On a crisp autumn afternoon in Salt Lake City, Utah, on October 14, 1979, four-year-old White male Alonzo Daniels was playing in the courtyard of his apartment complex. His mother, who kept a watchful eye on him, momentarily lost sight of her son, and when she looked back, he was gone. A frantic search by his mother and relatives throughout the complex and the nearby streets proved fruitless, prompting them to call the police.
As officers began a door-to-door search of the apartment
complex, they spoke with a neighbor named Roger Downs, who lived just across the hall from the Daniels family. Downs denied having any knowledge of the boy's whereabouts, and with no reason to suspect him, the police continued their investigation. However, the tragic reality was that Alonzo was already dead. Downs, whose real name was Arthur Gary Bishop, had lured the young boy into his apartment with the promise of candy. When Alonzo began to cry and threatened to tell his mother, Bishop panicked. He first struck the child with a hammer before ultimately drowning him in the bathtub.
In a chilling act of audacity, Bishop placed Alonzo's body in a large cardboard box and carried it out of his apartment, walking directly past the boy's desperate mother as she called out her son's name in the courtyard. He then drove the body to a remote desert area near Cedar Fort, about 20 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and buried him in an unmarked grave. The search for Alonzo continued for days, with hundreds of volunteers joining the efforts, but it was all in vain. It wasn't until years later that Bishop was identified as a suspect in the disappearances of several other young boys. During questioning, he confessed to the murder of Alonzo Daniels and four other boys. Bishop led authorities to the locations of his victims' bodies. He was subsequently tried and convicted of five counts of aggravated murder and was sentenced to death. Arthur Gary Bishop was executed by lethal injection on June 10, 1988.
