Serial killer Ted Bundy linked to another horrifying crime 37 years after his death | World | News
New DNA testing has definitively linked the unsolved 1974 death of a Utah teenager to infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, the local sheriff’s office said Wednesday. 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime disappeared on Halloween night 51 years ago after leaving a party alone and going to a grocery store. About a month later, his body was found by hikers on the side of a highway in American Fork Canyon.
Authorities said evidence showed the teenager, who was found bound, beaten and without clothing, was likely kept alive for several days after his abduction. Investigators long suspected Bundy was responsible, but the case remained open until they were sure. Police said Bundy verbally admitted his guilt, which led to his execution in Florida in 1989.
Bundy was one of the most prolific serial killers in the United States; At least 30 deaths of women and girls in various states in the 1970s were linked to it. Murders in sororities, parks and other places have unsettled the country.
Utah Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason said investigators carefully preserved evidence in the Aime case and that forensic investigators were able to analyze that evidence to select the parts that appeared most likely to have usable DNA samples.
He said the state crime lab gets new technology in 2023 that will allow investigators to extract DNA from samples even if they are minors, degraded or contain DNA from more than one person. This technology allowed them to identify a single male DNA profile and submit it to the national law enforcement database.
Mason said Bundy’s DNA was a match.
At the time of Aime’s murder, Bundy was studying law at the University of Utah. The victim was described by her family as a free spirit who loved the outdoors and enjoyed everything she did.
“Laura Aime is the quintessential Utah County girl,” said Utah County sheriff’s Sgt. “We felt the pain that your family felt when you were kidnapped,” Mike Reynolds said at a press conference in the early hours of Wednesday, April 1. “We felt the pain that you felt this whole time and we felt the desire to bring you some kind of healing, we can’t really call it closure.”
It is unknown when Bundy first began his attacks, but by 1974 young women, most of them college students, began disappearing from Washington state. Authorities were still investigating these cases when Bundy moved to Salt Lake City and began killing people in Utah, Idaho and Colorado.
He confessed to killing 30 people before he died.
