Laura Ann Amy is one of dozens of victims now linked by DNA to Bundy. He was executed in 1989. On a farm in Fairview, Utah, a 17-year-old girl fed her horse red licorice nibs by hand. The horse, named Arab, knew the sound of her footsteps and waited for her at the fence line every afternoon. She had been bringing the candy since she was old enough to reach over the rail.
On Halloween night 1974, she left a party in Lehi to buy a pack of cigarettes. She never came home. By 1989, Ted Bundy was on death row in Florida, confessing to 30 murders before his execution. A Utah detective traveled to ask him about the disappearances on his old hunting ground along the Wasatch Front. About Laura, Bundy said he could not remember meeting her.
The case stayed open for decades after his execution. By the time it was finally closed in 2026, her parents were gone, and her younger sister had grown old waiting. Laura Ann Amy was born on August 21st, 1957 in Lehi, Utah. She stood nearly 6-ft tall. There was a cat she had claimed as her own, a dog she had grown up with, and a horse named Arab.
Her younger sister Michelle followed her everywhere. The Amy family lived on a working farm in Fairview, a town of about 1,200 people in central Utah. James and Sherlene Amy had raised their children among the animals: chickens, cows, peacocks, [music] hogs, sheep, dogs, and what one family account remembered as dozens of cats. Laura had been raised on the work.
She did chores before school, knew how to handle the animals, and grew tall and strong from it. By 15, she had won a state softball championship. She rode in an all-girls horseback riding club called the Silver Spurs through Sanpete County, competing in fairs and parades across the state. By 17, she was independent.
She moved between friends’ houses. The family had recently relocated from Fairview to Salem in Utah County, but Laura was often elsewhere, staying with friends rather than at home. Her parents had grown used to days passing without contact. That habit was about to matter in the worst way. On the evening of October 31st, 1974, Laura was at a Halloween party in Lehi.
The party slowed down late in the night. She told the others she was going out to get cigarettes. She walked out into the cold air and the dark streets of Lehi alone. Nobody at the party saw what happened next. The store was never reached and no phone call ever came home. She disappeared from the streets of Lehi without a single witness.
The family did not panic right away. Then a planned hunting trip with her father came and went, and Laura did not appear. She would not have missed it. That was the moment her parents knew something was wrong. A missing person report went in. Utah County deputies began checking hospitals, calling Laura’s friends, and driving the roads between Lehi and the farm.
They contacted the convenience store she had been heading toward. No one matching her description had come in that night. They retraced the route she would have walked, asking at gas stations whether anyone had seen a tall teenage girl alone on the road after midnight. No one had. The days turned into weeks.
November arrived with no trace of Laura Ann Amie. The family began the long part of waiting. On November 27th, 1974, two college students went hiking in American Fork Canyon, north and east of Lehi. They were out for the Thanksgiving holiday. Partway up the canyon near State Route 92, one of them saw something down an embankment.
He stopped his friend. They climbed down together. A body. 27 days had passed since Laura disappeared. The medical examiner’s findings were specific. She had been bound. The beating had been severe enough to make her face unrecognizable. She had been sexually assaulted. A nylon stocking had been wrapped around her neck and used to strangle her.
That had been the cause of death. Something else was in the report. Body condition and the location of the dump site indicated she had been kept alive for some period of time after the abduction. Days, possibly more. The location was not where she had been killed. It was where she had been disposed of. Her father drove to identify the body.
[music] James Aim could not recognize his daughter from her face. The beating had taken too much. He was about to walk out of the morgue when he remembered something. Years earlier, Laura had fallen off a horse and had been left with scars on her arm. He looked at the arm. The scars were there. That was how he confirmed it.
The family learned on Thanksgiving Day that Laura was dead. James Aim was broken after that. His wife, Sherlene, by Michelle’s account, was the stronger of the two. She did not show much emotion. The grief moved differently through their house. The investigation outside it had already begun. [music] The county sheriff’s office opened a homicide investigation.
