(NewsNation) — A Utah-based private investigator will spend the summer scouring mountains and countryside for the remains of Ted Bundy’s victims, looking for the gravesite of four Utah women whom the infamous serial killer admitted to burying in the mid-1970s.
The investigator, Jason Jensen, joined “NewsNation Now” to describe what his search will look like and what inspired it, dubbing it a “Ted Bundy Summer.”
Jensen’s search will be in conjunction with the Cold Case Coalition, a missing persons nonprofit he helped found.
Though the Bundy victims have been on his radar for years, this year marks the 50th anniversary of Bundy’s first proven murder of University of Washington co-ed Lynda Ann Healy in Seattle in 1974.
“As I was researching, I realized there were four actual missing Bundy victims still, and this the 50th anniversary since his crime spree, so it went from just a curiosity encounter about a tree to an actual search of four clandestine graves,” Bundy told NewsNation.
Before he was executed in 1989, Bundy confessed to over 30 murders across seven states, including Utah, Idaho and Colorado, but some experts believe that number could be much higher, according to a local Wyoming news outlet.
In his confession, Bundy described where some of his victims were buried, descriptions that turned out to be accurate.
“As Ted Bundy had described, about some of these [graves], they’re only 2 to 3 feet deep with a layer of rocks over it. And in one of the situations in 1989, they found a human’s right kneecap, a patella, that was confirmed in 2015 to be Debra Kent’s. So we know that the descriptions are pretty accurate,” Jensen said.
Because of this, Jensen says they have “reason to believe that all the descriptions are accurate” and that they’re “aiming to prove that this summer.”
Jensen’s team includes his cadaver dogs and a spiritual medium.
“We have a couple of dog handlers. We have some foot and horseback volunteers. We also have a medium to come by because in one of the locations, there was a paranormal experience described to me by somebody in that area. So we thought we would have a medium along just in case because we want to approach this from every possibility to come out successful,” Jensen said.