Between October 1979 and July 1983, five boys disappeared in Salt Lake County, Utah, and were never seen alive again. They were Alonzo Daniels, Kim Peterson, Danny Davis, Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham, and they ranged in age from 4 to 13. For almost four years police found nothing that tied the cases together. Parents across the state took their children to be fingerprinted, and schools held classes on not talking to strangers.
The answer came on July 24, 1983, in an interview room at the Metropolitan Hall of Justice in Salt Lake City. Detectives were questioning a man they knew as Roger Downs about the disappearance of Graeme Cunningham, a 13-year-old who had been missing for about ten days. By that evening the man, whose real name was Arthur Gary Bishop, had confessed to abducting and killing all five boys, and he then led officers to the places where their remains lay. A jury convicted him in 1984 and returned death verdicts on all five murder counts. After the Utah Supreme Court upheld the convictions in February 1988, Bishop told the courts he wanted no more appeals. He was executed by lethal injection at the Utah State Prison in June 1988.
Little is known about Bishop's early life. The Deseret News, in a long 1988 account of the investigation, described Roger W. Downs as a man "born and raised as Arthur Gary Bishop." He was a former Eagle Scout and had been involved with the Big Brothers program, according to ABC4 in Salt Lake City. In a 1984 television interview with the ABC4 anchor Phil Riesen, he said he had struggled all his life to connect with his parents and had not known how to deal with his problems.
By 1979 Bishop was living in Salt Lake City under the name Downs. That year he worked as a bookkeeper for a Salt Lake steel company. He later moved, took the name Lynn Jones and found work with a ski-industry organization, the Deseret News reported. When police finally looked into his background in 1983, they found that the names Downs, Jones and Bishop belonged to the same man. Lynn Jones was wanted for forgery or theft, and Arthur Bishop was wanted for violating probation, the Utah Supreme Court later recorded.
In his confession, as the Deseret News summarized it in 1988, Bishop said he killed the boys to keep from being exposed as a child molester. He also told detectives, "I never went out looking for victims." He lived close to the places where the boys disappeared. Alonzo Daniels vanished from the apartment complex where Bishop lived; Kim Peterson disappeared near a bowling alley close to where Bishop had moved; Danny Davis was last seen in a grocery store across the street from Bishop's home; and Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham were taken from the neighborhood where he lived in 1983, according to ABC4.
Alonzo Daniels was 4 years old. He lived with his mother in a Salt Lake City apartment complex, and on October 16, 1979, he disappeared from its courtyard. The Utah Supreme Court gives that date as the first of the five disappearances. (Its opinion lists Alonzo's age as 14, which appears to be a misprint: the Deseret News, in 1988 and again in 2006, gives his age as 4.)
Bishop lived in the same complex. He later told detectives that he lured the boy inside with candy, and that afterward he saw a distraught woman outside calling Alonzo's name. Salt Lake detective Buzz Blunk questioned Bishop two days after the disappearance, the Deseret News reported. Police found him odd, ABC4 said, but did not question him again for four years. Alonzo's remains were recovered in July 1983 near Cedar Fort, Utah, after Bishop guided officers to the site.
Claude Peterson, known as Kim, was 11. The Utah Supreme Court spells his surname Peterson; the Deseret News spells it Petersen. He disappeared after going to sell his roller skates to a man, the Deseret News wrote in 2006. Bishop had met him at a bowling alley.
Accounts differ on the year of Kim's disappearance. The Deseret News in 2006 and ABC4 give 1980. The Deseret News account of June 1988 gives the date as November 8, 1981. The Utah Supreme Court lists him second among the five boys, after Alonzo Daniels and before Danny Davis, but does not give a date. His remains were found in July 1983 near those of Alonzo Daniels.
Danny Davis was 4. On October 20, 1981, he was shopping with his grandfather at a supermarket when he wandered away and was not seen again. Hundreds of county, state and federal officers took part in the search. The store was across the street from Bishop's home, and the Deseret News reported that Bishop watched as officers searched for the boy. Two deputies came to his door the next morning but found nothing.
Danny's remains were recovered in July 1983. Years later Danny's cousin told ABC4 that Bishop was the devil and that his execution had been fitting.
After the third disappearance, investigators compared the cases. They found no link beyond the fact that three boys were missing, the Deseret News wrote. Public fear spread across Utah, and the fingerprinting drives and stranger-safety classes for schoolchildren began in this period.
