DNA ties Bundy to a 1974 Utah murder — and the right isn't covering it
Utah investigators have used DNA testing to link Ted Bundy to the 1974 murder of a teenager whose case had gone unsolved for fifty years. Three outlets are covering it: AP, CNN, and the Guardian. Not one right-leaning outlet in this set has picked it up. A cold-case DNA result with a named serial killer is not a partisan story, which makes the gap harder to explain than most.
Ted Bundy linked to another 1974 Utah teenager's murder through DNA testing
3 sources · hover a dot to see coverage
What happened
Utah authorities announced that DNA testing has connected Ted Bundy, the serial killer executed in Florida in 1989, to the murder of a Utah teenager killed in 1974. The victim's case had remained unsolved for five decades. DNA technology has advanced significantly since Bundy's conviction and execution, and investigators have increasingly applied it to cases from his known active period in the mid-1970s. Bundy was convicted of multiple murders across several states and is believed by investigators to have killed at least thirty people, though the true number has never been confirmed. AP carried the story as a straight news report. CNN and the Guardian followed. That is the wire version. Three outlets have it, all center or left-leaning, and what separates the coverage is mostly what's missing from it.
AP, CNN, and the Guardian ran it; nobody added much
The AP report is the factual spine every other outlet is working from. CNN and the Guardian picked it up without adding original reporting, named sources, or additional context about the victim or the investigative method used to obtain the DNA match. None of the three outlets named the victim in the excerpts available, which is either a deliberate editorial choice or a detail still being withheld by investigators. The coverage is thin but consistent: a confirmed DNA link, a named killer, a 1974 date, a Utah location.
What one side told you that the other didn't
A Bundy DNA result and no right-leaning outlet touched it.
Ted Bundy is not a politically charged figure. Cold-case DNA breakthroughs run regularly in conservative outlets alongside true-crime coverage. The complete absence here is a bandwidth or timing gap, not an obvious ideological one, but the effect is the same: the story is reaching only one slice of the news audience on the day it broke. If that holds through the week, a confirmed forensic link to a named serial killer will have landed in half the country's feeds and not the other half.
The victim has not been named in any outlet's coverage.
AP, CNN, and the Guardian all reported the DNA link without identifying the teenager by name. That is either a family request, an investigator hold, or a gap in the initial reporting. It matters because fifty years of anonymity for a murder victim is itself a story, and none of the three outlets flagged it as a deliberate omission or explained why the name was absent. The headline is Bundy. The victim is still unidentified in print.
What to watch
If Utah investigators hold a press conference or release the victim's name within the next 48 hours, watch whether right-leaning outlets enter the coverage then, and whether they credit the DNA methodology or lead with Bundy's name. A named victim typically pulls in true-crime-adjacent coverage across the spectrum. If the name stays withheld, the story likely fades before the gap closes.
This kind of gap — where one side reports a fact and the other doesn’t mention it — shows up in about 40% of major stories.