'Pitbull' detective who made her name with Ted Bundy breakthrough warns DNA loophole lets killers 'slip through the cracks'... and cold case murders could be solved with a simple fix

A 'pitbull' investigator who discovered that Ted Bundy's DNA was never registered before his death has warned other killers are 'slipping through the cracks' due to similar oversights.

Detective Lindsey Wade grew up in Tacoma, Washington - the same town as notorious serial killer Bundy, who confessed to 30 murders before he was executed in 1989.

Now retired, Wade told the Crime Desk during CrimeCon in Las Vegas that she was 'shocked' to find out that Bundy's DNA had never been entered into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) despite him being one of America's most prolific killers.

She came up with a plan to find a letter sent by Bundy, hoping that he had transferred his DNA to a stamp by licking it before attaching it to an envelope.

During her research, Wade discovered that hundreds of violent sexual predators living at the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island in Washington had also never had their DNA collected.

'There are lots of ways people slip through the cracks,' she said.

'In Washington State you need to be convicted of a felony or have about 13 gross misdemeanors to require DNA collection.'

Wade explained that some states collect DNA upon arrest for certain crimes, but Washington State doesn't do that and 'she hopes one day they start too.'

McNeil Island is located on the southern portion of Puget Sound, about ten miles southwest of Tacoma.

The facility operated as a federal penitentiary for more than a century and once held cult killer Charles Manson and infamous murderer Robert Stroud.

Today, it is known as the Special Commitment Center, a place for violent sex offenders deemed too dangerous to be released into the general public to live once they have completed their prison sentences.

With the help of the Attorney's General's office, Wade collected the DNA from offenders housed at McNeil Island that she needed.

’It took two years and 40 samples were collected,' she said.

After the samples were put into CODIS, matches for DNA collected from cold cases came back.

One was an unsolved murder from 1980 of 19-year-old Susan Lowe, from Bellevue, Washington.

Convicted rapist Michael Halgren had killed her, but Wade said he was 'never a suspect in her case... he was never on the radar at all.'

'The case had been worked by a cold case detective for 15 years he swabbed dozens of people and spent hours working on the case, to no avail, and the offender was just sitting down a few miles down the road in a detention city basically forgotten about it,' she said.

After the DNA match was established, Halgren pleaded guilty and was charged with Lowe's murder.

The FBI maintains over 19 million offender profiles in their CODIS database, but they are unable to provide an exact number of convicted felons whose DNA is missing from the CODIS system.

The bureau estimates that tens of thousands of samples have been missed due in part to collection loopholes and administrative backlogs. 

Every state has a CODIS system and manages their own database.

According to the National Institute of Justice, each state establishes their own criteria for whose DNA must be collected.

Wade made her name by managing to get a DNA sample for Ted Bundy after he had died.

Bundy, an aspiring lawyer whose charm and boyish looks earned him the nickname 'The Lady Killer' was a cold-blooded murderer whose reign of terror against girls and young women spanned multiple states.

He was finally apprehended in 1978 and was later convicted of three murders - Kimberly Leach, 12, Margaret Bowman, 21 and Lisa Levy, 20.

Days before his execution, he confessed to murdering 30 people. It is believed he killed dozens more.

Wade was on a mission to locate Bundy's DNA. She reached out to true crime author Ann Rule, who had a unique friendship with Bundy.

The pair worked as crisis counselors at a suicide prevention hotline in Seattle in the early 1970s.

Rule had written a book about their friendship called 'The Stranger Beside Me.' She mentioned that she received letters from Bundy when he was in prison.

'I reached out to her and asked if she would share any of the letters. She was amenable to it,' Wade said.

'We met for lunch and she brought me several letters that she maintained in a safe in her home.'

The meeting with the author was exciting on a personal level since Wade said it was Rule's book that inspired her to become a detective.

'The interesting thing about Bundy is that he doesn’t really fit the mold when we think of a predator or a sex-fiend killer,' she said.

‘I was fascinated and horrified at the same time.' 

In the process of obtaining his DNA, Wade said she researched the Florida prison system to find out what the procedure was for inmate mail back in the 1980s.

She was trying to find out if the stamps on the envelopes would be licked by the inmate or by the prison authorities. 

'Even today, prisoners cannot seal their own mail, they can write a letter and put it in the envelope but the prison has to read the letter before it goes out,' Wade said.

She learned that the inmate has to buy their own stamps and they have to put it on themselves. 

'This was 1986 well before we had self adhesive stamps. It was the old school roll and lick so I was pretty confident that the DNA on these stamps would have been Ted Bundy's DNA,' she said.

However Wade said she was then alerted to the existence of Bundy's blood being held in a Florida lab. 

The cold case detective worked with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the vial of Bundy's blood that had been collected in 1978 was tested and confirmed to be his DNA.

By 2011, after more than 30 years, the infamous serial killer's DNA was finally entered into CODIS. 

In April this year, it was that DNA that helped investigators link Bundy to the murder of Laura Ann Aime, a 17-year-old Utah girl, who disappeared on Halloween night 1974, after leaving a party alone.

Her nude body was found on the side of a highway a month after her abduction. She was bound and badly beaten.

Wade also helped solve the murder of two young girls who were brutally murdered also in her hometown of Tacoma, that haunted her as a young girl.

Twelve-year-old Michella Welch and Jennifer Bastian, 13, were raped and murdered just months apart in 1986.

DNA confirmed that they were killed by different people.

Wade's explained her Bundy crusade by explaining that everybody in Tacoma 'has some degree of connection with either a Bundy relative or one of his victims’, something she echoes in her book 'In My DNA: My Career Investigating Your Worst Nightmares.'

Wade said: 'It is not uncommon to talk and meet somebody and they say, ‘I went to high school with Georgann Hawkins.'

Hawkins was an 18-year-old from Tacoma who attended the University of Washington. She became one of Bundy's victims after disappearing in an alley behind her sorority house.  

Wade said that her mother, who attended the University of Puget Sound, knew Ted Bundy's mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell Bundy, who worked at the school as a secretary.

It was also the same college Bundy went to before transferring to the University of Washington in Seattle. 

Bundy's mother worked at the university when Bundy's murder spree began and according to reports, fiercely defended her son's innocence for years, when authorities were suspicious. 

‘Everyone who went there knew her. It’s kind of a small town and everyone knows somebody who knows him,’ she said. ‘It’s really bizarre.’