Chapter Four: Wasatch Autumn

A bright September sun glints off the golden statue of the angel Moroni, trumpet raised, standing high among the slender spires of the great Mormon Temple, above the office buildings and traffic of downtown Salt Lake City.

By this autumn of 1974, the dominance of the church over the social, economic, and political life of Utah and its cities and towns was undiluted, even as more newcomers moved into the state.

A few blocks east of the Temple grounds, in the church’s University Ward, Utah newcomer Ted Bundy was settling into his upstairs apartment in one of the older two-story houses along a tree-lined avenue. Shuffling a stack of books out of one of his packing cartons, Ted looked around his new surroundings and decided he would need more bookshelf space.

From Ted’s apartment, the University of Utah campus—and the law school where he now was enrolled—was only a few blocks to the east, where the foothills begin to rise toward the Wasatch Front.

He was embarking on his second effort at law school. Ted’s first experience in law school in Washington State hadn’t gone well. He had begun attending night classes at the University of Puget Sound, exactly one year earlier—the autumn of 1973. With some other students who lived in Seattle, he had car-pooled it to Tacoma three nights a week for those classes. Sometimes, even after making the forty-five minute trip to reach the UPS campus, while the others attended their classes, Ted had skipped his. He had gotten only partial credit for those two terms at UPS, but he blamed the school for his lack of inspiration.

“I was just really disenchanted with UPS,” he had told a friend a few weeks earlier, just before he moved from Seattle to Salt Lake City. “I’m really looking forward to law school at Utah.”

Ted had made application to several law schools, usually without success. His initial application to Utah had not been accepted.

Then, in early 1973 he had reapplied at Utah. His letter of reapplication must have been intriguing for the admissions committee at the law school. It made fascinating reading for those who subsequently came to study the ambiguities of Ted Bundy:

My lifestyle requires that I obtain knowledge of the law and the ability to practice legal skills. I intend to be my own man. It’s that simple. I could go on at length to explain that the practice of law is a lifelong goal, or that I do not have great expectations that a law degree is a guarantee of wealth and prestige. The important factor, however, is that law fulfills a functional need which my daily routine has forced me to recognize.

I apply to law school because this institution will give me the tools to become a more effective actor in the social role I have defined for myself.

Ted had folded into that readmission effort a little political persuasion. He arranged that Washington State Governor Dan Evans endorse his admission application at Utah. Because Ted had worked in the 1972 Evans campaign, he had no trouble getting the governor’s signature affixed to a letter of tribute:

I first met Ted after he had been selected to join my campaign staff in 1972 [said Governor Evans’ letter]. It was the consensus among those of us who directed the operation that Ted’s performance was outstanding. Given a key role in the issues, research, and strategy section, he demonstrated an ability to define and organize his own projects, to effectively synthesize and clearly communicate factual information and to tolerate ... strain and sometimes critical situations.

In the end it was probably his composure and discretion that allowed him to successfully carry out his assignments. These qualities made his contributions to strategy and policy dependable and productive. ...

I strongly recommend the admission of Ted Bundy to your law school. You would be accepting an exceptional student.

Although the letter was signed by Governor Evans, Ted was the primary author. Obligingly, the governor signed it as a routine gesture of political appreciation to a bright young man who had faithfully helped in the reelection.

Although the University of Utah had accepted Ted for admission in the autumn of 1973, he decided at the last minute not to enroll then. After his acceptance, he had written to the school, saying he would be unable to attend that fall because he had been seriously injured in an automobile accident. That wasn’t true. Instead Ted had begun his rather unsuccessful session of night classes at the law school in Tacoma.

Now in Utah, Ted missed Seattle. He had always enjoyed the city and felt especially at home around the University of Washington campus and its University District, alive with the sights and sounds of young people. There was a pulsing excitement, he thought, along the strip of bookstores, drugstores, coffee counters, apparel shops of University Way and its cross street, 45th. “I really love the District,” he said. “It’s a place of constant vitality, of beautiful people. My special place.” Now that was 900 miles distant.

Ted also missed Cas, the young woman who had become the closest, most comfortable person in his life. They had known each other—and been going together—for five years. Cas had found Ted to be a considerate, understanding man and a helpful counselor during a difficult period in her life. A rather plain, though not unattractive, woman with an angular face and light brown hair, Cas had just gone through a difficult divorce in Idaho when she first met Ted. Cas lived alone with Becky, her small daughter, near the University of Washington campus, not far from Ted’s apartment.

