Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

The essay opens in February 2010, moments before a mass shooting at the University of Alabama-Huntsville during the biology department’s weekly faculty meeting. One professor, Amy Bishop, was unusually withdrawn, perhaps due to a recent tenure denial. As the meeting ended, Bishop opened fire with a gun from her purse, killing three of her colleagues and wounding others. The incident became a national sensation, as Bishop did not fit the typical profile of a mass shooter due to her age, gender, and profession. Later, Huntsville police received a call from the police department in Braintree, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb where Amy had grown up. The police chief, Paul Frazier, informed his counterparts that Amy may have murdered her brother in 1986.

Amy’s parents met in art school. Her mother Judy was a lifelong New Englander, while her father Sam was a Greek immigrant who became an art professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Keefe notes that Amy’s mother was popular and active in town civic life. Amy and her brother Seth grew up as academically inclined musicians, both playing the violin. In an interview with Keefe, Amy insists that she and her brother were always close. Seth’s friends remember him fondly, as kind and less solitary than his sister. In 1985, the Bishops experienced a home invasion, and afterward, Sam purchased a shotgun. In December 1986, Judy Bishop called 911 to report that Amy had shot her brother, insisting “it was an accident” (118).

Keefe turns next to local history, based on interviews with Paul Frazier, the Braintree police chief who alerted the Alabama authorities about Amy’s past. Frazier recalls the dictatorial rule of his predecessor, John Polio, who was obsessed with the close oversight of subordinates. Polio was chief of police when Seth was shot. Amy had fled the scene, but was later taken in for questioning. She told the officers who interviewed her that she had swung the gun at her brother in a panic, fearing another robbery and not knowing how to unload it. Seth was pronounced dead at the hospital, and Amy was soon released to her parents’ custody. As the town mourned, local and state authorities ruled the death an accident.

Keefe reflects that, in another time, Amy might have gotten mental health support after Seth’s death, rather than retreating into solitude. She insists in an interview with Keefe that she deeply mourned Seth and that his death was not intentional. Amy immersed herself in academic success and married a college boyfriend in 1989. They had three daughters, and Amy enrolled in a PhD program at Harvard, where she failed to achieve significant results. She had a son and named him for her brother, though few of her friends knew the connection.

Keefe then turns to Amy’s inner life, noting that she wrote fiction preoccupied with the deaths of children and the search for atonement from sin. She had converted to evangelical Christianity in college, a departure from her upbringing. She struggled as the only working parent in her household and was briefly arrested for a violent altercation with a stranger in 2002. The move to Huntsville improved her financial situation, but she still struggled to publish and was not well-regarded as a teacher. Amy admits to Keefe in interviews that she had allergy attacks that coincided with auditory hallucinations, a phenomenon that had begun after her brother’s death. Some witnesses said that Amy’s husband supported her sense of grievance, and that he helped her practice shooting the gun she would later murder her colleagues with.

The 2010 shooting prompted a reassessment of Seth’s death and of Amy’s flight from the house in the immediate aftermath. Then, she had brandished the shotgun at a local car dealership and had to be persuaded to accompany local officers. Keefe learns, after studying shotgun mechanics, that Amy had a live round in the gun at the time of her arrest. This would normally have resulted in charges, but witnesses including Paul Frazier report that Braintree’s police chief, Polio, endorsed Amy’s release. One officer remembers Judy Bishop asking to see Polio personally. More troublingly, the prosecutor in the case tells Keefe that if he had known about Amy brandishing the weapon, he might have pursued charges that would have forced psychiatric evaluation. In interviews, John Polio and his wife deny any knowledge of Amy’s release or her threats to officers.

The increasing interest in Seth’s death led to more media coverage of Amy as erratic and unstable, and of Judy as the protector of a killer. In 2010, after a new investigation and witness testimony, Amy was charged with Seth’s murder. She attempted death by suicide in prison and was saved by a guard.

Keefe visits Sam and Judy Bishop at their new home in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Both of them reject the new theory about Seth’s death as a conspiracy of vengeance directed at John Polio; they resent their tragedy being sensationalized. Sam Bishop seems uncomfortable when Keefe asks if he and Amy ever argued.

Amy initially hoped to be executed by the state, and then considered pleading “insanity.” Given that this is difficult to prove, and that her psychiatric examination was not definitive, she ultimately decided to plead guilty and seek a sentence of life without parole. Persecuting Amy for Seth’s death, however, would be difficult for lack of definitive evidence of animosity between the siblings.

Keefe notes that the story of Seth and Amy Bishop has two possible narratives—one that sees Amy as innocent, and another where she is a killer aided by local political intrigue. He thinks it most likely there was no intentional conspiracy, but that the town simply ruled the death accidental so that the Bishops, whom everyone knew, could grieve in peace. The 2010 investigation was, in a way, the town exorcising its demons from the reign of John Polio.

An anonymous source tells Keefe that on the day of Seth’s death, Judy Bishop had cancelled plans with a friend because of a fight between Sam and Amy, and was thus home for much of the early afternoon. In this account, Amy likely had the gun out because she was angry at her father, not at Seth. Keefe likens this to an incident from his own adolescence, when he angrily threw rocks into the ocean while his father was swimming, an event that could have become a tragedy. Keefe finds an analog in one of Amy’s pieces of fiction: A girl kills her friend’s brother while trying to frighten her friend, and is told by her family not to speak of it again.

Keefe decides to ask the Bishops if it was possible Amy had been angry with Sam, not fearful of a prowler. Judy Bishop, sticking to her original story, “held her stare, unblinking, until, eventually, I grew uncomfortable and looked away” (149). In a note, Keefe states that Amy Bishop’s son, Seth, died in 2021 when a friend accidentally shot him, 11 months after she won a prize for her writing from prison.