{"id":22588,"date":"2026-04-02T00:53:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T00:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/04\/02\/five-decades-after-her-murder-evidence-now-points-to-notorious-serial-killer\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T00:53:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T00:53:37","slug":"five-decades-after-her-murder-evidence-now-points-to-notorious-serial-killer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/04\/02\/five-decades-after-her-murder-evidence-now-points-to-notorious-serial-killer\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Decades After Her Murder, Evidence Now Points To Notorious Serial Killer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div style=\"position:relative\" data-narration-container=\"true\">\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis case is now officially closed,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>WATCH:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><div class=\"youtube-embed\" data-video_id=\"eT9GeOM67OY\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Ted Bundy killed Utah teen found dead more than 50 years ago\" width=\"696\" height=\"392\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/eT9GeOM67OY?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p>Aime <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sltrib.com\/news\/2026\/04\/01\/ted-bundy-killed-utah-teen-laura\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">disappeared<\/a> on Halloween night in 1974, and her body was discovered in American Fork Canyon, near the Timpanogos Cave Visitor Center, about one month later \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p>The attempted kidnapping of a 19-year-old woman eventually led to Bundy\u2019s arrest in 1975, but he could not be directly tied to Aime\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>Bundy was never charged with Aime\u2019s murder, but her family \u2014 and local authorities \u2014 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 \u2014 but no one was able to tie him directly to the physical evidence until recently.<\/p>\n<p>Sheriff Smith cited \u201cnew forensic techniques\u201d that allowed commingled DNA samples to be separated into individual profiles \u2014 techniques that Utah\u2019s state crime lab was not able to make use of until 2023.<\/p>\n<p>Once a male DNA profile was extracted from the sample in Aime\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>In the state of Utah alone, Bundy is believed to have murdered at least five women \u2014 and as many as eight. He moved to Salt Lake City in 1974 to attend University of Utah\u2019s law school, but prior to his arrival there, he had already killed at least nine women in the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/five-decades-after-her-murder-evidence-now-points-to-notorious-serial-killer\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. \u201cThis case is now officially closed,\u201d Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith announced on Wednesday, detailing during a news conference the process by which his department had been able to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-current-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}