CAROLINA SHORES, N.C. (WHDH) — A North Carolina woman who had been adopted at birth sought out to find her biological parents and the results were shocking.
Kathy Gillcrist took a 23andMe test back in 2017, which revealed she had a third cousin in Maine — Susan Gillmor, according to WCET.
Gillmor is a successful genealogist, so she sought to help Gillcrist get more answers about her biological family.
Gillmore learned that Gillcrist’s biological father is William Bradford Bishop, Jr., who, according to the FBI, is accused of brutally murdering his wife, mother and three sons in Bethesda, Maryland on March 1, 1976.
“(Gillmor) said, ‘Okay, I found your father. All I’m going to do is give you his name,’” Gillcrist recalled to the local news station. “I said, ‘Is it someone famous?’ She said, ‘Um, yeah.’ I just laughed. We have a great sense of humor in my adoptive family and I thought ‘of course, my father’s a murderer.’”
After the murders, Bishop allegedly transported their bodies to Columbia, North Carolina, where he buried them in a shallow grave and lit them on fire.
He was charged locally with murder by the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Rockville, Maryland, and then charged federally with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, the FBI said.
Bishop remains on the run and was added to the FBI’s most wanted list in 2014.
Gillcrist says she is not sure if her biological mother knew about her father’s dark past but that she thinks she would be happy with the extended family that she has found.
Along with discovering her birth parents, Gillcrist also learned that she has a dozen family members in Massachusetts, with several of them being half-siblings on her mother’s side.
Gillcrist published a book in 2020 called, “It’s in my Genes,” discussing her journey to finding out about her biological family.
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