The work in Lehi turned up nothing the missing person’s search had not already turned up. No one had seen Laura get into a vehicle. No one had noticed a stranger watching her. The streets had been empty after midnight. By winter, the case had taken on a different shape. Laura’s abduction matched a pattern. 4 weeks earlier, a 16-year-old cheerleader named Nancy Wilcox had vanished from Salt Lake County.
2 weeks after that, on October 18th, Melissa Smith, the 17-year-old daughter of the Midvale police chief, had been abducted and found dead in a canyon with injuries that looked like Laura’s. Then, on November 8th, 8 days after Laura disappeared, a 17-year-old named Deborah Kent vanished from the parking lot of Viewmont High School in Bountiful.
The same night, an 18-year-old named Carol DaRonch escaped a kidnapping attempt at the Fashion Place Mall in Murray. The man who had approached her claimed to be a police officer. He told her someone had broken into her car, asked her to come with him to identify the suspect, and showed her what looked like a badge.
She got into his Volkswagen Beetle. When the car turned the wrong direction, she fought him off. He had pulled a crowbar from the seat beside him, the same crowbar a state trooper would find in his trunk almost a year later. She broke free, ran into the road, and flagged down a passing driver who pulled over.
The driver took her to a police station. She gave a description of the man and his car. He had been clean-shaven, neat, mid-20s, driving a Volkswagen Beetle with a tear in the front passenger seat. Four young women gone in 5 weeks. All teenagers, all in Utah, all taken in plain daylight or open hours. The pattern was impossible to ignore.
In the early hours of August 16th, 1975, a Utah Highway Patrol sergeant named Bob Haywood was on duty in Granger. At 2:30 in the morning, he spotted a Volkswagen Beetle moving slowly through a residential neighborhood. He turned to follow. And when the Beetle ran a stop sign, he hit the lights. The driver accelerated.
After a short chase, the car pulled over. [music] Hayward thought he had stopped a routine traffic violation. What he had pulled over was something else entirely. The driver was a 28-year-old University of Utah law student. In the back of his Volkswagen, Hayward found a ski mask, a pair of pantyhose with holes cut for the eyes, nose, and mouth, a crowbar, rope, handcuffs, a flashlight, garbage bags, and pieces of torn sheet.
The driver gave his name as Theodore Robert Bundy. Bundy had enrolled at the University of Utah Law School in September of 1974, 1 month before Laura disappeared. He took an apartment in the Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake City, joined the LDS Church, attended classes, and looked, from the outside, like any other student in his program.
His move into Utah lined up with the 5 weeks of the disappearances along the Wasatch Front. His movements through Salt Lake County, Holiday, Midvale, and Bountiful tracked the geography of the missing women precisely. Carol DaRonch picked him out of a lineup. He was arrested, tried, and convicted of her aggravated kidnapping.
Among Laura’s family, there was another piece of the story. Laura’s niece, Tara Stucky, speaking decades later, told reporters that Bundy had approached Laura more than once in the weeks leading up to Halloween, that he had been around her before the night she disappeared. He had stalked her, the family believed, before he took her.
It was not in the police record. It was something the family carried. There was something the record did have. In 1977, when investigators took a second look at Laura’s case. They interviewed one of her friends, Mary Ann Beverage. Beverage told them that on the night Laura disappeared, she had seen Bundy at Brown’s Cafe in Lehigh.
She picked him out by face. The eyewitness identification was put on file. By itself, an eyewitness picking a face out could not close a homicide. It was one more thing that pointed at him. Investigators across multiple jurisdictions believed he was responsible for the murders, too. The geography matched. The timeline matched.
So did the injuries on Laura and Melissa Smith. They fit the few things investigators had pieced together about how he worked. But the forensic tools of 1975 could not match biological evidence to a suspect. DNA profiling would not be developed for another decade. Belief was not proof. Bundy escaped Utah custody in 1977.
He fled to Florida and went on killing. At the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University, he attacked four women in their beds [music] and killed two of them, Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy. Three weeks later, he abducted and murdered Kimberly Leach, a 12-year-old, in Lake City. He was caught in Pensacola driving a stolen car, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
In the years before his execution, Bundy began making admissions. He met with investigators from Utah, Washington, Colorado, Idaho, and Florida. By the end, he had confessed to at least 30 murders. The true count was believed to be higher. Detective Dennis Couch of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office traveled to Florida in the days before the execution and sat across from Bundy with a recorder running.
