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The Hunt with John Walsh

The Hunt for Brad Bishop

Aired August 23, 2014 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


JOHN WALSH, CNN ANCHOR: Back in 1981, I had the American dream, the beautiful wife, the house in the suburbs, and a beautiful six-year-old son. And one day I went to work, kissed my son goodbye, never saw him again.

In two weeks, I became the parent of a murdered child. And I'll always be the parent of a murdered child. I still have the heartache. I still have the rage.

I waited years for justice. I know what it's like to be there waiting for some answers. And over those years, I learned how to do one thing really well.

And that's how to catch these bastards and bring them back to justice. I've become a man-hunter. I'm out there looking for bad guys.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road, the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth, I ask not good fortune. I, myself, am good fortune.

Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. Strong and content, I travel the open road.

WALSH: There are so many cold cases.

But this is one of the most horrible. It's time that bastard pays.

YOUNG: Eastern North Carolina is well-known for commercial companies that work in this area growing trees. And so there is a whole series of forestry fire towers in East North Carolina, I mean, in fact, all across the state.

About 12:40 p.m. on March the 2nd, 1976, a ranger on Highway 94 observed a fire. He was under the impression it was some type of disposal maybe of a farm animal.

I received a call through the state radio system requesting our assistance. After I got there, here was this pile of dirt, a shovel off to one side. There was a red gas can.

It was like someone had just dropped everything, set it on fire and fled. But I did not realize at that point it was going to get much, much worse.

I was seeing a leg sticking out, an arm, and shoes. It was human beings in this hole (ph). We took these first two bodies off. There was another body.

We removed the third body and then there was another body. How many bodies can be in this hole? Finally, after the fifth one, we found the bottom of the hole, thank god.

No one knew who these people were. We were thinking why aren't we having any reports in about people missing.

WALSH: In the old days, it was pretty prehistoric. There was no social media back then. There was no DNA. But they worked the case really hard.

YOUNG: Ultimately, the only thing we had that we could look at was a tag on a shovel that was like a price tag that had a partial name on it for a store.

COLBERT: This is the shovel that was found where the fire was started. And then this tag right here, all you can make out, you see OCHHD.

So in '76, when they found this, that's the only clue they had.

YOUNG: But we did not have any stores in North Carolina that ended in O-C-H hardware. So myself and another agent left North Carolina inquiring about having any hardware stores with those letters in the name.

Every department bent over backwards to try to help us. They just didn't have any information. Then when we went to the metropolitan police in Washington, D.C. and they were familiar with a store in Potomac, Maryland, and the name of the store was Poch, P-O-C-H hardware.

COLBERT: Investigators speak to the hardware store owner. They post a flyer at the hardware store of the victims. They only put four of the victims on the flyer because one was so, so badly injured.

YOUNG: At that point, we didn't know how to proceed in that area. And myself and the agent returned back to North Carolina.

WALSH: One thing that I've learned firsthand unequivocally, it only takes one small tip to break open a case. The public is the biggest resource that law enforcement has.

And in this case, a good citizen did the right thing and really drew attention to that little house in Bethesda, Maryland.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The neighbor said they hadn't seen the family in a week and the papers and mail were backing up. Because normally, the family would actually tell the neighbors that they were going out of town, they were going somewhere.

MCNALLY: I received a call on the police radio. I was working at that beat. And they told me to go to another residence on Williston Drive in Bethesda.

As soon as I got in there, the whole thing was just, you know, awful to even look at, just blood dripping down and pooling up on the -- on the floor. It was like a horror house.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Montgomery County authorities picked up the flyer that we had left at Poch Hardware. And the neighbors identified it as the Bishop family.

BRUNO: The whole family was described repeatedly by a number of people as being the perfect foreign service family. Brad Bishop, rising star in the State Department, trophy children, beautiful wife, talented, Bishop's mother living with them.

VOGT: The victims of the crime were Bishop's mother, Lobelia Bishop, who was 68 years old, Annette Bishop, who was 37 years old, William Bradford Bishop III, who was 14 years old, Brenton Bishop, who was 10 years old, and Geoffrey Bishop, who was five years old.

