Arthur Gary Bishop

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Arthur Gary Bishop (1951 - June 10, 1988) was a child molester and serial killer from Hinckley, Utah. He confessed to the murders of five young boys in 1983, as a result of a routine police investigation.

As a youth, Bishop was an honor student and Eagle Scout.^[1]

Bishop began molesting boys as a mentor in the "Big Brother" program. No one initially suspected him, although dozens of children would accuse him of abuse after he was arrested for murder. He was arrested for embezzlement in 1977 and given a five-year suspended sentence, but he skipped his parole and fled to Salt Lake City, living (and molesting children) under the alias "Roger Downs."

Bishop killed his first victim in 1979. He committed the next three murders over a three-year period, spending the months in between victims attempting to satiate his violent urges by torturing and killing animals. After committing the fifth murder in July 1983, he approached police (without admitting he had committed the crime), identified himself by his alias, and said he wanted to help the investigation. Local police looked into their past reports and found that "Roger Downs" lived in the vicinity of four of the murders, and knew the fifth child's parents. They brought him in for questioning, discovered his real name, and eventually got him to confess to all five murders. The next day, he led the police to three skeletons near Cedar Fort and two more recent corpses near Big Cottonwood Creek.

During his trial, Bishop claimed that an addiction to child pornography molded his violent sexual fantasies and eventually drove him to act them out. He was nevertheless found guilty of five counts of capital murder, five counts of aggravated kidnapping, and one count of sexually abusing a minor, and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection on June 10, 1988 at the Utah state prison at Point of the Mountain.

After his conviction he wrote in his letter,[1]

"Pornography was a determining factor in my downfall. Somehow I became sexually attracted to young boys and I would fantasize about them naked. Certain bookstores offered sex education, photographic, or art books which occasionally contained pictures of nude boys. I purchased such books and used them to enhance my masturbatory fantasies."

"Finding and procuring sexually arousing materials became an obsession. 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."

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