Couch had spent years on the Utah cases. He had read the files, walked the canyons where bodies had been found, sat with the families of the missing. The man across the table looked older than his arrest photos, leaner with the years of death row on him. The interview was a chance, possibly the last chance, to get on the record what he was willing to say.
Bundy was articulate during the interview. He spoke clinically, sometimes with detail and sometimes vaguely, taking breaks to smoke. He admitted to murdering Nancy Wilcox and described where he had buried her body in remote country near Capitol Reef National Park. The Debra Kent killing came next. He said he had left her in a grave somewhere in the foothills.
Details he gave matched the geography and the timing of what investigators had spent years trying to confirm. Then Couch asked about Laura Aime. Bundy said he had no memory of her. The same answer came when Couch asked about Melissa Smith. His mind, he told the detective, was not as nimble as it used to be. The two murders he could not place were the two where bodies had been recovered and biological samples preserved.
His words did not put him there. Laura had been 17 years old for 14 years by then. A new generation of Utah teenagers had grown up. The proof had been waiting in an evidence locker every one of those years, and nobody could read it. On January 24th, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed by electric chair at Florida State Prison.
He was 42 years old. 45 minutes before the execution, he told Florida Warden Thomas Barton that he had also killed Susan Curtis, a 15-year-old who had vanished from a Brigham Young University youth conference in 1975. Barton wrote down what Bundy said. The information was passed to Utah authorities who searched the area Bundy named.
They never found her body. The execution closed the Florida cases. It did not close Laura’s. A serial killer’s broad admission of guilt without a specific memory of the victim and without forensic confirmation was not enough to formally close an unsolved Utah homicide. Everyone knew Bundy killed Laura Aime. The detectives knew, the family knew, the public knew, but the file stayed open because nobody could prove it.
The Aime case sat in storage for the next 37 years. It occupied a category that almost never appears in cold case work. The suspect’s name had been on the file since 1975. After Bundy’s arrest in Florida, his DNA had been collected and stored. By the late 1990s, the FBI had launched a national database called CODIS that would have allowed any matching profile to be flagged automatically.
The match needed to close the case existed in the system from the day CODIS went live, but the other side of the equation had its own problem. Biological material degrades with age. Standard extraction methods needed relatively intact samples to produce a clean profile. They could not pull a usable read from material this old and this fragile.
The technology to do it did not yet exist. Michelle and Paula, Laura’s younger sister, lived through those decades without knowing the case was still open. She had been 12 when Laura died and 27 when Bundy was executed. Like the rest of the family, she had assumed the execution closed it. Nobody from law enforcement had walked them through the distinction between Bundy’s broad confessions and a forensically closed file.
Detectives reviewed the case periodically. Each time a new method emerged, they sent the samples back to the lab. Each time the answer came back the same. The technology was getting closer, but closer was not there. The 1990s passed, the 2000s passed, the 2010s passed. Laura stayed 17, and her file and her evidence sat in the same building, waiting for the same thing.
In 2023, the Utah State Crime Lab acquired new genotyping equipment, technology that could extract usable DNA profiles from samples that were small, badly degraded by age, or contaminated with material from multiple people. For the first time, evidence like Laura’s might be readable. The new equipment could isolate a single male profile from samples that previous tools had declared unreadable.
In March of 2025, new leadership in the cold case division prompted a fresh review of unsolved files going back to the 1970s. The Aime case came up early. It had been the highest profile of the Utah Bundy cases without a forensic close. Investigation Sergeant Mike Reynolds and cold case detective Jake Hall pulled the case and walked the evidence log.
The items had been collected at the 1974 autopsy and at the dump site, sealed and labeled by detectives no longer with the office. Reynolds and Hall recognized that the preserved samples had never been tested with the latest extraction technology. The samples were sent to the State Crime Lab.
