Could Ted Bundy Be Responsible for 4 Cold Cases in Utah? New DNA May Hold the Key

For more than half a century, investigators believed they knew who killed Laura Ann Aime.

What they lacked was proof.

Aime, a 17-year-old high school student, disappeared on October 31, 1974, after leaving a Halloween party in Lehi, Utah. Hikers found her naked body about a month later, just off a highway in the nearby American Fork Canyon. She had been bound, beaten and strangled.  

Utah authorities long suspected serial killer Ted Bundy was responsible—and he confessed to killing Aime shortly before he was executed in 1989. But without any other concrete evidence tying him to the slaying, investigators refused to close the case.  

That changed in April 2026, when the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced investigators had linked Bundy to Aime’s killing using recent DNA technology, closing a 51-year-old cold case. The evidence was so compelling that Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith said that prosecutors would have sought the death penalty against Bundy for Aime’s killing—if he was still alive.  

For many observers who had long accepted Aime as one of Bundy’s victims, the announcement seemed largely symbolic. But criminologists and investigators say the breakthrough could have far-reaching implications, not only for Aime's family, but for other unsolved cases that have hovered around Bundy’s orbit for decades.

Of the killings long attributed to Bundy but never conclusively proven, Aime's case “is the first to receive genetic confirmation,” Matt DeLisi, a sociology and criminal justice professor at Iowa State University and author of Ted Bundy and the Unsolved Murder Epidemic: The Dark Figure of Crime, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. The identification offers investigators something they've never had before: a DNA-confirmed Bundy homicide from his years in Utah.

The breakthrough also conclusively tied Bundy, who was only ever convicted in three murders in Florida, to a homicide committed years earlier and hundreds of miles away, Bryanna Fox, a former FBI special agent and co-director of the Center for Justice Research and Policy at the University of South Florida, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. 

For investigators trying to reconstruct the full scope of Bundy's crimes, that broader timeline could prove just as important as the DNA match itself.

“We know for certain that Bundy's MO [modus operandi] evolved,” Fox says, adding that the DNA match gives investigators a clearer picture of what that evolution looked like—and may help them spot connections to cold cases that once seemed unrelated.

The technology at the center of the DNA breakthrough was introduced at Utah’s state crime lab in 2023. It allows forensic scientists to extract DNA from minuscule, degraded or mixed samples—evidence that would have been considered unusable just a few years ago. 

Using that technology, analysts isolated a male DNA profile from evidence that had been preserved in Aime's case, then compared it to profiles in a national criminal database, where Bundy’s DNA had already been entered. For the first time, investigators had forensic proof that Bundy killed Aime.

Utah—the state most closely associated with Bundy's suspected killing spree—has long been central to efforts to understand the full scope of his crimes.

When Bundy confessed to killing Aime before his death in Florida’s electric chair, he admitted to murdering 29 other women in seven states, a number some criminologists say is likely a significant undercount. Bundy was convicted in only three of those killings. Authorities believe at least eight of his victims were slain in Utah, and several more women disappeared or were killed while Bundy was living in the Beehive State.

DeLisi says that “Bundy was constantly stalking women” in Utah, where he’d moved in 1974 to study law at the University of Utah. 

During the year or so that he lived there, several young women disappeared, including 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox; 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith; 17-year-old Debra Kent; 15-year-old Susan Curtis; and several women in Colorado authorities later linked to Bundy while he was still living in Utah. (Kent and Wilcox were among the women Bundy confessed to killing before his death.)

On October 27, 2026, Summit County Attorney Margaret Olson said at a press conference that DNA evidence, as well as Bundy's signature "pattern, motive, means and opportunity," linked him to Smith's 1974 killing and closed her case. Investigators made DNA connections between Smith and Aime, and evidence obtained from Smith's autopsy closed matched Bundy's DNA profile, Utah County Sgt. Mike Reynolds said.

"With every case closure, may we stomp the memory of Ted Bundy out," he added.

The aforementioned remaining cases have yet to been confirmed through DNA evidence.

Fox says the DNA confirmation expands investigators’ understanding of Bundy’s evolution as a killer and could have “a remarkable impact on other cold cases.”

Investigators typically look at a person’s MO—the practical steps used to commit a crime—as well as behavioral signatures, the often deeply ingrained actions that can reveal an offender's psychological motivations and help connect crimes across time, Fox says. But because MOs evolve, crimes committed years apart may appear unrelated even when they were committed by the same person, she explains.

Aime was killed years before the murders that ultimately sent Bundy to death row, but by conclusively placing him at a 1974 homicide, investigators now have a framework for evaluating earlier cases as potential Bundy crimes.

In the 1970s, DNA testing did not exist, and evidence collection practices were often far less rigorous than they are today. “Many cold cases from that era are limited in what can be used to forensically link Bundy to the murder,” Fox says. Instead, she adds, investigators working those cases can attempt to associate them with Bundy “behaviorally, rather than forensically.”

Even in cases where no usable DNA survives, Fox says the Aime breakthrough may help generate new investigative leads by giving authorities a clearer picture of how Bundy’s behavior evolved over time. Crimes that once appeared inconsistent with his known methods may now warrant another look, she says, potentially bringing investigators closer to answers in cold cases that have remained unresolved for decades.