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. '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.
