Fear struck Utah: Retired KSL reporter recalls beginning of Ted Bundy saga

SALT LAKE CITY — Retired KSL reporter Lynn Packer remembers the October weekend in 1974 when he first learned about the disappearance of a Midvale teenager named Melissa Smith.

Packer, who was then KSL-TV's Salt Lake local government beat reporter, was preparing for the 10 p.m. news broadcast.

"About 9:30, we got a call in the newsroom from the desk and they said, 'Come down here. The Midvale police chief wants to give you a press release,'" Packer said.

Packer went to the lobby of the station, where he met with a frantic Louis Smith, who said his 17-year-old daughter Melissa had been kidnapped.

"And I said, 'Well, how do you know?' He said, 'I know my daughter,'" Packer said. "It was chilling. I mean, the guy was extremely frightened, extremely concerned."

The first and second Utah victims

A little over two weeks earlier, a different teenage girl had vanished off the streets of Millcreek. Nancy Wilcox, 16, had stepped outside her family's home near Olympus High School following an argument with her father and failed to return. Wilcox's parents reported their daughter missing to the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office the following day, but investigators initially treated Wilcox as a runaway.

The first inklings of a larger problem didn't dawn on authorities in Utah until late on Friday, October 18, 1974. Melissa Smith went to meet a friend at a pizza restaurant in Midvale called The Pepperoni near 7720 South and 125 West. She didn't return home that night or the following morning.

Smith's status as the daughter of Midvale's police chief made it difficult to brush her off as a possible runaway, the way deputies had with Wilcox. When Smith's father showed up at KSL on the evening of Saturday, Oct. 19, reporter Lynn Packer agreed to put the story on the air. By that point, Smith hadn't been seen in 24 hours.

"It turned out that she was missing; she wasn't with friends or gone somewhere else," Packer said.

Packer didn't know it at the time, but he'd taken part in the first local press coverage of serial killer Theodore "Ted" Bundy's crimes in the state of Utah.

Ted Bundy arrives in Utah

Credit card receipts and other records reviewed by KSL, in cooperation with independent Ted Bundy case researcher Tiffany Jean, showed Bundy first arrived in Utah at the start of September 1974. Bundy made multiple trips from Salt Lake City to Seattle and back that month as he completed his move.

Sheriff's detectives in King County, Washington, were at that same time attempting to identify a man, believed to be named Ted, who had abducted two women from Lake Sammamish State Park east of Seattle the prior July. In mid-September, the skeletal remains of those two women, Janice Ott, 23, and Denise Naslund, 18, along with bones from a third woman, Georgeanne Hawkins, 18, were discovered in a wooded area outside of Issaquah, Washington.

Bundy's well-timed relocation to Salt Lake City did not keep the heat off for long. On the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 27, 1974, a pair of deer hunters stumbled across Melissa Smith's body in a patch of oak brush on the slopes of Toll Canyon in Summit Park, east of Salt Lake City. The hunters alerted Summit County Sheriff Ron Robinson, who called Midvale Police and the Summit County Sheriff's Office.

An autopsy conducted later that evening revealed Smith's manner of death was homicide. She'd suffered a crushing blow to the skull and been strangled to death.

Film from KSL-TV's archives showed that investigators from Summit and Salt Lake counties, as well as Midvale police, returned to the site the following day to comb through the brush in search of additional evidence. The investigators, led by Salt Lake County Sheriff's Capt. N.D. "Pete" Hayward, collected empty beer cans and other refuse possibly discarded by the as-yet-unidentified killer.

Unbeknownst to those police officers, Ted Bundy was already preparing to kill again. Late on Halloween night, Bundy abducted 17-year-old Laura Aime in the vicinity of American Fork. Aime's disappearance went largely unnoticed by friends and family. She was not reported missing at that time.

A failed abduction

A week later, on Friday, Nov. 8, Bundy attempted to abduct Carol DaRonch, 17, from the Fashion Place Mall by posing as a police officer and luring DaRonch to his tan Volkswagen Beetle. DaRonch at first entered Bundy's car, but fled after he attempted to handcuff her. She escaped with the cuffs still dangling from her wrist.

That same night, 17-year-old Debra Kent stepped out of a musical performance at Viewmont High School, leaving her parents to finish the play while she went to pick up her brother from a skating rink. Bundy intercepted Kent in the parking lot, forced her into his car and drove her to his apartment in Salt Lake City's Avenues neighborhood.

"Then it was clear it was more than coincidental; a predator was on the loose," Packer said. "Police (and) the press didn't know who was doing it, didn't know why [teenage girls] were disappearing."

Packer again played a role in the story, interviewing Kent's father for news coverage of her disappearance a few days later. Dean Kent pleaded with whoever had taken his daughter to return her safely to her family. Bundy had by that point already killed Debra Kent and hidden her body in central Utah.

