Is Ted Bundy's victim count higher than 30? This Iowa State criminologist thinks so.

Renowned Iowa State University criminologist believes Ted Bundy killed dozens more people than the official count tied to the notorious serial killer.

Matt DeLisi said he believes Bundy murdered 100 or more people; a much higher number than the 30 victims he confessed to killing. Bundy was active in the 1970s, when he kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls.

DeLisi will explore that theory during a lecture Monday at Iowa State University, planned for 6 p.m. in room 2630 of the Memorial Union, 2229 Lincoln Way, in Ames. The free event is open to the public.

It will follow the contradictions and controversies surrounding Bundy's life and dive into the issue of unsolved murders around the United States, a news release said.

DeLisi said he remembers watching the nightly news coverage of Bundy, his escape from a Colorado jail in 1977 and ultimate capture. Over the years, DeLisi has seen and read a lot of material about Bundy, where he found implications that the number of victims could be a lot greater.

"It was as if it was a mystery that I had to solve," he said.

In his research of criminal offenders, he found that psychopathic killers like Bundy tend to commit violent acts before their first victims. Bundy's first recorded victim occurred when the killer was 30-years-old in 1974.

More: Almost 45 years later, case finally closed for one Ted Bundy victim in Colorado

"When he was a 3-year-old boy, his aunt was sleeping and Bundy went to the kitchen and got all of the knives from the kitchen and arranged all of the knives around her body with the blades pointing in toward her," DeLisi said. "She at one point woke up and looked at him and he had kind of a detached, almost dissociative look on his face."

There are about 350,000 unsolved murders in the United States dating back to 1965, according to DeLisi. That statistic, paired with Bundy having traveled a lot during the hitchhiker era and his childhood violent outbursts, point to the likelihood that he didn't wait to kill until 1974.

DeLisi said he came to that conclusion from a mix of circumstantial evidence, as well as things Bundy had said to his defense attorneys, including that he killed a boy when he was a child. DeLisi said there also is strong evidence that links him to a murder of a 9-year-old girl in his neighborhood in 1961. Her body was never found.

What can be done to find more Ted Bundy victims?

DeLisi points to untested rape kits as a possible lead to finding more people. According to him, there are about 400,000 untested sexual assault kits in storage in the U.S. Some states have mandated that they all be tested to remove the backlog, and that the results could possible tie Bundy to more women.

More: Shocking revelations from Netflix's 'Conversations with A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes'

Another method would be to exhume remains of victims who haven't officially been connected to Bundy and test them to find a DNA match. He also suggests using ground penetrating radar to find some of the "clandestine" grave sites that Bundy had hinted to investigators existed.

These methods, he admits, are costly and time consuming.

DeLisi believes the criminal justice system right now is lax, lenient and ineffective, and the number of unsolved cases points to the consequences of the current system.

He hopes through the lecture and his book, "Ted Bundy and the Unsolved Murder Epidemic," people will have "greater scrutiny to the justice system in terms of tightening it up and having it be much more responsive to homicide victims regardless of the characteristics. I think that's important."

The Iowa State University Book Store will be onsite at the lecture selling copies of his new book.

More information about the event can be found online at www.news.iastate.edu.

Noelle Alviz-Gransee is a breaking news reporter at the Des Moines Register. Follow her on Twitter @NoelleHannika or email her at NAlvizGransee@registermedia.com.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa State researcher thinks Ted Bundy killed 100 women, not 30