Troy Ward was 6. On June 22, 1983, he was taken from a Salt Lake City park where he had arranged to meet a friend. During his confession a month later, Bishop admitted that he had kidnapped and killed Troy. The boy's remains were recovered in late July 1983.
Troy's mother later sat directly behind Bishop in the courtroom during his trial. She told ABC4 that it was hard to restrain herself, and that she still lived with "what ifs" about her son.
Graeme Cunningham was 13. He disappeared on or about July 14, 1983, the last of the five boys. The Deseret News reported that Bishop lured him with an offer of money for a delivery job. In 2006 the paper recorded simply that Graeme did not come home for dinner.
Graeme had been friends with Bishop and with a boy who lived with Bishop. The three had planned a trip to California together; ABC4 said they were due to leave for Disneyland the day after Graeme disappeared. Police later learned that Bishop had contacted Graeme shortly before he vanished, according to the Utah Supreme Court.
The Utah Supreme Court's opinion sets out the events of July 24, 1983, in detail, drawing on testimony at a suppression hearing held on February 9, 1984.
By then detectives had learned that Downs had been in touch with Graeme just before he disappeared, that Downs was not the father of the boy who lived with him, as he had claimed, and that he might be using other names, among them Lynn Jones and Arthur Bishop. A wire went out to law enforcement agencies in the western United States asking that he be found and held.
That afternoon officers learned that Downs and the boy were at the Cunningham home. After a few minutes of questioning there, an officer suggested they move to the Metropolitan Hall of Justice. Bishop drove himself, and an officer drove the boy. They arrived at about 1:50 p.m. Detective Bell interviewed the boy for about an hour. At about 3:56 p.m., Bell and Officer Smith began a taped interview with Bishop. Bell treated it as a routine interview, not the questioning of a suspect, and did not read Bishop his rights at the start. About 50 minutes in, Bishop was given the Miranda warnings. At about 4:56 p.m. he switched off the tape recorder, cited his right to a lawyer and said he did not want to talk any more.
What happened next became the center of his appeal. An officer served an arrest warrant. Bishop said he wished he were dead and that Graeme had been his friend. He asked what would happen now, and when told he was going to jail, said he did not want to go. He then said he wanted to talk, and Bell told him several times that the officers could not talk with him, because he had asked them to stop. Bishop said they would find out everything anyway and that he wanted to tell them about "something big." At 5:25 p.m. Bell asked him where Graeme was. "You can't help him anyway," Bishop replied.
Bishop then signed a consent form and went with officers to his house, where he handed over a revolver and other material. At about 6:23 p.m. a second taped interview began, with Officers White, Smith and Bell. Asked about Graeme, Bishop said that Graeme was dead and admitted killing him. When Bell found that the recorder had not been working, he restarted it, noted the time and date and reminded Bishop of his rights. Bishop then confessed to all five killings.
The Deseret News account of 1988 adds what the detectives, Bruce White, Steve Smith and Don Bell, heard in that room. After hours of questioning about Graeme, Bishop let slip a remark that suggested more than one victim. When Bell asked him about a word he had used, Bishop said: "Troy Ward I kidnapped and killed." By the time the detectives left the room, they had confessions to the abductions and killings of five Salt Lake County children between 1979 and 1983. Bishop later told them, "I knew you were never going to let go. So I decided to confess." Creighton Horton, then a deputy Salt Lake County attorney, told ABC4 that many people who had known Bishop thought of him as a good person, and called the solving of all five cases at once remarkable.
Bishop guided officers to the places in Utah where the bodies of all five boys were recovered, the Utah Supreme Court recorded. Each boy was given a proper burial, the station said.
Bishop was charged in Salt Lake County's Third District Court. The Deseret News reported in 1988 that he had been convicted in 1984 of five counts of first-degree murder, five counts of aggravated kidnapping and one further count involving a child. The Utah Supreme Court gives the same five murder counts and five kidnapping counts, with one further count involving a child. ABC4 describes the murder counts as aggravated murder; the court and the Deseret News use the term first-degree murder. The prosecution was led by Robert Stott, with Creighton Horton as co-counsel, ABC4 reported.
Before trial the defense asked to move the case out of Salt Lake County. In January 1984 Bishop moved for a change of venue, relying on a survey of 400 Salt Lake County voters: 80 percent of them believed he was guilty, and 88 percent favored the death penalty if he were convicted. The trial judge heard the motion after jury selection, at the defense's request, and denied it. Six members of the jury panel said they had read or seen part of an article the court described as prejudicial; all but one were excused, and the one who stayed said she would decide the case on the evidence alone.
