Utah investigators get full Ted Bundy DNA profile, reopen cold cases

A profile that was once too degraded to trust has suddenly become one of Utah’s sharpest tools in its cold-case vault. Investigators now have a full Ted Bundy DNA profile, built from 1970s evidence with technology acquired in 2023, and that shift could help reopen some of the state’s oldest unsolved murders and missing-person files.

The breakthrough mattered because earlier testing could only produce partial profiles, too weak to compare reliably in CODIS. Utah’s state crime lab was able to pull a single male DNA profile from old evidence and compare it with a complete Bundy profile preserved in Florida, a move that already helped close the 1974 killing of Laura Ann Aime. In April 2026, Utah authorities said DNA testing definitively linked Bundy to Aime’s death, giving investigators a working example of what the new method can do when older evidence finally yields enough genetic material to test.

That matters far beyond one case. The Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification runs the state’s cold-case database, and Utah law requires agencies to enter certain unsolved cases that have been open for three years or more. BCI says the system holds hundreds of unsolved homicides, missing-person cases and unidentified remains, which means a usable Bundy profile could be tested against more than the small set of cases already tied to his name. Utah officials believe Bundy is implicated in four known cold cases in the state, and the new DNA reference gives them a stronger way to check that assumption against evidence collected decades ago.

The state’s own cold-case pages already show how wide the Bundy footprint runs. Laura Ann Aime was 17 when she disappeared on Oct. 31, 1974; her body was found on Nov. 27, 1974, off American Fork Canyon Road. Melissa Ann Smith disappeared on Oct. 18, 1974, and her body was found on Oct. 27, 1974, near Toll Canyon in the Timberline/Summit Park area. Nancy Wilcox vanished from her home on Oct. 1, 1974 and was initially classified as a runaway. Susan Curtis was killed in a kidnapping-homicide on June 25, 1975, and Bundy is listed as the prime suspect after he confessed.

Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office cold-case detective Ben Pender said the profile could also surface cases investigators have not yet recognized as Bundy-related. That is the real power of the new tool: not Bundy lore, but Bundy evidence. A profile that once could not answer the question may now be able to test it, file by file, across Utah’s oldest unsolved cases.