New evidence connected the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy on Wednesday to the murder of a 17-year-old Utah girl, Laura Ann Aime, more than 50 years after she disappeared.
For decades, prosecutors throughout the country have sought to prove that Mr. Bundy was responsible for the deaths of Ms. Aime and many other young women.
Ms. Aime went missing on Halloween in 1974 and her body was found by hikers a month later.
Before his execution in 1989, Mr. Bundy confessed to murdering Ms. Aime and more than two dozen other young women, but prosecutors have long suspected that he may have killed as many as 50 women.
Here’s what to know about Mr. Bundy and the women he killed.
Who was Ted Bundy?
Mr. Bundy was born in a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vt., on Nov. 24, 1946. When he was 3 years old, he and his mother moved to Tacoma, Wash., where he was raised.
His mother married a man named John Bundy, and the couple later had four daughters and a son.
He attended several universities but graduated from the University of Washington with a psychology degree in 1970. He also attended law school twice, but dropped out.
Mr. Bundy was described as a “terrific looking man” with curly brown hair and blue eyes in a New York Times article about his trial in 1979. The article said that he had “a smile turning the corners of his lean all-American face” and that he appeared relaxed in the courtroom.
He was first convicted of kidnapping a teenager and escaped prison twice.
Mr. Bundy first came onto the police’s radar in the mid-1970s, when he was accused of kidnapping Carol DaRonch, a 17-year-old girl from Salt Lake City. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
In 1977, while he was in Colorado for a hearing regarding a murder accusation, Mr. Bundy jumped from a courthouse library window and escaped into the mountains. He was arrested days later.
Later that same year, he escaped from his jail cell in Colorado, where he squeezed through a hole in the ceiling after losing about 30 pounds. He was accused of murdering two women at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University and a 12-year-old girl before his recapture two months later in Florida.
He was convicted several times, but was sentenced to die in Florida.
Mr. Bundy was found guilty in 1979 of several charges, including first-degree murder, in the slayings of the two sorority women at Florida State and in the killing of a young girl that occurred after he escaped the Colorado jail.
He was sentenced to death and died on the electric chair at the Florida State Prison at 7:16 a.m. on Jan. 24, 1989, after 2,000 volts of electricity surged through his body for one minute.
As his execution date neared, Mr. Bundy continued confessing to murders he had committed, including the killings of eight women in Washington and another in Colorado.
Mr. Bundy’s confessions closed cases on 13 killings in Utah, Colorado and Washington State. He provided information on 14 more cases in Washington, Utah, Idaho, California, Vermont and Pennsylvania, and mentioned at least 20 more slayings in various states dating from 1969.
Christina Morales is a national reporter for The Times.
The post What to Know About Ted Bundy, the Notorious Serial Killer appeared first on New York Times.
