Crime Junkie - WANTED: Bradford Bishop // Yaser Said

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

This week, we have two stories for you of men who are wanted for killing their families.Our first story is about a man named Bradford Bishop, a man who, after not receiving a promotion at work, went home, and methodically killed his entire family. Officials believe he then fled the country and has been living out his days in Europe.Our second story is about a man named Yaser Said who is still on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for murdering his two daughters in the back of his cab. His daughter died while on the phone with 911 trying to get help, but they couldn't get to her in time. The FBI believe Yasser is now living in NYC and working as a cab driver. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/wanted-bradford-bishop-yasser-said/    

Hi crime junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers and I'm Britt and today I need all our international listeners listening close because this case is yours to solve. We are telling the story of two wanted men in this episode, one of which who is believed to be living out his days outside of the U.S. and we need your help to catch him. So Britt, you ready to do this? So ready. The first story I want to tell you today is about the Bishop family. Bradford Bishop was the patriarch of this family and he's a crazy smart guy like graduated from Yale spoke multiple languages worked for the U.S. State Department in their Foreign Services Division kind of smart. He spent many years in the U.S. Army working counterintelligence and he was stationed all over

the world places like Milan, Florence, different parts of Africa, Ethiopia, Botswana. He traveled all over the world with his college sweetheart Annette who he married right after graduating. They had this really exciting exotic life even after having three sons while they traveled from country to country post to post. Bradford loving every single minute of the adventure but Annette slowly tiring of the road and the new places and the new homes wanting something more stable for her kids. In 1974 when Bradford got offered a job in DC as an assistant chief in the division of special activities and commercial treaties it seemed like the perfect fit. He could still work in government and that could finally put down some roots and Bradford's mother

actually could even move in and live with them and she could be closer to the family. But it's said that Bradford started getting restless very soon after this move. He did not like sitting behind a desk the mundane day-to-day operations of life in an office were making him itch for his freedom again. By 1975 he was already talking to Annette about taking another position overseas but she was firmly against it. She had started going back to school she was loving her classes loving the new life that they were building for themselves back in the US. Along with their disagreeing over where the family should live there could have been other strains on their marriage. It's reported that there were some financial troubles in their household although it's been said

multiple places that those financial troubles aren't anything wildly out of the norm for a couple in their mid 30s living in a wealthy neighborhood in an expensive town in an expensive house but there was one report that the family was getting audited but this was never confirmed by either the IRS or the FBI. So Bradford's a little unhappy life isn't perfect he's not totally in love with his job but show me one person who is totally in love with their job and has the perfect life. Yeah like all of this seems normal to me but it just took one small thing one straw to break the camel's back. Bradford had been up for a promotion at his job and he thought he was a shoe in for it with all of his years of experience with his travel he felt that by far he was the

most qualified but on March 1st 1976 Bradford went to work to find out that he had not gotten the position and they had given it to someone else. After he learned that he didn't get the job Bradford gets up from his desk tells his secretary that he's not feeling well and needs to go home for the day he walks out of his office no one's suspecting that he would never again return and no one's suspecting what he was about to do. When Bradford left his office he did not go directly home he first made a stop at his bank where he withdrew several hundred dollars uh that's normal right just like Robert Fisher oh girl just wait he then drives to Montgomery mall where he buys a sledgehammer and a gas can oh okay yeah and then he takes that gas can and his station wagon to a

gas station just adjacent from the mall and fills them both up before making one more stop at a hardware store to get a pitchfork and a shovel. The next time Bradford is seen again is on March 2nd in Jacksonville North Carolina he was buying a pair of tennis shoes at a sporting goods store and according to the witness that came forward later they said he had their family dog with him and he might have also been with another woman. Do we know for sure that it wasn't his wife? Oh no this woman was described as being quote Caribbean and people said she had much darker skin than his wife plus we now know looking back that it definitely wasn't his wife because at the time that he was buying those shoes his wife along with his mother and his three kids were currently

set ablaze after being dumped in a shallow pit and lit on fire what but no one who knew the family knew that they were there when the fire department outside of Columbia North Carolina found the remains they had no idea who they belonged to surely someone would have reported an entire family missing and clearly this was foul play but with their remains far from recognizable it would be days before a connection was made days that allowed Bradford and his dog to get far far away from North Carolina. On March 10th police back in Bethesda where the family had their home got a call from a concerned neighbor they said they hadn't seen or heard from the family in days and they wanted police to do a welfare check as soon as police arrived what they saw confirmed

