Amy Bishop stepped out of the science building and into the afternoon light. She was a solid woman—5′8″ and 150 pounds—and from a distance, at least, her red V-neck sweater and jeans made her look more like a soccer mom on an errand than a remorseless killer leaving the scene of her crimes. Upstairs, in Room 369R, there was only suffering. Three professors lay on the floor, dying. Three more were wounded.

Now Bishop stood near the loading dock, unarmed. On her way down from the third floor, she had ducked into a restroom to stuff her Ruger 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol and blood-spattered black and red plaid jacket into a trash can. The 45-year-old assistant professor had also phoned her husband, James Anderson, and instructed him—as she often did—to come pick her up. “I’m done,” she’d said.

Bishop focused her blue eyes, so fierce under the horizon of her dark bangs. She paid attention to people’s eyes. There was so much you could see in them. Pain. Hardness. Sometimes she envisioned that people’s eyes made sounds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Other times she imagined she could feel eyes boring into the top of her head. Now her own eyes scanned the street. Where was James?

More than two decades earlier, the first time she’d fired a gun with fatal results, James had stood by her. Other boyfriends would have turned their backs. But not James. In the dark days after that 1986 shooting, Amy—then a 21-year-old senior at Northeastern University in Boston—had actually broken up with him. James waited patiently for her to return to herself, then to their relationship. The shooting was ruled an accident, and soon they were getting married, honeymooning in the Bahamas, starting a family. James would stand by her again, when she had problems on the job after earning her PhD from Harvard University. She had no reason to think he wouldn’t stand by her now.

At 4:10 pm, as ambulances rushed to the scene, a Madison County sheriff’s deputy approached Bishop and took hold of her. She looked dazed as her hands were cuffed and she was put into a squad car. Later, during an interrogation that went on for more than two hours, Bishop would insist, “I wasn’t there” and “It wasn’t me.” Her assertions seemed ludicrous, of course. Twelve people who knew Bishop, who saw her almost every day, had spent nearly an hour with her before she started shooting without a word of warning. Nine of those witnesses were still alive.

When Bishop found out that a member of her tenure review committee had
referred to her as "crazy,” however, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
alleging gender discrimination and citing the professor’s remark as
possible evidence. According to court papers filed in a lawsuit against
Bishop and her husband by some of the victims of the shooting, the
professor was given a chance to back off from the comment, but he did
not. The court filing states, "I said she was crazy multiple times and I
stand by that… This woman has a pattern of erratic behavior. She did
things that weren’t normal… she was out of touch with reality.”

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The best places for the insane to go unnoticed are with the eccentric and odd.
Academia is about as chock full of eccentric and odd as you can find.

ETA: This is not intended to mean I would let her off with an insanity plea.  I'm for executing the crazy killers every bit as much as the rest.  Proven Murderers no longer have a right to oxygen in my book.

Shortly after Bishop's arrest, people at the university's biology department expressed concern to police that she had "booby trapped the science building with a 'herpes bomb'" intended to spread the virus.

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No shit.  Did she station diseased hookers in broom closets to jump out and wipe their moist parts on unsuspecting people???

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That's really a great way of phrasing that.



Also, people don't 'snap'. It doesn't happen like that. There is no switch that turns a rational, level-headed person into a murderous lunatic.