Their stories crowded the pages of local Utah papers in 1974, three beautiful, bright teenage girls: one missing, two found brutally murdered. The cops were convinced they were connected; two had been seen in the company of “a man about six feet tall,
weighing 180 pounds, well-groomed dark hair, good looking, and a sharp dresser … [with] a light-colored Volkswagen” according to The Salt Lake Tribune. They were killed in the same fashion: strangled and sexually assaulted. All disappeared around the same time.
Still, it would be more than 50 years before cops were able to connect two of the girls to Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, thanks to decades-old evidence, dogged police work, and a woman who had the foresight to fight for Bundy’s DNA to be uploaded to the Combined DNA Index System, a.k.a. CODIS, an FBI database that helps law enforcement match DNA found at crime scenes with known individuals. Finally, the mystery of what happened to 17-year-olds Laura Ann Aime and Melissa Ann Smith has been solved; Bundy was ID’d as Aime’s killer in April, and Smith’s just this week. And the third? That news could be on the horizon.
Lindsey Wade, then a detective in Tacoma, Washington, was tracking down local murderers and sex criminals back in 2011 when she realized that Bundy was missing from CODIS. That struck her as a massive oversight, as Bundy confessed to 30 murders before his 1989 execution, but indicated that he’d killed many more women and girls. “I was incensed,” Wade says. “I knew that there were many more unsolved cases that were likely attributed to him. And so it was just stunning to me that he was not represented in the national DNA database, which was established to solve crimes.”
Wade connected with the CODIS administrator in Florida, who was able to track down a vial of blood collected from Bundy following his 1978 arrest in the state after murdering two sorority sisters and a 12-year-old girl. He’d previously been convicted in 1976 for the kidnapping and assault of 18-year-old Carol DaRonch before escaping — twice. All this after he killed Smith and Aime.
At first, Wade was told that the DNA could only be uploaded to Florida’s DNA database, since Bundy’s crimes occurred before the country enacted DNA collection laws. However, after much jockeying, CODIS made an exception due to Bundy’s involvement in crimes across state lines and added Bundy in August 2011. “It took 15 years for them to finally get a hit, and that was on the Laura Ann Aime case in April,” says Wade. Smith would come a few months later.
Before Bundy’s execution, he “verbally acknowledged his culpability in the death/disappearance of Laura and others,” according to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. “However, Bundy would not elaborate or give any detail to his actual involvement with the deaths or abductions of the women.” All they needed was solid proof, and now they had it.
Aime was one of the girls in the papers back in 1974 — and in a photo Sgt. Michael Reynolds of the Utah County Sheriff’s Office keeps on his office wall. All doleful eyes and feathered hair, the 17-year-old reminded Reynolds of his niece. “I just kept coming back to the thought that it’s 50 years later, and we still have no accountability,” he says. “How hurt I would be as a law enforcement officer and as an uncle to a niece if I could never find that closure.”
Aime was a small-town farm girl enamored of animals. “Laura had her cat, and Laura had her dog, and Laura had her horse, Arab. She was really passionate about animals,” her sister Michelle Impala later told ABC 4. “You could ride everywhere back in those day … She got a lot of attention, very pretty. But she was just fun to be around.” Impala didn’t respond to a request for an interview.
Aime went missing after leaving a Halloween party on Oct. 31, 1974, and, on Thanksgiving, her body was found by two college students on a hike in a canyon. She was bound, beaten, and naked — strangled to death by one of her stockings. Her father was almost unable to ID her, until he saw the scars on her arm from a time she’d been thrown from a horse.
“I can only speak for myself, but we all ‘knew’ that it was Ted Bundy. I mean, the MO was the same as other cases he’d been linked to,” Impala said.
At the time of Bundy’s execution, when he owned up to the murders, the Utah County Sheriff’s Department and Utah County Attorney’s Office were unable to convict Bundy at the time because they didn’t have enough physical evidence connecting him to the crimes. DNA technology was not advanced enough at the time to bridge the gap. However, in 2025, Reynolds and his team took on the case, gathering DNA from the 50-plus-year-old evidence.
“We were able to take body fluids that were found on Laura Aime’s body and create a DNA profile that was the best, with the most advanced, highest amount of strains,” Reynolds says. Those were matched with Bundy’s DNA in CODIS. “I do strongly believe that this full profile, which is the best profile I’m aware of of Ted Bundy that’s in CODIS now,” Reynolds adds. “It’s like that fingerprint, you know, or the snowflake. It’s just it’s individual. It’s yours. There’s no way to dance around it.”
And that snowflake could yield an avalanche. Case in point: This week, Smith, who was 17 when she went missing in October 1974, was linked to Bundy via DNA, with help from the team that solved Aime’s case. “It has always been suspected [that she was killed by Bundy],” says Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera; Smith went missing in her jurisdiction when Rivera was a child. “But until you know the evidence is there, you can’t say whether or not it was. Until they had that DNA, they can’t say for sure. In homicide cases, we never get rid of the evidence. That was what was so key in this case: preserving the evidence.”
Salt Lake County still had that evidence from Smith’s murder, which they sent to Summit County in 2025, where her body was found. “There was some clothing, there were items taken from the medical examiner’s office from the examination, there were some items from Ted Bundy,” says cold case Detective Ben Pender of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department. Bundy was stopped by the highway patrol in Salt Lake City town in 1975 — leading to that 1976 conviction — and his vehicle was seized.
“Even in these older cases in the Seventies and the Eighties, the detectives actually did an outstanding job,” he adds. “I don’t quite understand their foresight because a lot of the items that were collected, they wouldn’t have ever even known about DNA, but they still collected items that today have been extremely helpful for us.”
Last July, the crime lab matched the DNA profile they recovered from Aime’s body to DNA recovered from Smith’s remains. Bundy was her killer as well. Still, the celebration was muted. “The challenge is the fact that it took so many decades, and her family all passed away without knowing,” Riveria says. “But at least this one, we can close it, and we know that there’s not another perpetrator out there still that we haven’t addressed. So that does help.”
And Smith may not be the last Bundy victim in Utah to finally get justice. There’s another teen, 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox, who went missing on Oct. 1, 1974, after a fight with her parents over her boyfriend. “The day before Bundy was executed, we had a detective from the sheriff’s office go to Florida and meet with him and interview him, and he did admit picking up Nancy Wilcox and killing her and dumping her body,” says Pender. Her remains have yet to have been recovered. But the cops haven’t given up. “We’ve got some searches that have happened in the past, and some upcoming searches that we’re going to be doing to try to identify or try to locate where he put her,” Pender adds.
As for Wade, the woman who helped put all this into action? She’s ecstatic about all the recent news. “My phone was just lighting up. People calling me and texting me,” she says. “Finally, after all this time. I knew it would happen. I just didn’t think it would take 15 years.”
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