As they spent more time together, their thoughts and talk had turned to marriage. In fact, during that autumn of ’74, they still talked about that—marriage—perhaps around the end of the year.

Inwardly, though, each sensed it would not occur. As she thought about Ted, Cas was prone to extreme emotional upswings and downswings. In many ways, she thought, she still loved him. Yet she had developed some nagging doubts about him—doubts about his integrity, some of his actions, and, especially, his fidelity.

Yet they remained close to each other, bound by a mutual dependence. Now that he was in Utah, Ted was grateful for the telephone. His calls to Cas—and he dialed her number often—helped take the edge off his loneliness, caused by being so far from Seattle.

Cas, daughter of a prominent Mormon family at Ogden, had attended college in Utah and had encouraged Ted to enroll at the University of Utah. Her parents, George and Mavis Brimner, had warmly invited Ted to come visit them at their comfortable home whenever he chose. And that was only forty miles from his apartment.

Ted’s half brother Glenn had helped him move his belongings from Seattle to Salt Lake City in the earliest days of September. They had driven an old pickup truck which Ted had bought cheap—through a want-ad from an older man in Seattle’s North End—just for that move. Then, less than two weeks after his arrival in Salt Lake City, Ted had flown home to Seattle to finish some budget work for the Washington State Department of Emergency Services—an unfinished dab of business left over from his summertime job.

He had seen Cas only briefly during that trip to Seattle. She seemed to be terribly edgy.

The newspapers in Seattle were full of details about the search being carried out near Issaquah for the remains of some murdered young woman who had vanished from Lake Sammamish State Park the previous July.

Those headlines had been rather grisly: bones, dental records checked. And inch-by-inch bones search set.

Ted may have noticed a Seattle Times article on September 13 which reported, “So far, police and volunteers have covered a square mile by foot and vehicle. More than 140,000 square feet within that mile have been covered by Explorers in a hands-and-knees, shoulder-to-shoulder search. ... Yesterday searchers found a piece of rib bone, making it the fifth straight day that remains have been discovered. If nothing more is found over the weekend, the search will be called off.”

Ted left Seattle that day, returning to Salt Lake City, alone, driving his Volkswagen.

Indian summer came colorfully to Utah’s Wasatch Front. Beginning in the final days of September, continuing long into October, the stands of aspen and cottonwood turned to shining yellows. Clumps of oak became bursts of brilliant red. Their colors decorated the apron of the mountain range and daubed all the canyons with brightness. Then gradually, their colors began to fade in the rains and raw winds of late October.

About fifty miles south of Salt Lake City, near Provo, where the family was living temporarily, Shirleen Aime felt uneasy as she read and heard the disturbing news near the end of October. There were reports that a girl’s body had been found up in the mountains, at Summit Park, east of Salt Lake City. The girl had been identified as Melissa Smith, seventeen-year-old daughter of Louis Smith, police chief of the little town of Midvale. Melissa had been found nude, bludgeoned and strangled with one of her nylon stockings—the victim, obviously, of a brutal sex killing. Shirleen felt a chill as she looked at the girl’s photograph. Melissa reminded her of her own daughter, Laura. It was a ghastly thought, Shirleen reflected, that someone capable of committing that kind of a crime should be on the loose in this part of Utah.

So, when Laura telephoned that day, Shirleen was especially delighted to hear her voice.

Laura and her parents had gone through some difficult times in their relationship for more than a year now. Laura had dropped out of school, much to the displeasure of her mother and father. They thought she was running around with a bad crowd. In recent weeks Laura had been living with first one girlfriend, then another in the small towns around Provo.

Shirleen told Laura about the news she’d read, of the seventeen-year-old girl getting killed up near Salt Lake City—about how she had been found nude, strangled, and all beat up.

“Aw, Mom,” replied Laura. “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

Laura, indeed, was a big girl—about six feet tall. She had long, brown hair, light enough to be almost a sandy color. At times her eyes seemed a light hazel, which gave her almost a tawny look. When she was growing up, Laura had been a gangly, self-conscious tomboy. But then she blossomed out of her tomboyhood. Laura was now a tall young woman with long legs and an ample figure, which caught male eyes.

