Bobby Bizup Pt. One

This was a case that took place all the way back in nineteen fifty eight, and Bobby Bissop was a ten year old boy who was hearing impaired and went missing while attending a summer camp at a Catholic camp in Colorado before some of his remains were found in a wooded area about a year later, and at the time they just assumed that he wandered off and died of exposure and it pretty much faded from the spotlight for several decades, but then in twenty nineteen, an investigated

reporter named Kevin Vaughan who worked for the Denver based TV station KUSA, was doing a deep dive into a cover up and a sexual abuse scandal involving Catholic priests and children and wound up having an unexpected tie into Bobby Bisop's disappearance. And then in twenty twenty one, this case went in a very unexpected direction when a man came forward with a human skull belonging to a child that he said had been in the possession of his father.

And there's been speculation that this skull might have belonged to Bobby Bissum. And I don't know if you were recalled, but in twenty twenty one, this story was everywhere for a while, it was all over social media just because of how unusual it is. So do you have any recollection of hearing about this four years ago?

But back in the nineteen fifties, there wasn't as much public knowledge about the cover up of sexual abuse from priests in the Catholic Church of Children, so nobody really suspected that anything bad happened. But of course, once they started doing this deep dive several decades later and they found out some new information about Bobby Bisop's disappearance, everyone started looking at this in a different light. And once they uncovered this skull, everyone was going, WTF, what actually

happened here? And it became one of the weirdest mysteries of the modern era.

to the elements. But when you know that there's children that are being preyed upon by these priests and Bobby could have potentially been one of them, then you look at it in a whole new light. So that is the advantage when time passes and we gather more information and then we have the ability or investigators have the ability to go and revisit these cases and to look at them with this new information in a fresh set of eyes.

the authorities to reopen the case. But here the complete opposite happened, because, as we're going to talk about, Bobby's parents at the time did not think that there was anything suspicious about the way he died, accepted that it was nothing more than a tragic accident, went on living

the rest of their lives, and then passed away. And now many years later, people are now looking at the case at a different light and are now thinking, nearly seventy years after the fact, that hmm, maybe foul play did take place after all. So, like I said, this took place all the way back in nineteen fifty eight in Colorado. Bobby Bisop was the only child of Joseph

and Connie Bissop. His father, Joseph, was a master sergeant in the United States Air Force who was stationed in California when Bobby was born, so he was actually born on an Air Force base, but they eventually transferred to Colorado, and at this particular point, Joseph is now stationed at Lowry Air Force Base, while Connie is a stay at home Mump and Bobby sadly had been completely deaf since birth nearly He was now, at this particular point, a

fifth grade student at a school for children with disabilities, and he did wear a hearing aid, but he could still barely hear it all and had difficulties speaking King, so he pretty much had to communicate with sign language and was also an accomplished slip reader. But Bobby was described of still being a positive, upbeat boy and he loved to go to a destination called Camp Saint Malo, which was a Catholic boy summer camp located in Boulders

County near the town of ST's Park. And as a side note, if you never heard of SD's Park, this place is kind of famous because it has the Stanley Hotel there, which is the hotel that Stephen King stayed

at when he wrote his classic novel The Shining. And as a side note, when I went to the True Crime Podcast Festival in Denver in twenty twenty four, I decided to take a side trip to SD's Park and went to the Stanley Hotel because they do a full fledged Shining tour and have some hotel rooms there that are made up to look like the hotel rooms in

Stanley Kubrick's movies. So EST's Park is a very beautiful mountainside town and it's not the place you would expect that a scandal would be taking place involving the disappearance in death of a ten year old boy.

town like ours. We left our doors unlocked. It's almost a true crime trope.

happen to Bobby in the nineteen fifties. It's still kind of a landmark because even though Camp Saint Malo has since closed down, it had a chapel on the property known as the Saint Catherine of Siana Chapel, which rests on a large rock formation and has since become known as the Chapel on the Rock and is pretty much a still a major tourist attraction, and in the nineteen eighties they actually turned it into a retreat and conference center and it was visited by none other than Pope

John Paul the Second. So this is a town that has a lot of history to it.

I can't imagine that there would have been that many schools because the approach to learning back then seemed to be like a one size fits all and if you don't fit into this very narrow paradigm of like how we view a student should be or how learning should happen, then you were kind of left to fend for yourself.

been attending Camp Saint Malo for a year. They kind of divided it up into like one week sessions, and he had already gone to three weekly sessions, and by all accounts, he really loved it there, from what he told to his parents writing in letters, saying that they always treated him very nicely, that he got a lot

of support there. So in retrospect, you can understand why his parents never thought that anything suspicious happened, because everything that Bobby was communicating to them in his letters made it sound like he was having a great time there, so you would never think that anyone was trying to take advantage of them.

