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Former University of Alabama at Huntsville scientist Amy Bishop, 47, had previously pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Bishop was said to have been angry at being denied tenure in the department.

Separately, Bishop has been charged in the 1986 shooting death of her brother, previously ruled an accident.

On Tuesday, the Harvard-trained biologist admitted one count of capital murder in the three deaths and three counts of attempted murder.

Meanwhile, it emerged that Bishop told police she was not present when three co-workers were shot to death in a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville in February. Previously, it was reported that Bishop claimed she didn’t remember the shooting.

Former neurobiology professor Bishop, 45, is charged with capital murder in the killings of three colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville during a Feb. 12 shooting rampage in which three others were injured. In her first court appearance yesterday, a judge ordered her held without bail and her case sent to a grand jury.

Prosecutors said the gun used in the attack was bought by a former New Hampshire man in 1989. Donald Proulx Jr. told federal authorities he bought the gun for James Anderson, Bishop’s husband.

At the time, Anderson told Proulx he was having problems with neighbors, prosecutors said. Bishop and her husband were living in Massachusetts at the time, which had stricter gun laws.

Proulx could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Meanwhile, Huntsville police investigator Charlie Gray testified that Bishop, during a taped interview that lasted more than two hours, was not agitated but “seemed calm, she seemed very intelligent” as she denied anything to do with the shooting.

“She said it was no way she was there, no way it happened. ‘I wasn’t there.’ That kept being a reoccurring thing throughout the interview,” Gray said.

Several neighbors have come forward to say Bishop often called the police over minor issues.

In 1993, federal officials investigated Bishop and her husband after a bomb scare at the home of one of Bishop’s colleagues. No charges were brought, but the U.S. attorney is now reviewing the case.

Meanwhile, local authorities still are investigating Bishop’s role in the 1986 shooting death of her brother, Seth. Norfolk District Attorney William Keating has convened an inquest to make sure that investigation was properly handled.

Several people with connections to the university’s biology department warned that Dr. Bishop, a neuroscientist with a Harvard Ph.D., might have booby-trapped the science building with some sort of “herpes bomb,” police officials said, designed to spread the dangerous virus.

Only people who had worked with Dr. Bishop would know that she had done work with the herpes virus as a post-doctoral student and had talked about how it could cause encephalitis. She had also written an unpublished novel in which a herpes-like virus spreads throughout the world, causing pregnant women to miscarry.

By the time of the reports, the police had already swept every room of the science building, finding nothing but a 9-millimeter handgun in the second-floor restroom.

The book, “Amazon Fever,” has an eerie quality in the context of the events of the past week involving the University of Alabama at Huntsville professor. The book’s heroine, Olivia, is trying to make it as a scientist during a pandemic, struggling mightily against depression and fear of losing tenure. She muses about the poet Sylvia Plath and her suicide — and continually worries about her future.

“Although she was sure that Steve would be happy with the news, telling Steve [her boyfriend] that she was pregnant still felt like dropping a bomb, only because of the timing,” Bishop wrote. “With her career breathing its last and Steve’s business in economic ruin it was indeed the worst time.”

The Alabama school is mentioned in the book as the MIT of the South, and a James Anderson, Bishop’s husband’s real name, is mentioned as a crack genetic sequencer at the university. The book takes swipes at Harvard, from its snotty bartenders to a phone number of a talk show given five times in one paragraph.

In real life, that number — 617-432-5555 — is the Harvard Medical School’s confidential Research Compliance Hotline. A recorded message sounded when the number was dialed this afternoon.

Court-appointed attorney Roy W. Miller told the Associated Press that Bishop, 45, and a mother of four children, appears to have paranoid schizophrenia. The Harvard-educated PhD opened fire on her colleagues at a staff meeting last week, killing three and injuring three others.

To use an insanity defense, her lawyers would have to prove that Bishop lacked the capacity to know right from wrong. She could face the death penalty on capital murder charges and is being held without bond.

Bishop’s husband, James Anderson, a freelance scientist who has steadfastly supported his wife, said that he believes denial of tenure was to blame for the rampage. Anderson, who spoke this morning with “Good Morning America,” has had only telephone contact with his wife since the arrest.

Her lawyer said that Bishop has been “very cogent” in jail, though she cannot explain the shootings.

“Obviously she was very distraught and concerned over that tenure,” Miller told the AP. “It insulted her and slapped her in the face, and it’s probably tied in with the Harvard mentality. She brooded and brooded and brooded over it, and then, `bingo.”‘

“She gets at issue with people that she doesn’t need to and obsesses on it,” Miller said. “She won’t shake it off, and it’s really (things of) no great consequence.”

Reports have mounted since the Feb. 12 shooting that Bishop had a violent past, though her husband has insisted she never had any mental problems.

Psychiatrists say that schizophrenia can go undiagnosed for years, especially for those who lead insular lives.

It is unclear how an insanity defense might play out with an Alabama jury if Bishop is tried on capital murder charges.

“People in science and computers are solitary people,” said Dr. Igor Galynker, associate chairman for the department of psychiatry and behavioral science at psychiatry at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City and professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein college of Medicine. “They work in solitude and they don’t need to interact in complex social situations and can be paranoid for a long time without someone realizing.”

Schizophrenia can be marked by social isolation, odd behavior, “strange disordered” thinking and speaking, poor hygiene and lack of friends, according to Galynker.

Often people don’t notice signs until more serious symptoms emerge.

“Brilliant scientists are supposed to be crazy,” he told ABCNews.com.

John Nash, the Nobel-winning economist from Princeton, portrayed in “A Beautiful Mind,” could be brilliant in his field, even as he suffered from schizophrenia.