The defense's theory of the case, as the Utah Supreme Court summarized it, was that Bishop's diagnosed mental condition, a form of pedophilia with what the defense called narcissistic overtones, amounted to an extreme mental or emotional disturbance for which there was a reasonable explanation. If the jury accepted that, the defense argued, the charges would be reduced to manslaughter. Two defense psychiatrists testified about his condition. The trial court ordered examinations by two court-appointed psychiatrists, and one of them, Dr. Tomb, was allowed to testify only to criticize the methods the defense experts had used. The jury was told to judge the claimed excuse by an objective standard, from the viewpoint of a reasonable person, and not by Bishop's own state of mind.
The jury convicted Bishop on every count. At a separate penalty hearing it returned verdicts of death on all five murder convictions. The Deseret News reported that he was sentenced to death in March 1984, and that the sentence of death by lethal injection was imposed by Judge Jay Banks. On the other counts the court imposed prison terms of five years to life, some with mandatory minimums.
Bishop appealed to the Utah Supreme Court. His lawyers filed a brief of nineteen points that, by the court's count, made more than forty separate arguments. The court rejected them in an opinion by Chief Justice Hall issued on February 3, 1988, and denied rehearing on February 24.
The justices held that the trial judge had given the lawyers ample room to question the jury panel, and that three jurors the defense wanted removed had not shown bias when their answers were read in context. They upheld the use of voter registration lists to summon jurors and the denial of a change of venue, finding that the publicity was not so extreme that prejudice could be presumed and that Bishop had not shown actual prejudice among the jurors chosen. "Utah's death penalty scheme is constitutional and was constitutionally applied to defendant," the court wrote.
On the confession, the court agreed with part of Bishop's argument. The statements he made before he was warned of his rights should have been excluded. But the court found the error harmless, because the full confession that followed was given after proper warnings and was voluntary. It found that Bishop himself had restarted the conversation after asking for a lawyer, so his second waiver of his rights was valid. Some of what officers said to him was improper, including Bell's remark about how prison inmates would react to him and a comment, made in his presence, that Bell would "punch his lights out." The court found that the remark was not meant to intimidate him and that no threats, promises or inducements had produced the confession.
The court also approved the manslaughter instructions, holding that the reasonableness of an explanation for an extreme emotional disturbance is judged objectively. It found no error in the court-ordered psychiatric examinations or in Dr. Tomb's limited testimony. The justices were divided on whether three photographs should have been shown to the jury; the opinion held that they were cumulative and should not have been admitted, but the court was unanimous that any error was harmless given Bishop's detailed confession. It also held that the prosecution did not have to accept Bishop's offer to admit the boys' identities in place of its own proof, since the identity of each victim was an element the state had to prove, and that there was clear evidence that each of the five boys had died by criminal means.
After the Supreme Court ruled on February 3, Bishop said he wanted to end all appeals so that the victims' families could find peace, the Deseret News reported. His lawyers were still trying to save his life through the appeals, and he moved to dismiss them. In his motion he wrote, "True justice rightfully demands my life for the horrible crimes I committed."
On April 8, 1988, Third District Judge James Sawaya held a hearing on whether Bishop was competent to make that choice. Three court-appointed psychiatrists, Louis Moench, Mark Rindflesh and Breck Lebegue, testified that they found no significant mental disorder apart from the pedophilia diagnosed at trial, and that this condition would not impair his ability to think rationally. Moench, who had interviewed him for nearly three hours on March 16, called his decision "knowing, intelligent and rational." He said Bishop felt "a need to die" and had only an "ambivalent wish" to go on living.
Bishop gave the psychiatrists several reasons, the Deseret News reported. He believed his death would have a cleansing effect on the community and on the families. He had been moved by news coverage of the execution of Dale Pierre Selby, another Utah death-row prisoner, which he saw as having brought relief to surviving families. Some of his victims' families had not forgiven him, and he believed his execution would spare them what he called the sin of unforgiveness. He called prison a "worthless existence" and did not want to become embittered like other inmates, and he believed his execution would be favorable in God's eyes.
Under questioning by his lawyer Joan Watt, the psychiatrists said that Bishop was not seeking execution as a substitute for suicide or to please anyone, including his mother. She had visited him in prison and told him she thought he should be executed. Bishop wore an orange prison jumpsuit, took notes and conferred often with Watt and his other lawyer, Betsy Bowman. At one point he stood and objected to their questions, saying, "I don't feel a person should have to waive his rights to personal privacy." The judge continued the hearing to April 15.
