DNA Links Ted Bundy to 1974 Murder of Utah Teenager Melissa Ann Smith
Authorities announced on Tuesday, 27 October, that DNA evidence links Ted Bundy, the American serial killer executed in 1989, to the 1974 murder of 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith of Utah. The announcement was made at a news conference, according to The Guardian. Summit County officials named Bundy as the killer in the cold case, meaning the case had gone unsolved for decades, based on the DNA evidence.
Smith disappeared in 1974 after leaving a party alone, and her nude body was found several days later, the Associated Press has reported. A prosecutor said that new DNA testing had linked Bundy to the killing of another Utah teenager in 1974, according to a report on the announcement.
That other case involves Laura Ann Aime, also 17. In April, Utah County detectives confirmed that Bundy had killed her in 1974. She was last seen at a Halloween party, and her body was found in late November of that year, dead and severely beaten. Bodily fluid taken from her body matched Bundy's known DNA profile.
The genetic link between the two cases comes from a Y-STR DNA profile, a type of genetic marker, recovered from each young woman's body. The profile from Aime genetically matched the one recovered from Smith, The Guardian reported.
Bundy confessed to killing Aime before his execution in 1989 for two murders. Smith's case is the second Utah cold case linked to Bundy that investigators have closed this year, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
Between 1974 and 1978, Bundy sexually assaulted and killed at least 30 women across the American West and Florida. Investigators in several states have spent decades examining cases linked to him, and the Utah cases add two more names to a list that remains part of the public record of his crimes.
