Authorities said Tuesday that the murder of a Vermont instructor more than 50 years ago was solved after they connected a discarded cigarette butt to a suspect who later ordained as a Buddhist monk.

Rita Curran, 24, was strangled in 1971, and the suspect, William DeRoos, passed away in San Francisco 15 years later, according to interim Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad.

According to Jim Trieb, the head of the police department’s detective services division, Curran’s roommates discovered her dead in their apartment on July 19, 1971.

Who Was William DeRoos?, Suspect Of The 1971 Burlington Murder Of Rita Curran

Police questioned the man who murdered Rita Curran at the time of the murder because he had been a suspect for many years. About two weeks prior to the homicide, in the summer of 1971, in Burlington, William DeRoos wed Michelle DeRoos.

They shared a condominium complex with Curran. On July 19th, after a fight between the pair, William DeRoos went for a stroll to get some fresh air. Michelle DeRoos, who now goes by a different name, admitted during an interview with Burlington police in the autumn of 2022 that her then-husband, who had a criminal record, had instructed her not to tell them that he wasn’t at home during the murder.

William DeRoos went to Thailand, married his then-wife again, and became a monk not long after the murder. He then reappeared in San Francisco in 1974, where he encountered Sarah Hepting, his second wife. In 1986, DeRoos’ body was discovered in a motel room after he overdosed on drugs.

Who Is Rita Curran?

When Rita Curran, a second grade teacher, was brutally killed in her Burlington apartment in July 1971, she was 24 years old. For the first time, Curran had recently left her parents’ house to reside with three other roommates she didn’t know well.

She was attending doctoral classes at the University of Vermont while working as a maid at a nearby motel during the summer. She was discovered dead on July 19 around midnight, having been beaten, strangled, and sexually assaulted.

At a time when many Burlington residents left their front doors unlocked, the murder spread dread, and despite the police looking into hundreds of leads, the murderer remained a mystery for decades.

How Was The Rita Curran Case Solved?

When Lt. Detective Commander Jim Trieb assigned his entire squad of detectives to the case in 2019, the Burlington Police Department reactivated the investigation. According to a report by Trieb’s staff, the case’s age made forensic evidence crucial to its resolution.

The oldest cold case in the division is Curran’s case, which was placed on hold for many years. Key pieces of evidence, including a LARK cigarette butt discovered on the floor next to Curran after the murder, were sent to a forensic lab in New York City in 2014 for DNA testing.

However, important pieces of evidence had been kept in storage. Testing revealed that there was male DNA on the cigarette butt, but the DNA did not match anyone in the federal database of criminals. Additionally, it did not match the 13 primary suspects whose DNA was known to the police.

In 2022, additional evidence including Curran’s clothing was sent to a facility in Florida where cutting-edge DNA-extracting methods were used. Detectives sent the DNA from the cigarette butt to a genealogy firm in the meantime to see if a larger database of DNA could aid them in identifying the murderer. It happened.

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