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Wallace Books, the scene of the Sellwood crime

(Steve Duin)

Early on the afternoon of Aug. 15, Hilary Leah Bishop hopped

to post a video of a dog receiving a full-body massage.

"Yep," Bishop wrote, "this is what my massage clients feel like."

Five hours later, Portland police say, Bishop, 44, arrived at Wallace Books in Sellwood, just before closing.

Decked out in black and a ski mask, Bishop aimed a gun at Lynn Ferguson, the cops tell us, and said, "Give me your twenties."

Twenties? "At an independent book store?" owner Julie Wallace would later say. "On a Monday night in August?"

That is not the last of the small, sad turns in this crime story. This is what it feels like when a life unravels.

Ferguson wasted no time handing over everything in the cash drawer. As the robber slipped out the door, Lonny Keller was standing 25 feet away, at the corner of Southeast Milwaukie and Knapp.

"She was wearing all black and a ski mask, like a '70s cops and robbers movie," Keller says. "That's unusual attire in my world but it is Portland."

Hilary Bishop, in better days.

The woman pulled off the mask and came down the steps, passing 10 feet from Keller. "Deer in the headlights," he says. "She looked at me like, 'Whoops,' and walked away."

Keller is a parole and probation officer in Washington County. As Ferguson inched outside with the phone in her hand, a 911 call already in progress, Keller asked, "Did that woman just rob you?"

As he set off after the robber, Ferguson yelled after him, "She has a gun."

In a four-count indictment, the Multnomah County district attorney says Bishop also waved "what purported to be a dangerous and deadly weapon" the previous night, Aug. 14, at Clogs-N-More on Southeast Hawthorne .

That may explain the ski mask. Bishop once lived four blocks from Clogs-N-More. "It's her favorite store," says her ex-husband, Dewey Mahood. "She wears clogs from there."

Hilary Leah Bishop

As Keller followed the woman north on S.E. Milwaukie, he also called 911. When she squeezed into a Mitsubishi Mirage, illegally parked in front of the Boys & Girls Club, he wrote the license number on his hand.

He misread an "X" as a "K," but the police were up to the challenge. "Every squad car in Southeast was looking for her," Wallace says.

At 7:30 p.m., the cops executed your standard high-risk stop at S.E. 31st and Holgate. According to court records, police found "a large amount of dollar bills" underneath Bishop's purse, and a tote bag containing a black hoodie, "a replica pistol, and a black mask with eye holes."

Police then brought Ferguson and Keller to the intersection for IDs. Ferguson had her doubts, Wallace says, because she never saw the woman's face.

Keller? "None whatsoever. Same eyes. Same cheekbones."

An evolving reality. "She was very upset," Keller says. "She was crying heavily."

She's not the only one reeling over the arrest.

"All of our friends are shocked," says Mahood, who owns Mothership Music on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

"She's always been the most peaceful, animal-loving vegetarian. Very anti-gun. That this happened is almost insane."

Many of those friends are in the local book community. Bishop worked for years at Broadway Books and Powell's before she became a licensed massage therapist.

"They bought a house behind the Hawthorne Powell's store," recalls Donna Kane, who retired from Powell's in 2014. "She was always seemingly happy with them married and living in their little house."

Then something came undone. Mahood and Bishop separated, divorced, wrangled over custody of their daughter. Bishop had a serious car accident, Kane says, that left her hospitalized for months.

"This is the population I work with," Keller says, "and my first instinct is to ask, 'What's the driver?' The biggest ones we deal with are addiction and mental health. What happened? People don't normally jump to armed robbery."

Brian Schmonsees, the public defender assigned to Bishop's case, had no comment. Tara Gardner, a deputy district attorney, said there's an "ongoing investigation" as to whether Bishop will be charged in other crimes.

Was she drawn, toy gun in hand, to the stores that were most vulnerable ... or most familiar?

"The police look at it one way: She was targeting small businesses where they didn't have security cameras," Wallace says. "I'm concerned she didn't have a safety net.

"Am I giving her a free pass? No. She did something wrong. But what systems are in place that she gets the help she needs?"

For the moment, Mahood - who has not been close to his ex-wife for years - is glad she's housed at the Justice Center.

"As horrible as this sounds, it's the safest place for her now," he says. "She needs help. She is obviously out of control."

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com