Adopted woman searching for biological parents finds out her father was a murderer

GENERAL OVERVIEW

• Kathy Gillcrist, a 63 years old woman from Brunswick County, North Carolina who was recently retired from her job as a high school teacher started to find her family history in 2017.
• Kathy was aware about the fact that she was an adopted child. Now, she was curious and she thus developed a desire to find her birth parents.
• She took a home DNA test through which she found her third cousin, Susan Gillmor, a 71 years old genealogist in Maine. Both Gillmor and Kathy were English majors as well as teachers.
• Gillmor helped Kathy in finding more information about her biological family. She found Gillcrist’s birth mother who had put her to adoption in 1957. However, Gillmor found it a bit difficult to find her biological father.
• After several years of research, she solved the mystery. Gillmor said, “I’m looking at the names in common, I’m looking at geography­­­- and his name is William Bradford Bishop Jr.”

FURTHER DETAILS

• Gillmor created several family trees and came to the conclusion that the name; St. Germain kept showing up. Another name she found was Coder who married a Bishop in the late 1800s. After her in depth research she learned that William Bradford Bishop Sr. married Lobelia Amaryllis St. Germain had one son named William Bradford Bishop Jr.
• She further searched Bishop Jr. on Facebook and found an FBI picture of him.
• Mr Bishop was a graduate in American studies at Yale University and had a master’s degree in Italian from Middlebury College in Vermont. According to his FBI profile, he also spoke Spanish, French and Serbo-Croatian. The profile said, “Bishop was described as intense and self-absorbed, prone to violent outbursts, and preferred a neat and orderly environment.” Officials also said that he was an avid reader, expert camper and an insomniac who might be have been receiving some psychiatric care.

FATHER: A MOST WANTED MURDERER

• Mr bishop has been wanted by the US government since 1970s and was also on the list of the FBI’s most wanted list for murder in 2014.
• On March1, 1976, Mr Bishop who was 39 years old left his office at the State Department. According to FBI on his way back home in Bethesda, he bought a large hammer along with him.
• He used this hammer to bludgeon his family including his wife, his mother and his three sons aged 5, 10 and 14 years old.
• He then drove nearly 300 miles about six hours South to North Carolina with the bodies in the family station wagon. He then left the battered bodies in a shallow grave and set them on fire. Later on the abandoned, blood-soaked car was found hundreds of miles away in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, near Gatlinburg, Tenn.
• He was charged with murder by the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Rockville, Maryland. Further according to the FBI he was charged federally to avoid prosecution. Mr Bishop vanished, however there were reported sightings of him in Stockholm and Sorrento, Italy but he was never tracked down by the FBI.
• In October 2014, the remains of an unidentified man were exhumed in Scottsboro, Alabama. However, that body was of a John Doe which resembled Mr. Bishop.
• “A reward up to $100,000 is being offered for information leading directly to arrest of Bishop, a highly intelligent former US Department of State employee who investigators believe maybe hiding in plain sight,” the FBI report continued.

THE ENDING STORY

• Gillmor and Gillcrist through their research found out Gillcrist’s biological mother and more than a dozen relatives in Massachusetts, mostly half-siblings from her mother’s side.
• Gillcrist also published a book called, “It’s in my Genes” in the year 2020 where she described her journey in finding her biological family.
• The FBI states that Bishop must be considered “armed and extremely dangerous with suicidal tendencies”.

What do you think about Kathy Gillcrist’s rollercoaster journey to discovering her biological family and eventually finding out her father as the most wanted murderer? 

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