Workers exhume a casket in Alabama on Thursday to determine whether it contains the body of Bradford Bishop, wanted for allegedly bludgeoning his mother, his wife and their three sons to death in Montgomery County in 1976. (DeWayne Patterson/The Daily Sentinel, Scottsboro, Ala.)

For nearly 40 years, the legend of Bethesda fugitive William Bradford Bishop Jr. carried an air of not just evil brutality but refined sophistication.

This was a man suspected of killing his family with a small sledgehammer in 1976 and setting their corpses on fire. Then he vanished, taking with him fluency in five languages, the experience of a world traveler for the State Department, and a fondness for playing tennis, flying airplanes and drinking Scotch.

There were alleged sightings: a public park in Stockholm, a restroom in Sorrento, Italy, a train station in Basel, Switzerland.

Now, in a potentiality stunning development in the case — centered in a municipally owned cemetery in the northeastern corner of Alabama — remains that were exhumed Thursday may tell a different story. Bishop could be the heretofore unidentified man called John Doe, who was struck by a car while walking down a highway in 1981, a person who appeared to be homeless, who’d worn several layers of heavy, dirty clothes and weighed just 155 pounds.

“After all these years,” said Montgomery County Sheriff Darren Popkin, “if we can confirm this is him, there is some irony with the fact he was run over by a car without a dollar in his pocket.”

An FBI wanted poster shows William Bradford Bishop Jr. The image on the left shows how Bishop would look now. (Getty)

Workers used shovels and machinery to lift a vault and casket out of the ground in Scottsboro, Ala. They took the casket to a funeral home. Forensic experts opened it and saw bones, a small amount of hair and pieces of clothing, said Lt. Erik Dohring of the Scottsboro police. They took samples and will send them to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va., for DNA comparisons. Results are expected in two to four weeks.

The story of how John Doe might be Bishop involves a reopened unidentified persons case, DNA extracted from Bishop’s shaving kit, the CNN show “The Hunt With John Walsh” and a 32-year-old TV viewer in Scottsboro who works for a sign company and has an uncanny memory.

For years, a weather-battered headstone sat in the Cedar Hill Cemetery.

“UNKNOWN WHITE MALE

DIED OCT. 18, 1981

DUE TO ACCIDENT ON HWY 72 E.

SCOTTSBORO, ALABAMA

The family of William Bradford Bishop Jr. is seen on a poster earlier this year at Montgomery County police headquarters. (Dan Morse/The Washington Post)

BURIED NOV. 11, 1981

WITHOUT BEING IDENTIFIED.”

The nearly four-week period between death and burial reflected police efforts to identify the man.

Late last year, officials with the Scottsboro police decided to make another push to identify the man, using a photograph of John Doe taken by a county coroner.

The image was published in the Daily Sentinel newspaper, which was read by Jeremy Collins, who works as a salesman for his family-run sign company. Months later, Collins and his wife sat down to watch TV and flipped their way to “The Hunt,” a new show that was airing a special on the Bishop case.

Collins was struck by the savagery of the crime.

Bishop, a Foreign Service officer, had for no apparent reason allegedly slaughtered his family in their Bethesda home, sneaked the bodies into a station wagon under darkness, driven to North Carolina, dug a shallow grave, dumped the bodies inside and ignited them. The car was found about three weeks later at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park along the North Carolina-Tennessee border.

And something else struck Collins: the photo of Bishop taken in the 1970s.

“You know,” he remembers telling his wife, “that looks like the guy who was in the Daily Sentinel.”

He called the number given out by the CNN program and, the next day, with printouts of the two photographs in hand, paid a call to Scottsboro Police Chief Ralph Dawe. “You can see the resemblance, can’t you?” Collins asked him.

The chief could and called Popkin, the Montgomery sheriff.

“The similarities were incredible,” Popkin recalled, noting what appeared to be matches of the hairline, nose, chin, some kind of growth above an eye and the earlobe.

Popkin called Stephen Vogt, the FBI agent in charge of the Baltimore field office.

FBI agents in Alabama began probing what they could about John Doe. Records were incomplete, but an agent was able to speak with a funeral home worker who remembered the case — the mangled legs, the layers of clothing, the appearance of homelessness.

The match between John Doe and Bishop isn’t perfect.

When Bishop, 40, disappeared, he was described as 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds, with brown eyes. John Doe was estimated to be 55, 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds, with blue eyes.

But the difference in height could have been because of John Doe’s crumpled legs from the highway incident. The blue-eye report could have been a false assumption made in 1981. As for the age difference, according to the FBI, it could have been related to the man’s lifestyle.

“If John Doe spent several years living on the streets and running from authorities, he likely would have appeared older than his actual age,” agent Pamela Hanson wrote in an affidavit. “The difference in weight, 155 lbs. versus 180 lbs., could also be explained by John Doe spending years living on the streets.”

At the Montgomery police department, detective Brian Stafford has spent two years on the Bishop case. In recent months, he said, authorities looked for Bishop in California, Mexico and Cambodia. Tipsters had been struck by the similarity between someone they’d seen and “age-enhanced” images, including a sculpture, of what Bishop might look like today.

What’s appealing about the Alabama case, Stafford said, is that the photograph was taken only five years after a known image of Bishop.

“That’s what makes this a little bit stronger,” he said.

That John Doe was hit by a vehicle 200 miles from where Bishop’s car was recovered doesn’t strike Stafford as a big deal. There is an indication that John Doe had been hitchhiking, and five years is a long time for him to have covered a lot of distance.

Bishop was an avid outdoorsman who liked to hike and camp. He could have survived in the Smoky Mountains area.

Stafford said that earlier this year, detectives were able to get a good DNA sample lifted off a shaving kit and razor found in Bishop’s station wagon. The problem: It could have been someone else’s DNA. But detectives had blood cards from the Bishop family members whose bodies were found in North Carolina. They used that evidence to confirm that the shaving kit/razor DNA was Bishop’s and are confident they know his DNA profile.

“It might be him. And we’re going to know in about two weeks,” Stafford said.

The detective said he will have mixed reactions if there is a match.

The case will be solved, so that’s good, he said. But if it is a match, Bishop never had to face trial and never had to answer for what happened to his family.

“If this is him, he didn’t get punished,” Stafford said. “It’s too quick and too easy.”

Dana Hedgpeth contributed to this report.

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