EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (28 page)

Arthur Gary Bishop

You would never have been able to predict that Arthur Gary Bishop was a monster who would grow to be Utah’s most notorious killer of the 20th century.

Born in 1951 in the small town of Hinckley in Utah, and raised by God-fearing Mormon parents, as a child he was a high-achieving student and an Eagle Scout. Following his graduation from high school, like most Mormon kids, he served as a missionary, his service taking him to the Philippines. Returning to America, he enrolled at a Utah business school and graduated from there with good grades.

Success in high school and college, a solid, religious background; all seemed normal in Bishop’s world. But he was far from normal. He had grown addicted to pornography, but not just any old pornography – it was pornography involving children.

It was not that, however, that brought his first contravention of the law. In 1977, to the surprise of his family and everyone who knew him, he was accused of embezzling almost $9,000 from a used-car dealership where he had been employed as a bookkeeper for a year. He pled guilty and was given a suspended five-year prison sentence on condition he repaid all the money. He seemed to show the appropriate remorse, but it turned out to be a sham. Before long, he had disappeared, spending the next five years on the run, using false names, finding work wherever he could and stealing money to live on when he could not.

His flight from justice did not take him very far. He went to Salt Lake City, about 100 miles northeast of Hinckley, calling himself Roger W. Downs. That was the name he used when he enrolled with Big Brothers Big Sisters, a non-profit organisation designed to help children reach their potential through one-to-one relationships with mentors. It was the last place that a man with the proclivities of Bishop should have been and it later emerged that during his time with the organisation, he molested at least two young boys. The tragedy is that both incidents were reported to the police and nothing was done about them.

Meanwhile, he worked in odd jobs, continuing to molest boys whenever he had the opportunity. In October 1979, however, molestation turned into something altogether more serious.

On 14 October, four-year-old Alonzo Daniels was approached by Downs who lived in the apartment across the hall from his own. He told him he could have some candy but it was in his apartment. Once there, Downs undressed and fondled the frightened boy, panicking when Alonzo began to cry and said that he would tell his mother. Bishop grabbed a hammer and bludgeoned Alonzo with it. Still failing to stop the boy crying, he carried him into the bathroom, turned on the taps and drowned him in the bathtub. Putting the corpse into a large cardboard box, he carried it out to his car. As he walked through the courtyard, he passed Alonzo’s mother who was calling her son’s name.

When the police arrived, they started door-to-door enquiries, Downs being one of the first to be questioned. He was, of course, unable to help them. Meanwhile, the search for the boy escalated and carried on for several days, with hundreds of police officers and civilians involved. Photographs were distributed and thousands of people were questioned, but he seemed to have vanished without a trace.

On the night of the fourteenth, Bishop drove out to the desert, twenty miles outside Salt lake City and buried Alonzo’s body near the town of Cedar Fort.

It seemed for a while as if Bishop tried to subvert his urge to murder children by focusing instead on killing puppies. He adopted around twenty from shelters over the next year, killing all of them by bludgeoning them with hammers, by strangulation or by drowning. He later claimed that it was like killing Alonzo. ‘It was so stimulating,’ he told a detective. ‘A puppy whines just like Alonzo did.’ The strange thing is that nobody seemed to notice, or if they did, they chose to take no action.

He was still molesting young boys but they were allowed to live if they promised not to tell anyone. It was not until November 1980 that his murderous urge took over again.

He met an eleven-year-old, Kim Peterson, at a roller-skating rink and agreed to buy his skates from him. The boy left home the following day, telling his parents that he had found a buyer for the skates and was going out to meet him. It was the last time they would see him. When he failed to return home in time for dinner that night, the police were called and another search was launched, with similar results to the one for Alonzo. This time, however, there were some witnesses who provided a description of a man aged between twenty-five and thirty-five who was seen talking to Kim at the rink. He was wearing, they said, glasses, jeans and an army-style jacket. A couple of skaters at the rink agreed to be hypnotised and provided more details, including the fact that the man drove a silver Chevrolet Camaro with an out-of-state registration. This last fact was, of course, incorrect and misled the police for some time. Critically, however, they failed to connect the case of Kim Peterson’s disappearance with that of Alonzo Daniels.

Meanwhile, Kim who had also been bludgeoned to death, was also buried out in a remote part of the desert. Now Bishop realised that although he had killed both boys to prevent them from exposing him as a child-molestor, he had actually enjoyed it. He wanted more.

First, however, he had to find some cash without working too hard to get it. He took a job as a bookkeeper at a ski shop, under the name Lynn E. Jones. One day he simply failed to return from his lunch-break and neither did $10,000 he had removed from the shop safe, along with his personnel file.

A few weeks later, on 20 October 1981, he spied what he later sickeningly described as ‘the most beautiful little boy’ in a local supermarket. He approached the boy, four-year-old Danny Davis, who was fiddling with a bubble gum-machine and offered him sweets. Danny had been well-taught, however, and refused the offering. Bishop gave up, deciding to leave the shop. But the boy followed him, and, once outside, Bishop led him towards his car.

In the shop, Danny’s grandmother realised Danny was missing and raised the alarm. The shop-workers and customers quickly searched the shop and the surrounding area but Danny was long gone by that time. The authorities looked everywhere for him, police divers searching ponds and lakes, the mountains and desert being combed in the most intensive search in Salt Lake City’s history. A $20,000 reward was offered for information and the FBI became involved. No trace of the boy was uncovered.

