Bundy’s confirmed victim count has continued to grow decades after he was executed, with investigators using DNA technology to connect additional cold cases to the serial killer. On April 1, a Utah sheriff confirmed that Ted Bundy was responsible for the unsolved death of a Utah teen in 1974, and said the Utah County Sheriff’s Office expected more cases could move toward resolution.
Utah sheriff’s Sgt. Mike Reynolds told reporters that the office had created Bundy’s full DNA profile and that it had helped identify his role in the 1974 death. Reynolds said the office expected another cold case would be “close to closure” soon, also citing the availability of Bundy’s DNA profile.
The AP report said Bundy’s attacks began in Washington state in 1974. It described how the earliest linked deaths were reported around Seattle, and how an 18-year-old University of Washington student survived an attack in January 1974 but with permanent injuries. The report said Bundy was believed to have been responsible because the case fit a pattern prosecutors later associated with him: breaking into young women’s homes, attacking them, and then either leaving them to die or dumping their bodies elsewhere.
The report said other early cases in Washington and Oregon involved abductions of women, including accounts in which witnesses saw the women talking to a man wearing an arm sling. It also said that by October, the report linked Bundy to disappearances in Utah, including the death of 17-year-old Melissa Anne Smith, whose body was found on a hillside in Summit Park, Utah, after her head was beaten with a crowbar.
As the AP account described, Bundy later faced a case tied to Carol DaRonch, an 18-year-old who was snatched by Bundy after he claimed to be a police officer investigating car break-ins. DaRonch survived after she jumped out of his car when he tried to handcuff her, and the report said DaRonch’s testimony later helped put Bundy behind bars.
The report also recounted Bundy’s early encounters with law enforcement and the way his custody status changed as cases moved through courts. It said he was arrested for the first time in connection with disappearances in August 1975, when police pulled him over and found items including rope, handcuffs and a ski mask. The report said Bundy was found guilty the following year of kidnapping and assaulting DaRonch and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and while imprisoned he faced charges tied to the earlier death of a nursing student.
According to the report, Bundy escaped custody by climbing out a second-story courthouse window in 1977 during a hearing brought to Aspen, Colorado. It said he was caught about a week later, but that he escaped again six months later by breaking through the ceiling of a jail. The report said he then fled across the country and, on Jan. 15, 1978, entered the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University, where he bludgeoned two women to death and left two more badly injured.
The AP report said Bundy was seen by many during his 1979 trial as a “handsome charmer,” and it said the case drew attention because of his self-assured presence in court. It included a quote from a teenage spectator who told an AP reporter: “I don’t know what it is he has, but he’s fascinating. He’s impressive. He just has a kind of magnetism.” It also said the judge presiding over the trial, Edward Cowart, described Bundy as a “bright young man” who would have made a good lawyer, while also recognizing him as a violent killer and sentencing him to die.
Bundy was executed on Jan. 24, 1989, by electric chair in Florida, and the AP report said he gave a series of confessions in his final days, including to some crimes that were previously unknown to police. The report said not all of those cases have been confirmed.
DNA testing has been central to the ongoing reassessment of Bundy’s confirmed victims, the AP report said. It described how new DNA testing confirmed that Bundy also killed 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime, whose body was found a month after she went missing on Halloween night in 1974. The report said authorities believed Aime had been kept alive for several days after her abduction, and it said evidence from that case was preserved until DNA forensics technology allowed investigators to extract a DNA profile that matched Bundy and formally closed the case. As covered in the MSI prior story, the new DNA testing linked Laura Ann Aime’s 1974 death to Bundy. MSI previously reported that new DNA testing linked Laura Ann Aime’s 1974 death to Ted Bundy.
The AP report also placed Bundy among the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history, describing other defendants for comparison, including Gary Ridgway, Samuel Little and Donald Harvey. Even as his execution dates back decades, the report said DNA testing has continued to add to the number of victims confirmed as investigators match preserved evidence to Bundy’s full DNA profile.