STUNNING – AT 8:14 P.M. ET:  The case of the University of Alabama (Huntsville) professor accused of murdering three faculty members on Friday, and severely wounding three others, gets more and more curious, and sickening.

First, we learned that this woman shot and killed her brother in 1986, and was let off despite police protest – the shooting was officially ruled an accident – and that all the records from that killing are missing.

Then we learned that the shooter's mother held a political position.

Next we learned that the district attorney in charge of the 1986 case was William Delahunt, now an influential congressman from Massachusetts, who says he doesn't recall the case.  How a man can forget the killing of a boy by his sister is beyond me. 

And now this, from the Boston Globe:

The professor who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said today.

It was the second startling revelation in two days about the past of Bishop, who is accused of fatally shooting three colleagues and wounding three others Friday afternoon at a faculty meeting on the University of Alabama's Huntsville, Ala. campus.

A Massachusetts police chief revealed Saturday that Bishop had fatally shot her brother in 1986.

Rosenberg was opening mail, which had been set aside by a cat-sitter, when he returned from a Caribbean vacation on Dec. 19, 1993, according to Globe reports at the time.

Opening a long, thin package addressed to "Mr. Paul Rosenberg M.D.," he saw wires and a cylinder inside. He and his wife ran from the house and called police.

And...

Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said. The official said investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had shot her brother to death in 1986.

Note that the alleged motive for Friday's murders in Alabama was that Bishop was denied tenure by the university.

Officially, Bishop was cleared in the attempted bombing of the Harvard professor.  Officially, she was cleared of her brother's killing, even though he was shot in the chest at point-blank range. 

But there is much that is curious here.  As we said yesterday, it goes to the issue of public records, and how much a university, like Alabama, had a right to know about a prospective faculty member.

We'll follow this.

February 14, 2010