The Bundy case I studied in 1987 — and what DNA has just closed

This piece describes the abduction and murder of young women and girls. It is written plainly, without relish, and it names the victims because they were people.

If you are affected by what is described here: in the United States, RAINN is 1-800-656-4673 and the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is 988. Elsewhere, your national support line will take the call.

I studied Ted Bundy in 1987.

Not for interest. It was a psychology course, and he was one of the case studies we went through — the manuscripts, the police records, the audio material, all of it. Reading it properly rather than watching a documentary about it.

What makes that strange now is the date. In 1987 he was still alive. He was on death row in Florida, working through his appeals, and he was not talking. Everything we were reading was other people's reconstruction: the trial record, the investigation files, the interviews he had given and regretted giving. The one account that would have been worth having was the one he was withholding, because withholding it was the only thing keeping him breathing.

The two cases closed this week were blank lines on the page I was reading.

What was announced

On Tuesday, 27 October 2026, the Summit County attorney in Utah announced that DNA evidence had linked Bundy to the murder of Melissa Ann Smith.

She was seventeen. She lived in Midvale, south of Salt Lake City, where her father was the chief of police. On 18 October 1974 she was out at a pizza parlour and then a restaurant, and she did not come home. Nine days later a hunter found her body in the woods in Summit County.

Fifty-two years to the day. Her parents are both dead. The relatives who survive her were told the news and declined to attend the announcement, and declined to speak to reporters.

The case had always been listed as unsolved. Not unidentified — everybody knew who she was. Unsolved. Bundy was the suspect everybody assumed and nobody could prove.

Why it could be proved now

Two things had to happen, and neither of them had anything to do with a detective having a hunch.

The first was Laura Ann Aime. She was seventeen too, and she went missing after a Halloween party in Utah in 1974, and she was found dead and badly beaten in late November of that year. Bundy confessed to killing her in the days before his execution — a confession nobody could do much with at the time, because he had spent fifteen years lying to everybody about everything.

In April 2026, DNA testing finally backed him up. Fluid recovered from her body matched his profile, which had been sitting in Florida since his conviction there.

The second was equipment. Utah's state crime lab got new technology in 2023 that can pull DNA out of samples that are too small, too degraded by fifty years in the ground, or too mixed with other people's to have been readable before. It is not a better detective. It is a better machine, and a decision by somebody years ago to keep the evidence instead of losing it.

They matched the profile from Laura Aime to a profile recovered from Melissa Smith. Two girls killed within weeks of each other in the same state by the same man, and it took half a century to join them up.

The number is a floor, not a total

The figure usually given is thirty. That is the floor, not the count.

Bundy was convicted of three murders, all in Florida. Everything above three is confession and inference. And the confessions were a transaction. When he told somebody something, he wanted something back. He was still talking in the final week of his life, sitting with investigators and trading details, and he was still hoping the talking would buy him one more delay. It did not. He was executed on schedule with the account unfinished.

So the record is not a list of what he did. It is a list of what he was willing to sell, to whom, and on what day. Some of what he offered in that last week has still never been verified. Some of it never will be, because the evidence is gone or the location is a field that has been built over.

This is why a DNA result in 2026 can still add a name to the total, and why it is not the last one. Nancy Wilcox, sixteen, disappeared from Utah in 1974. Salt Lake County is still working that case. Bundy is thirty-seven years dead and the ledger is still open.

The mistakes were not mistakes

The accepted reading is that he got careless at the end. I came out of that case study with the opposite conclusion, and I have never changed it.

He was not slipping. He was baiting them.

Look at what he left behind. The bite marks. The same car, stopped more than once, with the tools of the trade in it, and him talking his way out of both stops. Being seen. Being remembered by people who would later be asked to describe him. Leaving a trail that any single competent investigator with access to two states' worth of files could have put together years before anybody did.

You can read that as a man losing control. I read it as a man running an experiment: how close can I walk to them before they see me? And the answer, every time, was closer than anybody was prepared to believe.

There is a detail that settles it for me. The bite was the thing that put him in the chair. Of everything he left, that was the one piece of evidence that could be matched to him and only him, and it was left in the one place where it would be found and kept. A man that careful does not do that by accident. He does it because the risk is the point, and because being looked at and walking away is the best thing he ever felt.

And it worked, because being seen is not the same as being caught. Departments in different states kept separate files on separate men who were the same man. There was no mechanism for one to reach the other. He kept walking up to the edge of it, and the system kept failing to close its hand.

