Campus Crimes: Death in the Ivory Tower

On February 12, 2010, biology professor Amy Bishop opened fire on her colleagues at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, killing three and wounding three more after being denied tenure. But investigators quickly discovered the shooting wasn't her first act of violence: a quarter century of buried history, closed files, and institutional failures had put a gun in that room long before tenure ever came up. This second episode of Campus Crimes traces the deaths of Gopi Podila, Maria Davis, and Adriel Johnson, and the chain of overlooked warnings that preceded them. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Serial Killers & Murderous Minds to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped together on Monday ad-free. Join atcrimehouseplus.com http://crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Serial Killers & Murderous Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Murder True Crime Stories, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse https://www.instagram.com/crimehouse/TikTok: @Crimehouse https://www.tiktok.com/@crimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudios https://www.facebook.com/crimehousestudiosYouTube: @crimehousestudios https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus, Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This is Crime House.

• 0:42Vanessa Richardson?

  The highest rung on the academic ladder is tenure. It's a job for life, the reward for a decade of relentless work, the moment a scholar stops having to prove they belong and finally, permanently does. It's the thing you spend your whole career striving for. In the spring of 2009, a biology professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville was told she wasn't going to get it. She appealed, she lost, and by early 2010, the message was clear. Her time at the university was almost over. On the afternoon of February 12th, she sat through an ordinary faculty meeting, schedules,

• 1:25Vanessa Richardson?

  budgets, the spring open house. She barely said a word, and then, near the end, she stood up, took a handgun out of her bag, and started shooting the people around the table. Three of her colleagues would be dead within minutes, three more would be wounded. But here's what almost no one in that room knew. This wasn't the first time Amy Bishop had held a gun while someone bled out in front of her. It wasn't even the second. And in the end, the most disturbing questions wouldn't be about what she did that afternoon in Alabama. They'd be about everyone and every institution that had looked the other

• 2:07Vanessa Richardson?

  way for more than 20 years and helped put her at the front of that room.

• 2:28Vanessa Richardson?

  This is Serial Killers and Murderous Minds, a Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson. This is the second episode of our latest Crime House limited series, Campus Crimes. Four Sundays, four tragic crimes connected to American universities. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. If you're a Crime House Plus subscriber, all four episodes of Campus Crimes are available right now, completely ad-free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap Try Free on the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds show page on Apple Podcasts. Along with early access to this series, you'll also get every episode of this show and the

• 3:12Vanessa Richardson?

  rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early. Before we begin, you should know this episode describes a mass shooting along with other acts of violence, so please listen with care. Last week, we started at the top of a university with a founder. Today, we move to a faculty member. Amy Bishop was a Harvard-trained scientist and a professor of biology, a wife, a mother of four, by every outward measure, a success. And on an ordinary Friday afternoon in 2010, she walked into a meeting of her own department and opened fire on the people she worked with every day. In this episode, I'll take

• 3:54Vanessa Richardson?

  you through the scientist and the career she built, the tenure decision that turned her whole world upside down, the 90 seconds of gunfire that shattered a department, and the buried history that turned a workplace shooting into something far stranger. And running underneath all of it, a harder question than why did she do it, it's this: how many people and how many institutions had to look away to put a gun in that room?

• 4:31Vanessa Richardson?

  Amy Bishop had spent her whole adult life building toward one thing: what she did next would leave three of her colleagues dead. In February of 2010, she was 44 years old, working as an assistant professor of biology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. On paper, she was exactly the kind of person a university is built around. She'd grown up outside Boston, gone to Northeastern University, and then earned a doctorate from Harvard. She'd done her postdoctoral research in Boston Hospital Labs, working at the frontier of cell biology. On top of all that, she was married to a man named Jim Anderson, and together, they were raising four children.

• 5:14Vanessa Richardson?

  The Bishop's had come to Alabama in 2003, part of a common academic migration, following the work, chasing the tenure-track job that might finally become permanent. Huntsville is a science town, built up around NASA and the aerospace industry, and the university there was growing. For a scientist with a Harvard degree and outsized ambition, it was a place to plant a flag. And Amy wasn't only a researcher, she was an inventor. She designed a piece of laboratory equipment, a portable incubator meant to keep living cells alive and let scientists watch them in real time, something she hoped could replace a tool that had been standard in labs for more than a century. She'd partnered with

• 5:57Vanessa Richardson?

  a local business development group to try to bring it to market. Amy had patents, ambition, and a vision of herself as the rare scientist who could do the deep research and also turn it into something the whole field would use. And Amy had another passion: writing. In her spare time, she wrote fiction, several unpublished novels with scientists at their center. At the time, to the few who knew about it, it seemed charming, eccentric, maybe, although it would look very different once investigators actually read what some of those stories were about. But on the surface, Amy Bishop represented the ivory tower at its most appealing: the promise of it, a place where a sharp mind can spend its days

• 6:42Vanessa Richardson?

  chasing questions that matter, teaching the next generation, and maybe, if the work is good enough, leaving something behind.