The forensic team examined what had been collected from Laura’s body at the 1974 autopsy, selected the portions most likely to retain usable genetic material, and ran the new extraction. They had survived the decades. A single male DNA profile emerged from biological material collected in 1974, clean, complete, and readable. It was entered into CODIS, the national database.
The system ran it against millions of records from convicted offenders across every participating jurisdiction in the country. A match came back. The unknown male from the 1974 evidence matched a sample stored in a Florida database. The match was high confidence. It was a full genetic identity. Not a partial profile or any or relative hit.
That profile belonged to Theodore Robert Bundy. The match was direct, not genetic genealogy, not a family tree traced through distant cousins. The DNA left on Laura’s body in 1974 matched the genetic profile of the man Utah investigators had been looking at since 1975. After 51 years, the forensic proof the case had always lacked finally existed.
On April 1st, 2026, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office held a press conference at their headquarters in Spanish Fork. Reporters had been told the morning before that something significant was coming. The Aime family had been told the night before what the announcement would be. Sheriff Mike Smith stood at the podium with Sergeant Reynolds, Detective Hall, and Bo Mason, the Commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety.
The announcement was direct. “We now have definitive evidence that Theodore Ted Bundy murdered Laura,” Smith told the room. “This case is now officially closed.” The Sheriff’s Office released a written statement that morning describing the result. “Forensic work,” the statement said, “had confirmed irrefutably that DNA evidence recovered from Laura’s body verified the existence of DNA belonging to Bundy.
” Smith added that if Bundy were still alive, prosecutors would have pursued the death penalty. He praised the original detectives who had collected and preserved the evidence in 1974. That evidence, the sheriff said, had endured the years and was pristine. Reynolds spoke next. Laura, he told the room, was the quintessential daughter of Utah County.
A rural girl who had grown up among horses and fairs, walking out of a Halloween party. The team had felt the pain the family had carried for half a century. They had wanted, Reynolds said, to deliver some measure of healing. Michelle and Paula sat in the room. Laura’s younger sister was 64 now. Tommy Amy, the youngest of the Ames sisters, was in the room as well.
After Reynolds finished speaking, Detective Hall walked over and hugged her. Michelle talked about Laura at the microphone. She talked about a girl who was just fun. About following her older sister everywhere as a 12-year-old. About riding horses through town together and sharing a bedroom on the farm in Fairview.
Michelle described the red licorice nibs Laura kept in her pocket for Arab. Then Michelle said something the investigators had not known. After Laura died, Arab would not eat licorice nibs anymore. The horse that had stood at the fence every afternoon, the one that had learned to expect the candy from Laura’s open hand, refused them.
She did not explain why. She said it had just happened. She also said that her mother and father, both gone now, would have been glad to know the case was finally closed. “It was really quite amazing,” she told reporters, “that people were still interested in Laura’s case.” She thanked the sheriff’s office and the media for caring when they did not have to.
And then she said, of Bundy, that knowing he was gnashing his teeth in hell was something she did not want to think about. “But with him,” she said, “that was what he deserved.” Reynolds told reporters that the Bundy profile generated from Laura’s evidence could now be compared against preserved material from other open cases in Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, and Washington.
Detectives in Salt Lake County who had spent decades on Nancy Wilcox’s case had been waiting for this. So had agencies in three other states. Several other cases were linked to him without forensic confirmation. That could change. When the conference ended, Brent Bullock, who had led investigations at the Utah County Attorney’s office during the original case, came up and shook Michelle’s hand.
He had worked the Aim file in the years after Laura disappeared when investigators believed it was Bundy but had no way to prove it. Now retired, he had come to see this end. The family left the building together. Michelle walked out into the Spanish Fork afternoon carrying 51 years of grief and a single new piece of information she had not woken up with.
The case she had thought was closed had only just been finalized. The file that had been open since November 1974 was marked closed. Bundy had been dead for 37 years. He could not be charged or tried or sentenced. Evidence collected from Laura’s body on Thanksgiving Day 1974 had finally spoken.
Science had confirmed what a confession could not. Laura’s horse stood at the fence line every afternoon waiting for the girl who brought red licorice nibs in her open palm. After Halloween night 1974, he stopped eating them. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
