Arthur Gary Bishop

What the record shows

Arthur Gary Bishop was a Utah man convicted of abducting and murdering five boys, aged 4 to 13, in the Salt Lake City area between 1979 and 1983. A Salt Lake jury found him guilty in March 1984 of five counts of first-degree murder, five counts of aggravated kidnapping and one count of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, and returned five death sentences. After the Utah Supreme Court upheld the convictions and he abandoned further appeals, he was executed by lethal injection at the Utah State Prison in Draper in the early hours of June 10, 1988.

The five victims named in court records and contemporary reporting were Alonzo Daniels, Claude (Kim) Peterson, Danny Davis, Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham. According to UPI, Alonzo Daniels, 4, disappeared on October 16, 1979; Kim Peterson, 11, vanished on November 8, 1980; Danny Davis, 4, was taken from a South Salt Lake supermarket on October 20, 1981; Troy Ward, 6, disappeared on June 22, 1983; and Graeme Cunningham, 13, went missing on July 14, 1983. The Deseret News later reported that Daniels was last seen in the courtyard of his family's apartment complex and that Ward was taken from a park where he was to meet a friend. The Utah Supreme Court opinion lists Daniels as aged 14, but UPI, the Deseret News and the Wikipedia article all give his age as 4.

The investigation that ended the series centered on Cunningham. According to the Utah Supreme Court, the boy had been planning a California trip with a friend and with the defendant, who was then using the name Roger Downs and had been described to police as the friend's father. Detectives learned that Downs had telephoned Cunningham shortly before he disappeared, and that he might also be using the names Lynn Jones and Arthur Bishop; Lynn Jones was wanted for forgery or theft and Arthur Bishop for a probation violation. On July 24, 1983, Bishop arrived at the Cunningham home while police were there and was taken in for questioning.

The court opinion records that after about an hour of unhelpful answers Bishop briefly asked for a lawyer, then said he wished to continue and took officers to his residence, where he produced a revolver and several hundred photographs of boys. Back at the station he confessed to abducting and killing all five boys, and he directed officers to sites in Big Cottonwood Canyon and near Cedar Fort, Utah, where their remains were recovered. UPI reported on August 1, 1983, that he had been charged with capital homicide and kidnapping in the five deaths. Police later said, according to UPI, that three of the boys had been beaten, one strangled and one possibly shot, and prosecutors said four had been sexually abused.

Bishop's trial in Salt Lake City lasted about a month. Jurors convicted him on Monday, March 19, 1984. During the penalty phase they heard his taped confession, in which, according to UPI, he said he had lured the boys to his home with treats, toys and money and could not stop; his mother and older brother testified in an effort to spare his life, and he did not testify. On March 23, 1984, the same jury returned death verdicts on all five murder counts. The trial judge, identified in the Deseret News as Judge Jay Banks, also imposed consecutive prison terms on the kidnapping and sexual abuse counts.

Utah law required the death sentences to be reviewed by the state Supreme Court. Bishop's appeal raised more than forty issues, including a challenge to the admission of his confession; the court affirmed the convictions and sentences on February 3, 1988. That month, UPI reported, he described life on death row as tedious and worthless, dismissed his anti-death-penalty attorneys and asked that the sentence be carried out, and the Deseret News reported he wanted the victims' families to find peace. After the court lifted his stay on May 2, Third District Judge Frank G. Noel signed an execution warrant. Bishop declined a last meal and was pronounced dead at 12:15 a.m. on June 10, 1988, the 99th execution in the United States since the Supreme Court lifted its moratorium on capital punishment. In a written statement he apologized to the families; Graeme Cunningham's mother called the execution his last self-serving act.

Bishop was born in 1952 in Hinckley, Utah, a small town about 130 miles south of Salt Lake City, and UPI reported that residents remembered him as an honor student, Eagle Scout and Mormon missionary. Investigators in Box Elder County and in California examined whether he was linked to other child deaths, including that of 9-year-old Thomas Walling, according to UPI and the Deseret News, but he denied further killings and was never charged in any other case.