• 6:53Vanessa Richardson?

  Amy had bet her entire adult life on that promise. And in the American university system, there's one moment where that bet pays off, or doesn't. It's called tenure. So let me quickly explain what tenure is, in case you're not familiar with it. When a professor is hired onto the tenure track, they're given a set number of years, usually around six, to prove themselves. They teach, they publish research, they bring in grant money, they serve on committees, and at the end of that clock, the university makes a decision. Grant tenure, and the professor essentially has a job for life, the security to chase bold, slow, risky ideas without fear of being fired for them. Deny it, and

• 7:38Vanessa Richardson?

  the rule at most schools is brutal and simple. It's called up or out. You don't get demoted, you don't get another try, you have one final year, and then you're gone. For an academic, tenure isn't only job security, it's validation, proof that you belong at the highest level of your profession. And the tenure year is famously one of the most stressful stretches of a scholar's life, a slow-motion referendum on everything you've worked for. And for someone like Amy Bishop, someone whose whole sense of herself was bound up in being a scientist, a Harvard PhD, a doctor, the stakes weren't only professional.

• 8:21Vanessa Richardson?

  To lose tenure wasn't just to lose a job, it was to be told by the institution she'd given herself to that she didn't measure up. In March of 2009, the University of Alabama in Huntsville made its decision about Amy Bishop. They said no.

• 8:42Vanessa Richardson?

  They had questions about her research record, and, more quietly, questions about how she got along with the people around her. Because there was another side to Amy Bishop, one her colleagues had started to notice. She was brilliant, no one disputed that, but she could also be abrasive, prickly, and hard to work with. Some students found her unsettling. A handful had even signed a petition asking that she be taken off a course. None of it was disqualifying on its own. Plenty of brilliant professors are difficult to be around, but tenure weighs collegiality right alongside research and teaching. It asks whether a person is someone the department can live with for the next 30 years.

• 9:26Vanessa Richardson?

  On that scale, Amy had made herself a hard case, and she did not take the tenure decision quietly. She appealed, she fought it hard. She brought it up constantly, in meetings, in hallways, in conversations where the subject didn't belong, until colleagues came to expect it. One of them later said she'd talk openly about being denied tenure and appealing it in committee meetings that had nothing to do with her case. It made people uncomfortable. It made her stand out. She had reason to fight, though. If the appeal failed, the spring semester of 2010 would be her last. Everything she'd built, the lab, the research, the career,

• 10:09Vanessa Richardson?

  the identity she'd spent decades constructing, was scheduled to end. The appeal failed. By the start of 2010, it was over. Amy had one semester left, and then the university would be done with her. To almost anyone else, that would have meant a brutal year and a job search, but to Amy Bishop, it seems like it meant something much closer to the end of the world. Now, there were signs, if anyone had known to connect them, that Amy's response to being thwarted could run to something darker than complaining in meetings. But those signs were scattered, and most of them were small, and individually, none of them looked like a warning.

• 10:52Vanessa Richardson?

  Take one incident from a few years earlier. Amy was at a restaurant, a pancake house with her family. Another mother had taken the last booster seat for her own child. Amy demanded it. When the woman refused, Amy punched her in the head while reportedly shouting, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop." She was charged with assault, pleaded guilty, and was placed on probation. Prosecutors recommended anger management classes. According to her husband, she never went. On its own, it's an ugly little story about a bad temper. In hindsight, it's something far more sinister, a glimpse of a woman who reacted to being told no, even about something as trivial as a chair,

• 11:37Vanessa Richardson?

  with sudden physical rage and a fierce sense of her own status. "I am Dr. Amy Bishop." That title mattered to her enormously, and the university had just told her the title was going away. But no one was connecting those dots in early 2010. To Amy's colleagues, she was a difficult, gifted, slightly odd professor who was unhappy about her tenure case, which described a lot of people, and none of them were dangerous. Her students that final week said she seemed completely normal. One had her for an anatomy class the very morning of the shooting, and noticed nothing at all.

