Strange Circumstances Surround University of Alabama Huntsville Killer

The police recovered a 9mm handgun when they arrested a 45 year old woman for shooting three people to death at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Things are tough all over, as they say, but full professorships at even the smallest university are as hard to get at as the Hope Diamond, even if you're qualified.

I have a woman friend who has a doctorate in Musicology, a spacious apartment in a great Manhattan neighborhood, a devoted husband and an adorable nine-year old kid. So desperate was she for an adjunct professor's job that she went across the country to take a job at a community college in Arizona. I didn't ask her husband, Richard, how the kid was doing. Probably about as well as the marriage, I guess.

University teaching jobs in New York City are "to kill for" if not "to die for" but Amy Bishop Anderson might achieve both purposes for what she did to three faculty members at a meeting convened for a purpose as yet undisclosed. She killed three and wounded three others. That's called "capital murder" in Alabama and can get you the death penalty.

Presumably, Amy Bishop Anderson's horrific actions had something to do with tenure. Adjunct or associate professors must look to their peers and superiors in order to be granted full tenure of professorship. Amy Bishop Anderson didn't make it, probably knew it beforehand, and brought a pistol to the meeting.

Interestingly, police were quoted in a CNN story saying that they weren't ruling out additional suspects. That's a fairly unusual statement if these murders are a case of "going postal." I wonder if they'll change that outworn phrase now to "going university." But the prospect of additional suspects raises the possibility of a conspiracy to commit murder before the murders actually took place. The story filed by CNN contains a series of photos. Oddly, one frame of the series shows another woman being escorted away in handcuffs by police. Strange stuff, indeed. I expect that police, who have questioned Amy Bishop Anderson's husband, are investigating the relationship she had with the woman being carted away.

Amy Bishop Anderson had been working at the University of Alabama at Huntsville since 2003. She is a graduate of Harvard and had an advanced degree in Biology. The university has cancelled classes to give the shocked academic community time to grieve.

Meanwhile, Fox News has published a story on their website which does not directly bear on the case but adds to its bizarre nature. Amy Bishop Anderson shot her brother in death in their Boston suburb home of Braintree, Mass. twenty years ago. Adding to the weirdness of events in this case is that the records of that shooting disappeared. According to the Fox News report, the woman fired three shots at her brother, one of them hitting him in the chest and killing him.

With regard to the missing records, some officials claim that an investigation will likely be done to ascertain how the records mysteriously disappeared. Police officers who recalled the case said that, in spite of three shots fired, the death was ruled accidental and Amy Bishop was released into the custody of her mother.

Sources: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/13/alabama.university.shooting/?hpt=T1

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,585781,00.html