Utah teenager Melissa Ann Smith, killed in 1974, identified as Ted Bundy’s victim

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

“Although there was much speculation regarding a suspect at the time, no suspect was ever 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 cold case Utah investigators have closed this year after linking it to Bundy. In April, investigators announced that he killed Laura Ann Aime, a Utah teenager 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 with the evidence related to pattern, motive, means and opportunity,” led investigators to conclude that Bundy was Smith’s killer, said Margaret Olson, Summit County attorney.

In April, a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Public Safety said three other unsolved cases in Utah were believed to be linked to Bundy.

They include Nancy Wilcox, a 16-year-old from Salt Lake County who investigators say was Bundy’s first victim in Utah; Susan Curtis, a 15-year-old girl 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.

The Utah crime lab began using new genotyping technology in 2023, which allows investigators to create complete DNA profiles from degraded or mixed samples that older methods could not fully analyze. Investigators used this technology to compare DNA collected in Utah with Bundy’s complete DNA profile in Florida, leading to these advances.

Investigators first suspected Bundy in 1976.

Smith, 17, was the daughter of Midvale Police Chief Louis S. Smith. According to the Salt Lake Tribune in 1974, Smith left a girlfriend at a Midvale pizzeria on the night of Friday, October 18, and was seen at a Murray restaurant shortly afterward.

Her naked body was found nine days later, on October 27, by a deer hunter in Summit Park, a housing development near Park City.

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

At the time, Bundy was serving a 1- to 15-year sentence in Utah State Prison in Draper for kidnapping a 17-year-old girl near the Fashion Place mall on November 8, 1974. He was served with a murder warrant for 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 a missing person case could be linked to Bundy. One of these deaths was that of Smith, another that of Aime.

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

The State of Florida executed Bundy via the electric chair on January 24, 1989.

Chief Smith resigned from the Midvale Police Department 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 his execution in Florida in 1989, Bundy confessed to killing at least 30 young women. In Utah, he is believed to have killed at least five, possibly eight, young women in Salt Lake, Davis and Utah counties. Some of their bodies were never found.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.