After a nearly five-year investigation involving hundreds of possible suspects, Tennessee authorities suspect a custody dispute was behind the killing of a National Guard member who was bound with zip ties and fatally shot in 2019.
Loudon County officials said Tuesday that Amanda Bishop, 39, and Eric Byrd, 39, have been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the killing of Jacob Bishop, a Tennessee National Guard member who had returned from a deployment to Poland in the months before he was fatally shot.
Amanda Bishop of Kingston and Byrd of Lenoir City were arrested Tuesday, the sheriff’s office said in a news release.
Their bail was set at $1 million each, the sheriff’s office said in the news release. Court records for the case were not available Thursday night, and it is not clear whether Byrd or Amanda Bishop, Jacob Bishop’s wife at the time of his murder, have attorneys speaking on their behalf.
Byrd is Amanda Bishop’s cousin, NBC station WBIR in Knoxville reported.
During a press conference Tuesday, Loudon County Sheriff Jimmy Davis alleged that there was a heated argument over custody of the couple’s child and that this sparked the animosity that ultimately led to Bishop’s murder.
No additional details about the dispute were immediately available. Jacob Bishop’s family members did not respond to requests for comment Thursday evening. Contact information for Amanda Bishop’s family members could not be found.
Authorities found Jacob Bishop dead in his apartment in Lenoir City, southwest of Knoxville, shortly before 8 a.m. on Oct. 1, 2019. He was bound and had been shot multiple times, the sheriff’s office said.
According to the sheriff’s office, his body was found by his mother. In 2021, she told WBIR that she went to his house because he was late for work and thought he had overslept.
“When you find your son dead on the floor of his apartment, it’s something that sticks in your mind,” Diane Bishop told the station. “It doesn’t go away.”
She said she didn’t want to portray her son as a saint, but that he was a “very good person,” she told the station.
In the 2021 report, former Loudon County Sheriff Tim Guidner told WBIR the case was “complex” but had not cooled down and was being investigated daily.
The sheriff’s office said in a news release Tuesday that more than a dozen law enforcement agencies were involved in the investigation, including the FBI, the Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and a Texas sheriff’s office.
In the 2021 report, WBIR noted that the sheriff’s office initially identified about 400 possible suspects with ties to Jacob Bishop. Asked about the number at Tuesday’s news conference and whether Amanda Bishop had previously been considered a prime suspect, Davis said she was “always at the top of the list.”
Davis attributed the arrests to good detective work and new technology. After five years of grief and worry about whether the case would be solved, Davis said, it was a relief to finally tell Diane Bishop that two people were in custody for her son’s murder.
“I don’t think there’s really any closure in a case like this,” he said. “But we can at least try to give her some justice.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
