A man who spent more than 50 years in prison in connection with a string of rapes that terrorized Salt Lake City’s Sugar House neighborhood has died.
Ronald Dale Easthope, once referred to as “the Sugar House rapist,” died on April 25, a family member confirmed. He was 79, and had been living in a care facility, according to the state’s Board of Pardons and Parole, which issued him a conditional release last December. Before that, he had served most of the previous 53 years in prison.
Easthope had admitted to committing eight rapes during a four-month period in 1970 and 1971, all but one of them in the Sugar House area. Easthope would break into a victim’s home while she slept and assault her at gunpoint, often wearing a mask or a nylon stocking over his face.
“This guy is cool, calm and knows exactly what he’s doing,” Capt. W.M. Stoler of the Salt Lake City police said when his detectives were still pursuing the case in January 1971, as reported by The Salt Lake Tribune. “We’ve checked out hundreds of suspects and leads trying to get this guy, … and we’ve got a couple of officers going crazy because they’ve tracked down so many leads that go nowhere.”
Police arrested the 24-year-old Easthope on Feb. 26, 1971, after five victims picked him out of a lineup. Three of the victims started crying when they identified Easthope, The Tribune reported at the time.
(Salt Lake Tribune archives) A mug shot of Ronald Dale Easthope, the so-called "Sugar House rapist," in 1971. Easthope, who served more than 52 years in prison for a series of rapes in Salt Lake City's Sugar House neighborhood in the early 1970s, died April 25, 2025, in a care facility.
In the four months before Easthope’s arrest, police said they suspected the same man had committed 9 or 10 rapes or attempted rapes — one in the Avenues neighborhood, the rest in Sugar House.
Easthope was ultimately convicted on charges of rape, sodomy and robbery and received a sentence of up to life in prison.
In 1974, The Tribune reported that a woman had sought to marry Easthope while he was in prison, and the warden denied the request. She appealed to the Utah Supreme Court, which also turned down her request, and to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.
In July 1981, Easthope was granted parole. Two months later, he raped a 17-year-old girl. He was arrested almost immediately, after telling a friend about the assault.
During his trial in the 1981 rape case, 3rd District Judge Dean E. Conder ordered Utah media outlets not to use the phrase “Sugar House rapist,” fearing it would prejudice potential jurors. KUTV, KSL and the Deseret News, along with Utah’s Society of Professional Journalists chapter, sued to have the gag order lifted. Even though the restriction lasted just four days, the Utah Supreme Court in 1983 ruled unanimously that Conder was wrong to order it.
“Though sensational and unsavory, that epithet is still an instrument used to communicate information or ideas,” Justice Dallin H. Oaks wrote in his opinion. “If prior restraint cannot be used to withhold information and ideas, neither can it be used to censor the vocabulary through which they are communicated.”
(Oaks left the court in 1984, called to be an apostle for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Today he is first counselor in the First Presidency to President Russell M. Nelson.)
Easthope, once back in prison, applied several times to be paroled, each time without success. In a 2009 parole hearing, he told the parole board that he was a changed man in prison.
One reason for that change, Easthope said, is that he learned that a man he befriended in prison, Daniel Ray Troyer, had killed Easthope’s mother in her Salt Lake City home in 1982 — a death previously attributed to natural causes.
Troyer, who was serving a life sentence for killing two women in their 80s, confessed in 1999 that he killed Easthope’s mother, Tessie, and two more women. Troyer made the confessions after prosecutors promised he would not face additional charges.
“Somebody just like me killed my mother,” told the parole board in 2009.
A year later, the board decided that Easthope, then 64, would serve “natural life” in prison and never be released.
However, on March 19, 2024, the board granted Easthope a “compassionate release,” which under administrative rules can be given to inmates whose threat to public safety is “significantly reduced due to the effects or symptoms of advancing age, medical infirmity, disease, or disability, or mental health disease or disability.”
The board set a release date of Sept. 17 of last year, but because of difficulty finding a care facility, his release was delayed until Dec. 17.
Easthope’s crimes occurred before a national victims’ rights movement gained momentum; Utah’s Rights of Crime Victims Act was passed by the state Legislature in 1994.
Today, state law requires the Department of Corrections to notify victims who ask to be updated when an offender is released, and in April 2024, the parole board launched MyVoice, a tool designed to inform crime victims about upcoming parole hearings.
In Easthope’s case, a spokesperson for the parole board said, the board was “unable to locate any of the victims of record.”
The Department of Corrections also maintains a public website that lists inmates who have died in custody — eight so far in 2025. Since Easthope was no longer an inmate when he died, his name would not appear on that site, a Corrections Department spokesperson said.
