Murdaugh Murder Case: Family Annihilator is a State of Mind
At the request of an FBI-led task force, I pursued a family annihilator for seven years. I was left only with questions.
In the Alex Murdaugh murder case, the prosecutor stated, “Husbands have been killing wives for years and fathers killing sons goes back to King Herod. And when those pressures mount, someone becomes a family annihilator.”
“Family annihilator” is not a household term. How can a parent/spouse murder their partner and children? One shudders at the thought. Invariably, one is left wondering, as in the Murdaugh case. There are many motivations to murder: greed, love, anger, revenge, to name a few. But wiping out one’s family? It defies all reason.
As with millions of others, I took an interest in the Murdaugh case. Not usually one to follow real crime events, however, my attention in this one was sparked by another family annihilator case — one in which I was tangentially, though actively, involved for over a period of seven years.
In early June 2013, I received call out of the blue from an agent of the Diplomatic Security Service at the U.S. Department of State, my former employer. He explained that the FBI had just stood up an interagency task force to track down a man who had murdered his entire family. “We’d like you to help us,” he said. I agreed.
On March 1, 1976, Foreign Service officer William Bradford Bishop, Jr., 39, drove home from work at the State Department and sat down for dinner with his family — wife, mother and three sons, aged 5, 10 and 14. Later in the evening, Bishop methodically bashed each family member’s head in with a ball-peen hammer — his wife while reading a book in the living room, the boys in their beds asleep and his mother in a downstairs bathroom in which she futilely had sought protection.
Bishop then loaded the bodies in the family station wagon, along with the unharmed family dog, and drove 275 miles south to a remote area of eastern North Carolina. He dug a shallow pit in which he dumped the bodies, poured on gasoline and set them afire. He then drove off with the dog. And vanished.
The crime wasn’t detected until a week later. While several acquaintances claimed to have spotted Bishop in Europe over the years, none have been confirmed. The trail was thin and law enforcement was slow off the mark in pursuing Bishop. Cold case. Thirty-seven years later, the FBI decided to make one last try to find Brad Bishop and finally deliver justice. They placed him on their Ten Most Wanted List. The task force asked me to assist because of a book, an Amazon bestseller, I’d written involving the case.
I became swept up in the case, specifically, what would drive a man to commit such a heinous act. At the request of the task force, I blogged messages directed to Bishop both taunting him and appealing to his conscience. I offered my contact information to him. Government psychiatrists gave me guidance in this endeavor.
That summer, I traveled to Bishop’s old haunts in Europe, countries where he had served or hung out as a diplomat and earlier as an Army intel officer: Spain, France, Italy, Croatia. In advance and along the way, I blogged to Bishop suggesting that we meet, or at least exchange messages. My family thought I was nuts. Perhaps. But I was on a mission to find this man.
CNN enlisted me as an interviewee and narrator for an hour-long special on the Bishop murders.
All manner of individuals — most mentally unbalanced — flooded me with “tips,” which I passed on to the FBI.
I consulted a team of psychiatrists, seeking to get into Bishop’s head, determine what might have driven him to do what he did, based on what we knew of his health and state of mind. I found one shrink’s insights particularly useful:
A psychiatrist in practice for over three-and-a-half decades told me that, based on what he has seen about Bishop, it was unlikely that he was indeed clinically depressed. A person suffering from diagnosable depression experiences difficulties functioning in daily life - holding down a job and doing it capably, maintaining social relationships, etc. Bishop received good marks from his State Department superiors for his work performance. He maintained various households over the years both in DC and abroad even while under financial pressures. He was active in sports and other recreational activities. Moreover, investigators found out that Bishop had carried on several extramarital affairs over the years, something that required care and cunning. My source tells me that diagnosis of depression, as well as other mental conditions, was highly unreliable four decades ago and indeed still is. In his view, Bishop was a “high functioning criminal.” His having planned out his family’s murders and disposal of their bodies well in advance reveals “a highly capable individual,” but one under tremendous emotional strain. Hence, he sought therapy. The medication he was taking, Serax (Oxazepam), is an anti-anxiety drug, not an anti-depressant. Bishop, this source surmises, was under tremendous strain from his marital and financial difficulties, but even more so from his plan to kill his family members. He therefore likely suffered from anxiety, not depression.
A “high functioning criminal.”
That’s also the conclusion that nailed Alex Murdaugh. The prosecution successfully argued that Murdaugh, scion of a wealthy and powerful legal dynasty, fatally shot his wife and 22-year old son as a means to draw attention from, and perhaps to generate sympathy for himself in face of, huge financial crimes which he was facing.
“This defendant…has fooled everyone, everyone, everyone who thought they were close to him,” prosecutor Creighton Waters told the jury. “Everyone who thought they knew who he was, he’s fooled them all. He fooled Maggie and Paul too, and they paid for it with their lives. Don’t let him fool you, too.”
“It might not have been you. It might have been the monster you've become when you take 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 opioid pills. Maybe you become another person. I’ve seen that before. The person standing before me was not the person who committed the crime, though is the same individual,” Judge Clifton Newman told Murdaugh during his sentencing hearing.
Law enforcement agencies surmised that Brad Bishop may have killed his family out of anger after being denied a promotion by the State Department compounded by angst over financial pressures.
I find the explanations in both cases unconvincing. Murder your family because you’re pissed at work? Or, to distract the public from your financial crimes? They just don’t add up. Murdaugh was addicted to painkillers and Bishop was on anti-anxiety meds. So are many, many others. How many are driven to mass murder?
So, having been immersed in one “family annihilator” case, and having followed the latest one, I come away with questions and no answers. Shrinks, cops and experts of all stripes frankly haven’t helped me understand evil men like Alex Murdaugh and William Bradford Bishop much. The latter case remains unsolved.
Whenever that happens, I then turn to writers much wiser than myself:
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
~ John Milton, “Paradise Lost”
Murdaugh Murder Case: Family Annihilator is a State of Mind
The FSO who claimed he encountered Bishop in Sorrento was found to have lied. Frankly, I don't think any of the other sightings held any water either. I wrote a piece on doppelgangers a few years ago to explain how people could be mistaken. I was honored to have been asked to work on the case. But, alas, he pulled off the perfect crime. And a most monstrous one at that.
Great to be connected. Feel free to reach out any time.
James, you and I communicated a few years back on this. I agree. More questions than answers, but the fact that the FBI pursued those sightings in Europe so aggressively tells me that they had more than just a mere hunch that Bishop touched down on the continent after the murders. Ironically, my travels have taken me to Sorrento (most likely the same alleged public washroom) and Kungsträdgården in Stockholm. These two sightings seem be more wish fulfillment speculation by the witnesses, than actual verified ones, but regardless the FBI took them seriously at the time. Either way, I agree with you, he is long gone by now wherever he ended up.