Alerted by a lookout tower, Forest Ranger Ronald Brickhouse rushed to a rural logging road five miles south of Columbia, N.C., to investigate a brushfire. Brickhouse arrived at the scene and discovered what looked like a small blaze, burning away with no apparent cause. Near by he soon found the cause—a freshly dug ditch with five smoldering bodies, two women and three young boys. Off to the side were a 5-gal. gasoline can, a shovel and garden fork, and some tire tracks.
North Carolina police were quickly summoned, and found that all of the victims had died less than 24 hours earlier and all but one from brutal beatings around the head. The police began broadcasting descriptions of the five bodies to enforcement authorities along the East Coast; for almost a week they received no help. Meantime the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation managed to trace the shovel found at the murder scene by its serial number to the store where it had been bought—Poch Hardware in Potomac, Md. A flyer was left in the store with pictures of the bodies.
Good Hunch. That same morning, a policeman from Montgomery, Md., investigated the home of William Bradford Bishop Jr. in Bethesda, just outside of Washington, D.C. There had been no signs of life there for a week, and a worried neighbor in the close-knit community had called the police. In four bedrooms of the Bishop home and on the stairs, the policeman discovered blotchy splatters of blood. Otherwise there were no signs of forced entry or physical violence. None of the Bishops' neighbors could later recall any screams heard in the night, and none had any idea about what might have happened to the missing family.
But the Montgomery police had heard about the unidentified bodies unearthed in North Carolina, and the flyer that had been posted at Poch Hardware. On a hunch, they took the flyer from the store and showed it to a young woman who had been a babysitter for the Bishops. Shown the grisly photos, she cried out: "That's the Bishop family!" The flyer showed Annette Bishop, 37, her husband's mother, Mrs. Lobelia Bishop, 68, and the Bishop boys, William Bradford III, 14, Brenton, 10, and Geoffrey, 5. The only missing member of the family was Bradford Bishop, 39. Says North Carolina Attorney General Rufus Edmisten, once Senator Sam Ervin's assistant during the Watergate hearings, "Everything just fell into place" after that hunch by the local Maryland police.
As police reconstructed the killings, the murderer apparently bludgeoned the boys after they went to bed, since all of them were still wearing their pajamas when they were found. The mother and grandmother, who had on daytime clothes, were apparently attacked before retiring. The killer carried out the five bodies at night, lugging them over the 13 cement slabs that form a stepping-stone walk to the driveway, and presumably throwing them into the family's Chevrolet Malibu wagon, which has still not been found. The drive to the North Carolina grave site must have taken five hours.