ARTHUR GARY BISHOP
Panic
Utah police might be helpless in the face of Bishop's cunning, but state legislators were galvanized by the spate of disappearances. When three-year-old Rachel Runyan was kidnapped from a school playground in Sunset, 30 miles north of Salt Lake City, in August 1982, the public outcry was predictable. Discovery of her strangled corpse a short time later turned the fear to panic. Deafened by grass-roots calls for action, local politicians did what politicians always do: they passed another law.
First-degree murder was already a capital crime in Utah, but legislators showed their indignation with a new statute on child abduction, ranked among the strictest in the nation. Depending on the circumstances of a given kidnapping, convicted abductors faced mandatory 5-, 10- or 15-year prison terms for their crime. Civic groups applauded the effort, but it did nothing to help locate Utah's child-killer.
Investigators soon dismissed any link between Rachel Runyan's murder and the vanished boys of Salt Lake City. Statewide, they were deluged with reports of strangers accosting children on streets, in parks and playgroundsbut still, no one blew the whistle on child molester Arthur Bishop, alias "Roger Downs." Rumors circulated of an occult motive in the crimes, but police dismissed those in turn, noting that none of the missing boys had been kidnapped within a week of Halloween. The "sacrifice" theory was finally put to rest when October 1982 passed without another child abduction in Salt Lake City.
Authorities were baffled. Desperate for new leads, for anything at all, they rallied at the Metropolitan Hall of Justice in Salt Lake City. Representatives of the city police department gathered with detectives from the Salt Lake and Davis County sheriff's offices, joined by agents of the FBI. They reviewed their open cases, stymied by the seeming lack of pattern. Each of the missing boys had been kidnapped at different times, on different days of the week, thereby frustrating any speculation on the kidnapper's employment. Most killers prey on members of their own race, but Alonzo Daniels was African American, the later victims both fair-haired Caucasians. Kim Peterson was nearly three times the age of victims Daniels and Davis, casting doubt on the image of a pedophile stalking pre-school children.
In short, the meeting led investigators nowhere. The case was cold by June 23, 1983. Nearly two years had passed since the last disappearance in Salt Lake City, but the killer was about to return with a vengeance.
Troy Ward celebrated his sixth birthday that Wednesday afternoon. Permitted to play by himself at a park near his home, Troy was supposed to meet a family friend at 4:00 p.m., on a predetermined street corner. The friend would drive him home, where presents and a birthday cake were waiting. Come 4 o'clock, however, there was no sign of Troy on the sidewalk. His would-be chauffeur drove on to the Ward residence, expecting to find Troy there, but he had not returned from the park.
Police were called at once, patrol officers searching a grid of streets around the park. One witness, as related in the press, recalled a boy of Troy's description leaving the scene with a man, on foot, a few minutes prior to 4:00 p.m. The man and boy had seemed at ease with one another, the witnesses assuming them to be father and son.
In fact, the man was Arthur Gary Bishop, and his fourth victim was gone without a trace. At home, Bishop repeated his grim ritual of fondling and molestation. He later told Detective Bell (quoted in the Deseret News) that he considered freeing Troy alive, but a last-minute threat to report the assault changed his mind. The hammer and bathtub were waiting. Afterward, instead of driving to his private graveyard outside Cedar Fort, Bishop drove east and buried Troy near Big Cottonwood Creek, in the Twin Peaks Wilderness Area.
It was all so easy.
He would not wait two years to claim his next victim.
In fact, he would not even wait a month.