Utah County inmate set for trial tries to have victim killed, police say

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PROVO — A Provo man accused of sexually assaulting a teen girl at a party is now accused of trying to get his friends to kill her while he is in jail.

Jacob Carter Bingham, 20, was charged last week in Utah's 4th District Court with attempted solicitation of a minor to commit aggravated murder and attempted criminal solicitation of aggravated murder, both first-degree felonies. The case was moved on Monday from Provo to American Fork.

In 2023, Bingham was charged with rape, a first-degree felony, and several drug-related crimes. He is accused in that case of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl who was attending a party at his Orem apartment. A three-day trial is scheduled for April.

According to the new charges, in September, while his cell at the Utah County Jail was the subject of a random search, "officers located two sealed, stamped and addressed envelopes with letters. The first letter had the rape victim's name, address, date of birth and phone number and instructed the recipient to kill her, make her disappear, or at least force her to drop the charges. The letter indicates the reason he wants this done is that the victim 'is about to send me to prison for the rest of my life,'" according to charging documents. "The second letter says '(the girl) that put me in here needs to be handled NOW! I might be serving life in prison for nothing.'"

Bingham also allegedly tells the recipient of the letter, "If you don't kill her then I will. I wouldn't write this if it wasn't serious," a police booking affidavit states.

The affidavit further states that Bingham is an admitted gang member, and "the letters were found to contain gang-related words and drawings."

When confronted about the letters, Bingham allegedly claimed that writing in journals is a therapy technique. When police talked to his therapist, "his therapist stated that this writing about committing homicide (and) sealing it in an addressed envelope was not a technique he would have advised," according to the affidavit.

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Pat Reavy

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Pat Reavy interned with KSL NewsRadio in 1989 and has been a full-time journalist for either KSL NewsRadio, Deseret News or KSL.com since 1991. For the past 25 years, he has worked primarily the cops and courts beat.