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DNA Confirms Ted Bundy Killed Utah Teen Laura Ann Aime in 1974, and Her Case Is Closed

Utah County investigators matched a male DNA profile from preserved evidence to Bundy, ending a 51-year-old case he had confessed to but was never charged with.

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Illustration: old evidence items with blank paper tags in an archive box

Laura Ann Aime was 17 when she left a Halloween party alone on October 31, 1974, to walk to a convenience store. She had been staying with friends in the weeks before, so her family did not report her missing right away. On November 27, hikers found her body beside the highway in American Fork Canyon, near the Timpanogos Cave visitor center. She had been bound and beaten.

For more than half a century, almost everyone believed they knew who had done it. Ted Bundy, then a law student at the University of Utah, named Aime among the women he confessed to killing in the days before his execution in Florida in January 1989. He was never charged in her death, and the case stayed open. On April 1, 2026, at a news conference in Spanish Fork, the Utah County Sheriff's Office said that newly tested DNA had settled it. "This case is now officially closed," said Sheriff Mike Smith.

The test

The evidence had been kept for decades. The state crime lab, Utah Department of Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason explained, had acquired technology in 2023 that can separate mixed DNA profiles, and it pulled a male profile from a fluid sample collected in the case. Entered into the national database, the profile returned a hit in Florida, and Utah officials worked with the crime lab there to match it to Bundy.

Smith said that if Bundy were alive, his office would pursue criminal charges and the death penalty. Sgt. Mike Reynolds added that investigators now have Bundy's full DNA profile, which other agencies can use to try to close cases of their own.

"Laura Aime is the quintessential daughter of Utah County," Reynolds said. "We felt the pain that you felt this whole entire time, and we've had the desire to deliver to you some type of healing, we can't really say closure."

Her sister

Michelle Impala was 12 when her sister was killed. They shared a room and rode horses together, and she remembered that Laura used to feed her horse red licorice as a treat, and that after Laura died the horse would no longer eat it. Before the family moved to Utah County, Laura had grown up in Fairview, riding bikes and horses and, at about six feet tall, playing basketball. Impala said the confirmation was news her sister would have been "really happy to know."

When Aime's body was first found, police thought it might be Debra Kent, a 17-year-old from Bountiful who had disappeared on November 8, 1974. Bundy later confessed to killing Kent as well. Her body has never been found.

The DNA findings and the decision to close the case are the Utah County Sheriff's Office's, as announced at its April 1, 2026 news conference; the sheriff's statement itself was posted only on social media and could not be opened, so this account rests on reporting from the news conference by The Salt Lake Tribune and the Associated Press.

Sources

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