Roger Downs, living close to the scene of Danny’s disappearance once again answered the door to a policeman, but satisfied them once again that he knew nothing. What the police did not know, however, was that Bishop had smothered the boy by pinching his nostrils and covering his mouth with his hand when he would not stop crying. Once again he drove out to Cedar Fort and disposed of the body.

When a fourth child, a girl this time, four-year-old Rachel Runyan, disappeared from a school playground in August 1982, in the town of Sunset, north of Salt Lake City, there was uproar. The public was outraged that the authorities appeared powerless against this maniac who was on the loose. When her body was found, strangled, a short time later, the state passed a new piece of legistlation, making their law on child abduction the strictest in the United States. Abductors could now be sent to prison for up to fifteen years depending on the seriousness of their crime.

The police deduced that there was no connection between Rachel Runyan’s death and the disappearance of the three boys in Salt Lake City, but by now, people were panicking and reports of suspicious strangers in parks and playgrounds flooded in. As Halloween approached, rumours started to circulate that the missing boys had been kidnapped by occultists who had sacrificed them. When Halloween 1982 passed without incident, the rumours died down.

Police were baffled, however. There seemed to be no pattern to the disappearances. The boys had been taken at different times, on different days and they had been different races – Alonzo Daniels was African American and the other two Caucasians with blond hair. Neither was age consistent – Kim Peterson was eleven and the other two boys were four.

Two years passed before Bishop gave vent to his urges again. It was Troy Ward’s sixth birthday and he was playing in a park close to his home. He failed to turn up to meet a family friend at four o’clock on a corner near the park to be taken home for a birthday party.

There was no delay in summoning the police who immediately launched a search. They found a witness who recalled seeing a boy matching Troy’s description, leaving the park with a man just before four.

Once again, Bishop’s charm and ease with children persuaded Troy to go home with him. The usual ritual of molestation followed and then the hammer and the bathtub after the distraught boy threatened to report what had occurred. He then drove Troy’s body to Big Cottonwood Creek, in the Twin Peaks Wilderness Area where he buried him.

Just a month later, he struck again. He was going to be taking two junior high school boys on a camping trip. One of the boys disappeared before they left, however. Thirteen-year-old Graeme Cunningham disappeared from his neighbourhood on the afternoon of Thursday 14 July. Incredibly, while the disappearance was being flagged up on the news and the state began to fear that the maniac had struck again, the killer, Roger Downs, was knocking on the door of the boy’s mother offering any help he could.

The police again went through the motions, door-to-door questioning, dragging lakes, rivers and ponds and scouring the surrounding desert and mountains. This time, however, someone noticed something strange. A man called Roger Downs had been questioned each time one of the five boys went missing. Furthermore, he lived close to four of the boys and knew the parents of the fifth.

A couple of detectives returned to Bishop’s apartment and asked him some more questions. This time they felt sure he was being evasive and they invited him to police headquarters for further questioning. Experienced detective Don Bell interrogating him and soon began to squeeze the truth from him. He confessed to his real identity and before the day was out, he had also confessed to all five murders.

The following day, he took them to the sites where he had buried his victims, at Cedar Fort and Big Cottonwood Creek.

As the days passed, they strived to establish what motivated him to kill the boys. At first, he claimed that he killed them only because they threatened to expose him, but as time went on, it became obvious that although that had initially been his reason, he had grown to enjoy killing and would have carried on until stopped or arrested. ‘I’m glad they caught me,’ he said, ‘because I’d do it again.’

The floodgates opened following the announcement of his arrest. Numerous parents telephoned the police accusing Bishop of molesting their child or friends’ children during the past ten years. Police were baffled as to why they had not called earlier and possibly prevented Bishop from killing. The horror mounted when it emerged that his younger brother, Douglas, had been arrested for also sexually abusing young boys in Provo, a town south of Salt Lake City.

Arthur Bishop was charged with five counts of murder, five of kidnapping, two of forcible sexual assault and one of sexually abusing a minor.

Like all psychopaths, Bishop was found to have what the Desert County Attorney described as ‘a scheming, calculating, cunning mind,’ and his defence team played on his ‘emotional and psychological deficits’, trying to obtain a manslaughter rather than a murder conviction. They blamed his addiction to pornography, claiming that it had warped his mind and he himself agreed that porn had desensitized him to normal feelings. Eventually, the images of young boys naked had been insufficient for him and he required more to stimulate him sexually. ‘Finding and procuring sexually arousing materials became an obsession,’ he said. ‘For me, seeing pornography was lighting a fuse on a stick of dynamite. I became stimulated and had to gratify my urges or explode. All boys became mere sexual objects. My conscience was desensitized and my sexual appetite entirely controlled my actions.’

None of it mattered, however. He was found guilty on charges of murder, kidnapping and sexual abuse of a minor and was sentenced to death.

As was the law in Utah, he was given the choice between dying in front of a firing squad or by lethal injection. He chose the injection and sat on Death Row for four years, during which time he is said to have read the
Book of Mormon
ten times from cover to cover.

By the 10 June 1988, the date of his execution, Arthur Bishop was being described by a Mormon bishop as the most ‘sorrowful and repentant and remorseful’ of the thousands of inmates he had visited in the past thirty-three years.