The monster is officially tied to one more nightmare.
After five decades of agonizing uncertainty, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office confirmed on April 1, 2026, that modern forensic science has closed the book on the 1974 death of Laura Ann Aime.
Laura was just 17 when she vanished on Halloween night 1974 after leaving a party in Lehi to buy cigarettes. Her body was discovered a month later in the freezing wilderness of American Fork Canyon.
She had been beaten and strangled, but for over half a century, the case remained an "unsolved" mystery despite a massive shadow looming over it.
That shadow belonged to Ted Bundy. The infamous serial killer was a law student at the University of Utah at the time of the disappearance.
While Bundy actually confessed to the murder shortly before his 1989 execution, the lack of physical evidence meant the case could never be legally closed.
Everything changed when the Utah state crime lab applied advanced DNA technology to tiny, degraded samples preserved from the original crime scene.
The testing produced a single male profile that returned a direct hit for Bundy in the national CODIS database.
This breakthrough does more than just confirm a confession; it officially places Bundy’s DNA profile into modern law enforcement systems.
Investigators believe this could be the key to linking the executed killer to a string of other unsolved disappearances across the Pacific Northwest.
For the Aime family, the long wait for justice is finally over, proving that even a half century later, the truth has a way of coming to the surface.