Video After The Jump
The scientist who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama had been a key suspect in an attempted bomb plot at Harvard in 1993, police officials told The Boston Globe on Sunday.
Authorities questioned Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, in March 1993 after a bomb-laden package was delivered to a Harvard professor and doctor at Boston's Children's Hospital, the Globe reported.
The plot was the latest revelation linking Bishop to past investigations. Bishop is accused of shooting to death three colleagues during a faculty meeting on the University of Alabama's Hunstville, Ala. campus on Friday.
Bishop, who has four children, was arrested soon after the shooting and charged with capital murder. Other charges are pending. Her husband was detained and questioned by police but has not been charged.
In 1986, Bishop shot and killed her 18-year-old brother with a shotgun at their Braintree, Mass., home. She told police at the time that she had been trying to learn how to use the gun, which her father had bought for protection, when it accidentally discharged.
Authorities released her and said the episode was a tragic accident. She was never charged, though police Chief Paul Frazier on Saturday questioned how the investigation was handled.
In the Harvard plot, a police official told the Globe that Bishop's name surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned about getting a negative evaluation on her doctorate work from Dr. Paul Rosenberg.
During the initial investigation, Rosenberg told police that he had received a thin, long package addressed to him and soon discovered that was filled with wires and a cylinder, according to the Globe.
The package had contained two pipe bombs, which were hooked up two nine-volt batteries, the Globe reported.
During a search of Bishop's computer, investigators discovered a draft of a story that Bishop had written about a female scientist who had killed her brother and was hoping to find redemption in life my becoming a great scientist, the Globe reported.
Bishop and her husband were never charged in the Harvard plot.
'It was just a normal day'
Back in Alabama, some of Bishop's colleagues, including William Setzer, chairman of the department of chemistry, told The Associated Press they did not know about Bishop's past.
Alabama police said the gun she is accused of using in Friday's shooting was not registered, and investigators don't know how or where she got it.
Just after the shooting, her husband James Anderson told the Chronicle, she called and asked him to pick her up. She never mentioned the shooting, he said.
Anderson said his wife had an attorney but would not say who it was. He declined further comment to The Associated Press on Sunday. However, he told the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier in the day that he had no idea his wife had a gun — nor did he know of any threats or plans to carry out the shooting when he dropped her off at the faculty meeting Friday.
Even in the days and hours before the shooting, Bishop's friends, colleagues and students said she was acting like the intelligent — but odd — professor they knew.
UAH student Andrew Cole was in Bishop's anatomy class Friday morning and said she seemed perfectly normal. Kourtney Lattimore, 19, a sophomore studying nursing who had Bishop for anatomy and physiology courses, said she didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.
"She was fine. It was a normal day," Lattimore said.
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