In the annals of Rhode Island criminals, few have left a more impressionable legacy than convicted murderer Alfred “Freddie” Bishop.

When he walked out of the Adult Correctional Institutions last August after 33 years — a thin man of 64 with wavy gray hair and dressed in a black suit — only one other inmate (murderer James Silvia) had ever served more time behind bars.

The police described him for decades as a dangerous man of violent impulses, who once beat up three Warwick police officers in a single day. Word of his release last summer filtered quickly through the state’s law-enforcement community.

Though the state police did not formally oppose his parole last year as they did in 1993, investigators kept tabs on Bishop. For the 10½ months he was free, state police detectives periodically followed his movements, from his home at 61 Hollywood Ave. in Warwick, on the Cranston line, to the job he lined up making wooden cabinets for a yacht company in East Providence.

At the time the Parole Board voted to release him, Bishop’s lawyer, John F. Cicilline, said: “Freddie Bishop today is not the wild kid he was 33 years ago. Frankly, he just wants to get outside the walls and live a quiet life. It’s that simple.”

Yesterday the police said Bishop was the man who entered a Warwick house on June 28 and fatally shot one man while wounding two others.

Prosecutors leveled seven charges against him related to the shooting in his District Court arraignment yesterday. He was ordered held without bail pending his next court appearance.

For much of his life, Bishop earned a reputation for terrorizing people.

A high school dropout at 15, he was 18 when he caught 30 days in jail for picking a fight with two men in a bowling alley and beating them.

Bishop had a penchant for assaulting people. In 1965, he sent three Warwick officers to the hospital in a single day. The first officer Bishop punched twice in the head while the off-duty officer sat with his father in a booth at the Blue Danube Café in Warwick. “That’s for being a ---- cop,” Bishop yelled.

When two detectives tracked Bishop down hours later at another bar, the three men fought. Bishop grabbed the gun from one of the officers and threatened to kill them. The police captured the fleeing Bishop after he accidentally shot himself in the leg.

Bishop led a gang of armed thieves who shook down bars for protection money, mugged bookies and did odd jobs for organized crime.

Then in December 1973, Bishop stood outside the living room window of a Warwick house and emptied his shotgun into his friend James Dunn standing on the other side.

Before Dunn died, he whispered to medics and the police: “Bishop shot me.” A jury found him guilty of murder.”

Behind the prison walls, Bishop continued to wield the kind of power that intimidated inmates and guards alike and allowed him for a time to keep a pet goat, which he named after the warden. He was considered one of the “heavies,” who through force and fear claimed various sections of maximum security as their own.

In 1978, corrections officials moved in to take back the prison. They shipped Bishop and 14 other ringleaders out of state. Then-Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy justified the move, saying “guards and inmates live in constant mortal fear for their lives.”

In the next several years, Bishop moved among prisons in Pennsylvania, Maine and New Hampshire. In Maine he earned the nickname “Hit Man” and was shipped out after informants said he was planning an uprising. In New Hampshire, prison officials considered him the prime suspect in the murder of an inmate and transferred him back to Maine.

Bishop returned to the ACI in 1989 from Pennsylvania. When then-Corrections Director John J. Moran refused to move him into a lower security unit, essentially blocking Bishop’s chance for parole, word spread that Bishop had vowed to kill Moran.

Bishop denied he ever made the threat but Moran took the threat seriously and carried a department-issued shotgun in his car for protection until his retirement in 1990.

In 1993 the law-enforcement community, political leaders and corrections administrators came out in unison to block plans to parole Bishop, who still walked around the maximum security yard in a bleached bone-white jacket with #1 stamped on the back.

Even then, Bishop enjoyed some preferential treatment and correctional officers refused to talk about him. “They’re afraid he’ll find out,” explained one officer. No one wants to “end up in a barrel somewhere.”

Under intense criticism, the Parole Board reversed its decision to free Bishop and he came no closer to freedom for another dozen years.

Then in 2005 the Parole Board once again recommended releasing Bishop. Over the objections of current Director A.T. Wall, who refused to move Bishop into a lower security to ready him for release, citing safety concerns, Bishop walked out from behind the wire Aug. 16.

Now back behind it, he could spend the rest of his life there, if convicted on these new charges.

tmooney@projo.com