LOUDON COUNTY, Tenn. — The mother of a Tennessee National Guardsman worries his homicide case is going cold around two years after she found him bound and shot multiple times, inside of his Loudon County home.
The Loudon County Sheriff's Office has not named a suspect in the killing of Specialist Jacob Bishop, 35, in the early hours of October 1, 2019. His case is the only unsolved homicide in Loudon County, the sheriff said.
"When you find your son dead on the floor in his apartment, that’s something that sticks in your brain and it don’t go away. It does not go away," Diane Bishop said Thursday.
She thought her son had overslept and was late for work. So she said that she walked over to his house which was three doors down on the day he died. When she realized he wasn't asleep, she called 911.
"He never met a stranger and he could talk to anybody at any time, but that’s the way Jacob was," she said.
Jacob Bishop's friendly nature is complicating his case, the detective said. They initially identified around 400 possible suspects—all with ties to Bishop, but none who had a bad word to say about him.
"It’s not a cold case by any means, it’s being worked day-in and day-out," Loudon County Sheriff Tim Guider said Thursday. "I can’t say enough about the complexity of this case."
The sheriff's office initially identified a newer model white SUV as a vehicle of interest in the case but said Thursday that the detective's investigative attention had shifted elsewhere.
The guardsman had returned five months earlier from a deployment in Poland, Diane Bishop said. She credited two years in the Army and four in the National Guard with straightening her son out.
"I don’t want to make him out to be a saint, he wasn’t a saint. But he was a good man," she said.
She said she trusts the detective on the case but still worries whether she'll ever know why someone killed her son.
"It’s been two years and we don’t have anything that we didn’t have two years ago," Diane Bishop said.
The family plans a memorial service and balloon release Saturday morning at 11 in Lenoir City Park.
Diane Bishop asks anyone with any information about the case to call the Loudon County Sheriff's Office.