Bishop
Tenure is one of my favorite dead horses, so when the Amy Bishop story first popped up, I watched closely, looking for connections to rant about.

But something about the story seemed incomplete, so I held back. Well, incomplete is putting it mildly. Turns out Bishop has a long record of murder and violence, and it also turns out that the meeting where she shot 6 colleagues wasn't the event where she was denied tenure.

TV news is doing a surprisingly good job on this, given that the perp is both female and Commie, thus definitely one of their own family.

The real problem here has nothing to do with academia and everything to do with local gov't corruption. Apparently her family was well-connected in Braintree, so the local police decided not to notice when Amy killed her brother, and later decided not to notice when she sent a bomb to a Harvard prof who had dared to disagree with her.

What a mess.

= = = = =

After more stories: Yikes! Amy Bishop is clearly a Joseph Duncan-style psychopath who has spent her entire life intimidating and killing everyone who dared to offend her galactic ego. Maybe the cops weren't corrupt after all; more likely the entire town was deathly afraid to report or testify.

Reminds me of a similar saga with a different ending in Skidmore, Missouri. A town bully named Kenneth McElroy prospered by stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, and shooting anything that got in his way. The cops didn't try very hard to prosecute McElroy, and on the one or two occasions when they did try, McElroy intimidated all the witnesses. McElroy finally received justice from an unofficial source in 1981. Since the law had never helped the people get rid of Kenneth, the people didn't see any reason to help the law, and the death sentence, which the police call "murder", remains "unsolved".

Missouri is saner than Massachusetts.
  ¶ 6:41 AM