TRUE CRIME: The Ex-Diplomat Who Allegedly Murdered His Family And Went On The Run

In early March 1976, one of Bradford Bishop’s neighbors in Bethesda, Maryland, called the police because they hadn’t seen him or his family for a while and had grown concerned.

When police arrived at the Bishop home, they found blood on the front porch and entered the house. Inside, they found blood on the floor and walls in the front hall and in the bedrooms, but no sign of any member of the family.

Days earlier, in Columbia, North Carolina, the burned bodies of three children and two adult women were found in a shallow grave along with a gas can, pitchfork, and shovel. On March 9, 1976, Montgomery County Police detectives traveled to North Carolina to use dental records and other information to confirm the bodies belonged to Bishop’s wife, 37-year-old Annette; his mother, 68-year-old Lobelia; and his three children, 14-year-old William, 10-year-old Brent and 5-year-old Geoffrey.

Bishop, however, was nowhere to be found. On March 18, his station wagon was found abandoned at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, just miles from the Appalachian Trail. Bishop has never been found.

Police pieced together the events surrounding the murders and determined that on March 1, 1976, Bishop left his job at the State Department after not receiving a promotion he expected. 

He claimed to be sick but then went to the Montgomery Mall to purchase a gas can and mallet at Sears before filling up the gas can and the family station wagon. He then went to his bank and withdrew almost everything he had in his accounts, about $400. He also stopped at a local hardware store to purchase a shovel and pitchfork.

Bishop then returned home and killed his family, police allege.

“He went from room to room,” Montgomery County Sheriff Darren Popkin, who has been searching for Bishop for 20 years, told CBS News in 2018. “And one at a time hit them around the head and killed each one of them.”

Bishop allegedly killed his wife first and then went into his son’s bedrooms and killed them one-by-one as they slept. At this time, Bishop’s mother had returned home from walking the family dog and was then killed. Bishop apparently spared the dog and brought it with him when he drove his family’s bodies six hours to North Carolina where he placed them in a shallow grave and set them on fire.

“A park ranger saw fire burning and immediately went to see what was going on. What he found was just absolutely grizzly. The discovery of five bodies in a shallow grave that was burning,” Popkin told CBS.

On the same day Bishop’s car was found in Tennessee, he was indicted by a grand jury for the murders. But Bishop has never been found and would now be 86.

Bishop received an American Studies degree from Yale University and a Master’s Degree in Italian from Middlebury College in Vermont, the FBI says. Prior to allegedly murdering his family, he worked as a U.S. Foreign Service officer, a diplomat who traveled the world learning multiple languages. He also reportedly worked for the CIA before to the State Department.

Part of Bishop’s duties at the State Department was making passports, and he has been sighted all over the world, though the U.S. Marshals Service only counts three as the most credible.

A Swedish woman who said she had worked with Bishop on a business trip to Ethiopia said she saw him twice in Stockholm, Sweden, in July 1978. A former State Department colleague reported in January 1979 that he saw Bishop in a bathroom in Sorrento, Italy, and asked him, “Hey, you’re Brad Bishop, aren’t you?” The man allegedly responded “oh no” with an American accent and ran away. Finally, in September 1994, a neighbor who had known the Bishop family claimed to have seen the fugitive on a train platform in Basel, Switzerland.

To the outside world, the Bishop family seemed picturesque, leading many over the years to question why a devoted family man would murder his family and go on the run. While it is theorized that he was angry over being passed over for a promotion, it seemed difficult to believe that was the only motive. Neighbors have since told media outlets that the family had financial problems and that Bishop wanted to work overseas while his wife wanted the family to stay in Maryland. He was also known to have taken medication for depression and insomnia.

In 2014 – 38 years after his family was murdered – Bishop was placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list, believing he may have been living in plain sight in the U.S. Four years later, in 2018, Bishop was removed from the list to make room for a different fugitive, but he is still being actively pursued by both the FBI and INTERPOL.

The strangest twist in the story

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