• 12:18Vanessa Richardson?

  Which brings us to Friday, February 12th, 2010. That afternoon, the biology department gathered for a routine faculty meeting on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Room 369, a small space with an oval table. About a dozen people filed in and took their seats. The agenda was the stuff of ordinary academic life, an upcoming open house, scheduling classes for the fall, budgets. One colleague later called it "one of the easiest, most laid-back faculty meetings they'd ever had." Amy took a seat near the door. And for most of the next hour, she did something a little unusual for her. She sat quietly. She said almost nothing.

• 13:03Vanessa Richardson?

  The meeting started to wind down. People were talking about the next school year, glancing at their notes, thinking about the weekend. It was the easiest faculty meeting of the year. It was about to become the worst day in the university's history.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Everyone has a story, something they saw, something that followed them, or something they survived. I'm Bobby.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  And I'm Lexi, best friends for 15 years.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  And hosts of Oddities on Elm Street. Every week, we dive into the creepy, the mysterious, and the downright unexplainable.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  With stories submitted by you. So grab a blanket, turn on the lights.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And come hang with us as we share the scariest real-life stories that might just keep you awake at night. Welcome to Oddities on Elm Street.

• 14:02Vanessa Richardson?

  There were 13 people around the table in Room 369 that afternoon. Before I tell you what happened to them, I want you to know who a few of them were. Because in a story like this, it's easy to let the shooter become the whole story, and the people Amy Bishop hurt deserve far better than that. At the head of the department was Gopi Podila. He was the chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, a plant biologist, an immigrant who'd built a distinguished career, and by all accounts, a thoughtful, generous leader. And here's something worth holding on to. When some of Amy's students had complained about her, it was Gopi who dismissed the complaints and defended her. When her tenure came up, he had voted in her favor.

• 14:46Vanessa Richardson?

  The man running that meeting was, in a real sense, one of her champions. Also at the table was Maria Davis, a scientist who worked in biotechnology and plant genomics, and Adrielle Johnson, who studied cell biology and physiology and who was known for taking students under his wing when no one else would. There was a staff assistant named Stephanie Monticolo. There was a microbiology professor named Joseph Leahy. And there was Deborah Moriarity. She was a biochemist and the dean of the graduate school. She and Amy had a real professional relationship. The two of them worked with cell cultures, borrowed equipment from each other, and had talked about writing grant proposals together.

• 15:30Vanessa Richardson?

  When Amy was fighting her tenure denial, Deborah was one of the people who tried to help her and had actually gone to the administration on her behalf. For nearly an hour, the meeting rolled along. And then, near the end, Amy Bishop stood up. She had a 9mm handgun. And without a word, no speech, no announcement, no explanation, she pointed it at the people closest to her and began to fire. She started with the colleagues nearest her seat, and she moved down the table methodically, one after another. Deborah Moriarity would later testify that she'd been looking down at a piece of paper when she heard the first shot. She looked up to see Bishop standing there, shooting.

• 16:14Vanessa Richardson?

  She watched Maria Davis be hit and killed where she sat. In a matter of seconds, three people were fatally wounded: Gopi Podila, Maria Davis, and Adrielle Johnson. Three more were shot and gravely injured. Joseph Leahy struck in the head, along with Stephanie Monticolo and a professor named Luis Cruz Vera. Understand how fast this was and how close. This was not a gunman firing across a lecture hall. This was a small room, a table maybe a few feet wide, people who worked together every single day. And one of them, calmly and at point-blank range, trying to kill everyone within reach.

• 16:57Vanessa Richardson?

  The survivors' first instinct was simply to get down, to get under the table, to make themselves small. People thought Amy meant to go all the way around the room. "It looked," one of them said, "like she was working through them one by one." And then Deborah Moriarity did something extraordinary. She was under the table, on her hands and knees on the carpet. She could see Amy's legs on the other side of it, and instead of hiding, she started crawling toward the gunfire. She reached Amy, grabbed her by the leg, and she started talking to her, not screaming, but pleading, using her name, trying to reach the colleagues she thought she knew. She said, "Amy, think about my grandson. Think about my daughter.

• 17:42Vanessa Richardson?