that something was very very wrong there was blood on the front porch blood on the floors and walls of the front hall blood in the bedrooms all of this which pieced together a gruesome tail for investigators what they realized is the family hadn't been seen since March 1st the day that Bradford left work sick after they pieced together his movements they realized that he methodically had come home from the hardware store around 730 and one by one killed his family members starting with his wife then his own mother after she returned home from walking their family dog then his three children William who was 13 Brenton who was 10 and Jeff who was only five all were beaten to death with a sledgehammer in their sleep Bradford then again seemingly as if

he's on a mission and knows every next step he's going to make he loads the bodies into their station wagon loads up the family dog and drives drives for 275 miles or 443 kilometers that's five hours of driving in the night with your entire family dead in the back seat or in the trunk five hours to think about what you've done why you've done it five hours of looking in the rear view mirror and seeing your young sons bloodied and cold because of what you did oh my god i can't i can't Bradford makes it to a wooded swamp area just south of Columbia North Carolina where he uses that shovel he bought to dig a small pit where one by one he places their bodies and for reasons unknown he douses them with the gasoline he bought

and sets their bodies ablaze and just walks away like he never had a family at all wait but he took the dog yeah i mean same but even more like Robert Fisher right yeah so so again i don't as somebody who loves prophets like i am not one to judge how much a person loves their dog but as we're talking about you know we talked about in the chris watz case there's no research around these family annihilators it seems to be at least we've seen it twice and i wouldn't be surprised if we saw it again that these people have no problem killing off their entire family children who've done nothing wrong but they they have some kind of loyalty to their animal that they don't even have to their own kids it's super weird his car would later be found abandoned in

Tennessee witnesses said that it had been there as early as the 5th of march or as late as the 7th of march the day after his car was found a grand jury would indict him with the murders of his family and he would become a wanted band but he was long gone by then Bradford had a diplomatic passport that police are sure he used to flee the country since that passport and his wallet were never found and again it's hard to imagine now that they would have no idea where he went but flying in the 70s was a totally different thing like you could just walk right up to the gate and step on a plane without showing even a piece of id barely right we're all in the post 11 world where there are so many hoops to jump through just to get through like tsa right but

not then there have been numerous sightings of him throughout europe over the years and police believe that he likely could be still residing either in italy switzerland or maybe california once in 1978 shortly after the murders a woman who worked with Bradford while he was assigned in ethiopia said that she spotted him twice at a public park in stockholm she didn't contact police then because she had no idea he was a wanted man she found out way later and just told police about this after she figured it out in 1979 one year later another colleague who had worked with him at the state department actually had a really close encounter with him he said that he spotted him in a restroom in italy and he said Bradford had a beard and the two men came like eye to eye and

he knew it was him and he couldn't help but ask like hey you're Bradford bishop aren't you and he said this man had a very distinct american accent and said oh no and then ran out of the bathroom and i don't know if it's like oh no or like oh no like those are two very different things to me there's no infection right so he says oh no and runs out of the restroom if this was him this sighting could have scared him and made him be more cautious because the next possible sighting of him didn't come until 1994 when an old neighbor of Bradford spotted him on a train platform in switzerland she wasn't able to make contact with him but she said she was sure that it was him none of these sightings have ever been fully substantiated by the fbi but i think there's

some credibility to them because in 2010 is when the authority said they thought he was living in switzerland italy or somewhere in california so clearly they think that the sightings have to hold some kind of water and this is where we need our international listeners to have their ears perked up today Bradford is in his 80s now and there is an age composite of him that we're going to put on our website and on our instagram but some notable characteristics that you should look out for he was an avid outdoorsman who loved camping loved hiking he had a pilot's license from when he was stationed in africa so lord knows the guy could be anywhere he enjoys riding motorcycles he works out all the time he did suffer at one point from depression and insomnia and i don't know how much

to read into that and how that contributed to what he did but he was taking medication for it now maybe his depression was about having a family and once that was over he's not taking medication anymore but he's also it says really fond of dogs so for a long time they think he had his family dog he probably would be having a new dog now i mean his dogs probably passed but they think he would have talked about that please or his dog could still be alive and dogs live for 30 years exactly or he might you know he could have had another dog but they think he either loves dogs would always have a dog or would like pass you and want to pet your dog he also enjoys scotch peanuts and spicy food and he has this six inch vertical scar on his lower back from a surgery

