By SHAILA DEWAN and KATIE ZEZIMA

Published: February 14, 2010

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — On Friday, this city of rocket scientists and brainy inventors was stunned when a neuroscientist with a Harvard Ph.D. was arrested in the shooting deaths of three of her colleagues after she was denied tenure.

But that was only the first surprise in the tale of the neuroscientist, Amy Bishop, who was regarded as fiercely intelligent and had seemed to have a promising career in biotechnology. Every day since has produced a new revelation from Dr. Bishop’s past, each more bizarre than the last.

On Saturday, the police in Braintree, Mass., said that she had fatally shot her brother in 1986 and questioned whether the decision to dismiss the case as an accident had been the right one.

The target of the mail bomb was Dr. Paul Rosenberg, according to The Boston Globe, which first reported that the couple had been questioned in the case. After returning home from a vacation, Dr. Rosenberg opened a package that contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries, The Globe reported. The doctor and his wife fled and called the police.

Officials said that Dr. Bishop was concerned that Dr. Rosenberg would give her a negative evaluation on her doctorate work, the newspaper wrote, and that they were concerned about the incident involving her brother. The authorities in Boston searched Dr. Bishop’s computer at the time and found a novel she was working on about a scientist who killed her brother and atoned by excelling at her work, The Globe reported.

Though he firmly protested his wife’s innocence in the earlier cases, Mr. Anderson said he remained mystified over Friday’s shootings, which left three professors dead and three other people wounded after a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

Dr. Bishop was charged with capital murder; three charges of attempted murder were added on Sunday. Mr. Anderson said he did not know of any specific incident that could have led to the shooting, and did not know that his wife allegedly had a gun when she went to the meeting.

via A Previous Shooting Death at the Hands of Alabama Suspect – NYTimes.com.