Her father, Jim Aime, a ruggedly handsome man of Italian descent, had worked for many years at the Geneva plant of the United States Steel Company outside Provo. The pay was pretty good. But, raising a family of five children, Jim and Shirleen never seemed to get ahead financially.

For several years, while Laura and her older brother John were growing up and going to grade school, and while the younger girls were arriving in the family, the Aimes lived in an aging farmhouse, its original walls made of adobe brick in Mount Pleasant, on the high Wasatch Plateau south of Provo. They lived with inconveniences. Their only toilet was an outhouse.

Yet Jim considered the hardships—even his sixty-mile drive, each way, to and from his job at the steel works—all worthwhile. It was, he thought, a perfect place to raise kids. The old house, at an elevation of 6,000 feet, was surrounded by quiet farmlands, and there were mountains, some of them 11,000-foot peaks, on every horizon. In and around the outbuildings of the old place, the family kept horses, chickens, cows, turkeys, hogs, goats, dogs, cats by the dozen, sheep, and almost every other kind of farm animal. Even peacocks for a while.

Laura loved the animals around the farm. When a wild deer ventured down out of the canyon, Laura left food for it and eventually coaxed it into becoming a pet. Laura got involved in 4-H, especially the horsemanship activities. When she was only eleven, Laura loved to climb on Arab, her shining blue Arabian, and gallop at top speed across the fields, her long hair streaming in the wind.

“That’s a damned wild horse,” Jim once observed “and Laura makes him even wilder, the way she handles him.”

Laura’s mother watched the galloping horse and the girl, her upper body arched over Arab’s flying mane, and agreed: “Laura has got hell inside her.” It was a smiling, loving, admiring assessment of a spirited girl.

One day Laura was tossed from the back of the galloping Arab into the barbed wire of a fence. Her dad hurried her to a doctor who stitched the awful, extensive gashes of Laura’s ring finger and the inside of her left forearm and upper arm.

For years Jim and Laura’s brother, John, would tell and retell the story of the time Laura, when she was eleven, helped her father bag his trophy deer and win the grand prize in the Utah hunting contest.

One day, during the hunting season of 1968, Laura, dressed in boots, jeans, red sweatshirt, and red hat, trooped into the mountains with her dad and John—up into the steep, rocky Fairview Canyon not far from their home place. It was a place avoided by less dedicated hunters, because of its steepness. In places they had to grab protruding roots of small trees to hoist themselves up vertical rock walls. On a pine-dotted ridge, Jim got a shot at a buck. He thought he hit it, but the deer had bounded up a draw and over a ridge, out of sight.

They all searched for some sign of the animal and it was Laura who eventually found the spots of crimson, “Hey, Daddy,” she shouted. “There’s a blood trail over here.”

For more than three hours, Laura was their stubborn tracker, leading her dad and brother through the mountains. At last, near dusk, they sighted the wounded animal. Jim raised his Remington 30.06 (a rifle he’d earlier won on a fifty-cent raffle ticket; Laura always teased him about that), sighted through the scope, and pulled the trigger. The big buck dropped.

When they reached the deer, they were astonished by its size and its antlers. “Damn,” said Jim. “That’s gotta be a trophy.”

John laid the rifle across the tips of the horns. “This rifle’s forty-eight inches long,” John said, “and it just barely covers point to point.”

“Oh, Daddy! Oh, Daddy!” Laura squealed in happy excitement, clapping her hands. “You and your fifty-cent rifle!”

Jim’s prize for that trophy was a new four-wheel-drive International Harvester Scout. Even before she was old enough to have her driver’s license, Laura was allowed by her proud dad to drive the Scout on the farm roads.

Because of her height, Laura always felt conspicuous in the small high school at Mount Pleasant. Some of the other kids teased her—with, nicknames like “Wilt the Stilt”—and it hurt her inside. Jim was convinced that was the reason Laura dropped out of high school.

Shirleen worried about Laura’s casual attitude toward hitchhiking. In their late October telephone conversation, the mother had said, “Laura, I really would appreciate it if you’d promise not to hitchhike anymore. I know this sounds like nagging, but I just don’t want you taking any chances.”

They said their good-byes. Laura promised she’d be calling or coming to the house in a day or two.

