SCOTTSBORO, Ala., Oct. 9 (UPI) -- The body of a man killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1981 in Alabama was exhumed Thursday to determine if he is suspected family-killer Walter Bradford Bishop.
Bishop, a U.S. State Department employee, vanished in 1976, when he allegedly beat his wife, three sons and mother to death in their Maryland home and buried the bodies in North Carolina. After the FBI put him on the 10 Most Wanted list earlier this year, investigators received a photograph of the John Doe who died five years later when he was struck by a car as he walked down a highway in Scottsboro, Ala.
In a request with an Alabama court for the exhumation order, the FBI said the unknown man looks like Bishop. Investigators said they want to compare dental records and DNA.
The dead man in Alabama had no identification. The only hint on where he had been was a piece of paper with a telephone number that turned out to belong to a truck driver who had given him a ride in Kentucky a few days before.
Scottsboro is about 200 miles from the place in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where Bishop's car was discovered in 1976. That was two weeks after the bodies of Bishop's wife, Annette, their sons, Brad, 14, Brenton, 10, and Geoffrey, 5, and his mother, Lobelia Bishop, were discovered in shallow graves where they had been set on fire.
Bishop, a Yale alumnus, joined the Foreign Service after serving in Army counterintelligence, and spent years in postings overseas. The day he allegedly killed his family he reportedly left work early after learning he had been rejected for a promotion.
Investigators said he bought a sledgehammer on his way home to Potomac, Md.
Bishop was 39 when he disappeared and would be 78 if he is still alive.