BRUNO: But Brad Bishop was gone. And nobody knows where he went.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He certainly had the experience of traveling the world. But he worked (ph) in a desk job and he didn't like being penned into an office and crowded.

VOGT: You've got a man who -- who couldn't handle his life.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

POPKIN: I grew up just about 10 minutes from where the Bishop homicides actually occurred. It was a tremendous shock to the community. Five members of the same family, killed in one incident.

D'AMBOISE: I couldn't believe it. They were great people. They were beautiful people. Lobelia -- she's the one I knew the best.

She was that great grandmother that everyone would love to have had, there all the time, ready to pitch in and help cook a meal, so and so, watch the children so you could go to a movie. She was a nurturer, trying to make his life easier, her son.

WALSH: He was the most unlikely suspect. He belonged to the right country club. He had the three beautiful boys in a very nice school. He was well-respected.

But it is police work 101. They started looking at Brad Bishop right away, because he wasn't with the rest of the family.

BRUNO: The foreign service in those days was what they call male, tail and Yale (ph). Very few women, very few minorities and a lot of Ivy Leaguers. And Brad Bishop was all of those.

HARRELL: No one ever denied that Brad was smart but he was always rather definitive. This is my opinion. It's the correct opinion. And after all, I'm a graduate of Yale and Middlebury.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He received quick promotions. He was posted to Italy, after that to Africa, to be the number two in the embassy.

WALSH: When you are sent to an embassy in another part of the world, you have status. It's limousines. It's drivers. It's a beautiful residence and you're treated with respect.

BRUNO: But it's an up or out system. If you don't get promoted to a certain grade within a certain number of years, then you are let go. We all take that very seriously in the foreign service.

Brad Bishop took it much more seriously than I guess the rest of us did.

POPKIN (ph): They were coming back to Washington. And Lobelia was so happy because her grandchildren would discover that they were American, right -- the hot fudge sundaes and hotdogs and their little league.

BRUNO: But for Brad Bishop, being posted back here in Washington was a bit of a shocker.

VOGT: He was not happy with his job. He didn't like being penned into an office.

BRUNO (ph): He had financial pressures. It's easier to live overseas financially.

VOGT (ph): His mother was financing a lot of their lifestyle. But his mother was running out of money.

BRUNO (ph): He would look forward to his next assignment being posted overseas. But Annette, Brad's wife, was getting very much attached to living in suburban Washington.

So Brad Bishop obviously was under pressure.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He actually purchased a motorcycle because he liked to be alone. He liked the privacy of -- of being on a motorcycle, the solitude.

BRUNO: It wasn't crucial at that point in his career that he would be promoted to the next rank. But in his own mind, it was everything. He felt he had to be (ph) promoted.

VOGT: Bishop's wife that morning spent three hours with an acquaintance saying I need to find work. We're in serious financial straits here.

POPKIN (ph): Brad Bishop ran into several people at the office that day. And he was short-tempered. He's angry that morning, finally tells his supervisor he doesn't feel well and that he's going home.

HARRELL: I was on my way back to the State Department at the 21st Street entrance. And suddenly, there in front of me is Brad Bishop. I said you look like you've lost your best friend.

He said I didn't get -- get promoted. It's now official. Well, I said, well, I didn't either. And he said but I'm far more deserving than you. I said, well, why don't you just go home and get in bed.

And we can get together next week. And I just stood there watching him leave. But there was never a next week.

VOGT: He definitely made the decision at that point what he was going to do.

BRUNO: How can a man like this turn dark?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People just don't snap overnight. He had been building up to this. He was filled with that anger and rage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BRUNO: Brad Bishop, when he did not get promoted, he was devastated. On March 1, 1976, he checked out of the State Department in the afternoon, got in his station wagon.

He drove to a mall in Maryland, Suburban Washington.

VOGT: It was approximately 6:00 p.m. that Bishop is then spotted in the Sears Department Store where he purchases a two-and-a-half pound mini mall sledge hammer. Bishop walked away from the counter, then came back with a gas can and purchased that.

