PUPodcast, Episode 262: Bradford Bishop Mar. 2, 1976. 12:40 pm. About 5 mi. south of Columbia, NC, which lies in the far eastern stretches of the state, out near the coast. A NC forest ranger on Highway 94 named Wilma Swain observes smoke in the distance and calls in authorities to help locate and contain the fire. Thinking it to be no more than a disposal fire, Ranger Ron Brickhouse goes in search of it. Initially, he finds a pile of dirt, a shovel, and a red gas can, as if someone had started a fire and just left it to burn. However, in the hole near the implements, Brickhouse finds an arm, a leg, and shoes visible amidst the flames. It looks as though there is a human body in the fiery pit. As investigators extinguish the flames and begin to extract the body, they find another body underneath. And then another. And so on. They keep going until they reach the bottom, and by then, they have pulled five human beings from the fiery wreckage. The state medical examiner finds the cause of death for the family members to be “blunt trauma to the head.” No one can immediately identify the victims, and without a driver’s license or some other form of ID, the authorities struggle, at first, to get the investigation going. Judging by the ladies’ hairstyles — which do not match the ‘dos of the rural population — the investigators (correctly) assume they are from a more urban area. The only item that have anything to go on is a shovel left at the scene. At the base of the shovel, down near the blade, is a sticker with partial name for a hardware store on it. The only letters visible on the handle are OCH[space]HD, which meant it was a hardware store whose name ended in OCH. This partial name was the only actual clue they gather to identify either the killer or the victims, and so they begin there. Off to a bad start. Unhelpfully, not a single hardware store in NC ended in OCH, so Agent Lewis Young and another agent, travel up the NC coast into Virginia, looking for hardware stores matching the name from the abandoned shovel. Mar. 7, 1976. Agent Young approaches the Metro Police in Washington, DC., and they are able to identify a store in Potomac, Maryland named Poch [like 2Pac] Hardware. They post a flyer of four of the victims in the hardware store (one of the victims was too badly damaged) and then, having no sufficient leads, eventually return to NC. March 8, 1976. Bethesda, Maryland. The Bishop family — a mild-mannered “DC” family consisting of William Bradford, who is a foreign service agent, his wife Annette, Bradford’s mother Lobelia, and three sons Brad, Brenton, and Geoffrey — hasn’t been seen in days, and neighbors become suspicious after the front lawn piles up with newspapers. Montgomery County MD Mike McNally receives a call to basically do a welfare check for a family living on Lilly Stone Drive in Bethesda, Maryland. Officer McNally gets inside the residence and finds a scene nothing short of horrendous. Not a single member of the extended family is present in the home, but the excessive amount of blood speaks to the obvious presence of foul play. There is blood on the front porch, blood inside the home, blood leading up the stairs to the second floor, and gouts of blood cover the walls in the kids’ bedrooms. Meanwhile, dental records from the crime scene are used down in North Carolina confirm the identities of the bodies in the fire pit. The five victims are the members of the Bishop family, which brings up two important questions: where is the husband, William Bradford Bishop, and how did the bodies end up on the coast of North Carolina? A little background on Bradford Bishop. Though on the surface his life appears to be perfect — a Yale graduate with multiple degrees, a prestigious job, and a beautiful and caring family — the cracks beneath the facade reveal a much different