Where Is Brad Bishop?

Was he a spy? Was the Foreign Service career just a cover?

The State Department has said no. So has the CIA.

Yet people wonder.

"I do," said Kight, 65, a barrel-chested lawman who was first elected sheriff in 1986. "It's my cop's suspicious mind."

The only money Bishop was known to have when he vanished was $400 that he took out of a bank hours before the killings.

"But he could go to work," Kight said. "He could get a job. He could be doing that now."

Police handled the murder investigation, but tracking the fugitive is the sheriff's responsibility. His investigative files -- big binders labeled "Interpol" and "State Department," "North Carolina" and "Sightings, William Bradford Bishop Jr., 1992-96" -- are stacked on shelves by his desk.

"This never leaves me," Kight said. "Every day, I hope I'll get a call or a letter or a lead from somewhere, and it'll finally be valid."

For fugitive hunters, the world is a lot smaller today than it was in 1976, before advanced computer systems allowed for rapid information-sharing among far-flung law enforcement agencies. Kight's office, in searching for Bishop, has tried to take advantage of the technology, to no avail.

In 2002, said Kight's chief deputy, Darren Popkin, "we thought by now there'd be a good database of unidentified bodies" from North Carolina to Pennsylvania -- and there was. "We checked them all and narrowed it down to three bodies," Popkin said. Dental records showed none was Bishop.

There have been hundreds of reported sightings over the years, but only three by people acquainted with the missing diplomat.

A Swedish woman who said she had socialized with him in Ethiopia said she saw him in a public park in Stockholm in 1978. A former State Department colleague said he saw Bishop in a restroom in Sorrento, Italy, in 1979. A long-ago Bethesda neighbor said she saw him at a train station is Basel, Switzerland, in 1994. The reports led authorities straight to dead ends.

About all Kight's deputies can do now is wait for tips, look into them and occasionally check data-mining services for some hint that Bishop is out there.

"McAllen, Texas," the sheriff said, recalling one such lead. "Someone sent in a photo, said this man is very secretive. He was dating the person's daughter. And he looked like Bishop. So we hopped a plane, went down there, pulled the guy off the street. Turned out he was wanted in two other states. But it wasn't Bishop."

Who's dead now.

Or is 69.

"It's still open," Kight said. "It's still a good warrant."