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- Rita Curran was violently murdered in her Vermont apartment in 1971 – and the case remained a mystery for decades.
- But, after 52 years, Curran’s family finally has closure. On Tuesday, investigators said they had solved the case through modern DNA and genealogy technology.
- The most incriminating evidence was a cigarette butt found next to Curran’s body.
BURLINGTON, Vt. – After 52 years, a 1971 Vermont murder has been solved using decades-old DNA evidence.
Rita Curran was murdered in her Burlington apartment in 1971, and the case remained a mystery for years. But in a Tuesday news conference, the Burlington Police Department announced that Curran’s case was solved – and the man responsible for the 24-year-old’s murder, William DeRoos, died years ago.
The case was solved through modern DNA and genealogy technology and the careful preservation of evidence from the crime scene in 1971. The most incriminating evidence: a cigarette butt found next to Curran’s body that contained DNA evidence.
Former Sen. Patrick Leahy, who was county prosecutor at the time of the murder, said he saw many gruesome crimes during his time as prosecutor but Rita Curran’s family stayed in this thoughts for years after.
“They weren’t going to bring Rita Curran back but they could at least bring closure,” he said in an interview after the news conference. “And after 50 years, they did.”
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Who was Rita Curran?
Rita Curran was a 24-year-old second grade teacher when she was violently murdered in her Burlington apartment in July 1971.
Curran had just moved out of her parents’ home for the first time to live in a house with three other roommates, whom she didn’t know well. She was spending the summer working as a maid at a local motel and taking graduate courses at the University of Vermont.
She was murdered around midnight on July 19 and was found strangled, beaten and sexually assaulted.
The murder caused ripples of fear in a time when many Burlington residents left front doors unlocked, and the killer remained a mystery for decades, despite the police looking into hundreds of tips.
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How was the Rita Curran case solved?
The Burlington Police Department reactivated the case in 2019 when Lt. Detective Commander Jim Trieb put his whole team of detectives on the case. Trieb said in a report that his team determined forensic evidence would be key to solving the case because of its age.
Curran’s case was put on the back burner for years, making it the oldest cold case in the department.
Key pieces of evidence had been kept in storage, however, and in 2014 several items – including a LARK cigarette butt found on the floor next to Curran after the murder – were sent to a forensic lab in New York City for DNA testing.
A male’s DNA was detected on the cigarette butt in testing, but the DNA did not match the DNA of anyone in the national database of felons. It also did not match the known DNA of the police’s 13 main suspects.
More evidence, including Curran’s clothes, was sent to a lab in Florida in 2022 where they performed new DNA-extracting techniques. Meanwhile, detectives sent the genetic evidence from the cigarette butt to a genealogy company to see if a bigger database of DNA could help them find the killer. It did.
CeCe Moore, scientist and genealogy expert at Parabon Nanolabs, was able to match the DNA to William DeRoos within hours of research through genealogical records and public records. Moore, who was at the news conference via Zoom, credited the databases of DNA that are now available to scientists because of genealogy testing and the detectives who collected evidence at the time of the murder.
“The DNA evidence ended up being so incredibly key,” Moore said. “They couldn’t have possibly imagined the power that we would have at this time to actually use that to narrow it down to one person.”
DNA testing of Curran’s housecoat at the lab in Florida further confirmed that DeRoos had committed the crime.
Who was William DeRoos? He fled US for Thailand, became a monk
The man who killed Rita Curran was a suspect for years and was questioned by police at the time of the murder.
William DeRoos was married to Michelle DeRoos in the summer of 1971 in Burlington, about two weeks before the murder. They lived in the same apartment building as Curran.
The night of July 19, the couple had a fight and William DeRoos went for a walk to get some air. In an interview with Burlington police in the fall of 2022, Michelle DeRoos, who now goes by another name, said that her husband at the time had a criminal history and told her not to mention to police that he was not home at the time of the murder because they would try to accuse him of it.
Soon after the murder, William DeRoos left his then-wife, moved to Thailand and became a monk. He then resurfaced in San Francisco in 1974 when he met his second wife, Sarah Hepting.
Hepting said in an interview with Burlington police that DeRoos once stabbed a woman in front of Hepting, and later said he thought he stabbed Hepting. She also said DeRoos strangled her once, the same way Curran died.
DeRoos was found dead of a drug overdose in a hotel room in 1986.
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Follow reporter Lilly St. Angelo on Twitter: @lilly_st_ang.
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