Utah authorities on Tuesday named Ted Bundy as the killer of Melissa Ann Smith, a 17-year-old from Midvale, in 1974. The link came from Y-chromosome DNA. The state crime lab matched it to evidence from another Bundy victim, Laura Ann Aime.
Summit County Sheriff Kacey Bates announced the closure at a news conference in Park City, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. It fell 52 years to the day after a hunter found her body in Summit Park. “After 50 years, we have reached a point that so many have worked for,” Bates said, according to KSL.
Florida executed Bundy in 1989, so there will be no trial. What the announcement settles is the official record, and it shows how far the science on decades-old evidence has moved in three years.
A case that stayed open for five decades
Melissa Smith was a high school senior. She left a girlfriend at a Midvale pizza parlor on Oct. 18, 1974, and her mother reported her missing, according to the Tribune and KSL. Her father, Louis Smith, was Midvale’s police chief at the time.
Nine days later, on Oct. 27, a deer hunter found her body in Summit Park. The subdivision sits near the Salt Lake County line. Investigators first looked for a possible Bundy connection in October 1976, the Tribune reported.
Bundy had moved to Salt Lake City in 1974 for law school at the University of Utah, KUTV reported. Suspicion fell on him in Smith’s case over the years, but it never became a formal finding.
“Although there was much speculation regarding a suspect at the time, a suspect was never named,” Bates said. KPCW reported that he added the case “was never officially closed.”
That gap mattered.
Bundy confessed to about 30 killings before his execution, but a confession without detail does not close a case. Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith made the same point in April. Bundy’s claim about Aime was not enough to rule out other suspects, he said, the Daily Herald reported.
The Aime case gave the lab a profile to work from
The breakthrough in Smith’s case started with Laura Ann Aime. Aime, 17, of Fairview, disappeared on Halloween night in 1974 after leaving a party in Lehi. Her body turned up off American Fork Canyon Road on Nov. 27 of that year.
On April 1, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced that DNA confirmed Bundy killed her. Utah Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason said the state crime lab acquired new technology in 2023, the Associated Press reported. It can pull DNA from samples that are small, degraded by age or mixed with DNA from several people.
That let analysts isolate a single male profile from evidence taken from Aime’s body. They entered it into CODIS, the national law enforcement DNA database. The search returned a hit from Florida, and the profile matched Bundy, the Daily Herald reported.
Mason said at the time that other agencies with long-suspected Bundy cases could now use that profile. Reynolds added that one case outside Utah County would likely close on the strength of that evidence, without naming it, the Herald reported.
Why Y-chromosome DNA, and what it can’t prove alone
The match in Smith’s case used a different kind of DNA test. Utah State Crime Lab scientists built a Y-STR profile from the Aime evidence and compared it with a Y-STR profile from Smith’s case, KUTV reported. The two were consistent.
A Y-STR profile reads markers on the Y chromosome, which only males carry. A Justice Department training brief explains why labs reach for it in old assault cases. Because the test targets male DNA alone, a male profile can be “unmasked in the presence of female DNA,” which standard testing can miss.
The tradeoff is precision. The Y chromosome passes “from father to son on down,” Heather Mills, forensic scientist manager for the Utah Bureau of Forensic Services, told KUTV. Men in the same paternal line can share a profile, so a Y-STR result narrows the field to a family line rather than one person.
Y-STR data also sits outside CODIS, Cowboy State Daily reported. That helps explain the route investigators took. They could not search Smith’s profile nationally, so they compared it with the one case already tied to Bundy by a full profile.
The lab ran that comparison on July 14 and found a match, the Tribune reported. Summit County Sheriff’s Capt. Justin Hemingway told KUTV he believed the tested material came from the examination after Smith was found. CBS News, drawing on AP reporting, described a “highly similar DNA profile” in evidence from her autopsy.
Officials chose their words carefully
Summit County Attorney Margaret Olson did not rest the conclusion on DNA alone. She said the DNA evidence, “when considered alongside evidence related to pattern, motive, means and opportunity,” led investigators to Bundy, according to the Tribune. KSL quoted her saying the evidence “establishes that Ted Bundy is responsible for Melissa Ann Smith’s murder.”
Some coverage went further than the officials did. A KSL photo caption said DNA “definitively linked” Bundy to the killing, and Cowboy State Daily described the link the same way. Olson’s own wording, and the nature of a Y-STR match, point to a conclusion built on several strands of evidence rather than DNA alone.
That reading does not weaken the finding. It reflects how the test works, and prosecutors framed it accordingly.
Preserved evidence and a detective’s last case
Investigators credited the people who kept the evidence intact for half a century. “This case demonstrates the importance of preserving evidence even when decades have passed,” Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera said, according to KUTV.
The renewed push began in June 2025, KUTV reported. That month Alan Siddoway, a Summit County sheriff’s lieutenant, contacted Ben Pender, a Salt Lake County cold case detective who held the full file. Siddoway then worked with the Utah County detectives who closed the Aime case.
Siddoway, a 42-year veteran of the department, died of cancer on Oct. 11, KSL reported. Utah County Sgt. Mike Reynolds dedicated the closure to his memory, KPCW reported.
“With every case closure, may we stomp the memory of Ted Bundy out,” Reynolds said, according to CBS News.
Smith’s family did not attend. Her father resigned from the Midvale force in 1980 and died in 1985, the Tribune reported. Her mother, Joan, died in 2024. Her closest relatives know the outcome but live out of state, Summit County spokesperson Skyler Talbot said, according to KPCW.
Nancy Wilcox and the Utah cases still open
Pender made clear the work is not finished. Closing Smith’s case “does not close the book on Ted Bundy,” he said, KSL reported.
The most prominent open case is Nancy Wilcox, 16, of Salt Lake County, who disappeared on Oct. 2, 1974. Investigators believe she was Bundy’s first Utah victim, a state public safety spokesperson said in April, according to the Tribune. No one has ever found her body.
Bundy reportedly confessed to killing her, but police have not confirmed it with evidence. “We’re not certain on Nancy Wilcox either. We’ll continue to work that case,” Pender said, according to KSL.
In April, a Utah Department of Public Safety spokesperson named two more cold cases that investigators tie to Bundy, the Tribune reported. Susan Curtis, 15, disappeared in 1975 during a youth conference at Brigham Young University in Provo. Deborah Smith’s body turned up near Salt Lake City International Airport in 1976.
Utah investigators now hold two reference points: a full Bundy profile from the Aime evidence, and a Y-STR profile that has already linked a second case. Investigators can check any remaining case with testable biological evidence against both.
Other Utah lab results made news this month, from a test on hair in the Skinwalker Ranch files to virus sequencing in the Utah mink farm bird flu outbreak.
For now, Pender’s office is still working the Wilcox file, and no agency has given a date for its next result.
