Body of John Doe could be FBI most-wanted fugitive last seen in 1976

The body of a John Doe struck by a car and killed on a rural Alabama highway more than 30 years ago could be of a fugitive currently on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

In a court filing to exhume the body, FBI officials note that photos taken of John Doe after his death in 1981 resemble William Bradford Bishop Jr.

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

FBI officials exhumed the body of the John Doe on Thursday from a grave near Scottsboro, Ala. Bishop’s dental records and fingerprints will be compared with John Doe’s, said Paul Daymond, an FBI spokesman in the bureau’s Mobile, Ala., office. No timeframe has been set for when an identification might be made, Daymond said.

In an effort to solve a hit-and-run highway death from 1981, local law enforcement ran a photo of John Doe in a newspaper last year looking for any clues to his identity or who might have struck him, Scottsboro Police Chief Ralph Dawe said.

“We thought with Facebook and all the new technology someone might recognize this guy. Even with that, nothing happened,” Dawe said in an interview with The Times on Thursday.

But after the TV program “The Hunt With John Walsh” aired an episode this year that featured Bishop, viewers came forward noting Bishop’s picture looked similar to that of the John Doe whose image ran in the paper.

“Tips started to flow in and the FBI got involved quickly,” Dawe said.

Photographs a coroner took of John Doe after his death “strongly resemble” those of Bishop, wrote the FBI in its petition to exhume the body.

“Both John Doe and Bishop have cleft chins, distinctive noses, thin lips, and similar hairlines and sideburns,” the FBI’s court filing notes.

Over the course of more than three decades, hundreds of tips have come in, including some alleging Bishop had fled to Europe.

“This here might bring some sort of closure,” Dawe said. “We’ll just have to see.”

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