The police chief’s daughter, found in Summit Park in 1974, was murdered by Ted Bundy, DNA confirms

New forensic testing connected evidence from Smith’s 1974 homicide to another Utah victim whose DNA had been directly matched to Bundy

PARK CITY, Utah — Fifty-two years to the day after hunters found the body of 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith in Summit County, law enforcement officials formally closed her murder case Tuesday, saying DNA evidence and decades of investigative work establish that Ted Bundy killed her.

Smith disappeared from Midvale on Oct. 18, 1974. Her body was discovered nine days later, on Oct. 27, in a wooded area near the Summit-Salt Lake county line.

Although Bundy had long been suspected in Smith’s killing, he was never officially named as her killer and the Summit County Sheriff’s Office kept the homicide investigation open for more than five decades.

“Today, I am announcing the closure of the 1974 homicide investigation into the death of Melissa Ann Smith,” Summit County Sheriff Kacey Bates said during a press conference Tuesday at the Summit County Justice Center.

The breakthrough came through new DNA work stemming from the murder of another 17-year-old Utah girl, Laura Ann Aime, who was killed weeks after Smith in 1974.

Earlier this year, the Utah State Crime Lab developed an STR DNA profile from biological evidence recovered from Aime’s body and directly matched it to Bundy’s known DNA profile on file in Florida. Utah County announced the closure of Aime’s homicide case on April 1.

Investigators then used remaining evidence from Aime’s case to develop a Y-STR profile, which examines DNA from the Y chromosome. That profile was compared with a Y-STR profile previously developed from biological evidence recovered from Smith’s body. The Utah State Crime Lab determined the profiles were consistent.

Crime lab officials cautioned Tuesday that Y-STR DNA is passed through the paternal line, meaning male relatives can share the same profile. Unlike the STR profile in the Aime case, the Y-STR result from Smith’s case was therefore not treated as a stand-alone identification of Bundy.

Instead, investigators said the matching profiles, combined with evidence involving pattern, motive, means, and opportunity, established that Bundy was responsible for Smith’s murder. The Summit County Attorney’s Office reviewed the findings before approving the case’s closure.

The renewed investigation began in May 2025, when Utah County investigators contacted the Summit County Sheriff’s Office about similarities between the Aime and Smith cases. The late Summit County Sheriff’s Lt. Alan Siddoway began reviewing the Smith investigation and worked with Salt Lake County Detective Ben Pender, Utah County investigators and the state crime lab.

Salt Lake County had retained original reports and physical evidence from the 1974 investigation. Pender said Tuesday that evidence submitted for the renewed testing came from the examination conducted after Smith’s body was found.

Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera said the case illustrates why homicide evidence is preserved even decades after a crime.

“This case demonstrates the importance of preserving evidence even when decades have passed,” Rivera said.

Salt Lake County officials said the agency has retained the evidence since 1974 and does not destroy evidence in homicide cases, allowing investigators to return to it as forensic technology advances.

Rivera said investigators also had an obligation to establish what happened rather than simply close the case based on a long-held assumption about Bundy.

“We owe that to the families of these cold cases,” Rivera said. “We have to find these cases and solve these cases to the best of our ability.”

The Sheriff’s Office said Smith’s next of kin were contacted before Tuesday’s announcement and informed of the findings. A family member investigators reached was “very, very gratified” that the case had been resolved but did not want to participate publicly, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Bates also recognized Siddoway, who spent years working on the case before his death earlier this month.

Bates recalled a quote Siddoway often shared, attributed to Voltaire: “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.”

“Most importantly, we remember Melissa Ann Smith and the somber significance of finally bringing this investigation to a close,” Bates said.

Bundy was living in Salt Lake City and attending law school at the University of Utah during the fall of 1974. Before his execution in Florida in 1989, he confessed to killing other Utah girls, including Aime, but never confessed to Smith’s murder.

Tuesday’s announcement does not end law enforcement’s examination of unresolved Utah cases associated with Bundy. Rivera said investigators continue to work the disappearance of Nancy Wilcox, another Utah teenager whose case has long been linked to him.

“It does not close the book on Ted Bundy,” Rivera said.

BREAKING: Summit County to close 50-year-old murder case and name Ted Bundy as the killer