living abroad. On March 18, 1976, the family's maroon 1974 Chevrolet station wagon was located at the Elkmont campground in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee; police said it contained bloody items and an ax. A Montgomery County grand jury indicted Bishop on five counts of murder that month. He has not been seen by authorities since, and the family dog was also never found.

Bishop has never been arrested or tried, and the allegations against him remain unproven in court. Wikipedia lists reported sightings in Sweden in 1978, Italy in 1979 and Switzerland in 1994, none of which was confirmed.

On April 10, 2014, the FBI added Bishop to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, with a reward of up to 100,000 dollars and an age-progressed bust showing how he might look decades later. NBC Washington reported that, at 77, he was the oldest person ever added to the list. He was taken off the list on June 27, 2018; according to later accounts the FBI wanted the place for another fugitive, while the warrants and an Interpol notice stayed in force.

In 2021 a North Carolina woman who had been adopted as an infant learned through consumer DNA testing that Bishop was her biological father, a relationship reported to have been confirmed against a DNA profile held by the FBI. No arrest or confirmed trace of Bishop has been reported since. He was born in August 1936 and would now be 90 if alive; he remains wanted.