Utah sheriffs held a press conference Tuesday to announce they'd finally linked serial killer Ted Bundy — dead since 1989 — to the 1974 murder of 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith, a cold-case triumph that raises an uncomfortable question: why does solving a half-century-old case against an executed man get the spotlight while Americans are dying right now from fentanyl and violent crime that progressive prosecutors won't touch?
Summit County Sheriff Kacey Bates stood before cameras on the 52nd anniversary of Smith's body being found by hunters near the Salt Lake County border and declared the case closed. "After 50 years, we have reached a point that so many have worked for," Bates said, according to the Deseret News. Multiple agencies — Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, Utah County Sheriff's Office, Summit County Attorney's Office, and the Utah State Crime Lab — all collaborated on the effort.
The breakthrough came after Utah County earlier this year used new DNA profiling to link Bundy to the murder of 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime, who disappeared Halloween night 1974. Evidence from that case allowed investigators to match Bundy's DNA to the Smith murder. Summit County Attorney Margaret Olsen said DNA, plus "pattern, motive, means and opportunity," establishes Bundy's guilt, the Deseret News reported.
Nobody disputes the Smith family deserves closure. But Bundy was executed in Florida in 1989 — he killed at least 30 women and girls across multiple states in the 1970s, as the New York Post noted. He has been in the ground for 37 years. No one is safer today because of this announcement.
Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera framed the effort as a matter of duty. "We owe that to the families of these cold cases," she said, per the Deseret News. "No one is just going to walk away and blame everything on Ted Bundy, even though many cases have been that way. We're going to do everything we possibly can to find the truth."
Rivera added it's a reminder "that the work that we do today makes a difference decades from now" and offered "hope" to families with unsolved cases. It's a fine sentiment. It also sidesteps what's happening right now: fentanyl kills tens of thousands of Americans annually, repeat offenders cycle through progressive district attorneys' offices, and a 14-year-old girl in York County, Pennsylvania — Madison Copenheaver, last seen Oct. 19 — is currently missing, according to the York Daily Record. Down in Shelby County, Alabama, a 44-year-old man was just charged with murdering a 35-year-old woman Sunday morning, AL.com reported — John Wesley McClain, who was initially arrested on drug charges before the murder warrant came.
The Washington Examiner and New York Post covered the Bundy announcement straight. The Deseret News gave it the most real estate, including the full press-conference quotes and the detail that Smith's surviving family declined to attend the announcement. What none of the coverage asked: at a time when law enforcement agencies across the country say they're stretched thin, what's the opportunity cost of multi-agency cold-case work on a killer who's already dead?
Detective Ben Pender, a cold-case expert with Salt Lake County, said the Smith closure "does not close the book on Ted Bundy," noting the still-unresolved Nancy Wilcox case from the same era, per the Deseret News. Bundy even confessed to that one. The work continues.
Meanwhile, the body count from crimes that could have been prevented — if prosecutors did their jobs and agencies prioritized the living — keeps climbing.