Shirleen wondered if that girl who’d been murdered—Melissa Smith—had been hitchhiking. According to the newspaper, the girl had last been seen on State Street, a main business drag out of Salt Lake City, in the suburb of Murray.

During the early evening of November 8, Carol DaRonch, a pretty, seventeen-year-old brunette, guided her car through a misting rain, off State Street into the parking lot of the big shopping center in Murray.

She chose a parking space in front of Sears, one of the many stores in the Fashion Mall. It was the largest, busiest shopping mall in the Salt Lake City area. Carol got out of her maroon Camaro, locked it, and strode toward the Sears doorway. Tall and slim, wearing a jacket with white fur trim and dark, tight-fitting pants, Carol could have been a fashion model, with the naturally slinky, graceful way she walked. But it was not an affectation. Carol was a fresh, natural, and rather shy teenager.

Carol passed through the doors of the Sears store, browsed at a couple of counters, then entered the mall which connected several shops, boutiques, and department stores. By coincidence, she encountered her cousin, Joanne, who was there shopping with a friend. They talked for a

few moments. Then Carol resumed her stroll. She paused to look at the window display of Walden’s bookstore.

“Excuse me, miss.” The man’s voice came from behind her. Carol turned to see a rather good-looking, dark-haired young man in a jacket and necktie. He politely introduced himself as a police officer and asked, “Did you just park your car out in the parking lot?”

“We have a problem out in the parking lot,” he said. “We think there’s been an attempted burglary of your car. I’d appreciate it if you’d go with me out to your car to identify a suspect my partner is holding out there.”

It was Carol’s habit, because of her natural shyness, not to look an older person directly in the eye. So, as they stood at that moment in the lights of the indoor mall, she didn’t study his face. As they walked together toward an exit leading to the parking lot, she noticed he was wearing patent-leather shoes.

He escorted the girl out of the mall, into the misty, dimly lighted parking lot. When they arrived at her Camaro, Carol noticed it was still locked. “Everything looks okay to me,” she observed.

When the man leaned forward to look into the car, Carol noticed he carried handcuffs in an inner pocket of his jacket.

“My partner must have taken the suspect over to the sub office,” he said. “We’ll have to go over there.”

Carol accompanied him back into the lights of the mall, across the flow of shoppers, and through another doorway. Outdoors again, they walked north along a walkway beside the mall building and then, passing beneath a street light, crossed 61st Street South.

“The sub office is right over there,” he said, nodding toward a small building ahead of them. Beneath one exterior light on that building, Carol saw an inconspicuous door which bore the number “139.” Carol waited at the sidewalk as he walked to the door and unsuccessfully tried to open it. “Hmmm,” he said. “It’s locked. I guess we’re going to have to drive over to headquarters.” Carol wasn’t aware that the door he had tried to open was the side door of a laundromat.

By now Carol and the man had been walking together for more than ten minutes. He guided her eastward along the darkened sidewalk until they came to a Volkswagen parked at the curb. “Here’s my car,” he said, opening the passenger door for her. “Get in.”

In the dim light from a distant street lamp, Carol noticed it was a rather ratty-looking car. There were blotches on its side and front fender. She summoned the courage to ask to see his police identification. With a light chuckle of understanding, he drew out his wallet and opened it to show her a police badge. In the darkness she could barely see it, but she was satisfied he had a badge.

As Carol slid into the seat of his car, she caught a glimpse of a conspicuous tear along the top of the rear seat upholstery. Once again, she thought it was a crummy car for a police officer to be driving. Her escort, settling in behind the steering wheel, told Carol, “Buckle up your safety belt. I’m a real nut on safety.” She thought she smelled alcohol on his breath.

Carol looked down in the darkened car and sensed that the belt was crumpled and dirty, apparently unused. She refused to snap it around her. The man started the car and sent it lurching into a sharp U-turn into and across the street, eastward. He made a quick stop at the first intersection and then turned left.

It happened quickly. When he jammed on the brakes and swerved the steering wheel to the right, the VW bounced to a stop with its right wheels up over the curb in front of a darkened school building. With his right hand he grabbed Carol’s arm and, in an instant, his left hand snapped a handcuff on her wrist. She recoiled, screaming, ‘‘What are you doing?”