But the one thing that would kind of fly in the face of that is that it's not like this was just his first time going to the camp. He'd been going previously, and so when he gets home, if he felt safe to speak to us, to sign with his parents about this, because we know in the cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, it can take those who have been children at the time, like twenty to

twenty five years to come forward with their stories. So I can't assume that if that was happening that we would have necessarily seen all the telltale signs, or that he would have spoken to his parents about that.

and at that it's something did happen to it. It probably took place during his most recent session in August of nineteen fifty eight, So it was August fifteenth when Bobby went fishing at Cabin Creek, And there are many different versions of how Bobby disappeared, but this was the official one that I'm going to share now that was published in news accounts back in nineteen fifty eight. But the story was that he was fishing at Cabin Creek.

He was about a few hundred yards away from the main lodge, and at around six pm, one of the councilors, Terry Cowan, said that he saw Bobby fishing there with an ice cream carton full of worms, and he pointed at his watch to indicate that it was nearly time for dinner, so he needed to gather up his things and return to the camp to visit the mess hall. And Bobby then nodded a Cowan to acknowledge that he understood him. But the story goes that after Cowan walked away,

Bobby soon banished without a trace. An hour passed and Bobby had still not returned to the mess hall for supper, so the councilor started searching for them. It's been reported that they found Bobby's fishing pole and a carton of worms, but there are differing counts from different sources about where they found it. One of them said that it was on a hillside near the camp, and there was another account that said it was a full half mile away. But they checked the creek, it was only a foot deep.

So they found it very unlikely that Bobby could have fallen in and drowned, because otherwise they could have found him. So they decided to launch a major search effort for him, and it would involve the United States Forest Service, the Boulder County Sheriff's office, and because Bobby's father, Joseph, was a station with the Air Force, they got two hundred airmen from Lowry Air Force Base to search the surrounding area and the mountains because it was right next to

Rocky Mountain National Park. But unfortunately, they just had trouble finding any trace of them.

the search efforts failed to miss them. And this was particularly devastating for the Bisops because Bobby was her only child, and it's been reported that his mother was so devastated that she became seriously ill and had to be placed

under doctor's care. They got a fairly promising lead about a week later when there were sightings of a boy in SD's Park who had gone into a shop and the witnesses said that he kept pointing to his mouth in his ears and seemed to have trouble communicating, and they're thinking, how many hearing impaired boys are going to be there, So they thought there was a good chance that this was Bobby, and they started wondering that maybe Bobby was just worried that he was going to get

into trouble because he had not come back to the mess hall in time for supper, So they were hoping that he had run away and was hiding out and was just not coming forward because he thought he was going to get in trouble, so his father actually arranged for a pilot to fly over the camp and drop thousands of leaflets containing this message quote mother and father love you. We need you. Mother is sick, she needs

you at home. We love you end quote. So it's so heartbreaking to hear that, because I think they were holding out hope that Bobby was still alive and that if he got one of these leaflets he would finally come forward and return to the camp on his own.

It just seems like there's a higher probability that that was not an accurate sighting.

was mistook for Bobby. And we now know that this was a mistake in sighting and it was not actually him.

give up. Over the course of the next year, he would return to the area to perform his own independent searches for Bobby at the camp and the surrounding wooded areas and the surrounding mountains, but unfortunately he was unable

to find anything. It would be in almost an entire year before we got some sort of resolution because on July third, nineteen fifty nine, tre of councilors from Camp Saint Malo were taking a group of campers on a hike through the adjacent Rocky Mountain National Park, and one of the councilors was a young man named Neil Hewitt. And it was pretty much state or procedure for a lot of the counselors there to be seminary students who were training to become priests, and that's exactly what would

happen to Hewitt. He would become a priest a couple of years later, and he claimed that he was looking down ravine and he noticed what appeared to be a scrap of clothing and a bone which was concealed beneath

some heavy underbrush. So he took the bone in the clothing and brought it back to the camp's director, a priest named Reverend Richard Heaster, and he subsequently contacted the Rocky Mountain National Park rangers and they decided to launch another search effort on that mountain, and sure enough, they soon found some additional clothing scraps which seemed to match

the description of what Bobby was last seen wearing. And they also found some additional human remains, including a scapula, a clavical, a humorous, several vertebra, some vertebral discs, and a number of ribs. And they were not able to find a skull. And obviously they could not check for Bobby's dental records, and because this was nineteen fifty nine,

they could not do DNA testing. But they also happened to find a Zenith hearing aid battery case which would match the one that Bobby often carried for his own hearing aid. Well, even though they cannot positively identifying the remains as belonging to Bobby, they figured, well, what are the odds that another hearing aid case is going to

be found next to these skelt remains. So they felt comfortable saying that even though we can't use dental records and they couldn't use DNA, that they were positively certain that these remains did belong to Bobby.

