Five Decades After Her Murder, Evidence Now Points To Notorious Serial Killer

More than 50 years after 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime first disappeared, DNA evidence confirmed that she died at the hands of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.

“This case is now officially closed,” Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith announced on Wednesday, detailing during a news conference the process by which his department had been able to connect Bundy to the case.

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Aime disappeared on Halloween night in 1974, and her body was discovered in American Fork Canyon, near the Timpanogos Cave Visitor Center, about one month later — and police initially thought they were looking at the body of a different missing teen. Debra Kent, also 17, had gone missing in Bountiful on November 8. The body of 17-year-old Melissa Smith, whose father was the Midvale police chief, was discovered just weeks earlier.

The attempted kidnapping of a 19-year-old woman eventually led to Bundy’s arrest in 1975, but he could not be directly tied to Aime’s murder. While DNA evidence was recovered at the scene, the technology was not yet available that would have allowed investigators to separate mixed profiles in order to make an identification.

Bundy was never charged with Aime’s murder, but her family — and local authorities — believed that he was the most likely suspect. The notorious serial killer himself named Aime, and Kent, as well as his victims, in a confession prior to his 1989 execution in Florida — but no one was able to tie him directly to the physical evidence until recently.

Sheriff Smith cited “new forensic techniques” that allowed commingled DNA samples to be separated into individual profiles — techniques that Utah’s state crime lab was not able to make use of until 2023.

Once a male DNA profile was extracted from the sample in Aime’s case, it was entered into a database that included samples from all around the country. A hit on the profile in Florida led investigators to collaborate with the crime lab there, and together they connected the profile to Bundy.

In the state of Utah alone, Bundy is believed to have murdered at least five women — and as many as eight. He moved to Salt Lake City in 1974 to attend University of Utah’s law school, but prior to his arrival there, he had already killed at least nine women in the Pacific Northwest.