EXCLUSIVE: Ala. Shooting Suspect Amy Bishop's Husband: Tenure Likely 'a Factor'

Feb. 18, 2010 — -- The husband of the associate professor accused of killing three colleagues and seriously wounding three other people on an Alabama campus last week suggests the stress of her battle for tenure could have made her snap.

"Only someone who's been intimately involved in that fight understands," James Anderson told ABC News' "Good Morning America" of his wife Amy Bishop's alleged actions.

"It's a tough, long, hard battle," he said in his first sit-down, on-camera interview since the incident. "That, I would say, is part of the problem. It's a factor."

Though police have not declared a motive in the Feb. 12 shootings at the end of a University of Alabama in Huntsville biology department meeting, associates said Bishop was angry about having been denied tenure at the university.

See more of Anderson's on-camera interview about his wife's alleged crime Friday morning on "Good Morning America."

In an earlier telephone interview with ABCNews.com, Anderson maintained the academic community at the university shares some of the blame for the shootings.

"I have worked around Ph.D.s before and they are pretty much the same," Anderson said. "Psychologically, they run hot and cold. That's why we are asking the news media to investigate that whole world that no one knows of. We are referring to an isolated group, like monks, and no one knows what goes on there."

However, the campus shootings are not the first violent crimes with which Bishop was involved. Her fatal shooting of her brother in 1986 was declared an accident. She was questioned, but not charged, during a mail bomb investigation in 1993. She admitted in court in 2002 that she punched a woman in an IHOP. And last year, some of her students petitioned to have her removed from the classroom.

Anderson talks to Bishop for a few minutes daily on the phone, but as of Wednesday had not been allowed to visit her.

"She calls about the kids," Anderson earlier told ABC News. "Are they doing their homework?"

Their four children, aged 8 to 18, are aware of their mother's arrest, Anderson said, though the youngest one doesn't fully comprehend what it all means.