  It's me. I've helped you before. I'll help you again. Don't do this." Amy looked down at her. Then she pointed the gun directly at Deborah Moriarity and pulled the trigger. There was a click. The gun didn't fire, it had jammed. Deborah scrambled up and out into the hallway, and Amy came after her, aiming again, pulling the trigger again. A click. And then a series of clicks, the gun wouldn't fire. And that malfunction, a jammed weapon in a room where the shooter still had rounds left and targets left, is almost certainly the only reason anyone in that room lived. Deborah threw herself back inside, and now the survivors moved.

• 18:27Vanessa Richardson?

  Together, they forced Amy out of the doorway and into the hall, shoved the door shut, and dragged a table against it to barricade themselves in. One of them said afterward that they fully expected her to shoot her way back through, and they were bracing for it, working out what they'd do when she came through that door. She never did. Later, one of the survivors put it simply. He said Deborah Moriarity was probably the one who saved their lives. But Deborah has always refused to call it heroism. She said she didn't have time to think, she just grabbed a leg, and the gun jammed. That, she said, wasn't being a hero. That was God looking out for her. Outside the barricaded room, Amy Bishop walked away.

• 19:16Vanessa Richardson?

  And what she did next is, in its own way, as chilling as the shooting. She didn't flee the building in a panic. She walked to a second-floor women's bathroom, and she hid the gun, tucked it into a trash can along with her blood-stained coat. Then she walked into a nearby lab where a student was working and calmly asked to borrow a cellphone. She wanted to call her husband. She needed a ride. The student handed over the phone. He'd say later that Amy looked anxious, a lot of anxiety in her eyes, but that otherwise she seemed like a normal person, like someone who'd just gotten some bad news and needed to make a call. Minutes later, police swarmed the Science Building.

• 19:58Vanessa Richardson?

  They found Amy and took her into custody just outside without a struggle. And when they had her, she said something investigators would repeat for years. She told them, in effect, that it hadn't happened, that there was no way, that her colleagues weren't dead. She would later insist to her own attorney that she hadn't been there at all, that she had no memory of any of it. Whether that was denial, or shock, or something more calculated, no one could say for sure. But it set the pattern for everything that came after, because Amy Bishop would spend the next decade insisting, in one way or another, that she wasn't responsible for what a dozen people had watched her do.

• 20:42Vanessa Richardson?

  Across campus and across the country, the news went out. Three faculty members killed, three wounded, by a professor who'd shot her own colleagues at a meeting. It made no sense. Universities are supposed to be safe. Faculty meetings are the very definition of mundane. And the shooter wasn't a stranger who'd wandered in off the street. She was one of them. A Harvard PhD, a scientist, a mother.

• 21:10Vanessa Richardson?

  A week later, the university held a memorial service. Some 3,000 people came. They grieved a department chair and two scientists, and the ordinary Friday afternoon that had been taken from all of them. And almost immediately, people started asking the obvious question: How? Students were asking it out loud. How does someone like this end up here? Do universities not check who they're hiring? How did all of this slip through the cracks? It was a fair question, and it had a reasonable-sounding answer. Amy Bishop had a Harvard PhD and a clean record. She'd been vetted, hired, and promoted toward tenure. On paper, there was nothing to find.

• 21:53Vanessa Richardson?

  But nothing on paper is a very different thing from nothing there at all. Because as investigators, first in Alabama, then 2,000 miles away in Massachusetts, started to pull on the thread of Amy Bishop's past, they found something almost no one had ever put together. The shooting in Alabama wasn't the beginning of the story. It was the end of one.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Early morning, on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  It was an assassination-style killing, and everybody saw it.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Now, as Luigi Mangione prepares to stand trial for the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Audio and 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to Burden of Proof: Luigi Mangione wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:04Vanessa Richardson?

  To find the beginning, you have to go back to 1986 and to a house in Braintree, Massachusetts, a suburb south of Boston. On December 6th of that year, 21-year-old Amy Bishop shot and killed her 18-year-old brother Seth. Here's the account Amy and her mother gave the police at the time, and it's the account her family has stood by ever since. They said it was an accident. Their father kept a shotgun in the house. Amy was supposedly worried about a break-in and had gotten the gun out, loaded it, but couldn't figure out how to unload it. She brought it downstairs to ask for help. It went off, and the blast hit Seth in the chest, killing him.

• 23:48Vanessa Richardson?