Psychotics like Seung-Hui Cho, the student who killed 31 at Virginia Tech in 2007, are particularly dangerous.

They view others as inconsequential and often humiliation can set off a psychotic depression that could make a person violent or suicidal, said Galynker.

Madison County District Attorney Robert Broussard, who will prosecute the case against Bishop, said he would not oppose a mental evaluation.

Bishop’s only public comments since the killings have been, they “didn’t happen. There’s no way,” as police led he away after the massacre. “There’s no way. They’re still alive.”

Both Bishop and her husband Anderson have been described by “oddballs” but neighbors and colleagues in both Boston and in Alabama.

Anderson has been talking to media outlets across the country, downplaying his wife’s past outbursts.

He has said faculty sabotaged his wife’s aspirations for tenure, sending “nastygrams,” and that she may have even been the target of a stalker.

“I don’t buy that,” said Tom Capozzoli, an associate professor of psychology at Purdue University and an expert in workplace violence.

He speculated Bishop may have impulse control disorder, but he wonders about Anderson, as well.

“I’d be very curious about his mental stability,” Capozzoli said. “I seriously can’t believe that he didn’t know that something was going on.

“There were lot of trigger events,” Capozzoli added, “and if he knew what to look for, he might have prevented it.”

In an interview this week, Anderson deflected questions about Bishop shooting her 18-year-old brother, her being interviewed by police over a mail bomb sent to a professor at Harvard University and even the punching of a woman at an International House of Pancakes over a booster seat.

When asked if his wife had mental problems, Anderson told ABCNews.com, “I know what’s inside the brain, I don’t know how it works.”

“Part of me is a scientist and I can’t do anything until I get all the data in,” he said.

Of the revelation that his wife hit a restaurant customer in the head in 2002, Anderson said, “Another patron started it and tried to blow it out of proportion. When someone jumps in your business, in your face, you get upset.”

A judge disagreed, sentencing Bishop to probation as prosecutors recommended she take anger management classes, according to a report in the Boston Globe.

He backed up his wife’s claim that the 1986 death of her brother Seth Bishop was “accidental,” even as new reports revealed that in the hours after the shooting she still carried the shotgun when confronted by police at a nearby Ford dealership.

“She’s like, ‘Hands up!’ and I’m like, ‘Yes ma’am,'” auto body worker Tom Pettigrew told the Boston Herald.

Of the reports that he and his wife were questioned in 1993 when one of Bishop’s colleagues, Harvard University’s Dr. Paul Rosenberg, received a pipe bomb in the mail, Anderson said, “We were cleared of that.”

Neighbors’ claims in both Massachusetts and Alabama that the couple was belligerent and confrontational were laughed off by Anderson.

“They were out of line saying Amy was nuts and I realized they had accused her of using a ray gun to stop kids from operating their motorcycles,” he said of their Huntsville neighbors.

“A police officer called: ‘I have to ask this: Do you have a ray gun?’ I wanted to say, ‘We keep it in the flying saucer.’ They were crazy,” he said.

A former neighbor in Ipswich, Mass., who did not want to be identified, said Anderson “could be forceful and confrontational, but she [Bishop] was much more aggressive.”

“He was quieter and didn’t swear,” she said, citing a time Anderson came knocking at her door when her son’s music was too loud.

“He always supported [Bishop],” she said. “Every once in a while he would say something, but it was mostly her.”

Anderson said he had never been afraid of his wife, nor was she ever violent with their children.

“She was a loving mother,” he said. “She had a normal temper. The neighbors might think they are hearing her yell at the kids, but she was yelling for the kids. We had a huge house in both [Massachusetts and Alabama]. Come on guys, get a grip.”

The couple met nearly two decades ago as undergraduates at Northeastern University.

Anderson denied his wife had psychological problems and said of their relationship, “It’s a pretty good basic marriage: four kids, a house and two jobs,” said Anderson. “Work kept us together.”

Together, they “flip-flopped back and forth” in child care responsibilities, he said.

Speaking easily and calmly, Anderson only allowed emotion when asked about an ABC interview with Debra Moriarity, a professor who was at the Alabama shooting scene but escaped unscathed.

Moriarity, 55, said she tried to crawl out of the room, but Bishop pointed the gun at her, firing three times while out of bullets, as she begged for her life.

“No, no, don’t tell me about that,” Anderson told an ABC News reporter.

When asked if he was “delusional” about his wife’s mental health, Anderson said, “I can’t comment one way or the other.”

It’s hard to speculate how Anderson is reacting to his wife’s arrest, said Dr. Grant Brenner, director of trauma service of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City.

He, like the other mental health professionals quoted in this story, has no connection with the case and said it is “unethical and unprofessional” to hypothesize about specifics.

But “disassociation” — when the mind distances itself from an experience or emotion — can be caused by the trauma itself, according to Brenner.

“When emotions are so powerful, or thoughts are so unacceptable, that they cannot be comprehended or regulated, people respond as adaptively as they can in order to continue to function,” he told ABCNews.com. “For people who are hearing a story like this, it’s often hard to be empathic,” said Brenner. “It’s much more comfortable to ascribe what happened either to psychiatric pathology, or to some kind of moral turpitude or failing, than it is to ask the more difficult and useful question of why do things like this keep happening, from a more thoughtful perspective. How do we contribute to this, and are we willing to devote resources to prevent these tragedies from happening?”

Meanwhile, Anderson talks to Bishop for a few minutes daily on the phone, but has not been allowed to visit her in person for 30 days.

“She calls about the kids,” he said, referring to their four children who range in age from 8 to 18.