that he had and he has a notable cleft chin and a mole on his left cheek so i think that scar from surgery and the cleft chin are something that would be really really hard to get rid of and be some very notable factors yeah definitely there were a couple of times investigators thought they were close to him in 2014 a john doe who was hit by a car and killed was exhumed because of similarities in how he looked to bradford but a dna test confirmed that that wasn't him they also compared two different men one from hong kong and one from france after those guys had died they compared their fingerprints thinking maybe those were him because they were very similar but neither of those were a match either bradford ended up getting removed from the fbi's 10 most

wanted list just this past summer to make room for new awful humans but the fbi has not stopped looking for him it's likely he is still alive and still well and it's now up to our crime junkies to keep their eyes peeled for bradford bishop all right brit are you ready for a story about another really crappy dad who's wanted by the fbi i'm not sure if i'm going to say yes or no well i'm definitely not but i'm going to tell you anyways and i'm going to tell you about yasser syed the events that took place leading to yasser being put on the fbi's 10 most wanted list took place much more recently than our last story this story happens on january 1st of 2008 in a small town called lewisville texas but the story really begins years before that

in october of 1998 when yasser's two daughters amina and sarah accused their father of sexual abuse they made these allegations to the sheriff's office and an investigation had begun when they interviewed the girl's mother patricia she had signed an affidavit confirming that this was true yasser had been touching both of them inappropriately and had actually penetrated at least one of them but within three months the charges would be dropped from what we know about yasser and his control over the family he likely forced this on them with some type of coercion and patricia often would try and leave him try and stand up to him and then back down and she did end up like taking back her affidavit however he got them to back down the girls ended up telling the

sheriff's office that they lied because they had wanted to go live with their grandmother so they could attend another school and the case gets dropped now just because the charges were dropped didn't mean there wasn't something there and i don't think his daughters were truly his first victims because when yasser immigrated to the us from egypt in 1983 he met and married his wife patricia he was 30 and she was 15 which i think is a crime in and of itself uh yeah patricia says yasser was very abusive during their marriage and that was the reason she covered him for so many years like many women who suffer abuse patricia tried to leave but would return to her husband multiple times one time in particular when she tried to leave yasser even shot out the tires

on her car to keep her from leaving along with sexually assaulting his two young daughters he would continue to lash out physically and mentally at them well into their teenage years he would try to control their every move by recording them with audio or video recorders without their knowledge and he made them afraid of even using public telephones because they feared that he was everywhere always listening and they had a reason to be afraid of him listening and watching because he would turn very violent amina and sarah both told friends that they were terrified he was going to kill them and they would share the threats that he made toward them with their close friends but it was far from just threats amina once showed up to her high school class

with welts on her face and she told her friend that her dad had been kicking her oh my god a friend of amina's was quoted by the dallas news saying that amina had told her he kicked her in the face because he had found notes from her boyfriend and her friend said quote her lips were pretty much attached to her breezes but they wouldn't take her to the doctor because her family feared her father would be taken to jail end quote the abuse continued to grow worse with threats of violence and even murder from yasser yasser was so upset by amina having a boyfriend that he moved the family a half hour away from euless texas to lewisville texas just to try and break them up but it didn't work tension rose the older the girls got the more they prepared to leave the plan was for both of

them to get away when they go to college they were both super smart they both wanted to be doctors school was going to be their escape but things were getting so bad they just couldn't wait that long they feared maybe they wouldn't even live long enough to see a life in college away from their father so in december of 2007 they planned to run away with their mother sarah told a friend in an instant message that her dad had found out amina was still dating that boy and he was quote going to kill them she continued her i am conversation telling her friend quote before he told me that he was going to put bullets through her head today he told me to get used to my sis because she's not going to be with us long end quote they knew time was running out on christmas day of 2007

patricia sarah amina and the girls boyfriends left the state of texas they used fake names and got an apartment in tulsa oklahoma yasser filed a missing persons report for his family just one day after they left but patricia called the police to tell them she was not missing here is a direct quote from that report patricia stated that she was not going to call back again as she was in great fear for her life patricia said she is very fearful of her husband harming her and or her children which is the reason she left her husband patricia further advise she and her children sarah and amina are just fine and are going to continue hiding from her husband end quote but that resilience in patricia didn't last long on new year's eve she got her daughters

