The Strange Case of Amy Bishop: Sleuthing Birth Info on the Web

amy-bishop-arrestAmy Bishop walked into a meeting, and shot six people killing three. Later we find out that she killed her brother in a pronounced accidental shooting 20 years prior. There were other incidents, a strange confrontation with a woman in an IHOP, an investigation as a suspect in a pipe bombing. As with anything with Amy Bishop the details and motivations aren’t clear.

Also perplexing is the lack of good birth info on Amy Bishop which points out the care that is needed in accepting birth information on the web. As we shall see, even sources that usually can be trusted need to be fact checked before we can confidently use the information for our astrology charts.

In the case of Amy Bishop, the first birth information (since changed) was a generalized date of February 1965. The source was the original Wikipedia entry citing a listing of scientists. Then a reporter listed the University of Alabama Huntsville Faculty information as April 24, 1965. Muddying the waters still is the inmate information from the Madison County Sheriff’s Office that lists her birthday as February 4, 1968.

What’s an astrologer to do?

Digging in Amy Bishop’s personal history, we find that the Braintree Police department listed her age as 18 in 1986 in the incident reports of the fatal shooting of her brother. That would put her birth year as 1968. That was the birth year of her brother who according the police report was born on April 9, 1968. Since Amy Bishop is not a twin, this is clearly not possible.

As we find out Amy Bishop graduated High School in 1983 and was graduated from Northwestern University in 1988. These events puts Amy’s birth year closer to 1965 than 1968, so the 1968 birth year can be discarded.

So what about the birth month and date? And why all the confusion?

Amy Bishop’s life is marked with a traumatic event and subsequent random acts of anger and violence. In the case of traumatic events like this involving a sibling it is not unusual for the surviving child to use the birth date of the deceased sibling. Katherine Hepburn did it for years, using the birth date of the brother she found dead by hanging as her own.

As stated in a previous post, a February birth date is consistent with the violent events of the University of Hunstville, Alabama tragedy. One would like to think that the Madison County Sheriff’s Office got part of it right, but the fact is at this moment, we just don’t know.

Me, I’m guessing her birth date is February 4, 1965. Anyone with better info, please let me know.

Web Sources to Check for Birthdates

Astro Data Bank at www.thinkastro.com large assortment of celebrity birth data
Police reports—except in unusual cases usually reliable
Obituaries—Most of the time prints birth dates, though not always
Gravemarkers—Occasionally printed as photographs
Facebook/My Space info—Newspaper sources occasionally gets access for high profile cases and prints the information
Newspaper articles—usually reliable, must fact checked against other sources
Wikipedia-Helpful but not reliable. Use as a starting point.

Photo printed under a Creative Commons License from Flickr

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