“Shut up or I’ll blow your head off,” he snarled reaching for her other wrist. Terror jolted Carol into a frenzy. Screaming, she struggled away from him. The other handcuff clicked onto the same left wrist, as Carol’s right hand clawed for the door handle and found it. Then the door was opening, and she was falling, screaming, outward. He was lunging toward her, across the passenger’s seat. In the darkness Carol could see a metal bar in his hand—a metal bar, raised to strike. She struggled against the blow, reaching up, gripping the steel. In a blur of terror, Carol wrestled free and went screaming, stumbling around the rear of the Volkswagen and out into the wet, dark street, into the headlights of an approaching car.

When the running girl loomed in the headlights, Harold Walsh slammed on the brakes. For an instant his wife, Mildred, was afraid to open the door and let her in. But the girl who’d run in front of their car, and was clutching the outside handle of the door on Mildred’s side, was obviously terrified. In the next moment, Carol had opened the door. She fell into their car, collapsing in Mildred’s arms, trembling violently. The older woman could feel the girl’s heart pounding as she whimpered and sobbed, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe it,” Carol sobbed. “He tried to kill me. I can’t believe it.”

In that instant of confusion, the Walshes didn’t see a Volkswagen pull away from the opposite curb in the darkness.

They took Carol to the Murray City Police Department headquarters. It took a while to calm her down enough so that she could describe what had happened. Sergeant Joel Reit was called in to interview her. Whatever had happened, Reit sensed when he first saw her, it must have been something godawful. She couldn’t stop trembling and crying. Reit noticed she had lost one of her shoes in the scuffle. There were some flecks of blood on the white fur trim of her coat. Reit wondered if she had scratched the man when she fought him off. Reit decided to clip some of those blood specks for possible evidence.

While Carol was being calmed and interviewed in the Murray police headquarters, an audience of moms, dads, and kids settled into their seats in a high-school auditorium about half an hour’s drive north of Murray. The curtain was about to go up on The Redhead, a comedy presented by students of Viewmont High School in the quiet residential community of Bountiful.

Sitting with her parents, Debbie Kent, a cherub-faced, seventeen-year-old brunette, grinned and waved at classmates seated with their families in other parts of the auditorium. For many parents, the school play can be a dreaded obligation. But for Dean Kent the evening was an occasion of special happiness. A balding man in his late forties, a good, family-loving Mormon, Dean had just recovered from a severe heart attack. He enjoyed feeling well again, being with his wife and daughter among friends in his community. An official of a petroleum company, Dean Kent was a well-liked and respected man in Bountiful. Debby’s younger brother, Blair, was at the roller-skating rink. They planned to pick up Blair at ten o’clock, after the play ended.

But there were delays getting the show started at the eight o’clock curtain time—the usual delays backstage, tinkering with sets and lighting, plus some last-minute costume adjustments. In the lobby, Raylene Shepherd, the drama instructor, an attractive woman in her early twenties, was hurrying toward some of the student dressing rooms when a young man stopped her. “Excuse me,” he began.

“I wonder if I could get you to help me for a minute with my car out in the parking lot,” he said. Raylene studied him with interest for a moment. He had long, brown, wavy hair and wore a mustache. The man, who appeared to be in his late twenties, was quite attractive, the teacher thought. But she explained she was awfully busy at that moment and didn’t have time to help. She excused herself and hurried away to the needs of her young cast.

Because of the delay at the start, the final act of The Redhead hadn’t ended as ten o’clock approached. In their seats, Mr. and Mrs. Kent and Debbie bent heads together for a whispered conference. Someone had to go pick up Blair at the roller arena. Debbie volunteered to leave the play before the final curtain and drive the family car to pick up her brother. “I’ll be back to get you,” she whispered to her parents.

One of the funny lines of the play produced a laugh from the audience, as Debbie rose and quietly walked to an exit.

About half an hour later the show ended, and as happy applause filled the auditorium, the cast members of The Redhead took their curtain calls. As the auditorium lights brightened, Dean and Belva Kent joined the rest of the audience in moving up the aisles to the lobby. While waiting for Debbie, they talked for a while with passing friends. Everyone agreed the comedy had been enjoyable.

Several minutes elapsed, and while they waited, Dean Kent wondered why Debbie hadn’t returned yet with her brother. When he walked into the nearly empty parking lot, he made the puzzling discovery that the family car was still there, right where it had been parked originally. It looks like Debbie never reached the car, Dean frowned with the thought. He knew his daughter well enough—her high sense of responsibility—to know at once that something must be wrong.