Anderson has said his lawyer has urged him not to talk about the shooting incident, but he continues to grant interviews.

Sometimes “love and intimidation” can persuade a spouse to blindly believe the other — a mindset that is not necessarily pathological, according to violence expert Tom Capozzoli, who is still intrigued with the Anderson-Bishop relationship.

“He said it was a ‘normal’ family,” said Capozzoli. “But what does that mean? The reason he may be talking now is he has nothing to fear. I would really be interested to know more about this ‘normal’ family.”

“I think mental illness is a real logical defense,” said Judith Armstrong, who lives next door to Bishop and Anderson on McDowell Street in Huntsville. The families were in a dispute over property lines before the arrest.

“We didn’t know them well because we have grandchildren and they have little children, so we don’t move in the same circles,” she told ABCNews.com. “But Jim seemed very quiet and Amy was quite assertive.”

Regardless, she was summonsed to Essex County District Court on two misdemeanor charges and retained an attorney. A lawyer entered a guilty plea on Bishop’s behalf, said Police Capt. Dennis Bonaiuto.

The incident happened about a year before Bishop was hired at UAH. According to a police report, Bishop punched a woman in the head during an argument over a child’s booster seat at an International House of Pancakes in the Boston suburbs.

Bishop pleaded guilty to assault and battery and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors, and was placed on probation. The judge also ordered her to take anger management classes.

The bizarre incident happened at an IHOP restaurant in Peabody, Mass., on March 16, 2002, a Saturday morning. According to the police report, a 37-year-old woman who had walked into to the restaurant just before Bishop got the last available booster seat.

When Bishop arrived with her family and was told there were no more booster seats, the report says, she became “very angry and loud and stated that, ‘We were here first.'”

The victim told officers that Bishop, then working as a Harvard researcher, came to her table and launched into an abusive, profanity-laced tirade. The woman was at IHOP with her two young children, whose ages are not listed on the report.

Bishop was so irate that the restaurant manager came over to try to calm her down.

“She continued to shout and at one point exclaimed loudly, ‘I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” the report says.

When the manager asked Bishop to leave, it says, she punched the other mother in the right side of the head. Bonaiuto said the manager wrote down Bishop’s license plate number as she was driving away.

The case file indicates that the district attorney’s office sought a guilty finding from the judge, plus supervised probation and anger management classes for Bishop. Bonaiuto said the records are unclear whether Bishop was given supervised or unsupervised probation, or if she attended the anger management course.

Peabody, a city of about 55,000 on Boston’s North Shore, has seen its share of sensational crimes. But Bonaiuto, the police department’s public information officer, said few things have generated as much media interest as the eight-year-old IHOP incident.

A police officer approached cautiously, holding his pistol behind his leg as he tried to reason with the wild-eyed 21-year-old. But Bishop would not budge.

“Miss Bishop seemed frightened, disoriented, and confused, but she kept both her hands on the shotgun at all times,’’ the officer wrote in a police report. “She wouldn’t drop the gun.’’

It wasn’t until another officer sneaked up behind her that Bishop was finally handcuffed and taken to the Braintree police station that December day in 1986.

Bishop was not charged in the events of that day, which began with the shooting death of her brother and was followed by her attempt to hold up an auto dealership and her bid to resist arrest.

Now, she is a 45-year-old biology professor accused of gunning down three colleagues in Alabama last week, and prosecutors here in Massachusetts are taking another look at the incidents in Braintree in 1986.

They concluded yesterday that there had been probable cause to charge her in the decades-old case, if not in the death of her brother, which was deemed accidental, then for her actions afterward.

The reports prosecutors used to make the determination – which included statements that Bishop, her mother, and her father made to Braintree police – were released publicly for the first time yesterday and paint a vivid portrait of a harrowing series of events that chilly December day.

In some respects it seemed like a typical Saturday. Amy’s mother, Judy, left the house at about 7 a.m. to visit a nearby stable, while her husband and two children remained behind.

An unsettling incident then marred the domestic scene: Samuel, Amy’s father, said he had a disagreement with Amy over a comment she made, the nature of which has never been disclosed.

He then left the house at about 11:30 a.m. to do some shopping at the South Shore Mall, leaving Amy in her room while her brother, Seth, washed Samuel’s car, according to the police reports.

Amy ventured into her parents’ bedroom, where she found her father’s shotgun lying on a chest of drawers and shells for the gun resting on a bureau.

While Amy told police about the “spat’’ she had with her father, she insisted she went to her parents’ room for the shotgun because she was worried about a possible robbery, as the house had been burglarized about a year earlier.

After returning to her room, Amy loaded the gun, although she had never been trained to use the weapon. And when she tried to unload it, she told police, the gun went off, putting a hole in her bedroom wall, which she attempted to conceal with a book cover and a metal Band-Aid box later found by police.

Shortly before the gun went off in Amy’s room, her mother returned from the stable with lunch in mind. Discovering there was little to eat, Seth went out shopping and returned with the makings of a family meal.

He dropped the groceries in the family kitchen, moved into the living room to turn on the television, and returned to the kitchen just as Amy came downstairs carrying the shotgun.

Amy told police she went downstairs to ask Seth for help unloading it. Seth and his father were members of a local gun club and Seth had been trained to use the weapon. And upon entering the kitchen, Amy said, Seth told her to point the gun up.

When she did, she was distracted by something her mother said – perhaps her mother telling her not to point it at anyone – and the gun went off a second time, leaving her brother bleeding to death on the family’s kitchen floor, the reports said.