It would be really hard to spot that. So it seems pretty unlikely that somebody just would happen to catch it in their eye and then be like, Oh, let me go down this ravine and check it out.

and no one stumbled across these remains. And we'll talk more about this later, but my personal theory was that because Bobby's father, Joseph, kept coming back to the area to perform his own independent search, I'm thinking that if there was some sort of cover up and foul play took place, that maybe the people at the camp were thinking, if he doesn't find something, then his father is just

going to keep coming over and over again. But if we can plant some of the remains here and pretend that we discovered them, then maybe there will be closure here and Bobby's family will accept that he wandered off and died of died of exposure, and we can finally close this case for good.

depend on the twenties and mid twenties. I mean, unless they're if they were doing a PhD in theology, they could be like twenty six years old or something if they were just coming to the end of their PhD and they did it straight from like you know, bachelors to Masters to PhD. So yeah, they could be anywhere from eighteen to like, yeah, mid twenties, maybe late twenties.

But it's not the like camp counselors that I was picturing in my head, which was like the teenage camp counselors that I used to have a Bible camp that were like fifteen or sixteen.

was cover ups taking place here. So even though these seminary students like Neil Hewett were quite young, they probably would have had older mentors who would have been able to help them orchestrate a cover up if that is what happened.

away on vacation. So the authorities pretty much had the mindset, we don't want Joseph and Connie reading about the discovery of their son's remains in the newspaper until we have the chance to personally talk about them. And it was not until a couple days later that they were finally able to track the Bisoms down and inform them about what happened, and then it would be made national news on July the ninth. But all I'm thinking is if this happened today, then there's no way that this would

not have leaked out. That if they found the remains of a missing person, it would be out on the internet immediately, and those poor parents would probably read about it on social media. But because it was nineteen fifty nine, they were able to keep it a secret until they could finally tell the parents face to face.

no looking at your phone. There would be no way you would be able to escape that information, and it does put investigators in a precarious position because you don't want the family to find out that way and when you don't have a way to contact them. They found their remains on the third and they don't get ahold of them till the sixth. It seems like that's several days where they could have had some kind of resolution

and at least some kind of piece. Just on a side note, do you know what Connie's health was like at this point?

So that's why it's very good that they were able to keep this dark until they were able to talk to Joseph and Connie face to face, so there were no apparent signs of foul play on the remains, so the coroner was inclined to believe the Bobby had simply wandered away from the camp and gotten lost, and his

death was likely the result of exhaustion and exposure. And Joseph and Connie they accepted the coroner's conclusion and didn't think that anything suspicious took place, And they even made a public statement saying that they did not hold any resentment towards the camp or the counselors, and they actually praised them for having taken good care of Bobby while he was there, because as far as they knew, he

always had a great time there. And of course these words would turn out to be ironic when you learn about some of the new information that would serve as decades later. So sadly, Joseph and Connie I don't believe they went on to have any more children. Joseph died in two thousand and one and Connie passed away in two thousand and eight. And as morbid as it might be to say this, that was probably a blessing in disguise that they died before all this new information came

out about Bobby's disappearance many years later. Because they were pretty much at peace, they figured, well, we lost her son. He died of exposure, but they didn't have to hear any information to make them believe he was being abused or might have been murdered. So if they had to hear about this scandal that we're going to talk about before they passed away, it would have been just devastating.

So in a way, it's very good that they died at peace not having to learn any of these horrible things that potentially happened to Bobby.

murdered just never crossed their mind. So the case would return to the spotlight in October of twenty nineteen, when Robert Troyer, the former US Attorney of Colorado, released a report titled Roman Catholic Clergy Sexual Abuse of Children in

Colorado from nineteen fifty in twenty nineteen. The report came about after an independent review of records from the Archdiocese of Denver, the Diocese of Colorado Springs, and the Diocese of Pablo as the dioceses and the Colorado Attorney General's off has had a degree to fund an investigation into child's sex abuse allegations against Catholic priests, and the final numbers have since increased, but back in twenty nineteen, the initial report concluded that a total of forty three priests

had molested at least one hundred and sixty six children in Colorado between nineteen fifty and twenty nineteen, and most of these incidents were covered up by the church and

never reported to the police. And it would turn out that at least three of these children were abused at Camp Saint Malo from the late nineteen forties until the nineteen sixties, and one of these children claimed that he had been victimized by the camp's original founder of Reverend Joseph Bassetti, and while they were still seminary students at the time, two other accused priests in the report had been working at the campus counselors at the time that