Fear struck the state

Police working the Smith, DaRonch and Kent cases began comparing notes in mid-November. They learned that a handcuff key found in the parking lot of Viewmont High School fit the cuffs DaRonch's would-be kidnapper had placed on her. They distributed a composite sketch of a possible suspect, based on descriptions from people who'd seen a strange man at Viewmont High on the night of Kent's disappearance. Newspaper columnists warned their female readers not to go out after dark.

"Fear sort of struck the state," Packer said, "it was a really scary time."

The day before Thanksgiving, a young couple went for a hike along a little-used path in American Fork Canyon. They spotted what appeared to be the body of a young woman tangled in willows along the bank of the creek. The body was that of Laura Aime.

Aime's autopsy revealed similarities in injuries and manner of death to Melissa Smith. Police working the cases, who'd previously been unaware of Aime's disappearance, wondered whether a single killer might be to blame.

"We're certain that the two are connected — the one out of Utah County and the one that was up in Summit County. That's the Aime and the Smith girl," Hayward told KSL on Dec. 6, 1974. "We don't have anything on the Kent girl that would tie her or her disappearance into the other two homicides."

Calls for a serial killer task force

Behind the scenes however, detectives from Bountiful and Salt Lake County were sharing information and evidence. Salt Lake County's homicide investigators also began to wonder during this period whether Nancy Wilcox, who hadn't been seen since Oct. 1, might also be among the victims.

The newly-elected Utah County Attorney, Noall Wootton, was not so certain. Wootton requested all of the involved police agencies to form a task force, in the hopes of pooling resources.

"The purpose of it is, of course, to try and coordinate the input of the information, the leads that we're getting, so that we have once centralized organization that can check those leads out," Wootton told KSL. "I think it'll be much more effective if we put some full-time investigators from each of the agencies onto working exclusively on these cases."

Wootton never got his task force, as the involved agencies opted to continue collaborating in an ad hoc fashion.

"Should they have found a suspect or located one sooner? I really don't know," Packer said. "I just know that it was more by luck that they finally found a suspect."

Ted Bundy turns to Colorado

Bundy was aware of the growing media attention on his crimes. By January of 1975, he began to shift focus away from hunting for potential victims around Salt Lake City, instead taking long weekend roadtrips to Colorado.

Bundy abducted Caryn Campbell, 23, from a ski resort in Snowmass, Colorado, on Jan. 12, 1975. Campbell's body was located a little over a month later, in brush along a roadside creek.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of March, skeletal remains of several missing Washington women surfaced in the Taylor Mountain area southeast of Seattle. Police there formed a task force to search for a suspect, believed to be named Ted, who they believed might be responsible.

At that time, Bundy was busy in Colorado. On March 15, Bundy kidnapped Julie Cunningham, 26, from Vail. Bundy drove Cunningham to a rural area north of Rifle, where he killed her and left her body in the open. Then, in early April, Bundy returned to the site to bury Cunningham. On the return drive to Salt Lake City, Bundy stopped in Grand Junction, where he murdered Denise Oliverson, 24.

Bundy later admitted to killing both Cunningham and Oliverson. Their remains have never been located.

A serial killer at last identified

At the start of May, Bundy drove from Salt Lake City to Pocatello, Idaho, where he murdered 12-year-old Lynette Culver. Bundy would later describe placing Culver's body in the Snake River. Her remains have never been located.

Bundy swiped 15-year-old Susan Curtis from the campus of Brigham Young University on June 27, 1975. Curtis was attending a youth conference at BYU, and her disappearance was not at the time linked to the other deaths and disappearances. Curtis' remains have never been located.

A gas station clerk in East Layton was the next to vanish. On July 4, 1975. Nancy Perry Baird, 23, disappeared out of a convenience store co-owned by Debra Kent's father, Dean Kent, leading to some speculation in the local news media about a possible link between the cases. However, new reporting by KSL's COLD podcast has discounted the long-held theory that Bundy might have abducted Baird.

Finally, on Aug. 16, 1975, the killing came to an end when a Utah Highway Patrol trooper spotted a suspicious man sitting in a tan Volkswagen outside a home in the Salt Lake City suburb of Granger (today West Valley City). Following a brief pursuit, the trooper searched Bundy's Beetle and located suspected burglary tools in the car. That led to Bundy's arrest.

Investigators subsequently arranged a line-up, and Carol DaRonch identified Bundy in the line-up as the man who'd tried to abduct her the prior November. As a result, the Salt Lake County Attorney filed charges of kidnapping and attempted murder against Bundy.

"And that's what led to my covering the Ted Bundy trial," Packer said.

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