Then went and filled his family station wagon with gas and also filled the gas can.

POPKIN: A young lady stayed with the Bishop family a number of days earlier. And they would have family dinner at the same time pretty much every day.

But he never said anything at the dinner table. He was quiet. He was aloof. On March the 1st, after dinner, Mr. Bishop's mother takes the dog out for a walk.

Neighbors actually see her out that evening walking the dog. The wife was downstairs in a study area. Two of the boys were in one room in their pajamas.

The teenager is actually in his own room.

BRUNO: He then used that mini hammer, the sledgehammer, and used it to bludgeon to death his wife first.

MCNALLY (ph): They found her notes there on the shag carpet submerged in a pool of blood.

POPKIN (ph): One of her earrings was found in the study on the floor.

MCNALLY: Once he had killed her, he took her back into the master bedroom, laid her on the bed, then you go upstairs and you see where the 14-year-old son was murdered. Blood everywhere.

BRUNO: He did not have a background of criminality or violence. So how could somebody who's very much like myself turn dark?

POPKIN: People just don't snap overnight. He had been building up to this. He was filled with that anger and rage, and went room by room by room.

MCNALLY: I (ph) mean (ph), you go in where those two little boys slept. It seemed like all three of them were pretty good athletes because on the wall were ribbons from awards that they had won all splattered with blood.

Geoffrey was bludgeoned in the top bunk bed. The hammer marks on the ceiling was the thing I'll never forget. The number of marks that were in there, you know, how many times he must have hit his son.

BRUNO: And then when his mother returned home...

D'AMBOISE: Lobelia, if she was out walking the dog and came in, the place was right, did he meet her at the door? And did she say, oh, Brad, what a surprise? And then he went to hit her with a hammer?

And I don't know.

MCNALLY: She ducked into the bathroom, trying to lock herself in there, thinking she might be safe.

D'AMBOISE: I can't -- I can't understand it. What did he look like, his face, right? Distorted? Calm? I can't -- I can't see his face. I just see this powerful-shouldered man with a hammer kicking in a door.

But I see Lobelia, the terror in her heart, the world turned upside down.

BRUNO: Same thing, with a hammer blow to the head.

WALSH: He beat his family to death. What did he do next? He took a shower. Because all they were to Brad Bishop was an impediment.

He felt that this is just baggage to keep me from the life that I deserve. And he got rid of that baggage in the most horrible way.

BRUNO: He then collected the bodies of all -- all of his family members and he put them in the station wagon.

D'AMBOISE: There's a wonderful poem by Yates, "Love is a crooked thing. There is none that knows all that's in it, for one would be thinking of love until the sun ran away and the shadows cover the moon."

But the line, oh, love is a crooked thing, didn't he love his children? "Love is a crooked thing. There's none that knows all that's in it," right? Right?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The murder is not over when the victims die. The murder's over after he has sated his anger against them.

WALSH: Everybody underestimated the intelligence of Brad Bishop.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WALSH: Brad Bishop went to the darkest side possible and killed his family. The baggage that he was carrying was too much for him. And he eliminated them.

What did he do next? Clean up, get on the road.

WALTER: Brad Bishop is a malignant narcissist. After this type of murder, often, the person has a sense of well-being. And you would never dream in a thousand years that they had just killed somebody.

Why? Because they just took off 50 pounds of emotional weight off their shoulders. No guilt at all, absolutely none.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: From this hour, I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines.

VOGT: Bishop had a journal. The first page, he writes a passage from the Walt Whitman poem "A Song of the Open Road." There are a lot of statements in there about being master of your own destiny, not letting people hold you back.

Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute.

D'AMBOISE: It's also this man force striding his way across the landscape, smiting trees in his way. The east and the west are mine. There's a tremendous ego.

I don't need anything. I will take a sledgehammer and hammer anything in my way. The stale cadaver blocks up the passage. The burial waits no longer.

POPKIN: He drove 275 miles south, then to a state road, then to a rural road. And the logging road wasn't even on the maps. Truly, you don't just find this spot happenstance.

He had to have been down there before. He dug a shallow grave.

