Utah investigators now have a new tool that could help solve several decades-old cold cases long suspected of being tied to Ted Bundy. The state crime lab used new genotyping technology to turn degraded and mixed evidence into a full DNA profile that can be compared with the FBI's national database.
The breakthrough helped investigators close the more than 50-year-old killing of Utah teen Laura Ann Aime, who was found dead in American Fork Canyon in 1974. Detective Ben Pender, who leads the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office cold case unit, said the profile for Bundy was pieced together from samples collected from Aime's body at the time, and then compared with a complete profile of Bundy in Florida.
The work matters because the old evidence in these cases had been sitting for decades. Much of it was collected in the 1970s, often degraded or mixed with DNA from more than one person, and earlier testing produced only partial profiles that were not strong enough to compare with CODIS, the FBI's national DNA database. In 2023, the Utah state crime lab began using the newer method, which allowed investigators to reconstruct a full profile and enter it into the database.
The update also gives investigators a sharper way to revisit cases that were once stuck in the gray area between rumor and proof. There are currently four known cold cases in Utah that Bundy is said to be involved in, according to the Utah Department of Public Safety's cold case database and a department spokesperson. Amy Newman said of the new work, “I think it is significant.” She also said it could help with “Maybe even cases that we’re not aware of that are Bundy cases.”
Bundy confessed to killing at least 30 young women before he was executed in Florida in 1989, including eight in Utah. But some of the bodies of his victims have never been found, and not every confession has been independently verified. Nancy Wilcox, a 16-year-old cheerleader from Salt Lake County, went missing in 1974, and investigators have never been able to confirm Bundy's confession that he killed her.
That is why the new profile matters beyond one closed case. Bundy moved to Salt Lake City in September 1974, and at the time Aime was killed he was a law student at the University of Utah. With a full profile now in hand, investigators can compare evidence from other Utah cases against something they could not build before. For cold-case detectives, that changes the odds in a way the old testing never could.
