There’s several possibilities for a hike to the Appalachian Trail out of Elkmont in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. One is taking the roughly 11.5 Little River trail option that starts out placidly enough but become much more strenuous after connecting to Goshen Prong trail. The kindlier choice to body and soul is the Jake’s Creek trail, with just over 6 miles from the trail head to the AT via the Miry Ridge trail.

Back in 1976, you didn’t have to buy a parking pass in the GSMNP if you were stopping anywhere for more than 15 minutes. So, it’s not that surprising that a 1974 Chevrolet Station Wagon left in the Jake’s Creek parking lot for at least week hadn’t raised any eyebrows. But by March 18, a nationwide manhunt was underway for Maryland resident and U.S. Foreign Service employee William Bradford Bishop.

Bishop was what we now call a family annihilator, a term that entered the zeitgeist 40 years ago. The short version of the story is as follows:

  • March 1, 1976: Bishop finds out he’s not getting a promotion, leaves work early and stops to purchase a gas can and ball-peen hammer, goes home and murders his mother, wife and three sons (ages 5, 10 and 14) with said hammer.
  • March 2, 1976: A Forest Service ranger in North Carolina spots a fire in a swampy stand of pine trees near the Alligator River in Columbia. Further investigation reveals the half-buried and burning bodies of two women and three juvenile males. The only clue to their identities is a tag on a shovel left behind from Poch’s Hardware in Potomac, MD. Authorities there are notified, but, at the time, there were no missing persons that matched the description. Later that day, Bishop was seen purchasing tennis shoes at a sporting goods store in Jackson, NC (roughly 90 miles south of Columbia). He was reportedly accompanied by a woman around his age (39) who was outside the store walking a dog
  • March 8,1976: One of Bishop’s neighbors in Bethesda, MD contacts local police with concerns about Bishop and his family. Newspapers were uncharacteristically piling up in the driveway, and it was unlike the family to leave town without letting neighbors know. Police were able to enter the house and discovered no one here, but blood all over the place. The car was gone as well as the family dog, a golden retriever named Leo. Some notifications had arrived through the mail putting Bishop on notice to report in or lose his job.
  • March 10, 1976: Authorities in Montgomery County, MD (home to Potomac and Bethesda) were able to confirm the identities on the five bodies found in NC as Bishop’s mother, wife and sons.
  • March 12, 1976: And All Points Bulletin goes nationwide for Bishop.

Things were different in Elkmont back in 1976. The Wonderland Hotel was still in operation, and plenty of leases were still active in the cabin section known as Daisy Town. Some folks used them for vacations; others lived in them year-round. Then as now, the GSMNP was the nation’s most visited national park, but by about 5 million less than what the park sees now. March is routinely one of the least visited months in the GSMNP, but it was unseasonably warm for the first couple of weeks that year.

  • March 18, 1976: Elkmont resident Roy Owenby reports to the park service that a rust-colored station had been parked at the Jake’s Creek trailhead for nearly two weeks. Ranger C.E. Hinrichs showed up and didn’t initially see anything untoward peering through the windows of the locked automobile. The whole scene turned on a dime once he made the call to run the Maryland plates. Within two hours, 10 agents from the Knoxville office arrived.

Agents gained entry to the station wagon and found his clothes, dog biscuits, a shotgun and shells, his shaving kit that included Bishop’s medication, a bloody blanket, and the spare tire well filled with blood. Soon area trackers arrived, and one dog reportedly chased his scent to a one of the cabin’s at Elkmont. The tennis shoes purchased in Jackson weren’t in the station wagon. Some footprints near it left no tread marks, indicating smooth bottomed dress shoes. The search for Bishop was intense, but brief. He had simply vanished into thin air.

One item not recovered from Bishop’s home or car was a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver he’d inherited from his father. Authorities believed he had it with him when his run as a fugitive began. If he’s still alive, he’d now be 90 years ago. Though reports have popped up of sightings across the country and the world in the decades since his heinous acts, nothing concrete has ever turned up. No one knew to be looking for him until nearly two weeks after the murders. He had more than enough time as well as the proper documents to hop a plane out of the country. Or just get the murder wagon cleaned up and jump across the border into Mexico from Laredo, TX. He could have easily been out of the country days before his neighbor called for a welfare check.

The station wagon abandoned at Elkmont could have been a red herring. Or it was simply, as many law enforcement officers at the time felt, the end of the line, that in some laurel hell in the wilderness off the Appalachian Trail, Bradford Bishop made his own resting place.

Sources: Knoxville Journal digital archives, Into the Mist: Takes of Death and Disaster by David Brill.

Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.

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