There’s one thing that almost everyone who has touched the William Bradford Bishop cold case agrees with: He killed his family.
In the 50 years since the brutal murders in Bethesda, Maryland, many investigators have painstakingly gone through the boxes and boxes of evidence to piece together the crime.
Multiple alleged sightings of Bishop around the United States and even overseas in Europe have been followed up on. Yet two big questions remain: Why did he do it and where did he go?
News4 sat down recently with former and current investigators in the case.
“We knew who did it. That wasn’t the question. We just need to find where this guy is,” said retired Montgomery County Detective Brain Stafford.
“I would like him to face justice for what he did,” said retired FBI Special Agent in Charge Steve Vogt.
“The fact that this hasn’t been resolved, it does, I think, eats at us,” said Montgomery County Sheriff Maxwell Uy.
The Crime
According to investigators, on March 1, 1976, Bishop left his job at the State Department, telling his boss he wasn’t feeling well. He drove to Sears at Montgomery Mall and bought a gas can and a short-handled sledgehammer and then headed to Potomac Village, where he purchased a shovel and a pitchfork at Poch’s Hardware. Police say Bishop used that sledgehammer to kill his wife, Annette; their three boys, Brad, Brenton and Geoffrey; and his mother, Lobelia.
Bishop then drove six hours to the small town of Columbia, North Carolina, where he dumped the bodies in a shallow grave and burned them.
The family station wagon was eventually found almost two weeks later in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. Police think Bishop left it there after driving eight hours from Jacksonville, North Carolina, where a store owner remembered a man with a dog buying a pair of Converse tennis shoes.
Steve Vogt recalls first seeing the killings mentioned in the newspaper as an 11-year-old. He eventually got the chance to work on the case years later.
“Throughout my life after that, I was just tied to the case. It never left me,” he said.
Vogt told the I-Team he believes the last known sighting of Bishop was at a nearby hotel in the days around when the car was discovered in the mountains.
“The guy had checked in with a California driver’s license, a passport and he had a revolver on his bed. No one knew Bishop was carrying a California DL [driver’s license],” he said.
As for the motive, Vogt thinks it was about money and that Bishop wanted to start his life over. He said weeks before the killings, Bishop was passed over for a work promotion and that the family was having financial problems and missed a mortgage payment.
“They talk about narcissistic personality disorder. The guy saw his family as just, they’re his property, “ said Vogt.
Where did Bishop go?
How is it possible that with so many investigators on the case over the last five decades, Bishop has never been found?
“If you’re disciplined, you stay out of trouble, you don’t get fingerprinted, you create a new identity and don’t talk to anybody you ever knew before, you won’t get caught, especially in 1976,” said Vogt.
Vogt was instrumental in getting Bishop added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List in 2014. News4 asked him where he thinks Bishop went after leaving those mountains.
“I believe southeast, southern United States somewhere. I think that’s where he went and stayed,” he said.
But Brian Stafford, who worked the case for years as a detective for Montgomery County police, isn’t so sure. He keeps going back to a missing resolver that investigators knew Bishop had but that was never recovered.
“I honestly don’t know. I went through a long period of time thinking, we never got the revolver back. He walked off into the Great Smoky Mountains and shot himself,” said Stafford.
The tips have continued to come in over the last five decades, with sightings around the U.S. and even overseas in Italy, Sweden and Switzerland. There have also been rumors about Bishop being somehow connected to the CIA.
“I personally have not held to that theory, but we may never know,” Uy, the Montgomery County sheriff said.
No coincidences
“Everything he did, cold, calculated, obviously planned out before. I do not believe there are any coincidences in this case,” said retired detective Stafford.
It’s his belief that Bishop had been planning the crime for a while.
“Too much went right for him,” he said. “”I think that he knew when he left that house where he was going to take those bodies and where he was going after that.”
That’s a question the family of Ron Brickhouse would like answered. Back in 1976, the forest ranger was the one who discovered the bodies in that shallow grave in North Carolina. News4 spoke to Brickhouse back in 2014, years before he passed away. Even then, almost 40 years after the crime, he had a hard time talking about the case, saying it was difficult to get the images out of his head.
“It’s just bad memories,” he said. His family said that interview was the last time he spoke about the case publicly.
All these years later, they’re still hoping for some closure.
“I wish there could be, before I pass away. I was hoping that for my husband, but it didn’t happen,” said his wife, Patricia Brickhouse.
The FBI hopes the identification of a daughter of William Bradford Bishop will lead to more clues and tips in a 45-year-old cold case that has rocked the D.C. region for decades. News4’s Shawn Yancy reports investigators hope the discovery will help explain why Bishop killed his family.
The 50-year hunt
When News4 asked Stafford if he thought authorities were ever close to finding Bishop, he responded, “I don’t think we ever were.”
But five decades after the killings, the FBI said the Bishop investigation remains active and that they continue to receive a high number of tips.
Uy said he too has a deputy assigned to the case file.
“If we were to get a tip tonight, if we’re to get a tip today, the deputies in our criminal section can actively look into it,” he said.
“We did everything we could. And maybe still, maybe this 50th anniversary, maybe somebody someday will pick up the phone,” said Vogt.
All it takes is one phone call.
“I believe someone has seen him and they haven’t made the call,” he said.
While Vogt isn’t sure if Bishop is alive or dead, the case has never left him. He recently joked with a friend on New Year’s Day that his resolution was to catch Bishop this year.
“A few months back, I was in an airport and I saw somebody that looked like him,” he said.
But he doubts over the years that he’s actually ever seen the fugitive.
“No, absolutely not,” he said.
Investigators acknowledge time could be running out to resolve this case.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re past the point of getting our hopes up because we’ve seen cases resolve sometimes when we think that they’re not likely to,” said Uy. “Personally, he would be 89 years old if he was still alive today, and I really do not believe he’s still alive.”
But Stafford still wants answers for the five people brutally killed, the people who still remember them and every investigator who has worked the case over five decades.
“The question is, why not just leave? Why do all this? If you’re thinking you just wanna leave, you just want to go, and you don’t want to get a divorce, you don’t wanna go through all that, you just want to disappear, get in the car and go,” said Stafford. “Why did you decide you had to kill them all?”
They’re questions police say only Bishop can provide if he’s ever caught. And if he isn’t, “Justice is never served. Ultimately, he’s gonna answer for this crime, no matter what,” said Stafford.
“Maybe it still will happen. Who knows. You never give up ‘til it’s over, you know,” said Vogt. “When everybody that knew Brad Bishop is gone, is no longer on this earth and nobody cares anymore, that’s when it’s over. I mean, for me, obviously, when I’m no longer here, it’s over for me. But it’s just a mystery that you’d like to solve.”
If you have any information about the hunt for William Bradford Bishop you can call 1-800-CALL-FBI.
Shawn Yancy and the News4 I-Team share how they got the interview with William Bradford Bishop’s daughter and their years covering his case.
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