DNA Ties Bundy To 1974 Utah Killing; No Wyoming Links Found

Officials in Utah confirmed Tuesday that DNA evidence links Ted Bundy to the 1974 murder of Melissa Smith, a case that has been open for 52 years. The Summit County Sheriff's Office and the Summit County Attorney's Office announced the finding at a joint press conference. The announcement fell on the anniversary of the day Smith's body was found.

Smith was 17 when she vanished on Oct. 18, 1974. She was the daughter of Midvale Police Chief Louis Smith. She had been visiting a friend at a local pizza restaurant that evening. Her body turned up more than a week later near Toll Canyon in Summit Park. An autopsy showed she had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled.

The Utah County Sheriff's Office ran new DNA genotyping in April. The Utah State Crime Lab bought that technology in 2023. It can build a full DNA profile from small samples or samples that have degraded with age, as well as from mixed samples. The work produced a complete genetic profile for Bundy and tied him to Smith's case. It also tied him to the 1974 killing of Laura Ann Aime, another 17-year-old in Utah.

Before this technology, investigators held only a partial profile for Bundy. Bundy confessed to as many as 30 victims, including Aime and Smith, but the partial profile and confessions were not enough to close those two cases.

Bundy is believed to have killed at least 30 young women between 1974 and 1978. The killings ran across seven states, among them Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. He was caught in Florida after the killing of a 12-year-old girl. A court convicted him on three counts of first-degree murder and other charges. He received a death sentence and was executed in January 1989.

Private investigator Jason Jensen said he was glad to see the case move forward. He spent two summers searching for four missing victims thought to be buried in Utah and Colorado and found nothing. He plans to search again next summer. "I'm glad to see these old cases still get attention," Jensen said. "Some of them were presumed Bundy cases and left to remain unsolved because he was executed."

Jensen also said the new DNA profile can work in two directions. It can identify victims tied to Bundy and clear him from cases wrongly placed on him. "This Melissa Anne Smith case deserved to be formally closed attributed to Bundy since he confessed to it and the forensic evidence confirmed it," Jensen said. "May she now rest in peace."

Wyoming does not show up in the list of states where Bundy said he killed. Ryan Cox, commander at the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation and head of the state's cold case unit, said he is not ruling the possibility out. Cox said in an email Monday afternoon that he knows of no open investigation in the state that looks at Bundy.

The DCI cold case database holds four unsolved cases from 1974 through 1978, the years Bundy is known to have killed. Three of those involve females. One is the Aug. 24, 1974 disappearance of a 10-year-old girl in Rawlins. Her body was found about eight months later. The entry is unnamed but fits the record for Jayleen Dawn Banker, who died from a blow to the head. Another lists Doris Kay Holmes, found dead of a ligature strangulation in her Sheridan apartment on July 1, 1975. A third records an unknown female who was sexually assaulted in a desert region of Green River on Sept. 30, 1977.

The DCI database remains incomplete. A state law passed in March 2024, the Cold Case Database and Investigations Act, requires every law enforcement agency to report unsolved homicides and felony sexual offenses older than two years to DCI, with records reaching back to January 1972.