Bobby went missing. One of them sounds like a real monster. His name was Harold Robert White, who has been accused of abusing at least seventy children throughout the course of his life and described as the quote unquote most a

clergy child sex abuser in Colorado history. In total, White was assigned to six different parishes in one twenty one year period, as it seems apparent now that the church received numerous allegations of abuse against him, but then decided to cover it up by transferring him around, and eventually came to the point where the amount of accusations were so large that White was finally removed from the priesthood in nineteen ninety three, and he was subsequently defrocked by

the Vatican in two thousand and four before he died in two thousand and six at the age of seventy three. But of course, he never faced any punishment from law

enforcement about the whole thing. And even though there has never been any evidence to service that White may have personally abused Bobby, the idea that he was a seminary student and a counselor at the camp back at the time Bobby went missing really makes your skin crawl once you learn about all the abuse he got away with throughout the course of his life.

their stories. It creates a whole host of issues where they question themselves on so many different levels, and it can create major issues within their relationships, to actually say that out loud and know that there's no legal recourse in most cases because of the way that the laws

are structured. There's a statute of limitations. So we can know that this person did all of these horrible things, but never to be able to hold this person to account legally and to have them be punished is such a travesty of justice.

any time in prison. And as we're going to talk about, you're correct a lot of these abuse allegations only come out after these child victims reach adulthood, and they always say that, well, at the time, I thought this sort of thing was normal, or I thought that, well, I've been taught never to speak out against a priest, so maybe I deserved what happened. And it's only once they reach adulthood and find out how widespread this was that

they feel comfortable coming forward and sharing their story. But like you said, the statute of limitations for the most part, have usually expired, so these priests can never be arrested or punished for what they did.

with a child. And then you're going to have manipulation, and you're going to have somebody who's brainwashing them to say that like this is normal or this is your path to God, or whatever they say. But you also have parents who are like, oh, this person is paying special attention to my child. That must mean that my child is special. And they also know how to target

children that have some type of issue. And it could be in Bobby's case that he was hearing impaired, and in other children's cases that maybe their families were really busy, both parents were working all the time, or was a single parent household. There is something about that child that makes that person think like, Okay, I can target them

and I can potentially get away with it. They're not going to pick a child where they think, Okay, if I target this child, they're going to go run and tell Oh.

had discovered Bobby's remains. He had studied at the Saint Thomas Seminary in Denver and was officially ordained as a priest in nineteen sixty two, four years after Bobby went missing and he decided to leave the priest who had eighteen years later when he decided to get married, And for many decades people really didn't suspect that there was

anything wrong with Hewitt. But it all started in two thousand and two when a woman named Donna Ballentine was going through a box of her deceased mother's papers and uncovered a letter which had been written by her cousin named Stuart Sake, who had taken his own life with a self inflicted gunshot wound. He definitely had a very troubled life, and she read this line in his letter that really struck her, which said, quote, dear Neil it's been twenty four years since you sexually molested me. I

have been an alcoholic for twenty four years. End quote. And the letter apparently detailed a lot of sexual abuse that Stuart claimed he had suffered as a teenager by a priest named Neil who would take him on trips and use alcohol in order to groom him. And now he was saying that this was the source of his substance abuse disorder that he developed as an adult. Well, Donni instantly figured out that the Neil that Stuart was referring to was Neil Hewitt, who had been a big

part of her family's life. So she took the letter to the Archdiocese of Denver and filed a formal complaint against Hewett. And this is when the House of Cards started tumbling down.

these things that unfairly sexual abuse survivors often feel. So they would turn to drugs or alcohol, and then when coming forward as adults against the Catholic Church, they only would use that to discredit them, which was so so heartbreaking. And it's like most of them would likely not have ended up with substance use or alcohol use disorder had they not been exposed to such egregious things by an

institution that should have protected them. And like in Bobby's case, with the one priest you talked about, you molested like at least seventy children. Okay, well, they moved him six times. They had the opportunity to defrock him any one of those times because each time it would have been a major infraction to move a priest. It's because something really

terrible happened. So they could have taken it upon themselves to take responsibility and say this guy's out, this is ruining the culture of the Catholic Church from the inside. But instead they just let it rock.