The Utah Supreme Court lifted Bishop's stay of execution on May 2, 1988, and sent the case back to the district court to set a date. Third District Judge Frank G. Noel issued a warrant ordering the execution for June 10, 1988, in line with Bishop's wish to end his appeals. The warrant was served on Gerald Cook, warden of maximum security at the Utah State Prison. Salt Lake County Sheriff Pete Hayward called the service of the warrant "just a technicality."
Graeme Cunningham's mother rejected the idea that Bishop was giving up his appeals for the families' sake. She called it a shallow gesture and objected to anyone seeing him as a martyr, ABC4 reported.
In the days before the execution, the Deseret News reported that Bishop said he was ready to die. Shortly after 12:01 a.m. on the scheduled day, he was to be strapped to a gurney and given a lethal drug mixture through an intravenous line in his right arm. He was executed by lethal injection at the Utah State Prison in June 1988, under the warrant setting June 10. His last words, as recorded in a 2019 KUTV list of everyone executed in Utah, were: "Give my apologies to the families of my victims." KUTV listed the five boys' ages as 4, 4, 6, 11 and 13.
Bishop confessed to five killings and was convicted of five. Investigators in two other Utah child cases looked hard at him, and in both he denied any part. Neither case was ever charged against him.
Rachael Runyan, 3, was abducted from a playground in Sunset, Utah, on August 26, 1982, and her body was found on September 19, 1982, in Morgan County, KUTV reported in August 2026. In June 1988 Sunset Police Lieutenant Phil Olmstead, who had worked the case for six years, told the Deseret News that he considered Bishop the best suspect. He pointed to what he saw as a similar lure, to Bishop's familiarity with the Sunset area, and to his belief that such abductions had stopped after Bishop's arrest. Rachael's brothers had described the man as light-complexioned and Black; Olmstead suggested that a deep tan from desert trips and Bishop's hairstyle in 1982 might explain the description. Bishop "looked me straight in the eye" when he denied it, Olmstead said, and had told him he would admit it if he had done it. "I'm going to keep working this thing until it's solved," Olmstead said. The case was reopened by cold-case experts in 2007, the Associated Press reported, and it remained unsolved in August 2026, when KUTV reported that investigators were still asking for information and that the state's cold-case unit describes the suspect as an African American man aged 25 to 35.
Thomas J. Walling, 9, ran away from a foster home and disappeared on June 24, 1983; his body was later found in Box Elder County. Box Elder County Sheriff Robert Limb interviewed Bishop twice. By June 1988 his confidence that Bishop was responsible had fallen from about 90 percent to roughly even. "It could be anybody," Limb told the Deseret News, though he noted some circumstantial physical evidence and the timing. Asked whether there were other victims, Bishop gave an unequivocal "No."
October 16, 1979: Alonzo Daniels, 4, disappears from his apartment complex courtyard in Salt Lake City; a detective questions Bishop two days later.
1980 or November 8, 1981 (sources differ): Kim Peterson, 11, disappears.
October 20, 1981: Danny Davis, 4, disappears from a supermarket while shopping with his grandfather.
August 26, 1982: Rachael Runyan, 3, is abducted in Sunset; never charged against Bishop, who denied it.
June 22, 1983: Troy Ward, 6, disappears from a Salt Lake City park.
June 24, 1983: Thomas J. Walling, 9, disappears; never charged against Bishop, who denied it.
July 14, 1983: Graeme Cunningham, 13, disappears.
July 24, 1983: Bishop is questioned at the Metropolitan Hall of Justice, arrested on a warrant and confesses to all five killings; he leads officers to the remains.
January 1984: The defense moves for a change of venue; the motion is denied.
February 9, 1984: Suppression hearing on the confession.
March 1984: Bishop is convicted of five counts of first-degree murder and five of aggravated kidnapping, with other charges, and sentenced to death.
February 3, 1988: The Utah Supreme Court affirms; rehearing is denied February 24.
April 8, 1988: Competency hearing before Judge James Sawaya; three psychiatrists find him competent to end his appeals.
May 2, 1988: The Utah Supreme Court lifts the stay of execution.
May 1988: Judge Frank G. Noel issues the warrant setting execution for June 10, 1988.
June 1988: Bishop is executed by lethal injection at the Utah State Prison.
2007: The Runyan case is reopened by cold-case experts.
August 2026: The Runyan case remains unsolved.