There were some discrepancies in the accounts Amy and her mother gave police. Amy said she asked Seth for help unloading the gun, for instance, while her mother said Amy asked her for help. But both accounts end with her shooting her brother in the chest.

Amy ran from the house, gripping the shotgun. She told police that “she thought she had dropped the gun when she ran.’’

But that was hardly the case, according to police reports.

Minutes later, workers discovered her in a stairway at the Dave Dinger Ford dealership. Thomas Pettigrew and Jeff Doyle said Amy pointed the shotgun at them and told them she wanted a car and a set of keys. She kept her weapon trained on them and backed out of the shop onto a nearby street.

John Polio, now 87, said in an interview yesterday that after reading a State Police report compiled in 1986 and released to the public last weekend, he has questions about the quality of the investigation into the death of Seth Bishop, which was declared an accident.

The report, which Polio said was not given to him at the time, reveals that State Police did not interview Amy Bishop and her mother, who witnessed the shooting, until 11 days later, and there were some discrepancies in their accounts of what happened.

“When I hear everything and I see this report for the first time, if this information was at my hands then, yes, I would have to do a lot of thinking before I made a decision then,’’ Polio said.

Polio’s comments came as Bishop, 45, stood before a judge in Alabama for the first time since the shooting. At a closed-door hearing, the charges against her were explained.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, neighbors and colleagues shared revealing recollections about Bishop during her days living in Braintree, Newton, and Ipswich and studying at Northeastern and Harvard universities. They described her as someone who was obviously bright, but also difficult or odd.

In Newton, neighbor Johnny Henk said he remembered Bishop as a “wacky’’ woman who was often seen yelling at her husband and children, but who also would play the violin in her home and invite neighborhood children to sit and listen.

“One minute she’s fine, the other minutes hollering and screaming,’’ Henk said.

In Ipswich, police said that Bishop called 911 so many times to complain about the noise of children riding dirt bikes or playing basketball that police referred to her and her husband as “regular customers.’’

“There was never enough we could do for them,’’ Officer Michael Thomas said. “When someone calls the police a lot about their neighbors, it says either they are not able to cooperate enough with them or that they are just unable to adapt to a neighborhood.’’

And in Hamilton, where Bishop joined a writing group, other aspiring authors recalled that the biologist-writer was talented but awkward. Bishop had penned three dramatic novels – a suspense thriller about an IRA operative; a tale about a virus that made all women barren and ended mankind; and a book she titled “Martians in Belfast,’’ which recounted the life of a girl growing up during the Troubles of Ireland, according to Rob Dinsmoor, a member of the Hamilton Writers Group, which Bishop attended in the late 1990s.

“She really had a knack for writing character, dread, and suspense,’’ Dinsmoor said. But, he said, she sometimes felt ill at ease in the academic world. “She didn’t know how to interact with them. She would just say what’s on her mind, and that would get her in trouble.’’

The shootings in Alabama dredged up some powerful memories for a former mechanic in Braintree, who was at work on the day in 1986 that Bishop shot her brother and then ran from the family home.

Tom Pettigrew said a wild-eyed Bishop burst into the dealership where he was working, pointed a shotgun at employees, and said that she had had a fight with her husband and he was going to come after her, so she needed a getaway car.

“I yelled, ‘What are you doing?’ and she screamed at me to put my hands up. So I put my hands up,’’ recalled Pettigrew, 45, in an interview at his home in Quincy yesterday.

Pettigrew said Braintree police briefly questioned him and several other employees, but authorities never contacted him again. Now, after the deaths in Alabama, Pettigrew wonders why authorities didn’t follow up more aggressively.

“It was almost like they wanted to put it on the shelf and forget about it,’’ said Pettigrew, whose encounter with Bishop was first reported by the Boston Herald yesterday. “I think if that happened to me I’d be wrapping up a long prison sentence. But with this, it seems like they just wanted it to go away.’’

Polio, the Braintree police chief at the time, said yesterday that he knew Bishop had to be apprehended at gunpoint, but he said he did not know she had pointed the shotgun at Pettigrew. Polio said he allowed officers to release Bishop on the day of the shooting because the lead investigator, Captain Theodore Buker, told him she was too emotional to interview.

Buker recommended that the case be handed to the district attorney’s office because “there were too many questions,’’ Polio said. Buker remained on the case, but State Police were the lead investigators, Polio said.

Polio said Buker, who has since died, told him the district attorney’s office had decided not to pursue the charges. Polio had no reason to question it at the time, he said yesterday.

In particular, Polio said, the report has too little information about ballistics.

Polio’s handling of the case has been questioned by the current Braintree police chief, Paul H. Frazier, and the mayor of Braintree, Joseph Sullivan, has pledged to look for missing police records about the case.

The district attorney who decided not to pursue charges against Bishop in 1986 was William Delahunt, now a member of Congress from Massachusetts.

Delahunt, who is in the Middle East, has not returned calls for comment over the last three days. Yesterday his spokesman, Mark Forest, said the congressman has “very little recollection’’ of the case but said his decision was based on a State Police investigation that declared the shooting an accident.

John Kivlan, Delahunt’s first assistant district attorney who reviewed the police reports into the shooting of Seth Bishop and accepted the police finding of an accident, yesterday acknowledged there were inconsistencies in the statements that Amy Bishop and her mother, Judy Bishop, provided. But he said those discrepancies did not challenge the overall finding by police that it was an accidental discharge.

Kivlan, however, said his assessment would probably have been different if he had been aware that Amy Bishop had fled the residence and pointed a shotgun at a man at a nearby car dealership, demanding keys to a car. He said that information was not contained in the report.