YOUNG: He just didn't dig this hole in 15 minutes. It took some time to dig three feet deep.

VOGT: He then placed all of the bodies of his family members in that shallow grave. It was Geoffrey on the bottom, Brenton, Annette, William Bradford III, and then Lobelia.

WALTER: The murder is not over when the victims die. The murder's over after he has finally sated his anger against them.

POPKIN: He's still killing them even after they're dead. Why he burned the bodies, I just don't know. He could have buried them deeper and covered them up.

And who knows if they ever would have been found.

WALTER: Well, you see, it doesn't count unless somebody sees it. He's making a statement, I, William Bradford Bishop, am in control.

These are my family members. I did it. Screw you. Bye.

YOUNG: With the forestry tower only being about a mile, we probably got there not long after the perpetrator had left.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And there was evidence of a -- a peel-out of a car. So they just missed each other.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Approximately, two and a half hours south of the grave site, Bishop was observed in a store. And he purchased a pair of low top tennis shoes.

POPKIN: He had to get rid of his actual shoes because they were covered by blood and other material. And then he uses his credit card to identify himself at a store that he has to know that we're going to find.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They found the station wagon at the Great Smoky National Park in a parking lot.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He didn't clean out the car, either. All the evidence was left in the car.

BRUNO: They found dog biscuits. They found a bottle of an Serax, an antidepressant drug. The spare tire well was filled with blood, caked blood.

VOGT: He had a shotgun in the car, shotgun shells, but he left them behind. We believe he was carrying a revolver with him when he walked away from the park.

WALSH: It was good police work. They were right behind him. They were breathing down his neck. That's what everybody thought.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two days, we conducted very extensive search.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We checked every hotel, unidentified bodies that were found all the way up through the Appalachians.

WALSH: But in retrospect, everybody -- everybody underestimated the intelligence and cunning of Brad Bishop.

BRUNO: He just disappeared, vanished. Nobody knows where he went. Nobody knows.

HARRELL: I just impulsively said you're Brad Bishop. And he began trembling and shaking, and turned and ran.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

POPKIN: Brad Bishop committed an atrocious homicide. Having children myself, it's just inexplainable how anyone could do that to their own children, their own wife, their own mother.

WALSH: Montgomery County Sheriff's Department, they believe Bishop's family deserves justice, never going to give up on this case because he is still out there.

VOGT: Oftentimes, when people aren't found quickly, people speculate. There's been a lot of speculation over the years, but what I want to stress is that we need to deal in facts.

POPKIN: We reopened the case back in the early '90s. We have looked at every single lead that has ever come in and every witness. One of the things we did was we actually went to the State Department and looked at Bishop's personnel file.

Then (ph) we found a letter that was sent by a noon (ph) bank robber by the name of Bankston.

BRUNO: So Brad Bishop, an official in the U.S. government, had been in correspondence with a convict. Now, why?

POPKIN: Bankston claimed Bishop was trying to get somebody else to actually commit the murders. Bishop was in Europe at one point and thought that his family would be murdered.

But he came home and they were all still alive. And then when Bishop said, hey, you didn't do this, why not, they said, well, you're not getting your

money back and we're not committing the murders.

He was with the southern (ph) mafia, Bankston. Bankston told us that he don't go around killing children. He was laughing at Bishop. We don't do that.

But unfortunately, we were never able to actually get someone to say yes, here are the people that Bishop was trying to hire to do this.

This man died long ago. He's no longer around to be questioned.

WALSH: A lot of those leads were a part of the mystique. He was living the secret private life. I don't know if we'll ever figure out does he have mistresses, secret bank accounts. Does he gamble?

Does he take drugs? Because he's good at keeping under the radar?

BRUNO: This is a man you could put into any number of environments and he could thrive.

POPKIN: His training with the State Department really would have provided him the ability to know where to hide, how to hide. He spoke six different languages.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He got a Masters Degree in Italian. He was fluent.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He had an expertise in developing passports. He was also an airplane pilot. And he was definitely flying a small plane when he was working in Africa.