After they were notified, the Bountiful police began a search that night—around the drive-ins and other places where the teenagers were congregating, and along some of the main streets of town. With flashlights and searchlights, they examined the area around the school building and the fields near the Kent home.

Next morning, in daylight, the search intensified. In the school parking lot, not far from the wall of the high-school building, one of the volunteers picked up a rather odd-looking key. Officer Ron Ballantyne recognized it as a handcuff key.

As the search widened, townsfolk of the good Mormon community turned out to help police in the block-by-block search of Bountiful. The search spread to the surrounding fields, farmlands, and side roads. In four-wheel-drive vehicles they scoured the foothills and canyons of the Wasatch. From a helicopter, sometimes hovering as low as twenty feet above ground, Sergeant Ira Beal and others eventually covered hundreds of square miles around Bountiful by air—all the way from the Great Salt Lake and its marshlands, off to the west, then eastward up into the mountains; from Salt Lake City, to the south, northward to Weber Canyon and beyond.

At the Bountiful Police Department headquarters, Ballantyne was on the telephone with Sergeant Paul Forbes of the Murray Police Department. Together they pondered the fascinating coincidence. Carol DaRonch had escaped a kidnapper that Friday evening, with a pair of handcuffs dangling from her wrist. Then a handcuff key had been found where Debbie later disappeared in the high-school parking lot a few hours later.

The high-school drama teacher, Ballantyne reported, had seen a strange young man at the school the evening of Debbie’s disappearance. The teacher had encountered him twice in the foyer of the school. The first time, when he asked her to go out to the parking lot with him to help start his car, it had been a few minutes before eight o’clock. Then she had seen him and walked with him later, while the play was still going on. He was still looking for someone to help him with his car in the parking lot.

She noticed him once again, later, sitting in an aisle seat at the rear of the auditorium, about the time the play was ending. ‘‘He seemed to be breathing kind of heavily,” she had said. In fact, she remembered that some people sitting nearby appeared to be distracted by the sound of the man’s labored breathing.

When the officers of Bountiful and Murray compared descriptions of that man with Carol DaRonch’s memory of her assailant at the shopping mall, they concluded it could have been the same man—a man in his twenties, rather well groomed, mannerly. The teacher at Viewmont thought his mustache was rather full. Carol thought she remembered a neatly trimmed mustache. The stranger at the school had well-combed, wavy brown hair. Carol thought his hair was “kind of dark and slicked back.”

There appeared to be one flaw in the theory that it had been the same man at the shopping mall and later at the high school—the time element. According to the time logged on Carol DaRonch’s report at the Murray Police Department, the man would have to have driven about twenty-six miles in perhaps fifteen minutes to reach that high-school auditorium at Bountiful at eight o’clock—a virtual impossibility.

Still, there was that strange possibility that one man, foiled in an attempt to kidnap Carol earlier in the evening, had driven north on the freeway, past Salt Lake City, taken the Bountiful exit, driven through some of the city’s business district, found Viewmont High School, and abducted Debbie.

Later, in Salt Lake City, detectives of Bountiful, Murray, and Salt Lake County, met to review their cases. Salt Lake County detectives Jerry Thompson and Ben Forbes, who were working on the October murder of Melissa Smith, had a hunch they might all be looking for the same man. “These cases are all different,” said Thompson. “We’ve got a murdered girl, a missing girl, and a girl who got away from a guy. But there sure are similarities.” The victims were all young, brunette, and pretty, noted Thompson, and each girl, wearing her long hair parted in the middle, resembled the others.

Another teenager of the same description was missing. Nancy Wilcox, a pretty high-school cheerleader, had disappeared from the Salt Lake City area in early October, too. But Salt Lake County juvenile authorities had jurisdiction over that case, and considered Nancy a runaway. Nancy had quarreled with her parents before her disappearance.

The investigators at Salt Lake City had never heard of Laura Aime. Worried when Laura hadn’t telephoned again, her mother had fearfully reported that she was missing. But the Utah County sheriff’s office at Provo dismissed Laura as a runaway.

Much to the despair of the ski-resort operators, Utah’s November 1974 was mild and wet. There were days of cold rainfall and some freezing. A few flurries of snow whitened the mountains and the canyons leading into the Wasatch. But then came warm rains to melt the snow.

