Ted Bundy identified as killer in 1974 Utah murder

Serial killer Ted Bundy has been connected to another murder more than 50 years after the discovery, prosecutors have confirmed.

Bundy has been linked to the killing via DNA evidence, authorities have announced.

Ted Bundy connected to another murder

Bundy, who died in 1989, is known to have killed at least 30 women and girls across a number of US states in the 1970s, with many more stories about those who escaped or survived attacks with injuries.

Now, a prosecutor in Summit County, Utah, has confirmed that authorities are satisfied that Bundy was also the man responsible for the murder of 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith in 1974.

The death has been listed as a cold case, but now it seems as if there is a resolution.

Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera said: “This case demonstrates the importance of preserving evidence.”

Ted Bundy identified as killer in 1974 Utah murder of Melissa Ann Smith

Serial killer Ted Bundy has been officially linked to another murder, more than 50 years after a Utah teenager’s body was found in the mountains east of Salt Lake City, in the latest twist in one of US news’ most notorious true crime cases.

Investigators say DNA evidence has finally closed the case of 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith, who was killed in October 1974.

The announcement came on Tuesday (October 27), 52 years to the day after her body was discovered.

Melissa Ann Smith murder linked to Ted Bundy through DNA

Summit County Attorney Margaret Olson confirmed at a press conference at the Summit County Justice Center that investigators are satisfied Bundy was responsible.

A release from the Summit County Sheriff’s Office said the evidence “conclusively proves that Ted Bundy murdered Melissa Ann Smith.”

Olson said that along with the DNA, Smith’s death fit Bundy’s ‘pattern, motive, means and opportunity’.

For decades Smith had been listed in Utah’s cold case database as an unsolved homicide.

Her next of kin have been told about the finding, although officials say none of them still live in the area.

Police chief’s daughter vanished from Midvale in 1974

Melissa was from Midvale, Utah, and her father, Louis Smith, was the town’s police chief at the time.

She disappeared on October 18, 1974, after leaving a pizza restaurant where she had been visiting a friend, and her mother reported her missing in Salt Lake County.

Nine days later, deer hunters found her body near Toll Canyon in Summit Park.

An autopsy found she had been sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled.

How the Laura Aime case helped solve it

The breakthrough came through another of Bundy’s Utah victims.

Laura Ann Aime, also 17, was killed in Utah County a few weeks after Smith, and her case was closed on April 1 this year after DNA from it was matched to Bundy.

That match was possible because of a vial of Bundy’s blood, taken in 1978 after his arrest in Florida, which turned up in 2011 and gave the FBI a full profile of his DNA.

The Utah State Crime Lab then compared DNA taken from Smith’s body in 1974 with the Aime sample, and on July 14 it concluded that the two profiles matched.

According to Cowboy State Daily, the work relied on DNA genotyping technology the crime lab got in 2023, which can rebuild full profiles from tiny, degraded or mixed samples.

Before that, investigators only had a partial profile for Bundy, which wasn’t enough to close either case.

Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera said: “This case demonstrates the importance of preserving evidence.”

Utah County Sgt. Mike Reynolds was more blunt, saying: “With every case closure, may we stomp the memory of Ted Bundy out.”

Ted Bundy never confessed to killing Melissa Smith

Bundy never actually admitted to this one.

In the days before his execution in Florida in January 1989, he gave a string of confessions, including to the murders of Nancy Wilcox and Debra Jean Kent in Utah that same fall.

Not all of those confessions have been confirmed, and some cases people assumed were his were simply left open after he died.

Private investigator Jason Jensen told Cowboy State Daily: “Some of them were presumed Bundy cases and left to remain unsolved because he was executed.”

He added: “May she now rest in peace.”

In fall 1974, Bundy was a law student at the University of Utah and living in Salt Lake City, according to the Utah Historical Society, and he was later convicted of trying to kidnap Carol DaRonch.

He is known to have killed at least 30 women and girls across several states in the 1970s, and one woman who survived his attack has spoken about how close she came to being one of them.

Even people close to him had their suspicions, with Bundy’s cousin Edna Cowell Martin later explaining how she knew he was guilty.

Smith’s case is the latest decades-old crime to be solved with modern forensics, following cases like the one where a single strand of hair led detectives to a killer 30 years on and a woman murdered in 1968 who was finally identified through DNA science.

Cases from 1974 in Washington state are still being investigated too.