  The Braintree police looked at the scene, questioned Amy and her mother, and concluded it was a tragic accident. They let her go. There were no charges. And for over 20 years, that was the official story: A terrible freak accident in a grieving family. But there was another set of facts, which never made it into the hands of the prosecutors, who might have asked harder questions. Because the shot in the kitchen wasn't the only thing that happened that day. According to police accounts that resurfaced decades later, Amy had fired the shotgun more than once. There was a shot in her bedroom before Seth was killed. Some reports said there was an argument. And then, after Seth was shot,

• 24:33Vanessa Richardson?

  Amy didn't stay and call for help. She ran. She left the house carrying the loaded shotgun, went to a nearby car dealership, and pointed the gun at the employees there, demanding a car. The workers fled. Police found Amy a short time later and had to order her repeatedly to put the weapon down, before she finally did. That's not how most people behave in the moments after a genuine accident. And yet, she was released without being charged. The reports describing the dealership, the pointed gun, the standoff with police, they were never shared with the district attorney's office. The most serious thing anyone considered at the time was a manslaughter charge, and even that went nowhere.

• 25:18Vanessa Richardson?

  Remarkably, the case file went missing for years. Whatever happened inside the Braintree Police Department in December of 1986, the result was that Amy Bishop walked away from her brother's death with no charges, no record, and no more questions asked.

• 25:38Vanessa Richardson?

  For more than two decades, they went unasked. And then, in February 2010, Amy Bishop shot six of her colleagues in Alabama, and investigators and reporters in Massachusetts suddenly remembered her name. The Norfolk County District Attorney reopened the death of Seth Bishop. Old officers came forward. The missing details resurfaced. A judge held an inquest, a closed-door hearing to examine a suspicious death. Over three days, hearing from 19 witnesses, including Amy's own parents. And in June of 2010, a grand jury did what no one in 1986 had been given the chance to do:

• 26:21Vanessa Richardson?

  It indicted Amy Bishop for the first-degree murder of her brother. I want to be careful and precise here, because this part matters. That indictment was never tested in a courtroom. Amy Bishop was never tried for Seth's death. After she was sentenced in Alabama, Massachusetts prosecutors decided it wasn't worth the cost and the risk of bringing her back for a trial that could only add to a sentence she was already serving, especially with key witnesses now dead, and the events almost a quarter of a century gone. So the charge was quietly set aside, and her parents have never wavered. They have always maintained that the death of their son was an accident

• 27:04Vanessa Richardson?

  and that their daughter did not kill him on purpose. So this remains in the eyes of the law: A death ruled an accident, reopened, indicted, and never resolved. But listen to what one of the prosecutors said when the case came back. He said that if the 1986 investigation had been done properly, in all likelihood, three people in Alabama who were killed might still be alive.

• 27:33Vanessa Richardson?

  There's one more chapter between the brother and the shooting. And like the others, no one connected it until it was far too late. In 1993, Amy was working as a postdoctoral researcher in a Boston hospital lab under a doctor named Paul Rosenberg. It did not go well. Rosenberg, by his account, didn't believe she could meet the standard the work required, and he was instrumental in her leaving the lab. Around the time Amy left, Dr. Rosenberg received a package at his home. It was long and thin, and when he started to open it, he saw wires and a cylinder inside, so he stopped. He called the police. Inside were two pipe bombs wired to batteries.

• 28:17Vanessa Richardson?

  Had they gone off, they could have killed him. Amy and her husband were questioned. Investigators learned that she'd been worried about a negative review from Rosenberg. A witness told federal agents that Amy's husband had talked about wanting to get back at Rosenberg, that he'd said he wanted to shoot him, or bomb him, or stab him. And when investigators searched Amy's computer, they reportedly found something strange: A draft of a story she'd written about a woman scientist who had killed her brother and was searching for redemption by becoming a great researcher. But the authorities were never able to trace the bombs to anyone, and so no one was charged. Amy and her husband were questioned and released,

• 29:01Vanessa Richardson?

  and the case went cold. Her husband has always said they were simply two of about a dozen innocent people swept up in a wide net, never suspects, and eventually cleared. After the Alabama shooting, federal prosecutors reviewed the old bomb case one more time. And in 2010, they closed it for good. There wasn't enough evidence to charge anyone. That's where it stands.

• 29:28Vanessa Richardson?

