Park City • More than 50 years after hunters found Utah teen Melissa Ann Smith’s body in a wooded area near the northwestern border of Summit County, authorities have confirmed that the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy was responsible for her death.

“Although there was much speculation regarding a suspect at the time, a suspect was never named, and the case was never officially closed,” Summit County Sheriff Kacey Bates said at a news conference Tuesday in Park City.

It’s the second Utah cold case investigators have closed this year after linking it to Bundy. In April, investigators announced that he killed Laura Ann Aime, a Utah teen whose body was found in American Fork Canyon in 1974.

Investigators used DNA evidence to close Aime’s case. Then, on July 14, they compared DNA from that case with evidence collected from Smith’s body and found a match, authorities said.

“This DNA evidence, when considered alongside evidence related to pattern, motive, means and opportunity,” led investigators to conclude that Bundy was Smith’s killer, said Summit County Attorney Margaret Olson.

In April, a Utah Department of Public Safety spokesperson said three other Utah cold cases were believed to be connected to Bundy.

They include Nancy Wilcox, a 16-year-old from Salt Lake County who investigators believe was Bundy’s first Utah victim; Susan Curtis, a 15-year-old who disappeared in 1975 while attending a youth conference at Brigham Young University in Provo; and Deborah Smith, whose body was found near Salt Lake City International Airport in 1976.

Utah’s crime lab began using new genotyping technology in 2023 that allows investigators to build full DNA profiles from degraded or mixed samples that older methods couldn’t fully analyze. Investigators used the technology to compare DNA collected in Utah with Bundy’s complete DNA profile in Florida leading to the breakthroughs.

Investigators first suspected Bundy in 1976

Smith, 17, was the daughter of Midvale’s police chief, Louis S. Smith. According to The Salt Lake Tribune in 1974, Smith left a girl friend in a Midvale pizza parlor on the night of Friday, Oct. 18, and was seen in a Murray restaurant a short time later.

Her nude body was found nine days later, on Oct. 27, by a deer hunter in Summit Park, a subdivision near Park City.

Nearly a year later, in October 1976, The Tribune reported that investigators were seeking a possible link between Smith’s death and Bundy.

At the time, Bundy was serving 1-to-15 in the Utah State Prison in Draper, for kidnapping a 17-year-old girl near Fashion Place Mall on Nov. 8, 1974. He was served a warrant for murder in the death of Caryn Campbell, a Michigan nurse who was killed while vacationing in Aspen, Colorado.

The Tribune reported that Utah investigators were looking to see if two unsolved deaths and one missing-persons case might be linked to Bundy. One of those deaths was Smith’s, another was Aime’s.

After Bundy was transferred to Colorado for that murder case, he escaped from custody twice. He made his way to Florida, where he killed two women in a Florida State University sorority and a 12-year-old girl in Lake City, Florida. He was arrested in Pensacola, Florida, on Feb. 15, 1978, and later convicted of those three murders.

The state of Florida executed Bundy via the electric chair on Jan. 24, 1989.

Chief Smith resigned from the Midvale Police in 1980, after 27 years on the force; he died in 1985. Melissa’s mother, Joan, died in 2024. Melissa’s sister, Jolene, died in 2014.

Before Bundy was executed in Florida in 1989, he confessed to killing at least 30 young women. In Utah, he is believed to have killed at least five, and possibly eight, young women in Salt Lake, Davis and Utah counties. Some of their bodies have never been found.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.