In the early morning hours of July 20, 1971, roommates returning to a Burlington, Vermont apartment discovered 24-year-old Rita Curran. She had been violently assaulted and killed. Police arrived and began the work of a murder investigation in a city that, at the time, had no cell phones, no security cameras, and no DNA technology. What they did have was a crime scene, witnesses, and a building full of neighbors.
Among those neighbors was a man who lived two floors above Rita. Police knocked on his door, asked if he had heard anything, and accepted his denial. The door closed, and the case went cold for more than fifty years. Rita Curran had only recently begun building her adult life.
She grew up in Milton, Vermont, part of a family known around town. Her father served as the town’s zoning administrator and worked at IBM, and the family ran a diner and rental cabins. Rita graduated from Trinity College, taught second grade, and had started graduate courses at the University of Vermont. For the summer, she took work as a maid at a local motel.
In June 1971, she answered an ad in the Burlington Free Press and moved into an apartment on Brooks Avenue with three roommates she barely knew. It seemed like a practical arrangement for the summer. She was quiet, described by her own parents as almost painfully shy, and close to her younger sister Mary, who would later remember the nights they spent together listening to music. On the night of July 19, Rita was home alone.
Her roommates had gone out to a restaurant on Route 7 in Shelburne. Investigators would later narrow the attack to a window of roughly seventy minutes. Her apartment door had been left unlocked, and there was no sign of forced entry. Whoever came in had not needed to break through a door.
They had simply taken an opportunity to be there. The response from the neighborhood brought investigators to a nearby apartment, home to thirty-one-year-old William DeRoos and his new wife, Michelle. The couple had married on July 5, just two weeks before the murder. DeRoos had a criminal record that included a conviction for armed robbery.
On the night Rita died, the couple had argued, and DeRoos left their apartment for what police would later describe as a cool-down walk. But police did not know that the morning after the crime. When they knocked on the door, DeRoos said he had seen and heard nothing unusual. His wife supported the account.
After the officers left, according to Michelle’s much later account, DeRoos told her to say he had been home all night if police returned. For decades, that alibi stood. The case developed slowly, the way old investigations did. About a week after Rita’s death, a confidential informant told detectives that William DeRoos was capable of committing a violent crime.
That information was documented. But investigators had a married couple’s consistent account on one side and an informant’s statement on the other, and no technology to break the tie. DeRoos was not among the thirteen main suspects. Rita was laid to rest on July 24 at St.
Anne’s Church and Cemetery in Milton, with nearly three hundred mourners in attendance. The state’s attorney overseeing the case, Patrick Leahy, announced a media blackout. The leads dried up, and the case entered Burlington’s files as one of its oldest unsolved murders. What kept Rita’s name alive was a theory.
Ted Bundy had been born in Burlington, and the motel where Rita worked sat near a home for unwed mothers where Bundy had been born. There were superficial similarities between her death and some of the crimes later linked to Bundy. Retired FBI agent John Bassett became convinced Bundy should be considered, and author Ann Rule discussed the possibility in her 1980 book The Stranger Beside Me. The theory gained enough traction that Rita’s sister Mary sent Bundy information about the case while he was on death row in Florida and asked if he had been responsible.
He did not give her the answer she wanted. Investigators questioned him, and shortly before his execution in 1989, Bundy again denied involvement. There was never solid evidence placing him in Burlington on the night of the murder. The theory was compelling, but it was not proof.
Meanwhile, evidence from 1971 had been sitting in storage. Among it was a discarded Lark cigarette found near Rita’s body. In 1971, it was an ordinary object with no evidentiary value. In 2014, Burlington police reopened the case for forensic testing, and for the first time, that cigarette produced a DNA profile.
But the profile produced no name. It did not match anyone in law enforcement databases. Investigators had a biological clue and still no suspect. A new generation of detectives returned to the old evidence in 2019, treating the case as if Rita had just been found.
They asked a question that had not been possible before: rather than searching for the man himself, could they search for his relatives? Genetic genealogy offered that path. Working with experts including CeCe Moore of Parabon NanoLabs, investigators analyzed the crime scene DNA against databases of voluntarily submitted genetic information. The results did not produce a name immediately.
They produced relatives. Investigators and genealogists built family trees, tracing branches backward through generations and forward again, collapsing the possibilities toward a single family. The trail led to William DeRoos, the man who had lived two floors above Rita and whom police had spoken to the morning after her death. A living half-brother provided DNA that strengthened the connection.
The trail was pointing at his family. But the science still needed corroboration. That came from the person who had once protected DeRoos. In 2022, Burlington detectives located Michelle, who had left DeRoos decades earlier and remarried, and now lived in Oregon.
She did not recognize Rita’s photograph and said she had never socialized with the other tenants. In a second interview that September, she told detectives a very different version of the night in 1971. She and DeRoos had argued. He left the apartment to cool off.
She was asleep when he returned. The next morning, police came to the door, and after they left, DeRoos told her to lie and say he had been home all night. She had followed his instructions. Investigators did not believe Michelle knowingly participated in the killing.
They believed she was a young new wife protecting a husband with a criminal history. There was one more piece of evidence. Investigators reexamined Rita’s housecoat, the red and white garment she had been wearing during the attack, torn and missing buttons from the struggle. Modern touch DNA testing, capable of recovering microscopic biological material from fabric even decades later, produced a mixture.
One profile belonged to Rita. The other matched the profile recovered from the cigarette, the same profile genetic genealogy had traced to William DeRoos. The case no longer rested on a single cigarette. It had become a chain of evidence: the same DNA profile from the cigarette near the body, from the torn housecoat, from relatives narrowing the tree to a name.
By the time investigators reached that conclusion, the man they sought was already dead. William DeRoos had not remained in Vermont. He had left, his marriage ended, and his life moved in an entirely different direction. At some point he settled in Thailand and became a Buddhist monk.
Eventually he returned to the United States, remarried, and became known in some circles as a spiritual teacher and countercultural figure. Another former wife described a very different side of him, sudden outbursts of violence and incidents in which he physically harmed people. That history provided context, not proof. William DeRoos died in 1986 at age forty-six from a drug overdose in a San Francisco hotel room.
There would be no arrest, no interrogation, no courtroom. In early 2023, Burlington police presented their findings. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George reviewed the evidence and concluded it established probable cause for aggravated first-degree murder, with one problem: there was nobody left to prosecute. On February 21, 2023, Police Chief Jon Murad announced that the department had solved one of the city’s oldest cold cases.
The supplemental report concluded that the Detective Service Bureau was unanimously certain that the sole perpetrator of Rita Curran’s murder was William DeRoos. The evidence had waited longer than the suspect had lived, and eventually it outlasted him. For Rita’s family, the announcement brought a complicated relief. There was no celebration.
Her sister Mary had spent decades wondering whether they would ever know what happened and had told investigators at one point that the family did not expect an answer in their lifetime. Now, more than five decades after her death, they finally had a name. They also wanted people to remember who Rita was, not just how she died. Money raised in her memory was directed toward helping others.
What happened to Rita could not be changed, but her family could still choose what happened next, and her story could continue through the people who remembered her.