BLAIRSTOWN, N.J. -- An antiwar activist wanted by state police for questioning in the killing of a trooper during a bloody gunbattle was on his sheep farm in Maine at the time of the shooting, he said Wednesday.
The FBI in Newark also said that although Cameron David Bishop, 39, of Dixmont, Me., was described by state police as a member of a leftist group, he was not being sought by federal authorities.
'I must be the damnest fugitive-from-justice ever,' said Bishop, who is listed with his wife Mary in the Maine telephone directory.
'The FBI knows where to find me. I'm listed, you found me,' he told UPI. 'I'm not wanted for anything.
'This is typical of what the FBI is doing right now,' said Bishop.'I think there's a move by the FBI and the Reagan administration to scare off any leftists, so they're trying to blame the old leftists.'
Bishop said he was watching the morning news at his sheep farm when he heard his name mentioned in connection with Monday's slaying of trooper Philip Lamonaco.
Bishop and two others have been the focus of a massive manhunt since Monday when Lamonaco, 32, was gunned down on an interstate highway. He was the first state trooper to be killed in the line of duty since 1973.
'He runs a farm with his wife and children. This is a disgrace,' said New York attorney William Kunstler. 'They (state police) flashed his picture all over... when a simple phone call could have determined where he was.'
Kunstler said Bishop was 'at his farm' when Lamonaco was killed and has been leading 'a very quiet life' for the last four or five years.
A spokesman for State Police Superintendent Col. Clinton L. Pagano said an investigator would be sent to Maine to talk with Bishop.
Others still being sought in the trooper shooting were identified by police as Bishop's brother-in-law, Thomas William Manning, 35, of Boston, whose fingerprints were found in a car used in the killing, and Raymond Luc Levasseur, 35.
State police said Bishop and Levasseur had been traveling with Manning.
'We just wanted Manning for murder and wanted to speak to the other two,' state police spokesman Sgt. Thomas Gallagher said.
Bishop said he was convicted in 1975 in a Colorado bombing incident, but the conviction was overturned on May 5, 1976, by a federal appeals court -- and there are no outstanding charges against him.
Bishop's wife, Mary, said she had not heard from Manning, her brother, since 1974.
Kunstler denied Bishop was a member of what authorities have identified as a 'left-wing revolutionary group' called the Melville-Jackson Unit. All three suspects were identified by New Jersey state police as members of the group.
