“She brooded and brooded and brooded over it, and then, ‘bingo.’” Bingo!?

Crooked Timber quotes the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Amy Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer says the professor accused of killing three of her colleagues appears to have paranoid schizophrenia and while she is “aware of what she’s done” and is full of remorse, she can’t remember the shootings. Roy W. Miller, the lawyer, told the Associated Press that her failure to get tenure at the University of Alabama at Huntsville was the likely key to the shootings.

“Obviously she was very distraught and concerned over that tenure,” Mr. Miller said. “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.’”

This is from a longer article in the Boston Globe which elaborates the sophisticated insanity defense planned by Amy Bishop’s public defender:

“Something’s wrong with this lady, OK?” Miller said, laying the groundwork for a potential insanity defense during a news conference.

One of the comments on Crooked Timber:

Great, just what I need: another reason for people to look at me funny in faculty meetings. Is this why my department never meets? Is it me?

Back to the Globe story– the public defender does hand out some good advice– telling Bishop’s husband to SHUT UP:

Later, Miller lectured Bishop’s husband James Anderson in front of the media for more than five minutes, pleading with him to quit talking to reporters about his wife. Miller said Anderson might hurt Bishop’s case.

Anderson has said he and Bishop went to a shooting range in the weeks before the killings and has given varying accounts of where she might have gotten the handgun used in the shootings.

Anderson has called his wife a “dedicated, loving mother” and said they fell in love over similar interests of science, music, reading and writing. But he said he doesn’t know his wife’s birthday.

“You never ask a woman her age and you never ask her her weight,” Anderson said.

Yesterday’s New York Times has a story going behind a lot of the background stories we heard through Bishop.  Apparently, both have a tendency to puff up and lie about her past.

She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities. …

Mr. Anderson initially insisted to The New York Times that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had sent him and his wife a letter clearing them in the pipe bomb case, but the law enforcement official said it was extremely unlikely the bureau had sent such a letter. …

Dr. Bishop also arrived in Huntsville with a padded résumé, giving the impression that she had worked at Harvard two years longer than the university’s records indicate. …

She lobbied for a revote in the department, badgering people for support, her colleagues said. They disputed an assertion by her husband after the shooting that Dr. Bishop had won the appeals process and the provost had overruled the decision. The appeals process identified only a minor procedural problem, which was remedied, they said. Last November, a university spokesman said, her appeal was finally denied.

And then there’s more scary stuff about her:

Not long after Amy Bishop was identified as the professor who had been arrested in the shooting of six faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on Feb. 12, the campus police received a series of reports even stranger than the shooting itself.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.

Wonder if they’ll connect that gun to her.  All this evidence of planning (going to gun ranges for the first time… having the gun in her purse) and flight (throwing the gun away… running) are going to make it really hard to pull of an insanity defense; assuming Alabama is like most other common law jurisdictions, all of that suggests she knew.

Finally, I want to highlight this silly sentence from the Times article:

Her academic career slammed to a halt with the shooting rampage nine days ago against her colleagues.