Utah DNA closes Bundy cases, decades after confessions
By The Conservative Desk (/journals/conservative-desk)
Melissa Ann Smith’s body was found near Toll Canyon in Summit Park on Oct. 27, 1974. Fifty-two years to the day later, Utah officials closed her murder case by tying the killing to Ted Bundy through DNA and other evidence.
Smith, 17, had disappeared on Oct. 18 after leaving a pizza restaurant. She was the daughter of then-Midvale Police Chief Louis Smith. The autopsy showed she had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled. Summit County authorities announced the link at an Oct. 27, 2026 press conference, stating the pattern matched Bundy’s, that he had the means, motive, and opportunity, and that he had long been a suspect.
The same forensic advance had already closed another Utah case months earlier. Laura Ann Aime, also 17, disappeared Oct. 31, 1974, after leaving a Halloween party. Hikers found her body about a month later in American Fork Canyon. Before his 1989 execution Bundy confessed to killing her, yet Utah County authorities kept the file open, saying they could not satisfactorily convict him on the evidence and science then available. On April 1, Sheriff Mike Smith announced that new testing confirmed DNA recovered from Aime’s body belonged to Bundy. “This case is officially closed,” Smith said. The Salt Lake Tribune and BBC recorded the same declaration: “This case is now officially closed.”
The technology that made both closures possible was DNA genotyping acquired by the Utah State Crime Lab in 2023. It reconstructs a full genetic profile from small, age-degraded, or mixed samples. Until then investigators had only a partial profile of Bundy. Confessions alone had not been enough.
At the April news conference Michelle Impala, Aime’s younger sister, spoke of the girl she lost. “I was 12 when Laura died. She was 17. We were really close. We shared a room. We rode horses together. She was very passionate about animals. She took me everywhere, as a 12-year-old that was pretty cool to hang out with my older sister.” Utah County Sheriff’s Sgt. Mike Reynolds told the family the office had felt their pain from the start. “We felt the pain the family feels when she was taken. We felt the pain that you felt this whole entire time, and we’ve had the desire to deliver to you some type of healing, we can’t really say closure.”
Private investigator Jason Jensen welcomed the Smith closure. “I’m glad to see these old cases still get attention. Some of them were presumed Bundy cases and left to remain unsolved because he was executed.” He added, “This Melissa Anne Smith case deserved to be formally closed attributed to Bundy since he confessed to it and the forensic evidence confirmed it. May she now rest in peace.” Jensen has searched for other presumed Bundy victims thought still buried in Utah and Colorado and plans to continue.
Bundy is believed to have killed at least 30 women across seven states between 1974 and 1978. He was studying law at the University of Utah when the Utah killings occurred. He was executed by electric chair in Florida on Jan. 24, 1989, for the 1978 Chi Omega sorority house murders of two women at Florida State University. In his final days he confessed to additional crimes, some previously unknown to police. Not every confession has been verified. Nancy Wilcox, a 16-year-old cheerleader allegedly killed by Bundy, has never been found. Debra Kent, abducted in November 1974 from a Bountiful high-school parking lot, is among the other Utah names long associated with him.
Fox News headlined the development as Utah authorities revealing a new Ted Bundy victim in a decades-old cold case and as Bundy expected to be linked to another homicide nearly 40 years after his execution. The factual core is narrower and stronger: two Utah teenagers, both 17, both murdered in the fall of 1974, both now tied to Bundy by reconstructed DNA rather than by suspicion or last-minute statements alone.
The conservative stake is the rule of law applied without theatrical shortcuts. A confession from a man already sentenced to die is not a substitute for proof that can stand in open court. Utah authorities refused for decades to close Aime’s file on Bundy’s word. When the crime lab obtained technology that could finish the genetic profile, they used it. The result is an official attribution that does not depend on the killer’s final performance. Limited government does not mean abandoning the dead; it means finishing the work the public paid for, with tools that actually resolve identity, and then closing the ledger so families are not left in permanent administrative limbo.
That same discipline protects the living. Cold-case DNA can clear Bundy of killings wrongly laid at his door as readily as it can confirm the ones that were his. Jensen noted the dual use. Taxpayers who fund state crime labs receive a concrete return when decades-old evidence finally yields a full profile instead of another press release about “presumed” victims. Public safety is served when the record is accurate: Bundy’s confirmed toll rises where the science supports it, and open files remain open where it does not.
Wyoming offers a cautionary contrast still inside the record. Ryan Cox, commander of that state’s Division of Criminal Investigation cold-case unit, has said there are to his knowledge no known Bundy investigations in Wyoming. The state’s cold-case database, expanded under a 2024 law requiring agencies to report unsolved homicides and felony sex offenses dating to 1972, lists four unsolved cases from the 1974–1978 window, three involving females. Bundy never placed Wyoming among the states of his confessed killings. The absence of a link is itself a fact the database preserves.
Smith’s remains were found on Oct. 27, 1974. The Summit County announcement came on the anniversary. The case is closed.