For more than half a century, investigators believed they knew who killed Laura Ann Aime.
What they lacked was proof.
Aime, a 17-year-old high school student, disappeared on October 31, 1974, after leaving a Halloween party in Lehi, Utah. Hikers found her naked body about a month later, just off a highway in the nearby American Fork Canyon. She had been bound, beaten and strangled.
Utah authorities long suspected serial killer Ted Bundy was responsible—and he confessed to killing Aime shortly before he was executed in 1989. But without any other concrete evidence tying him to the slaying, investigators refused to close the case.
That changed in April 2026, when the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced investigators had linked Bundy to Aime’s killing using recent DNA technology, closing a 51-year-old cold case. The evidence was so compelling that Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith said that prosecutors would have sought the death penalty against Bundy for Aime’s killing—if he was still alive.
For many observers who had long accepted Aime as one of Bundy’s victims, the announcement seemed largely symbolic. But criminologists and investigators say the breakthrough could have far-reaching implications, not only for Aime's family, but for other unsolved cases that have hovered around Bundy’s orbit for decades.
Of the killings long attributed to Bundy but never conclusively proven, Aime's case “is the first to receive genetic confirmation,” Matt DeLisi, a sociology and criminal justice professor at Iowa State University and author of Ted Bundy and the Unsolved Murder Epidemic: The Dark Figure of Crime, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. The identification offers investigators something they've never had before: a DNA-confirmed Bundy homicide from his years in Utah.
The breakthrough also conclusively tied Bundy, who was only ever convicted in three murders in Florida, to a homicide committed years earlier and hundreds of miles away, Bryanna Fox, a former FBI special agent and co-director of the Center for Justice Research and Policy at the University of South Florida, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
For investigators trying to reconstruct the full scope of Bundy's crimes, that broader timeline could prove just as important as the DNA match itself.
“We know for certain that Bundy's MO [modus operandi] evolved,” Fox says, adding that the DNA match gives investigators a clearer picture of what that evolution looked like—and may help them spot connections to cold cases that once seemed unrelated.