“At the end of the day, we don’t have to accept the [police] report given to us,’’ Kivlan said. “But there was nothing we knew of to contradict the finding of an accidental discharge.’’

State Police spokesman Dave Procopio said the trooper who conducted the investigation has retired, but that the agency will check its archives this week to see if there are additional records. A spokesman for the current Norfolk district attorney, William Keating, said that at this point, prosecutors have no reason to reopen the case.

Bishop is now facing one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder after allegedly shooting her colleagues during a faculty meeting Friday afternoon. Three people were killed and three others were injured.

Huntsville police spokesman Mark Roberts said yesterday that Bishop did not have a permit to carry the 9mm handgun she allegedly used Friday and investigators are still trying to determine who owned the gun and how Bishop acquired it.

He said she had been worried about “crazy students’’ since someone had followed her across campus last summer. But he said he warned his wife not to bring the gun to work.

Bishop, who has four children, was arrested soon after the shooting and charged with capital murder. Three counts of attempted murder were filed against Bishop over the weekend, according to jail records. Her husband was detained and questioned by police but has not been charged.

HUSBAND’S COMMENTS

James Anderson said his wife had an attorney but would not say who it was. He declined further comment to The Associated Press on Sunday.

Although she fired three times, the local police — who employed Bishop’s mother in the personnel department — believed her story that the shooting was an accident.

“She’s barely holding up,” he told ABC affiliate WCVB-TV in Boston today. “Nobody understands what happened. Nobody knew. Sit down and talk to her about what went wrong.”

Anderson said he didn’t believe his wife — a brilliant scientist who colleagues said had been upset about not receiving tenure — was capable of finding out who her alleged victims were for retribution.

And when asked why she might have killed, if she did, he said, “I am not a psychologist.

Meanwhile, Anderson told The Associated Press that he and Bishop went to a shooting range just weeks before the killing, but said the family did not own a gun.

He said he is still baffled about where she may have gotten the gun she is accused of using.

“I feel for all these people,” he told ABC. “I wish it had never came to this. She was loved and respected by everyone, students and assistants. All the nursing students liked and loved her.”

Bishop, 42, has been arrested and charged in the shooting deaths of three professors and the wounding of three others Friday at a faculty meeting. She could face the death penalty.

Anderson told the Chronicle of Higher Education that his wife had called from jail and said, “I know you guys are obviously in shock,” and asked if their four children had done their homework.

Before the shootings, he said, his wife had said nothing and he assumed their Friday “date night” was still on.

But a former colleague of Bishop’s has described her as “an oddball.”

Sylvia Fluckiger, a lab technician who worked with Bishop at Children’s Hospital in Boston, said her colleague was “socially a little awkward,” according to the Boston Globe.

Fluckiger and her husband Rudolph worked together at Children’s Hospital in the early 1990s where he was a researcher. Bishop helped Rudolph Fluckiger write a research paper as a medical student.

More recently, some of Bishop’s students had mostly praise for the biology professor at the University of Alabama. They gave her an overall 3.6 rating out of 5 on RateMyProfessors.com.

She was “absolutely the bomb! Knows her stuff cold, and quick-witted, too.”

One commenter said she was “surprised” the Harvard graduate was “not a snob.”

“Dr. Bishop is brilliant,” another said. “Her research is fascinating. She will surely get the Nobel Prize. She is the best teacher I have ever had.”

But another said that, although she graduated from Harvard, “she has very little common sense.”

The alleged violent past of the once respected University of Alabama professor accused of the fatal shooting rampage has stunned the families of her victims.

Sherry Foley, 63, who lives in the same Alabama neighborhood as Bishop, was still in shock over her arrest.

“You can’t believe that someone you know that lives just down the street can do something like this,” she said. “It’s like with sex offenders. You never really know what people are and they might be living right next to you.”

And news unearthed this weekend that Bishop had shot and killed her 18-year-old brother, Seth Bishop, in 1986, swirled.

Declared accidental at the time, Braintree, Mass., police say they were never comfortable with the ruling.

Investigators also revealed that seven years later, Bishop was the prime suspect in a 1993 mail bombing attempt on a Harvard Medical School professor.

“I just feel angry,” LaTasha Davis, stepdaughter of shooting victim Maria Davis — one of the dead — told “Good Morning America” today. “How did she even get a job working at the school when she had that type of background?”

She was reportedly upset about being denied tenure at the school. Husband Anderson told the Chronicle of Higher Education that one of her bosses had sent her negative e-mail they called “nastygrams.”

When she called him less than an hour after he dropped her off for the faculty meeting Friday, Anderson said, Bishop made no mention of the shootings and told him they were still on for their date night.

LaTasha Davis and her sister, Melissa Davis, told “Good Morning America” they believe Bishop was able to get a list of which professors did not vote in her favor for tenure and used it to plan the shooting.

Also killed, according to the Associated Press were, Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and faculty member Adriel Johnson.

Melissa Davis said she had taken a class with Bishop and found her to be disorganized and prone to rambling.

“I remember thinking, ‘I’m glad I’m not sitting in calculus or anything like that,'” she said.

Melissa Davis said she hopes the shooting will lead to more thorough background checks for its faculty and staff.

“We both loved Maria and believe she never should have been killed like this,” she said.

The Davis sisters remembered their stepmother as a calming presence in the house. Maria Davis married their father after the girls’ mother died when they were teenagers.

“Maria came in with this gentle kind heart,” Melissa said, adding that she never left the house without telling her family that she loved them.

In contrast, Amy Bishop seemed to harbor anger and resentment. Though investigators say they will not re-open the investigation into the 1993 attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor, those who worked with her at the time say it was terrifying.

