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Bishop's husband says tenure fight may have been a factor in alleged rampage

E-mail|Link February 19, 2010 08:15 AM

By Globe Staff

The husband of Amy Bishop, the professor who is charged with killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama, says her battle for tenure could have been a factor in her alleged shooting rampage.

“It’s the battle for tenure. Only someone who has been intimately involved with that fight understands. It’s a tough, long, hard battle,” James E. Anderson Jr. said on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” show.

“That, I would say, is part of the problem, you know, is a factor,” Anderson told interviewer Ashley Banfield.

Bishop is charged with shooting six fellow faculty members, three of them fatally, at a meeting at the University of Alabama Huntsville on Friday.

The story of the Harvard-trained scientist has taken some startling twists since, with revelations breaking daily about her past in Massachusetts. First, it was revealed she had shot her own brother to death in Braintree in 1986, then that she and Anderson had been questioned in a 1993 attempted Newton mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in whose lab Bishop had worked. Prosecutors also recommended that she attend anger management classes after a March 2002 attack on a woman at an International House of Pancakes

In the ABC-TV segment filmed at Anderson and Bishop's home, Anderson told the interviewer that his wife had never sought anger management treatment. Asked if he thought she might have needed it, he said, “I don’t think so.” And asked if he saw any link between past events in Massachusetts and the alleged slayings, he said, “No.”

“Nothing?” the interviewer asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

The Globe reports today that a law enforcement official has disputed Anderson's claim to have received a letter saying he and Bishop were cleared in the 1993 bomb investigation. Anderson's assertion about the ATF letter is one of a string of public statements by him that have raised questions.