This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A man known in the early 1970s as the Sugar House Rapist will never be allowed to leave prison, the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole announced this month.
Ronald Dale Easthope, 64, will serve "natural life" and never be released, the parole board said.
Easthope has admitted to committing nine rapes, eight of which occurred during a four-month period in 1970. Easthope would break into a victim's home while she was sleeping and rape her at gunpoint, often wearing a mask or nylon stocking over his head.
Arrested in February 1971, Easthope was convicted and sentenced to prison for up to life.
Paroled in July 1981, Easthope raped a 17-year-old girl two months later. He was arrested after telling a friend about the attack.
Easthope claims he is a changed man, in part because of learning that Daniel Ray Troyer, whom Easthope had befriended in prison, had killed Easthope's mother in her Salt Lake City home in 1982. Her death had been attributed to natural causes until Troyer confessed.
In 1999, Troyer was serving life in prison for killing two elderly women when he confessed to killing Easthope's mother and two other women after prosecutors promised he would face no additional charges.
"Somebody just like me killed my mother," Easthope told the parole board last year.