  So step back and look at the shape of it. Three times across 24 years, Amy Bishop was in close range of an attempt on a human life. A brother, dead by her hand, ruled an accident. A colleague, nearly killed by bombs, with her as an early suspect. And finally, a room full of coworkers, three of them dead. The one time there was no ambiguity at all, because she did it in front of a dozen witnesses. And at nearly every step before that final one, a system that was supposed to catch her looked away. In 1986, the Braintree Police Department had a young woman who had shot her brother,

• 30:11Vanessa Richardson?

  fired a gun multiple times, and then pointed a shotgun at strangers demanding a car, and they sent her home. The reports that would have raised alarms never reached prosecutors. The case file vanished. The chief who ran that department at the time spent years afterward defending how it was handled, insisting he'd done the right thing and that the failures were other people's. But the plain fact is that a homicide investigation was closed as an accident, and the paper trail that might have reopened it simply disappeared for a generation. In 1993, the bombing investigation ran out of evidence and went cold.

• 30:52Vanessa Richardson?

  And in 2003, when the University of Alabama in Huntsville hired Amy Bishop, it ran no background check at all, a check that officials later admitted might not have turned up anything anyway, precisely because she had no record, because the record had never been created, because back in 1986, everyone had looked away. Which brings us back to the explanation everyone reached for in February 2010, that Amy Bishop snapped over tenure. And it's true that the tenure denial was the pressure that came right before the explosion. But the tidy version, that she took revenge on the people who'd cost her the job, does

• 31:36Vanessa Richardson?

  not survive contact with the facts. Because look again at who was in that room. Gopi Podila, the chair she killed, had defended her against her critics and voted for her tenure. Deborah Moriarity, the colleague she tried to execute at point-blank range, had personally gone to the administration to help her appeal. If this was revenge against the people who had wronged her, she got it exactly backward. In the years since, Amy's offered a shifting set of explanations. In her appeals, she's blamed mental illness and medication and allergies causing blackouts. She's claimed she doesn't remember the shooting. She's even claimed that a stalker was the reason she brought a gun to campus in the first place.

• 32:20Vanessa Richardson?

  The courts have examined these claims and rejected them every time. In September of 2012, Amy Bishop pleaded guilty to capital murder and attempted murder. Under Alabama law, even a guilty plea in a capital case requires the state to lay its evidence before a jury, so there was a brief trial of formality. The jury deliberated for less than half an hour before returning its verdict. Amy was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. And in the years since, she's filed appeal after appeal, trying to undo the plea she entered. Every one of them has failed.

• 33:01Vanessa Richardson?

  As of this recording, she's an inmate at a women's prison in Watumpka, Alabama, and she has no path to release. But the sentence is not the part of this story that should stay with you. The survivors carried it out of that room, and they've been carrying it ever since. Joseph Leahy, shot in the head, lived, but with a traumatic brain injury and blind in one eye. Stephanie Monticolo lived with wounds of her own, physical and otherwise. When Amy offered an apology years later, Joseph refused it. He said that as far as he was concerned, she'd simply ceased to exist.

• 33:44Vanessa Richardson?

  He thought she was only sorry that she'd been caught. And the three who did not survive, Gopi Podila, Maria Davis, and Adrielle Johnson, were scientists and teachers and mentors. After they were gone, their department chose to honor them in the most fitting way it could find. By recommitting itself to the students, the three of them had spent their lives lifting up. The ivory tower is supposed to be the safest kind of place there is. Not safe from the ordinary dangers of the world, safe in a deeper sense. It's where we send our brightest people to build the future, to make knowledge, to raise up the next generation.

• 34:25Vanessa Richardson?

  Three of the people in that room had spent their whole lives doing exactly that. And they were killed by one of their own at a meeting about scheduling and budgets on an ordinary Friday afternoon. The hardest part isn't that it happened, it's how much of it might have been prevented. Years earlier and a thousand miles away, the people whose job was to look, to ask the obvious questions, to keep the records, to not let a homicide be quietly filed as an accident, looked away instead. And a woman with a history of violence was left free and clean on paper to walk into a university and be handed a classroom.

• 35:20Vanessa Richardson?

  Thanks so much for listening. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Be sure to come back next Sunday for our next episode of Campus Crimes, where we move to a different kind of failure, where a graduate student is stabbed to death in the middle of a crowded university library in the middle of the afternoon with people all around her, and nobody knows who did it. And you'll still get all our normal episodes every Monday and Thursday. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on Instagram at @CrimeHouse. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Serial Killers and Murderous Minds wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:03Vanessa Richardson?

  Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Serial Killers and Murderous Minds listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com. Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds show page. Serial Killers and Murderous Minds is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Serial Killers and Murderous Minds team: Max Cutler,

• 36:46Vanessa Richardson?

  Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Lori Marinelli, Natalie Pritzowski, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening. If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.