Arthur Gary Bishop was born on September 29, 1952, in Hinckley, Utah, the eldest of six boys of Eugene and Carol Bishop, whose families had lived in the area for generations; one account gives his birth year as 1951. He was a quiet, intelligent boy, an Eagle Scout and a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was an honors student at Delta High School from 1966 to 1970, where he was the school's business manager and a graduation speaker, and an honors student in accounting and business at Stevens-Henager College. At nineteen he served a mission in the Philippines.
In 1978 he was working as a bookkeeper at a Ford dealership when he was arrested in February for embezzlement and given a five-year suspended sentence. He skipped his probation, fled to Salt Lake City and lived as Roger W. Downs, and later also as Lynn Jones. The church excommunicated him in 1979. In Salt Lake City he joined the Big Brothers program and was a big brother to a ten-year-old boy for nearly a year, until the directors forced him out, before the first murder, on discovering he was molesting other children.
Five boys disappeared from Salt Lake County over five years: Alonzo Daniels, four, in October 1979; Claude Kimley Peterson, known as Kim, eleven, on November 8, 1980; Danny Davis on October 20, 1981; Troy Ward, six, on June 22, 1983; and Graeme Cunningham, thirteen, on July 14, 1983. Sources give Davis as four and as six. All five were sexually abused and killed. On October 14, 1979, by the most detailed account, although some give the 16th, he lured Alonzo Daniels from the courtyard of his apartment complex with the promise of candy, struck him with a hammer and drowned him in the bathtub, then carried the body out in a box past the boy's mother as she called his name, and buried him in Cedar Valley.
He lived near every one of them. He took Daniels from his own apartment complex. He lived across the street from the supermarket Danny Davis was lured from, moved near the alley where Kim Peterson vanished, and lived in the neighborhood Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham were taken from. Across the five he killed with what came to hand: a pistol, a hammer, a rubber mallet, a bathtub, his hands.
Nobody connected the disappearances to him for four years. He was questioned as a matter of routine after Peterson vanished and was not treated as a suspect, and the description witnesses gave of the man the boy had spoken to did not point anywhere in particular.
What ended it was the last killing. Graeme Cunningham had been planning to leave on a skateboarding trip to California with a friend and with the man he knew as Roger Downs. Bishop telephoned him the day before he disappeared. Police looking into that found that Downs was not the friend's father as claimed, had lived at a string of addresses, had offered to photograph a boy naked, spent money on young boys, and might be using the names Lynn Jones and Arthur Bishop.
On July 24, 1983 he was interviewed at the Metropolitan Hall of Justice about Cunningham alone. Detectives left that room with confessions to all five. Asked about a different boy, he answered simply that he had kidnapped and killed Troy Ward too, which stunned them. He told them he was glad they had caught him because he could not stop, that he would get around little children and start shaking. He then took the detectives to the bodies: Daniels, Peterson and Davis buried near one another in remote country, Ward and Cunningham in Big Cottonwood Creek, where they were found in a logjam.
He was convicted in 1984 on five counts of first-degree murder and five of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to death five times over.
In February 1988 he called life on death row tedious and worthless, ordered all appeals stopped, dismissed his anti-death-penalty lawyers and asked that the execution go ahead, saying he dared not deny its call.
He spent his last hours sleeping, reading scripture and meeting his lawyer, a bishop, a psychologist and his biographer, and refused a last meal. In a handwritten final statement he said he had allowed himself to be misled by Satan and that his life had been marked by wicked, perverse and depraved actions. Strapped to the gurney he asked that his apologies be given to the families of the victims. He was pronounced dead at 12:15 in the morning on June 10, 1988. Reports of his age at death differ, at thirty-five, thirty-six and thirty-seven.
The detective who had taken his confession in 1983 said afterward that killing Bishop would not stop other child abusers from killing children, but it would stop Bishop. The mother of one victim rejected the idea that he was giving up his life to make anyone's easier, and pointed out that he had offered to help her look for her missing son when he had already killed him.