“We were completely rattled — it was the time of the Unabomber,” former co-worker Sylvia Fluckiger said of the two homemade pipe bombs that were sent to the professor’s house. The bombs were later detonated by the bomb squad.

Once again, Bishop was never charged due to lack of evidence. And, authorities, say the motive seemed to be eerily similar to the potential motive in the Alabama rampage — Bishop was reportedly upset about a negative evaluation she was expecting to get from the targeted professor.

Fluckiger, who worked with Bishop at a research lab, said she remembered Bishop and the professor having a disagreement.

“I just know there was an argument … that the police questioned her,” Fluckiger said. “She had told me they talked to her about those bombs. She had like a grin on her face.”

Carrying a shotgun by her side, a 21-year-old Bishop walked intently across a car lot into the adjacent storefront, where she began searching for car keys. Coming down from the second floor, she was heading toward the garage when she ran into Tom Pettigrew and a friend, who had spotted her in the parking lot and came to investigate.

“Her gun hit me in the chest,” Pettigrew, 45, recalled from his Quincy apartment. “I yelled, ‘What are you doing?’ and she screamed at me to put my hands up. So I put my hands up.”

On Friday, Bishop, a biology professor at the University of Alabama, allegedly opened fire at a faculty meeting, killing three colleagues and wounding three others. Investigators soon discovered that Bishop had killed her younger brother in 1986 with a shotgun, a shooting that was ruled accidental.

But the Braintree police chief has cast doubt on that conclusion, and the armed confrontation at the garage provides new insight into her state of mind after her brother’s death. The Boston Herald first reported Pettigrew’s account of the events today.

Only minutes after that shooting, according to Pettigrew, Bishop frantically told workers at the garage she had been in an argument with her husband and needed a car to escape, nervously scanning the premises as she kept the gun pointed at their backs.

“She kept saying ‘I need a car, I need to get out of here,'” Pettigrew recalled. “She said he would be looking for her, and that if he found her he would kill her. She seemed terrified.”

Investigators said there were only three people in the Bishop home at the time of the shooting – Bishop, her mother, and her brother. Her father had left to go shopping after he and Bishop had a disagreement. In her statement to detectives, Bishop said she raced out the door after the shooting and believed she had dropped the gun behind her. She said she could not recall anything else that happened until she saw her mother at the police station after being taken into custody.

Pettigrew said he tried to defuse the situation by calmly asking her what was wrong, but she did not seem to hear him.

“At the time, I remember thinking she was out of her mind,” said Pettigrew, who was stunned when he learned that the thin, mousy teenager who once held him at gunpoint had been charged in the Alabama rampage.

At times, Bishop held the gun loosely, and did not appear to be familiar with firearms, said Pettigrew, an experienced hunter. So he and his friend, moving on eye contact, fled in opposite directions. Bishop did not fire at them.

“She just looked around agitated,” he said. “She didn’t know what to do.”

Seconds later, police surrounded the area, and quickly seized her, he said.

Later, Braintree police briefly questioned Pettigrew and several other employees, and authorities never contacted Pettigrew again. He read in the paper the family shooting had been ruled an accident, and that Bishop was not charged with a crime.

Now, after the deaths in Alabama, Pettigrew wonders why authorities didn’t follow up more aggressively, and wonders whether things could have turned out differently if they had.

Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, were questioned after a package containing two bombs was sent to the Newton home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg, a professor and doctor at Boston’s Children’s Hospital.

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.

The package contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries.

In March 1994, the Globe reported that federal investigators had identified a prime suspect in the case. But the article did not name the suspect.

A law enforcement official said today that the investigation by the US Postal Service and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms focused on Bishop, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow who was working in the human biochemstry lab at Children’s Hospital at the time, and her husband, Anderson.

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.

Investigators conducted a search of the home where Bishop and Anderson were living and questioned the couple, the official said. Anderson was questioned about whether he had purchased any of the components used to make the bombs, the official said.

During a search of Bishop’s computer, authorities found a draft of a novel that Bishop was writing about a female scientist who had killed her brother and was hoping to make amends by becoming a great scientist, according to a person who was briefed on the investigation and spoke to the Globe on the condition of anonymity.

The US attorney’s office in Boston did not seek any charges against Bishop or Anderson, and no one was ever charged with mailing the bombs to Rosenberg.

Federal prosecutors did not immediately return calls today.

At his home, Rosenberg declined to comment today and referred questions to Children’s Hospital administrators. Hospital officials said information on Bishop and the case was not immediately available and declined further comment.

Sylvia Fluckiger, a lab technician who worked with Bishop at the time, said Bishop had been in a dispute with Rosenberg shortly before the bombs were discovered.

Shortly after the attempted bombing, Fluckiger said, Bishop told her she had been questioned by police one day in the lab. According to Fluckiger, Bishop said police asked her if she had ever taken stamps off an envelope that had been mailed to her and put them on something else.

“She said it with a smirk on her face,” said Fluckiger. “We knew she had a beef with Paul Rosenberg. And we really thought it was a really unbelievable coincidence that he would get those bombs.”

Sergeant Mark Roberts, a spokesman for the Huntsville Police, said today that police in Alabama had been informed that Bishop was a suspect in the 1993 mail bombing case.

“Presently, we are trying to confirm it through law enforcement resources,” he said.

Roberts said the crime scene at the university was so large — the building is some three acres — that detectives had just finished gathering all the evidence in the shootings.

“What we’re doing now, they finally got all the evidence and they’re starting to go through it,” he said.

Bishop, 44, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville since 2003, allegedly opened fire during a faculty meeting Friday, killing three colleagues and wounding three others, reportedly after learning at the meeting that she was being denied tenure.

