4 pm, February 12, 2010—University of Alabama in Huntsville
Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Loading Dock.

Amy Bishop stepped out of the science building and into the afternoon light. She was a solid woman—5?8? and 150 pounds—and from a distance, at least, her red V-neck sweater and jeans made her look more like a soccer mom on an errand than a remorseless killer leaving the scene of her crimes. Upstairs, in Room 369R, there was only suffering. Three professors lay on the floor, dying. Three more were wounded.

Now Bishop stood near the loading dock, unarmed. On her way down from the third floor, she had ducked into a restroom to stuff her Ruger 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol and blood-spattered black and red plaid jacket into a trash can. The 45-year-old assistant professor had also phoned her husband, James Anderson, and instructed him—as she often did—to come pick her up. “I’m done,” she’d said.

Bishop focused her blue eyes, so fierce under the horizon of her dark bangs. She paid attention to people’s eyes. There was so much you could see in them. Pain. Hardness. Sometimes she envisioned that people’s eyes made sounds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Other times she imagined she could feel eyes boring into the top of her head. Now her own eyes scanned the street. Where was James?

More than two decades earlier, the first time she’d fired a gun with fatal results, James had stood by her. Other boyfriends would have turned their backs. But not James. In the dark days after that 1986 shooting, Amy—then a 21-year-old senior at Northeastern University in Boston—had actually broken up with him. James waited patiently for her to return to herself, then to their relationship. The shooting was ruled an accident, and soon they were getting married, honeymooning in the Bahamas, starting a family. James would stand by her again, when she had problems on the job after earning her PhD from Harvard University. She had no reason to think he wouldn’t stand by her now.

At 4:10 pm, as ambulances rushed to the scene, a Madison County sheriff’s deputy approached Bishop and took hold of her. She looked dazed as her hands were cuffed and she was put into a squad car. Later, during an interrogation that went on for more than two hours, Bishop would insist, “I wasn’t there” and “It wasn’t me.” Her assertions seemed ludicrous, of course. Twelve people who knew Bishop, who saw her almost every day, had spent nearly an hour with her before she started shooting without a word of warning. Nine of those witnesses were still alive.

Yet some would say that when Bishop claimed she wasn’t there, she wasn’t entirely wrong. It didn’t seem to be the Amy they knew who had come to that meeting; another Amy had. Bishop “was someone I trusted,” says professor Debra Moriarity, who survived the massacre. “There were oddities of personality that made you just go, oh, well, that’s just the way she is. But nothing would have predicted any behavior like this. She never appeared hateful.” But that afternoon in Room 369R, “she seemed suddenly different.” Soon, Moriarity and her colleagues would learn that they weren’t the first to have seen Bishop’s dual nature. For years, there had been two sides to this quirky, haughty researcher known for introducing herself as “Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard-trained.” Many had met Arrogant Amy, who seemed to thrive on order and usually had the upper hand. An unlucky few had encountered another Amy—chaotic, confused, full of menace. Angry Amy rarely took charge. But when she did, things never ended well.

What makes a smart, well-educated mother of four go on a killing spree? In the more than 12 months since Bishop became the first academic in US history to be accused of gunning down fellow professors, many theories have been offered up. One is that she’s a lunatic. That suggestion came from her attorney.

Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer, Roy Miller, called her simply “wacko.” Later he apologized for his word choice, but he has continued to press the point. “They’re going to try to show she’s sane, that she was just mean as hell,” he tells me, referring to the prosecution, which is seeking capital murder charges against Bishop in the killings of department chair Gopi Podila and professors Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. “If they seek the death penalty, which we have to assume they will, our only defense is mental.”

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