Alabama Biology professor Amy Bishop shocks everyone when she opens fire at a faculty meeting, killing three of her colleagues.
Dr. Amy Bishop was born and raised in the middle-class Boston suburb of Braintree, Massachusetts. Amy excels in grade school and is a gifted violinist. It’s no surprise to anyone when her IQ is measured in the gifted range. Although she achieves great success in academics, she struggles with severe allergies. But all of her trips to the emergency room also spur her to go into science, hoping to someday find a cure.
In 1983, Amy attends Northeastern University in Boston to study biology. While in college, she joins a dungeons and dragons club, where she meets fellow biology major James Anderson. They become inseparable. They are both very bright and share many common interests. It’s a good relationship for both. Jim is a calming influence to Amy’s more intense personality.
The couple marry and settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Amy is accepted into the graduate program at Harvard. She earns her PHD in genetics and starts working as a researcher at Boston’s children’s hospital. Over the next nine years, the Bishop-Andersons struggle to pay the bills. Amy works a variety of low-paying research jobs, and her husband freelances as a computer engineer. Her lack of success and prestige affect her deeply
By 2003, the couple has four mouths to feed, three girls and a boy. When Amy gets an offer to teach at the University of Alabama, she doesn’t hesitate to say yes. This is a steady paycheck the family desperately needs. And having not made the splash she wanted to in Boston, Amy thinks that maybe she can be a big fish in a smaller pond in Huntsville, Alabama.
No one would have expected that seven years later, she would turn a gun on six of her colleagues.
I Knew My Murderer: Series 1 Episode 2