Her husband was detained and questioned by police but has not been charged.

On Saturday, the police chief in Braintree confirmed that Bishop had fatally shot her brother in the family home in December 1986.

Police found the weapon used in the deadly shooting, which occurred during a biology faculty meeting, late last night in a bathroom on the second floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. Amy Bishop’s husband, James Anderson, was detained after the shooting but has not been charged.

Further charges may be pending against Bishop, including attempted murder charges for the three people wounded during yesterday’s shooting at UAH, said District Attorney Rob Broussard.

The Boston Globe reported at the time that Amy Bishop had accidentally shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth M. Bishop, an accomplished violinist who had won a number of science awards, in Braintree.

Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed today at a news conference that Amy Bishop had shot her brother in 1986. But Frazier offered a different account of the shooting, saying Bishop had shot her brother during an argument and was being booked by police when the chief at the time ordered the booking process stopped and Bishop released to her mother.

Frazier said he was basing his statements on the memories of one of his officers who was on the department at the time and had arrested Bishop. He said the records from the case have been missing since at least 1988.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘coverup’ … but this does not look good,” he said.

Then-Police Chief John Polio told the Globe in 1986 that Bishop had asked her mother, Judith, in the presence of her brother how to unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun.

Polio told the Globe that while Amy Bishop was handling the weapon, it fired, wounding Seth Bishop in the abdomen. He was pronounced dead at a hospital 46 minutes after the Dec. 6, 1986 shooting.

“Every indication at this point in time leads us to believe it was an accidental shooting,” Polio said at the time.

In an interview at his home this afternoon, Polio, 87, said, “There was no coverup.” He said he followed all department procedures and then-District Attorney William Delahunt’s office conducted an inquiry and the decision was made not to file charges.

Polio at times fumbled over names and did not remember some details of the case. He was not aware until told by reporters that Bishop was accused of the shootings in Alabama.

Delahunt, who is now a US representative, could not immediately be reached for comment this afternoon.

But Frazier said the media had been fed an incorrect story. He said that there was an argument at the home on Hollis Avenue and Amy Bishop had fired three shots, including the fatal one, then fled the house and pointed the shotgun at a motorist in an attempted carjack. She was then arrested at gunpoint by officers.

Organizing three different colleges to collaborate on one project is no small feat, but the success of this experiment proves it can be done. “It’s hard to get biologists and engineers to work together!” remarked case manager Alwin Heuer. The College of Nursing funded the project, the MAE Department’s Space Hardware Club constructed the balloon assembly, and Amy Bishop of the biology lab provided the nerve cells.

A unique aspect of this project includes the payload itself. Before this experiment, there was no way to transport living cells in a portable environment. James Anderson, owner of Cherokee Lab Systems and creator of the cell drive transporter, combined all his knowledge of electrical and computer engineering and biology to invent the device. “It wasn’t easy to create, and I’ve been working on it for a while, and this experiment gave me a reason to finish it.” The device is patent-pending.

After the balloon was set loose, a team of chasers immediately jumped into their vehicles to pursue the balloon via a GPS tracking system. It reached a height of 99,000 feet (18.75 miles), and eventually parachuted down northeast of Chattanooga. Everything was intact on recovery, and the cell drive transporter performed its job perfectly. When taken back to the lab, many of the cells were dead, and the next step is to grow the living ones and see how they react.

Dr. Bishop received her doctorate from Harvard University’s Department of Genetics and came to UAHuntsville in the fall of 2003 as an assistant professor of biology. UAHuntsville’s website listed her courses taught as:

BYS 313: Anatomy & Physiology 1
BYS 314: Anatomy & Physiology 2
BYS 400/600: Introduction to Neuroscience
Special Topics 691: Mechanisms of resistance to oxidative stress in the CNS
Special Topics 692: Research

She also conducted numerous research projects focused on molecular biology of oxidative stress, neurobiology, neuroengineering and induced adaptive resistance and has been cited in multiple publications.

Dr. Bishop’s husband, Jim Anderson, was also taken in for questioning. He is reportedly the owner/chief science officer of Cherokee Labsystems in Huntsville. One online business profile site lists Cherokee Lab Systems as a private company categorized under Telephone Services and located in Huntsville, AL. Current estimates show this company has an annual revenue of $120,000 and employs a staff of approximately 3.

Friday evening, two Huntsville Police cruisers were stationed outside the couple’s south Huntsville home. A neighbor, Josh Hudgins, told WHNT NEWS 19 that he saw the couple around 3 p.m. Friday afternoon. Hudgins stated, “I had dropped my daughter off about 2 :30, 3:00… came back around that corner. And, they had some duffel bags sitting on the ground next to their car and the kids were playing in the street looked like they were getting ready to go on a trip maybe.”

Shortly after 4 p.m. is when Amy Bishop allegedly walked into the Shelby Center, went to the 3rd floor and started gunning down co-workers in a faculty meeting.

Huntsville Police officers questioned Dr. Bishop for more than 5 hours at the department’s south precinct. WHNT NEWS 19 cameras were camped outside the south precinct and captured video of her as officers brought her out. She remarked, “It didn’t happen. There’s no way.” WHNT NEWS 19’S Nick Banaszak asked her, “What about the people who died?” Bishop replied, “There’s no way. They’re still alive.”

Bishop is accused of killing 3 fellow biology professors. But as of Friday night, she had only been charged with one count of capital murder. Bishop could face the death penalty if convicted.

Sammie Lee Davis, whose wife Maria Ragland Davis was killed at a faculty meeting, said his wife also described the alleged shooter, 42-year-old Amy Bishop, as “not as good as she thought she was.”

