Utah law enforcement officials said Tuesday that advances in DNA technology have definitively tied Ted Bundy to the 1974 killing of Melissa Ann Smith, bringing a long-open cold case in Summit County to a close. The finding links the 17-year-old’s death to one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history.
For Smith’s family, the announcement lands more than 50 years after she vanished on Oct. 18, 1974, after visiting a friend at a pizza restaurant in Midvale. Deer hunters found her body nine days later, on Oct. 27, 1974, in a wooded canyon near Summit Park.
Investigators got there through a second case. Earlier this year, the Utah State Crime Lab isolated DNA profiles from biological evidence recovered from Laura Aime’s remains, and that profile matched Bundy’s national CODIS profile on file in Florida. From there, state forensic analysts generated a paternal Y-STR DNA profile from the Aime evidence and compared it with the Y-STR DNA profile taken from Smith’s autopsy, giving them the link they said they needed.
The case had shadowed Bundy for decades. He was long suspected in Smith’s disappearance and death, but he was never formally charged before his 1989 execution in Florida. The Summit County prosecutor said investigators were satisfied that Bundy was responsible for killing Smith in 1974, a conclusion that puts a formal end to a case that had remained open in northern Utah for generations.
Smith was the daughter of Midvale Police Chief Louis Smith, and she attended Hillcrest High School and Continental Beauty College. Neighbors collected more than $1,000 for a reward after she disappeared, and a November 1977 Salt Lake Tribune report said her father, sister and best friend were subpoenaed to testify at a hearing in Aspen, Colorado, where Bundy was facing a murder charge in the death of Michigan nurse Karyn Campbell. He was later executed by electric chair in Florida after a criminal record that included at least 30 women and girls killed across multiple states in the 1970s.
What remains unresolved is not whether the DNA broke the case, but how far the evidence in Smith’s own autopsy can now be traced. That question is less about doubt than about the last technical step in a case that had waited half a century for the science to catch up with the crime.