Wednesday, November 27, was another chilly, overcast day. In American Fork Canyon, north of Provo, Raymond Ivins and Christine Shelly, two Brigham Young University students, were hiking along a trail beside the stream tumbling out of the mountains, looking for rocks and fossils which could be helpful in geology class. But mostly they were enjoying each other’s company. It was about nine o’clock in the morning.

From where they paused, at the edge of the stream bed, it was about forty feet to the opposite bank. Christine gasped, “Oh, God! There’s a dead girl over there!”

Ray described it: “I looked and I thought, you know, it was a deer or something and ... it was a girl. ... It looked like she had been ... she was dead. It was really grotesque. There was blood around her neck and breasts and she was naked and lying on that hill and it was a freak-out and I lost it. I thought maybe the guy was still somewhere around and I just panicked, worrying about my girlfriend ... and we ran down the trail. ... Came down and ran right through the creek and got in the car and just drove like a maniac, I guess as fast as I could, down to the ranger station and I reported it.”

The body had been found on a bank on the south side of that stream, in the Timpanogos Cave National Park, a summertime recreation place where thousands of visitors hike, picnic, and visit the natural caves. Usually, it is snow-covered by late November. The discovery had been almost a fluke.

From Provo, Utah County Sheriff Mack Holley hurried to the scene to join officers of the Utah Highway Patrol and the federal rangers who were already there.

When Shirleen Aime heard the news that a body had been found, her heart leaped to her throat. Fearfully, she dialed Sheriff Holley’s office.

“This is Laura Aime’s mother,” she told the officer who answered. “I want to know if the body they’ve found up in American Fork canyon could be Laura.”

“No, ma’am,” replied the voice at the sheriff’s office. “It’s not your daughter.”

There was, of course, little else that a sheriff’s office radio dispatcher could say in such a situation. There would be no point in telling an anxious parent there could be such a possibility. Besides, it had been immediately presumed that Debbie Kent had been found. The search for Debbie had been headline news across Utah for nearly three weeks, since she disappeared from Viewmont High School. No one in Sheriff Holley’s office attached any importance to the pleas from the Aime parents that something had happened to their daughter.

That evening the Provo newspaper, the Provo Daily Herald, carried a photo of Sheriff Holley, a Utah highway patrolman, and two forest rangers carrying the shrouded body up out of the canyon. Shirleen had studied it, then handed the paper over to her husband. “Jim,” she said, “I’m just scared to death. I’ve got a feeling that’s Laura.” The canyon was too nearby.

“Well, dammit,” Jim said, after he examined the photo and the accompanying story, “the cops sure in hell must know what they’re talking about when they say it isn’t Laura. They couldn’t make a mistake about that. Laura’s a tall girl. Almost six feet tall.” And right there in the newspaper, they were quoting one of the officers saying, “There’s a real good possibility that the body may be that of the Bountiful girl who disappeared Nov. 8 from Viewmont High School.”

Before dawn the next morning, Shirleen had a telephone call from her mother, urging her to read the description in the morning Salt Lake Tribune. It was a report that the dead girl’s height and hair color suggested the body was not Debbie Kent’s.

Once again, Shirleen called Sheriff Holley’s office and pleaded with the person who answered the phone: “I’ve got to know about that body. I think it’s Laura. I just know it is.”

The telephone voice at the sheriff’s office said it couldn’t be. He assured Shirleen that the body was that of an older woman, not Laura.

About an hour later, though, the sheriff’s office called back, asking how they could locate Laura’s dental records. Chilled by the question, Shirleen gave them the name of Laura’s dentist in Spanish Fork. Next came a phone call from the sheriff’s office, asking if Jim and Shirleen could be ready by ten o’clock that morning. Sheriff Holley would come by then and take them to the morgue in Salt Lake City to help in an identification.

For the Aimes, it was a long trip, in cold silence, to the morgue—traveling with the sheriff whose office had been so unresponsive.

Many officers waited at the morgue in Salt Lake City, including Thompson, the Bountiful officers, and others who’d initially thought the body could be Debbie Kent’s. At the inner door of the morgue, Jim Aime said softly, “If it’s okay, I want to go in alone. Just me. I don’t want my wife to have to go in there.” The officers nodded. Of course that was okay.