into the car and told them that she wanted to go put flowers on their grandmother's grave because it was the anniversary of her death but she had lied patricia felt guilty about leaving yasser and she once again returned but she was not only returning herself she was going to bring the girls back with her i'm sure patricia thought she would go back and things would be better or maybe her only expectation was that it just wouldn't be worse but little did she know she was bringing her daughters back to their murderer the next day january 1st of 2008 the start of a new year for those two girls yasser put them in his taxi cab and kissed them both he said he was going to take them out for dinner and patricia asked if she could come but yasser

said no this dinner was only for the girls not long after yasser drove away 911 got a call from sarah from the back of her dad's taxi cab ma'am are you still here ma'am are you still here all i've got is she's telling me she's dying i'm getting i've got a why are you still here ma'am ma'am what is your address the cab and our cab stand they're gonna appear as a driver but there are two people inside the cab one in the passenger seat the one in the rear of the vehicle uh one of the people on the and the passenger seat looks like she's hunched over and she has blood coming from her ear and they're alive to me i'm dying were sarah's last words to the 911 operator before she died

in her father's cab oh my god yasser had shot both sarah and amina in his cab and left it outside a hotel where another cab driver found it with yasser nowhere to be found there was a lot of talk about yasser fleeing back to egypt but airline travel in 2008 wasn't what it was back in the 70s when bradford bishop left i can see how bradford bishop just hopped on a plane was never seen again but like you said yasser was living in a post 911 world there's no way that he skipped the country at least not using his real name right so new york crime junkies are you listening now because the fbi believes that yasser is in new york city working as a cab driver back in 2014 he was seen driving a light colored or champagne colored older mercedes and working

as a cab driver but that was the last sighting of him he is still on the fbi's 10 most wanted list and as of the time that we're recording this there's a hundred thousand dollar reward for information leading to his capture you know taking what we learned about family annihilators in the watts episode i feel like we could easily classify yasser under the second category of disappointment right yeah that's the one where the killer believes that the family has let him down or has acted in ways to like undermine or destroy his vision of the ideal family and they say a lot of times this kind of family annihilator happens when they like clash in culture and i think a lot of that applies a lot of people are calling this an honor killing but everything i found doesn't support that

really at all the family didn't attend church or prayers regularly both patricia and their other son firmly reject the idea that this was an honor killing and really yasser's different than all of the other family annihilator to be talked about on this show because there was a clear history of abuse whereas with chris longo and chris watts and chris colman it was all the chris's it was kind of out of the blue time out we need a new life role that says don't name your child chris they're really all named chris and don't marry peterson let's be honest don't name your kid chris and don't marry a peterson wow anyways so all those cases along with bradford bishop everyone who knew them say they never saw it coming but in yasser's case i think everyone did see it coming

he was an abuser he made threats it doesn't make him any less of a family annihilator but he's i think a lot different than the ones we've talked about in the past it's not like he just snapped or something led him to this yeah he was really working up to the whole time right so if we're calling him the second category of like the disappointment one how would you classify bradford bishop i think we can put him in the anomic category right like we classified chris watts he's obviously linking his family to his success or lack thereof it sounds like he viewed his family as holding him back he didn't get to travel because of them he was stuck at a job where he didn't get a promotion because of them and they were the reason he wasn't succeeding yeah

and that's that's i think the most clear definition to me this is even more clear than chris watts because chris watts had a lot of financial troubles but in bradford bishop's mind at least from everything i've been able to research like his family was the reason he couldn't travel to other countries his family is the reason he couldn't take the positions he wanted to i'm sure in his mind he didn't get that promotion because of his family so i definitely think he falls into that category as well right you know not that that changes anything but it's like it's a little bit nicer to know that we have these kind of like buckets we can put these people in so we have two family annihilators one episode and an entire globe where these two men could be so again my

crime junkies in switzerland italy and california i need you looking out for bradford bishop and my new york crime junkies i need you to keep an eye out for yasser syed i'm actually going to be in new york myself at the end of the month and you better believe that i am going to be staring down all of my cab drivers to see pictures of these two men that we've talked about so you can be on alert visit our website crimejunkiepodcast.com click on the episodes link to see the blog post for this specific episode or you can check them out on our instagram at crime junkie podcast and be sure to follow us on twitter at crimejunkiepod and we will be back next week with a brand new episode

this episode of crime junkie was researched written and hosted by me with co-hosting by brit praywatt all of our editing and sound production was done by david flowers and all of our music including our theme comes from justin daniel crime junkie is an audio chuck production so what do you think chuck do you approve