A discarded cigarette butt found near the body of a 24-year-old Vermont school teacher led to the cold case being solved 52 years later.
Police closed the decades-old file after finding evidence that an upstairs neighbour strangled Rita Curran after a having a fight with his wife and going for a "cool down walk".
Ms Curran was killed during a 70-minute window in July 1971, with her body found by her roommate in their shared bedroom in a house in Burlington, Vermont, US.
Police said Curran resisted fiercely, but she was strangled. The murder shook Burlington.
DNA was collected from the cigarette butt, leading officers directly to neighbour William DeRoos, who was 31 at the time.
That night, after returning to his apartment, he told his wife of two weeks not to say that he had been out.
The investigation was renewed in 2019 and detectives re-interviewed DeRoos’ former wife. she told them he had left their apartment for a brief window of time when Curran’s roommates were also out of her Burlington apartment.
“We’re all confident that William DeRoos is responsible for the aggravated murder of Rita Curran, but because he died in a hotel room of a drug overdose he will not be held accountable for his actions, but this case will be closed,” Burlington Police Detective Lt. James Trieb, the commander of the Detective Services Bureau, said during a Tuesday morning news conference.
After Curran’s death, DeRoos, who was known to some as a guru, moved to Thailand and became a monk.
He later returned to the United States. In 1986 DeRoos died of a drug overdose in San Francisco, police said.
Curran’s parents died without learning who had killed their daughter, but the victim’s brother and sister attended the event held at Burlington police headquarters.
“I don’t think so much about the guy who did this as I do about Rita, my parents and what they went through,” Curran’s brother Tom said during the event. “I pray to Rita and I pray to my parents.”
A key piece of evidence was a cigarette butt that had been found near Curran’s body.
Previous DNA tests did not match any in databases compiled by law enforcement.
The detectives who picked up the case in 2019 compared with genetic material submitted to commercial DNA testing companies by members of the public.
Last August, Burlington detectives were told the sample, which had been traced through relatives on both sides of DeRoos’s family, was pointing at DeRoos, even though he had no DNA profile on record.
Detectives then determined DeRoos and his wife Michelle had been living upstairs at the time of Curran’s death. They had spoken with investigators after Curran’s death, but at the time they said they had not seen or heard anything.
DeRoos and his wife, who no longer uses the name DeRoos, left Vermont shortly after Curran’s death. Their marriage ended after DeRoos went to Thailand. DeRoos married again after moving back to the United States.
In a recent interview, DeRoos’s ex-wife, who lived with him in Burlington and now lives in Eugene, Oregon, told investigators she had lied about her husband leaving their apartment that night.
Detective Thomas Chennette, who interviewed DeRoos’s first ex-wife, said Tuesday he didn’t believe she knew he had killed Curran, but was protecting him because he had a criminal record.
“I think she lied at the time because she was young. She was naive. She was newly married. She was in love,” Chennette said.
