Utah authorities have closed the 1974 killing of 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith, saying DNA evidence and the facts of the case show that Ted Bundy killed her, more than half a century after hunters found her body in rural Summit County.
Summit County Attorney Margaret Olson announced the finding on Tuesday, October 27, at a Summit County Sheriff news conference joined by officials from Utah and Salt Lake counties, according to CBS News and Gephardt Daily. Gephardt Daily reported that hunters found Smith's body on October 27, 1974, which made the announcement fall 52 years to the day after the discovery. Smith was a high school senior, CBS reported.
What investigators found
The link came through paternal DNA. According to Gephardt Daily, the Utah State Crime Lab, working at the request of the Summit County Attorney's Office, developed a Y chromosome profile from Summit County evidence and found that it matched a Utah County profile previously determined to be Bundy's. CBS reported that Utah County Sgt. Mike Reynolds described a highly similar DNA profile linked to Bundy in evidence from Smith's autopsy.
That Utah County profile came from a second case. Laura Ann Aime, 17, of Lehi, went missing on Halloween 1974 and was later found dead. In April 2026, Utah County officials announced that paternal DNA linked Bundy to her murder, and Summit County then asked to compare its own evidence against that profile, Gephardt Daily reported.
Olson said Smith's death carried the hallmarks of "pattern, motive, means and opportunity," according to CBS. Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera said, "This case demonstrates the importance of preserving evidence." Rivera also said her office had told Smith's surviving family about the findings, adding, "We owe that to the families of these cold cases." Reynolds put it more bluntly: "With every case closure, may we stomp the memory of Ted Bundy out."
What a Y chromosome match can and cannot prove
This is the part of the announcement worth reading slowly. A Y chromosome profile is not the same kind of evidence as the standard DNA profile used in most trials, which we explained in How Is DNA Evidence Used in Court.
Guidance from the United Kingdom's Forensic Science Regulator on Y-STR profiling puts the limit plainly. It says "all patrilineally related males will have exactly the same combination of Y-STR alleles" and that "Y-STR profiling cannot distinguish between males who are paternally related." It also notes that "many individuals in a population may share the same Y-STR profile."
In other words, a paternal match narrows the field to a male line. It does not by itself pick out one man. That is why Olson's language matters. Investigators did not rest the conclusion on the lab result alone. They paired it with the timing, the pattern of Bundy's Utah crimes in the fall of 1974 and the separate Aime match. In a courtroom, a defense lawyer would press on exactly that gap. Here there will be no courtroom.
Why no case will ever be filed
Bundy was executed in Florida in 1989, at age 42, for a murder he was convicted of there, Gephardt Daily reported. A dead man cannot be charged, so the Smith case closes by official finding rather than by verdict. No jury will weigh the DNA, and no defense will test it.
The evidence that made the closure possible was saved decades ago. CBS reported that a vial of Bundy's blood, drawn in 1978 after his arrest in the death of a 12-year-old girl, was found in Florida in 2011, and that his full DNA profile was entered into the FBI's national database. The same logic that keeps murder open forever, which we covered in Statutes of Limitations, Why Some Crimes Expire and Murder Does Not, keeps evidence boxes on shelves long after the trail goes cold.
Our analysis: the timeline in numbers
October 27, 1974: Hunters find Smith's body in Summit County, per Gephardt Daily.
October 31, 1974: Aime disappears in Lehi, four days later.
1978: Bundy's blood is drawn after his Florida arrest, per CBS.
1989: Bundy is executed in Florida.
2011: The blood vial is found, 33 years after it was drawn.
April 2026: Utah County links Bundy to Aime through paternal DNA.
October 27, 2026: Summit County closes the Smith case, about six months after the Aime announcement and 52 years after her body was found.
The arithmetic shows how much of this depended on one preserved sample and one neighboring county's work. Without the Aime profile, Summit County would have had a Y chromosome result with nothing to compare it to.
What comes next
Bundy reportedly confessed to 36 murders, and law enforcement has confirmed at least 21, Gephardt Daily reported. Officials pointed to other Utah cases that may be resolved the same way, including the killing of 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox of Holladay, long attributed to Bundy. Rivera said her office will keep working on that case. For another decades-old case reopened by new DNA work, see DNA From a Mailed Envelope Leads to an Arrest in Spokane's 1986 Turner Killing, and for a defense lawyer's view of how Bundy and other serial killer cases shaped the field, see A Defense Attorney and His Daughter on the Minds of Serial Killers.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