Bishop was charged Friday night with one count of capital murder, which means she could face the death penalty if convicted. Three of Bishop’s fellow biology professors were killed and three other university employees were wounded. No students were harmed in the shooting, which happened in a community known for its space and technology industries.

Several sources told CBS News affiliate WHNT-TV in Huntsville that after being denied tenure in the morning, the suspect walked into a biology department faculty meeting Friday afternoon and opened fire.

Davis said he was told those at the meeting were discussing tenure for Bishop, who had been an assistant professor since 2003. Authorities have not discussed a motive.

Dave Williams, the university’s president, said the “whole campus is in shock,” but wouldn’t speculate on a motive for the shooting.

Appearing on CBS’ “The Early Show Saturday Edition”, Williams said classes would be canceled next week and the school has not determined when they will resume.

Students offered varying assessments of Bishop.

Andrea Bennett, a sophomore majoring in nursing, described Bishop as being “very weird” and “a really big nerd.”

“She’s well-known on campus, but I wouldn’t say she’s a good teacher. I’ve heard a lot of complaints,” Bennett said. “She’s a genius, but she really just can’t explain things.”

Bennett, an athlete at UAH, said her coach told her team Bishop had been denied tenure and that may have led to the shooting.

Amanda Tucker, a junior nursing major from Alabaster, Ala., had Bishop for anatomy class about a year ago. Tucker said a group of students complained to a dean about Bishop’s performance in the classroom.

“When it came down to tests, and people asked her what was the best way to study, she’d just tell you, ‘Read the book.’ When the test came, there were just ridiculous questions. No one even knew what she was asking,” said Tucker.

But Nick Lawton, 25, described Bishop as funny and accommodating with students.

“She lectured from the textbook, mostly stuck to the subject matter at hand,” Nick Lawton said. “She seemed like a nice enough professor.”

UAH student Andrew Cole was in Bishop’s anatomy class Friday morning and said she seemed perfectly normal.

“She’s understanding, and was concerned about students,” he said. “I would have never thought it was her.”

Bishop, a neurobiologist who studied at Harvard University, was taken Friday night in handcuffs from a police precinct to the county jail and could be heard saying, “It didn’t happen. There’s no way. … They are still alive.”

Police said they were also interviewing a man as “a person of interest.”

University spokesman Ray Garner said the three killed were Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two other faculty members, Davis and Adriel Johnson.

Three others were wounded, two critically, in the gunfire. The wounded were identified as department members Luis Cruz-Vera, who was listed in fair condition, and Joseph Leahy, in critical condition in intensive care, and staffer Stephanie Monticello, also in critical condition in intensive care.

Sammie Lee Davis said his wife was a researcher who had tenure at the university.

Bishop and her husband placed third in a statewide university business plan competition in July 2007, presenting a portable cell incubator they had invented. They won $25,000 to help start a company to market the device.

Biology major Julia Hollis was among the students who gathered to support each other and try to make sense of the news.

“When someone told me it was a staff person and it was faculty I was in complete denial,” said Hollis, 23, who had taken classes with two of the instructors who were killed. “It took me a bit for it to sink in.”

Sophomore Erin Johnson told The Huntsville Times a biology faculty meeting was under way when she heard screams coming from a conference room.

University police secured the building and students were cleared from it. There was still a heavy police presence on campus Friday night, with police tape cordoning off the main entrance to the university.

The Huntsville campus has about 7,500 students in northern Alabama, not far from the Tennessee line. The university is known for its scientific and engineering programs and often works closely with NASA.

The space agency has a research center on the school’s campus, where many scientists and engineers from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center perform Earth and space science research and development.

The university will remain closed next week and all athletic events were canceled to give students and staff time to grieve. Counselors were available to speak with students.

It’s the second shooting in a week on an area campus. On Feb. 5, a 14-year-old student was killed in a middle school hallway in nearby Madison, allegedly by a fellow student.

Mass shootings are rarely carried out by women, said Dr. Park Dietz, who is president of Threat Assessment Group Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based violence prevention firm.

A notable exception was a 1985 rampage at a Springfield, Pa., mall in which three people were killed. In June 1986, Sylvia Seegrist was deemed guilty but mentally ill on three counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder in the shooting spree.

Dietz, who interviewed Seegrist after her arrest, said it was possible the suspect in Friday’s shooting had a long-standing grudge against colleagues or superiors and felt complaints had not been dealt with fairly.

Huntsville police spokesman Sgt. Mark Roberts said Bishop was charged Saturday morning with one count of capital murder.

Bishop, 42, was taken Friday night in handcuffs from a police precinct to the county jail and could be heard telling TV reporters, “It didn’t happen. There’s no way …. they are still alive.”

The Harvard-educated geneticist and her husband, Jim Anderson, are credited with inventing a mobile cell incubation system touted as a replacement for the old-fashioned petri dish.

A smiling Bishop posed for the winter 2009 cover of a local technology magazine, “The Huntsville R&D Report.”

The 40-year-old, Harvard-educated geneticist and her husband, Jim Anderson, are credited with inventing a mobile cell incubation system touted as a replacement for the old-fashioned petri dish.

UAH President David Williams predicted in November 2008 that the couple’s InQ device would “change the way biological and medical research is conducted.”

The Huntsville Angel Network also thought highly of the idea, giving Prodigy Biosystems $1.25 million in startup funding.

“She was just really passionate about what she was doing, and very energetic,” Stuart Obermann, a former board member of the BizTech technology incubator, said of Bishop. “I’m really quite shocked.”