story to become public. But as we're going to find out here, it sounds like Neil Hewitt did this repeatedly and a whole bunch of different children over the course of two or three decades, and the only reaction to it was transferring them around to different parishes and covering it up. And you mentioned the movie Spotlight in case you haven't heard of it. It came out in twenty

fifteen and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Had an a list cast of Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel mccadams who play a bunch of journalists for the Boston Globe, and it was based on a real life investigation where they looked into the systemic sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and hundreds of victims eventually came forward to share their stories after this series of articles came out, and one of them was another man named

Michael Smolanik, who watched Spotlight in twenty fifteen and finally decided to come forward and make his own accusations against Neil Hewitt. He filed a formal complaint with the Archdiocese of Denver to say that Hewitt had habitually sexually abused him over the course of many years when he was a child, and he even went to the trouble of phoning up Hewitt to ask if he remembered what he did to him, and Hewitt apparently actually admitted to it

on the call. So this was pretty much evidence that finally got Hewitt to frock by the Vatican in twenty eighteen, But of course he had been retired from the priesthood for nearly thirty years at that point, and because of

the Statute of Limitations, they couldn't prosecute him. So it was another case where like a priest had his reputation destroyed, but he didn't have to spend any time in prison because so much time had passed and it would turn out that he had been accused of sexually abusing at least nine children at four different parishes over the course of eighteen years.

took place in part because of his death. So when all these sexual abuse allegations started coming out, Kevin Vaughn, an investigative journalist for Channel nine News at the Denver based TV station KUSA, decided to start looking into these allegations and he actually paid a visit to Neil Hewitt, who is now eighty three years old and living in Tucson, Arizona.

This took place in April of twenty nineteen, which was over sixty years after Bobby originally went missing, and while Hugh would not agree to a formal interview, he did agree to answer some of Vaughn's questions on the porch for about thirty minutes, but he was unaware that Vaughan had secretly set up a camera in order to record the conversation from a distance, and when asked if all the allegations from Stuart Sake and Michael Smellanic were true,

he would pretty much agreed to them. He said, yeah, I did this, and I'm really sorry for it, but there's nothing else we can do. So he was now finally trying to get all this off his chest and admit to all these horrible things that he had done

when he was a priest. But during the conversation, Kevin Vond decided to bring up the death of Bobby Bisop because he knew from reading news reports that Hewitt was the counselor who had discovered Bobby's remains all the way back in nineteen fifty nine, and all of a sudden, Hewitt started bringing up this story about the day that Bobby went missing, claiming that he had been running the camp snack bar and Bobby attempted to buy some candy from him, and Hewitt said that he told Bobby that

he had already had too many sweets and shouldn't have anymore. So Bobby started crying and took off, and Hewitt said that there was a the last time he saw him. But then Hewitt said this really odd remark quote, I did not do anything to him except not give him more candy, and of course Vaughn found this to be very strange because he had not accused Hewitt of doing anything to Bobby. He just said that line completely out

of left field. So this compelled Vaughn to start digging into this case because, as you might recall, the official story of how Bobby went missing is that he was fishing by a creek and was supposed to be coming back for supper before he suddenly disappeared. And nobody had ever heard this story about him going to a snack bar and Hewett refusing to give him candy and then Bobby running him away crying. So Bond started thinking could there be more to this story? We did that.

if there's somebody that's just highly paranoid. Okay, that's one thing, But it seems highly suspicious that he would be denying something when he hasn't been accused, and that he's coming up with an alibi without being asked where he was or what he was doing, and specifically saying I didn't do anything to him except not give him some candy. And it also in and of itself, is a little bit weird. So if you've got this candy bar where you're selling candy, it's because the camp is trying to

make money. Are you then really going to turn down the money from one of the campers who's trying to buy candy and tell them that they can't. Is there some rule with how much you can buy. It's just it's such a weird story, and after hearing that, it makes me think that there's a strong likelihood, especially when we combine it with Hewitt being the one to point out the remains, that he had something either to do with the death or the cover up.

I feel bad for it, and I'm sure he feels that. Well, I can say whatever I want because I've already been defrocked and because of the Statute of Limitations, I will never be prosecuted for this. But of course there is no statute of limitations on murder, so it just seems weird that he's willing to confess all this horrible stuff, but then is getting very defensive when talking about Bobby

and saying I didn't do anything to him. So you're wondering, hm, is he paranoid that he's going to be prosecuted for murder or something like that, and that's why he's making up this story completely at the left field. So that brings it in to part one of our series about the unexplained death of Bobby Bizop. Join us next week for part two.

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