Legal experts question quality of 1986 shooting investigation

A six-page State Police report shows Bishop and her parents were interviewed 11 days after the shooting, but provide little additional detail about the inquiry.

Hetherwick Pumphrey said the report should have included interviews of all of the officers who interacted with Bishop and her family on the day of the shooting. In addition, she said state police should have gone to Bishop's house and looked at how the fatal shot was fired, along with evidence that she fired the shotgun more than once while in the house.

"There's a whole investigation missing, basically," Hetherwick Pumphrey said. "One very well may have been done, but it's not here [in the report.]"

In today's editions, the Globe reported that former Braintree police chief had backed away from his earlier defense of a 1986 decision not to press charges against Bishop.

John Polio, now 87, said in an interview that after reading a State Police report compiled in 1986 and released to the public last weekend, he has questions about the quality of the investigation into the death of Seth Bishop, which was declared an accident.

The report, which Polio said was not given to him at the time, reveals that State Police did not interview Amy Bishop and her mother, who witnessed the shooting, until 11 days later, and there were some discrepancies in their accounts of what happened.

"When I hear everything and I see this report for the first time, if this information was at my hands then, yes, I would have to do a lot of thinking before I made a decision then, " Polio said.

His comments came as Bishop, 45, stood before a judge in Alabama for the first time since the shooting. At a closed-door hearing, the charges against her were explained.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, neighbors and colleagues shared revealing recollections about Bishop during her days living in Braintree, Newton, and Ipswich and studying at Northeastern and Harvard universities. They described her as someone who was obviously bright, but also difficult or odd.

In Newton, neighbor Johnny Henk said he remembered Bishop as a "wacky" woman who was often seen yelling at her husband and children, but who also would play the violin in her home and invite neighborhood children to sit and listen.

"One minute she's fine, the other minutes hollering and screaming, " Henk said.

In Ipswich, police said that Bishop called 911 so many times to complain about the noise of children riding dirt bikes or playing basketball that police referred to her and her husband as "regular customers."

"There was never enough we could do for them," Officer Michael Thomas said. "When someone calls the police a lot about their neighbors, it says either they are not able to cooperate enough with them or that they are just unable to adapt to a neighborhood."

And in Hamilton, where Bishop joined a writing group, other aspiring authors recalled that the biologist-writer was talented but awkward. Bishop had penned three dramatic novels - a suspense thriller about an IRA operative; a tale about a virus that made all women barren and ended mankind; and a book she titled "Martians in Belfast," which recounted the life of a girl growing up during the Troubles of Ireland, according to Rob Dinsmoor, a member of the Hamilton Writers Group, which Bishop attended in the late 1990s.

"She really had a knack for writing character, dread, and suspense, "Dinsmoor said. But, he said, she sometimes felt ill at ease in the academic world. "She didn't know how to interact with them. She would just say what's on her mind, and that would get her in trouble."

The shootings in Alabama dredged up some powerful memories for a former mechanic in Braintree, who was at work on the day in 1986 that Bishop shot her brother and then ran from the family home.

Tom Pettigrew said a wild-eyed Bishop burst into the dealership where he was working, pointed a shotgun at employees, and said that she had had a fight with her husband and he was going to come after her, so she needed a getaway car.

"I yelled, 'What are you doing' and she screamed at me to put my hands up. So I put my hands up, " recalled Pettigrew, 45, in an interview at his home in Quincy yesterday.

Pettigrew said Braintree police briefly questioned him and several other employees, but authorities never contacted him again. Now, after the deaths in Alabama, Pettigrew wonders why authorities didn't follow up more aggressively.

"It was almost like they wanted to put it on the shelf and forget about it,"said Pettigrew, whose encounter with Bishop was first reported by the Boston Herald. 'I think if that happened to me I'd be wrapping up a long prison sentence. But with this, it seems like they just wanted it to go away."

Polio, the Braintree police chief at the time, said yesterday that he knew Bishop had to be apprehended at gunpoint, but he said he did not know she had pointed the shotgun at Pettigrew.

Polio said he allowed officers to release Bishop on the day of the shooting because the lead investigator, Captain Theodore Buker, told him she was too emotional to interview.

Buker recommended that the case be handed to the district attorney's office because "there were too many questions," Polio said. Buker remained on the case, but State Police were the lead investigators, Polio said.

Polio said Buker, who has since died, told him the district attorney's office had decided not to pursue the charges. Polio had no reason to question it at the time, he said yesterday.

"I took the word of my captain, I took the word of the State Police," he said. ""ll I know is that they investigated, they found it to be accidental and that was it. But when I got all this other material . . . I found it to be deficient in answers."

In particular, Polio said, the report has too little information about ballistics.

Polio's handling of the case has been questioned by the current Braintree police chief, Paul H. Frazier, and the mayor of Braintree, Joseph Sullivan, has pledged to look for missing police records about the case.

The district attorney who decided not to pursue charges against Bishop in 1986 was William Delahunt, now a member of Congress from Massachusetts.

Delahunt, who is in the Middle East, has not returned calls for comment over the last three days. Yesterday his spokesman, Mark Forest, said the congressman has "very little recollection" of the case but said his decision was based on a State Police investigation that declared the shooting an accident.

John Kivlan, Delahunt's first assistant district attorney who reviewed the police reports into the shooting of Seth Bishop and accepted the police finding of an accident, yesterday
acknowledged there were inconsistencies in the statements that Amy Bishop and her mother, Judy Bishop, provided. But he said those discrepancies did not challenge the overall finding by police that it was an accidental discharge.

Kivlan, however, said his assessment would probably have been different if he had been aware that Amy Bishop had fled the residence and pointed a shotgun at a man at a nearby car dealership, demanding keys to a car. He said that information was not contained in the report.

"At the end of the day, we don't have to accept the [police] report given to us,'' Kivlan said. "But there was nothing we knew of to contradict the finding of an accidental discharge.''

State Police spokesman Dave Procopio said the trooper who conducted the investigation has retired, but that the agency will check its archives this week to see if there are additional records. A spokesman for the current Norfolk district attorney, William Keating, said that at this point, prosecutors have no reason to reopen the case.