FBI: Man killed in Alabama hit-and-run was not on Most Wanted List

Forensic scientists have confirmed that the body of a John Doe in Alabama is not a man who has eluded the FBI for more than 40 years.

In court papers filed last week, the FBI asked Alabama officials to exhume the body of a man killed in a 1981 hit-and-run crash along a rural highway because they believed he might have been William Bradford Bishop Jr., a former State Department diplomat wanted in the grisly killings of his mother, wife and children.

But on Wednesday, the FBI issued a statement confirming the body, which has remained unidentified in Scottsboro, Ala., since 1981, did not belong to Bishop.

The agency did not elaborate on its findings, and a call to a spokeswoman seeking comment was not returned. It was not immediately clear whether the agency had identified the dead man.

Bishop, who had worked as a diplomat in Europe and Africa, is suspected of bludgeoning his mother, wife and three sons to death in Bethesda, Md., in March 1976.

He is then alleged to have taken the bodies to North Carolina and burned and buried them in a shallow grave. The last confirmed sighting of Bishop was on March 2, 1976, outside a sporting goods store in Jacksonville, N.C., according to the FBI.

Pictures of the hit-and-run victim were published in a local newspaper last year in an effort to solve the cold case, and federal investigators noted the John Doe resembled Bishop.

FBI officials exhumed the body Oct. 9. Bishop’s dental records and fingerprints were compared with those of the John Doe, the FBI has said.

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