A 63-year-old woman from North Carolina was adopted as an infant, but her search for her biological parents led her to the FBI’s most-wanted list. Kathy Gillcrist set out to search for her biological parents after she took a DNA test in 2017.
Through genealogical sleuthing, she discovered that her father is one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives for murdering his mother, wife and three sons in 1976, reports CNN.
Gillcrist traced her third cousin Susan Gilmore, from Maine, after the test results found her the first match. While filling out the paperwork with the test, she revealed that she was looking for her other relatives.
Talking to CNN, Gillcrist shared she was amazed to find out how alike they were as both were English majors and teachers.
Gilmor is related to Gillcrist from her mother’s side that helped the latter in looking for her father, which was later confirmed with DNA test. Gillmor is an amateur genealogist who decided to help Gillcrist trace her family.
“Is it somebody famous?” she asked Gilmor, to which she replied positively. Gillcrist’s biological father is 84-year-old William Bradford Bishop Jr, wanted by the FBI for killing his family — mother, 68; wife, 37; three sons aged 5,10 and 14 — in Bethesda, Maryland on March 1, 1976, and drove to Columbia, North Carolina to bury the bodies in a grave, burning them.
Gillcrist told the media since she was brought up by people with a great sense of humour; she laughed and uttered, “Of course that’s why he is famous… he was a murderer.”
According to the FBI, Bishop was an insomniac who was kept in psychiatric care in the past, took medication for depression, was self-absorbed, intense, prone to violent outbursts and preferred a neat and orderly environment. His current whereabouts are unknown and the FBI considers him armed and extremely dangerous with suicidal tendencies.
Bishop has earned an American Studies degree from Yale University and a master’s degree in Italian from Middlebury College in Vermont.