WALSH: He thought I can't be a one-star father or a one-star member of society. But I can be a five-star fugitive.

BRUNO: There are three credible sightings of Brad Bishop over the years. A Swedish woman that he knew in Ethiopia said she spotted him twice in a park in Stockholm. A former neighbor from Maryland, she and her husband saw Brad Bishop in Basil, Switzerland on a train, stared at him right in his eyes. And then there was Roy Harrell, who was a friend and colleague.

HARRELL: All these years, and I really thought nothing more about Brad Bishop until Sorrento. I don't normally speak to people in men's rooms.

I thought he was a vagrant. He was sitting there when I came and stood right next to him and for some reason turned. In my mind's eye, I stripped off the beard and saw the person (ph) I had seen in Washington, D.C.

I just impulsively said, you're Brad Bishop, aren't you? And he began trembling and shaking and said, oh, god, no and turned around. I have no doubt that -- that it was him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: After that many years, a book was all of a sudden found.

WALSH: It really is as good as a bloody fingerprint at the scene.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

POPKIN: I have been involved in every aspect of this Bishop case, following up on every lead over the last 25 years. But unfortunately, there has been so many in the past that have come in that we were just never able to corroborate.

But this one really kind of surprised me. A book was all of a sudden found at a flea market in North Carolina. And we are a hundred percent certain based on handwriting analysis it was his diary.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: "May 3, 1967, you've got to project your vision before you. You must make sacrifices, time and effort."

POPKIN: To go back and look at some of the dark writings that he was doing, it was clear to us that this is not something that snapped that night. He was really heading in a downward spiral for about 10 years before he commits the murders.

BRUNO: As the years go by, his writing becomes more disjointed, his handwriting becomes less legible.

"This cursed (ph) insomnia makes me sleazy. I cannot reconcile the total absolute indifference of god to me."

BRUNO: He obviously was wrestling with emotions, but not fully equipped to do so.

"Love is compatible with ambition, egoism, premonitions of special destiny."

VOGT: We felt he was going to be found out. And his answer to that stress was to kill his entire family and start over again.

"One last great effort, come home."

WALSH: That journal is as good as a bloody fingerprint at the scene. It just shows what a sociopathic cold blooded narcissistic killer they're dealing with.

WALTER: Killing is always easier after you've done it. If somebody started to demean him or but (ph) worse (ph), of course, he can kill again.

VOGT: Last year, we all agreed to make one final concerted effort as a team to solve this mystery once and for all. Getting Bishop on the top 10 list was important because now, it's everybody's smartphone, Facebook, Twitter.

An age-enhanced bust, this is the best representation that you can have of what Bishop looks like now.

WALTER: Arrogance (ph) is still going to be there. He wants to be important more than anything else, OK? In my opinion, you would still find him trying to dress well, trying to eat well, see himself as important and superior.

VOGT: But what I want to emphasize to the public is that we have to look wherever we can for this guy. Perhaps that stress was so much that he would welcome a job at a gas station or a menial job.

He wouldn't have to live up anymore to the image that other people expected of him. So we have to look anywhere.

WALSH: We just have to get that one tip. We just have to get that one person that says, you know that old man over there, that guy that looks like somebody's grandfather, I think he might be that mass murderer Brad Bishop.

I'm going to make that call. And I don't care whether it's a week old or 38 years old, he should pay.

D'AMBOISE: It's just too big and tragic and monumental. I mean, the killing of a mother and a wife and the children, the disappearing. What is the answer? Who can explain this?

I think if we don't keep trying to solve it, it's not finished.

WALSH: Brad Bishop has a six-inch scar on his lower back and a mole on his left cheek. He's fond of dogs and the outdoors. If you've seen Brad Bishop or have any information as to his whereabouts, please call 1-866-the-hunt or go online at cnn.com/thehunt.

We'll pass your tip onto the proper authorities. And if requested, we'll not reveal your name.

It's sexy to talk about the mystique and legend of Brad Bishop, former army intelligence, worldwide diplomatic services guy, that he might be living the good life in Europe. It's glamorous.

But in the end, people are going to remember him for one thing, being a horrible coward bully.