There is a version of Florida that has him coming apart at the end. I do not think that is it either.

By then he had been running careful for years. Controlled, methodical, leaving nothing behind that could be joined to him. And he could not live like that. The carefulness was the thing he could not scratch — he was holding himself in, and holding himself in was worse than the risk. Florida is where he stopped holding it in. He said as much himself, that it was a hard time for him there, and everything he did in that state is the least careful he had ever been.

That is not a man losing control. That is a man who had been keeping a lid on it and decided the lid cost too much.

The only thing that finally stopped him was a traffic stop in a stolen car, and this time he could not talk his way out of it.

I will never know whether I was right. He is dead, he never answered it, and the one man who could have told me took it with him. This is a reading of a record, not a fact, and I am not going to dress it up as one. But it is the reading that fits every part of that file I have ever seen, and forty years have not given me a better one.

The street lights

Here is the thing the retellings always miss, because the people writing them were not there.

He was not hunting in a hostile world. He was hunting in a trusting one.

When I was a boy, nobody locked their doors. Not in the day, and mostly not at night. When we went out to play we were told not to come back until the street lights came on, and that was the whole of the supervision. If you wanted a drink you drank out of a hose. If a man pulled up and asked for help, you helped him, because that was what people did and there was no reason not to.

The broken arm. The sling. The books he dropped. The Volkswagen that would not start. Every one of those approaches worked because in 1974 a stranger asking for help was a person in trouble, not a threat. The word stranger danger did not exist in the language until the 1980s — it was invented afterwards, to teach children what their parents had never been taught.

He did not have to get past anybody's defences. There were none. There was no expectation that a polite, educated, well-spoken man in a nice car could be a predator, because that expectation had to be built, and it was built out of what he did.

That is the real reason we still study him. Not because he was fascinating. Because he is the case that taught a whole society to be suspicious, and the cost of that lesson was at least thirty women and girls.

Psychopath, sociopath, and what I concluded

The label usually attached to him is psychopath. I did not accept it then and I do not now.

He was a sociopath, and he was good at it. He could read a room, read a person, and be exactly what that person needed him to be for the four minutes it took. Nobody who met him came away uneasy. Not the neighbours, not the colleagues, not the police who stopped him. That is not the blank, cold, obviously-wrong thing people picture when they hear the word psychopath. That is a man with a working understanding of other people and no conscience to go with it.

Both words have fallen out of clinical use since. The diagnosis now is antisocial personality disorder, and the argument about whether the cause is born or made has never been settled. What I will say is that my own conclusion was the second one, and it was formed without the confessions, without the DNA, and without any of what has been established since.

He was made by an environment and then he was let loose in a culture that could not see him. That is not an excuse. It is an explanation, and explanations are the only thing that helps anybody spot the next one.

The films have never got him right

Every dramatisation turns him into something you would cross the street to avoid. That is the one thing he never was.

He was not frightening to look at. He was intelligent, articulate, and easy to be around for the length of a conversation, and that is the whole of why it worked. A man who made people uneasy would have been remembered, described, and caught. He made people comfortable, and they helped him carry his books to the car.

Even the number people quote about his intelligence came from him. He was the source of most of his own legend, and the films have spent forty years repeating it back. They gave him the one thing he actually wanted, which was to be thought of as extraordinary — and in doing it they buried the only fact about him that is any use: that he looked like nobody in particular.

What it means when the answer arrives late

There is a detail in this week's announcement that has stayed with me more than the science.

Her parents are dead. The people who waited fifty-two years for an answer were not alive to receive it. The relatives who are left declined to come and declined to speak, which is their right and their business, and reads to me like a family that finished grieving a long time ago and does not need a press conference to reopen it.

That is what these closures actually deliver. Rarely justice — the man was executed in 1989 and cannot be punished twice. Sometimes a name restored to a record. Mostly, an ending for a file, and a small amount of peace for whoever is still standing.

Adapted from the Disturbing Truths episode notes, 29 October 2026.

Sources

• AP, "Serial killer Ted Bundy is linked to another Utah teenager's 1974 killing through DNA testing", 27 October 2026.
• The Guardian, "DNA links serial killer Ted Bundy to 1974 murder of Utah girl", 27 October 2026.

Figures for the total number of victims are given as "at least thirty" throughout, following AP. No more precise figure is stated here because none is established.