From Harvard to hell: The professor who killed her colleagues

Maybe the most interesting thing to emerge in the story of Amy Bishop -- the Harvard-trained scholar who earlier this month pulled out a handgun at a departmental meeting at the University of Alabama Huntsville and shot six fellow professors, killing three of them -- was that it wasn't this gifted intellectual's first killing. Back in 1986, she blasted her "cherished" younger brother in the chest with a 12-gauge shotgun, a bloody horror that authorities dismissed as accidental. Needless to say, authorities are taking another look at that fratricide in light of Bishop's recent spree in Huntsville, seemingly sparked by her being passed over for tenure.

A team of five Boston Globe reporters, staking a claim to the tale based on Bishop's time in Cambridge, tease out the tangled threads of a troubled, brilliant life in this ably reported chronicle of the "morbidly shy...oddly sweet" serial killing prof, appearing in Sunday's paper.