Jim Aime was a leathery man, who could handle himself in any tough situation. But he wasn’t prepared for that gut-heaving experience.

Trembling, his eyes smarting, Jim looked at the body and really couldn’t be sure. The sickening damage to her head had been so massive, he couldn’t tell whether it was Laura or not. She was unrecognizable. “I ... I ... just can’t be sure,” he whispered. “I can’t tell.”

Jim turned to leave the room. Then he had a thought. He returned to the table where she lay and asked to have the girl’s arm raised so that he could see the inside of the ring finger and the inside of the forearm. He had remembered scars which had been left there after her horse had tossed Laura into some barbed wire—scars which had mostly faded.

Outside that room, where she paced in fear, Shirleen heard her husband’s scream. She knew that it was Laura.

While making arrangements for the funeral, Shirleen remembered something Laura had said—something that had come like a bolt out of the blue only a few weeks earlier: “Mother, at my funeral I don’t want to be buried in a dress.”

“Laura, what in the world are you talking about?” Shirleen had exclaimed at the time. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

“I’m serious, Mom,” Laura had said. “I don’t want to be buried in a dress.”

Shirleen had shrugged in puzzlement when Laura had said that. Now, as she planned her daughter’s burial, Shirleen decided that Laura would be buried in a warm, white flannel nightie and fuzzy slippers.

At Murray, Detective Paul Forbes continued to show photographs of possible suspects to the kidnap victim, Carol DaRonch, but as the dark-haired teenager patiently looked at them, one after another, she was unable to make an identification.

To the north, around Bountiful, the search for Debbie Kent continued until the December snows persisted and finally covered all the mountains and canyons along the Wasatch Front. The men could search no more.

Belva Kent spent many nights sleeping on the daveno in the family living room. “I wanted to be there, just in case Debbie came home,” she explained.

At the Midvale Police Department, Chief Louis Smith sorrowfully watched the days pass; reaching the conclusion that the person who had so savagely killed Melissa would never be caught.

Anguish and anxiety settled into the Aime home. Shirleen quit her job so that she could be around the house all the time to protect her other daughters. Jim Aime brooded at the thought of Christmas approaching. And Laura gone. He checked into a hospital for treatment of his acute depression.

Jim Aime never again had the heart to drive the four-wheel-drive Scout which Laura had helped him win on that hunting trip. He left it parked there at the side of the old farmhouse, to collect the snows of the winters and dust of the summers.

That caved-in place at the rear of the Scout—the dent put there by Laura when she was first learning to drive—was a reminder of her.

As the airliner circled the Salt Lake City airport, Cas Richter stared from a window at the gloomy December fog and concluded that the weather matched her inner feelings.

With her young daughter, Cas had flown from Seattle for a holiday visit with her parents at Ogden.

For weeks Cas had been on an emotional roller coaster when it came to Ted. Increasingly, she was plagued by awful thoughts about the man whom she’d thought of marrying.

When her girlfriend first teased her about her Ted and his Volkswagen and the “Ted” with a Volkswagen at Lake Sammamish, where the girls disappeared, Cas had grinned at the coincidence. But as time passed, suspicion had festered within her.

There were too many dark places, she thought, in Ted’s behavior. She thought of that day when she noticed a package of plaster of paris in his apartment. At the time he had laughed it off. But the memory gnawed on her when she read about the “Ted” suspect at Lake Sammamish who wore a sling and pretended to have a broken arm.

Because of those thoughts, Cas had actually summoned the will to telephone the King County police in Seattle, to tell them about her Ted—Theodore Bundy—who drove a Volkswagen. Afterward, full of remorse, she had cried. And the tears, the anxiety recurred, colliding with her recurring waves of love for her Ted. Can I be wrong? she wondered. I must be wrong.

Then all the turmoil within her worsened when she learned of the murders of some girls in Utah—beginning about the time Ted had moved to Salt Lake City.

The jetliner touched down on the runway and, with the reverse-thrust roar of its engines, slowed and made a lumbering turn toward the Salt Lake City airport building.

Cas began to gather her belongings from beneath the seat. She had decided that, soon, she’d have a long heart-to-heart conversation with her father about Ted. Meanwhile, she knew, Ted would be there at the airport to meet her—with his engaging grin and a kiss.