Ted Bundy’s NEW Victim Revealed After 52 Years

yellow police tape cordoning off an outdoor area — Photo: PhotosbyAndy / Shutterstock

Fifty-two years after a seventeen-year-old vanished from a Midvale, Utah drugstore, a laboratory comparison of genetic material drawn from her remains has closed the case — and reattached one more name to the ledger of Ted Bundy’s victims. The breakthrough did not come from a single eureka moment but from a technique built for exactly this kind of problem: tracing a paternal-line genetic signature across decades when no other witness remains to testify.

Key Points

Utah’s Summit County Attorney’s Office formally closed the 1974 murder of Melissa Ann Smith on October 27, 2026, attributing it to Ted Bundy.
The Utah State Crime Lab matched a Y-STR DNA profile from Smith’s autopsy evidence to the profile already tied to Bundy through victim Laura Aime’s case.
Officials say the DNA finding was weighed together with pattern, motive, means, and opportunity evidence, not treated as proof standing alone.
Y-STR testing identifies a paternal genetic lineage rather than a single individual, a scientific nuance that shapes how such matches are properly interpreted.
The case reflects a broader pattern in American cold-case work, where decades-old biological evidence, preserved and retested, has repeatedly reopened the ledger on serial offenders.

A Cold Case Closed Through Biological Evidence

Melissa Ann Smith disappeared in October 1974 and her remains were found nine days later in the mountains above Salt Lake City. For half a century the case sat unresolved in Utah’s cold-case files, one of several unsolved killings from the period when Bundy was abducting young women across the Mountain West. That changed on July 14, 2026, when the Utah State Crime Lab concluded that a Y-STR profile developed from evidence preserved from Smith’s autopsy matched the Y-STR profile already recovered from the remains of Laura Aime, another Bundy victim whose case had previously been resolved through DNA testing. Summit County Attorney Margaret Olson announced the closure at an October 27, 2026 news conference.

The Aime profile was not new. Investigators had already used it to identify Bundy by comparing it against his known reference sample on file in Florida, where he was convicted and executed in 1989. That earlier identification gave the Aime profile its evidentiary anchor; the new step was establishing that the same profile recovered from Smith’s remains matched it, effectively drawing a direct forensic line between the two homicides.

Why Y-STR Testing Is the Tool for This Kind of Case

Standard forensic DNA — autosomal STR typing — compares genetic markers inherited from both parents and, when a full profile is obtained, can statistically narrow a match to one person among trillions. Y-STR testing is different by design. It isolates markers carried only on the Y chromosome, which passes from father to son largely unchanged across generations. The National Institute of Standards and Technology notes that paternal relatives — fathers, sons, brothers, uncles, paternal cousins — are expected to share the same Y-STR haplotype, and that Y-STR results are therefore interpreted additively rather than multiplied the way autosomal loci are, producing far less individualizing power per locus than a full genetic profile. Forensic examiners trained under Department of Justice guidance accordingly frame a Y-STR result as an inclusion within a paternal lineage rather than an identification of a single man.

That distinction matters less in degraded or limited evidence than it might sound. Y-STR analysis exists precisely because it performs well on exactly the kind of sample a 1974 homicide produces decades later: small, mixed, or partially compromised biological material where a full autosomal profile is unobtainable. For investigators trying to connect two cold cases separated by fifty years, a paternal-lineage match that links back to a reference sample already tied to one known individual — Bundy, via Florida — is a workable and well-established forensic pathway, even though the underlying science identifies a lineage rather than a lone fingerprint.

DNA Plus the Rest of the File

Olson was explicit that the genetic match was not presented as a freestanding verdict. “This DNA evidence, when considered alongside evidence related to pattern, motive, means and opportunity establishes that Ted Bundy was responsible for Melissa Ann Smith’s murder,” she said at the announcement. That framing reflects how cold-case prosecutors typically close files of this vintage: a laboratory result anchors the physical evidence, while geography, timing, victimology, and the offender’s documented conduct in parallel cases fill out the rest of the picture. Bundy’s confirmed pattern — young women abducted from public places across Utah, Colorado, and the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1970s — gave Summit County investigators a behavioral template against which the Smith killing had long been informally compared, even before the DNA match made the connection official.

Part of a Recognized Pattern in Cold-Case Forensics

Smith’s case is not an isolated curiosity in the history of DNA-driven investigation. Retesting of preserved biological evidence has repeatedly reopened decades-old homicides and, in a number of documented instances, tied previously unconnected killings to offenders already known to law enforcement — a dynamic the National Institute of Justice has tracked through its postconviction DNA and cold-case review programs. The same forensic infrastructure that re-examined Smith’s remains has, elsewhere in the country, both confirmed serial patterns and — in separate proceedings — helped exonerate wrongly convicted individuals by identifying the actual perpetrator years after the fact. The technology is agnostic to the outcome it produces; its value lies in its ability to extract a usable signal from evidence that outlived every other investigative lead available in 1974.

BREAKING: Authorities in Utah have officially linked serial killer Ted Bundy to the 1974 murder of 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith. Breakthrough DNA evidence allowed investigators to close the 52-year-old cold case.

— Deborah Roberts (@DebRobertsABC) October 28, 2026

What the Closure Means Going Forward

For Smith’s family, the closure answers a question that sat open for more than half a century. For investigators nationally, it is a reminder that evidence rooms, not headlines, are where cold cases eventually get solved — biological material collected under 1970s forensic practice, properly preserved, remains usable under testing standards that did not exist when it was first gathered. Bundy’s name will attach to more files than the courts ever formally adjudicated, since his 1989 execution closed off any possibility of trial-level testing of this specific attribution. That reality places the full evidentiary weight on agency disclosure and laboratory rigor — which is exactly the standard Summit County invoked in closing Melissa Ann Smith’s case after fifty-two years.