Utah has officially closed a 51-year-old case after using new DNA technology to identify a girl as the victim of serial killer Ted Bundy.
17-year-old Laura Ann Aime disappeared after leaving a Halloween party in 1974. Her body was discovered a month later by hikers in American Fork Canyon.
The Utah County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday that new testing “conclusively confirmed that DNA evidence recovered from Laura’s body indicated the presence of DNA belonging to Bundy.”
Bundy killed at least 30 women between February 1974 and February 1978. At the same time, he was also linked to many more murders across the country.
Before he was executed in Florida in 1989, Bundy confessed to Laura’s murder, but because
At the time of Laura’s death, he was living in Salt Lake City and studying law at the University of Utah.
The sheriff’s statement said Laura was remembered as “an outdoorsy, free-spirited person who loved the outdoors and shared a passion for horseback riding, hunting and caring for several of her younger siblings.”
Bundy often approached women in public, winning their trust with his charm or feigned hurt, and then lured them to remote locations and killed them.
He was first arrested in 1975 for kidnapping a woman and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
But in 1977 he escaped by jumping out of a prison library window.
He was caught again, but escaped again eight days later and continued killing until he was finally released in 1978.