On February 21, 2023, Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad stood before reporters and announced that one of the city’s oldest cold cases had finally been solved. More than 51 years after 24-year-old Rita Curran was killed in her Burlington apartment, investigators said they had identified the man responsible: William DeRoos, a neighbor who had lived two floors above her—and who had been questioned by police the very morning after her body was found. The only problem was that DeRoos had been dead for nearly four decades. Rita Curran was 24 years old in the summer of 1971.
She had grown up in Milton, Vermont, the daughter of Thomas Curran Sr. , the town’s zoning administrator and a longtime IBM employee, and the family was well known locally. Rita had graduated from Trinity College and become a second-grade teacher in her hometown. She had also started graduate courses at the University of Vermont, and during the summer she worked as a maid at a local motel to help cover expenses.
That June, Rita made a small decision that would later carry enormous weight. She had lived with her parents her entire life, but then she saw an ad in the Burlington Free Press advertising a room in an apartment on Brooks Avenue, shared with roommates she barely knew. It seemed like a good fit for the summer, and she moved in. On the night of July 19, 1971, Rita was home alone.
Her roommates had gone out to a restaurant on Route 7 in Shelburne. Investigators would later determine that her death occurred during a narrow window of roughly 70 minutes. Sometime during that period, someone entered her bedroom. The early evidence told police something important.
There was no obvious forced entry. Rita’s apartment door had been left unlocked. Whoever entered had not needed to break in; they had simply gotten an opportunity to be there. Inside, Rita suffered a violent assault that took her life.
In the early morning hours of July 20, her roommates returned, and one of them discovered her. Police arrived and began processing the scene. They collected evidence, including a discarded Lark cigarette found near Rita’s body. In 1971, that cigarette was an ordinary object with almost no investigative value.
There was no DNA database, no genetic genealogy, no technology capable of turning biological evidence into a person’s identity. Investigators could preserve the evidence, but they could not yet ask it the question it would one day answer. The investigation immediately turned to the people who lived nearby. Two floors above Rita lived 31-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, including a previous conviction for armed robbery. According to investigators, he and Michelle had argued on the night Rita died, and at some point DeRoos left their apartment for what police later described as a cool-down walk. But that was not what police knew the morning after the crime.
When officers knocked on their door, they told the couple what had happened and asked if they had seen or heard anything unusual. DeRoos said no. According to Michelle’s later account, after the officers left, DeRoos told her that if police came back, she should say he had been home all night. She followed that instruction.
About a week after Rita’s death, a confidential informant spoke with two detectives and described DeRoos as someone capable of committing a violent crime. That information was documented. But the alibi DeRoos and Michelle had given—that he had remained inside their apartment all night—gave police a reason not to pursue him. In 1971, there was no DNA result waiting to break the tie.
Rita was laid to rest on Friday, July 24, 1971, at St. Anne’s Church and Cemetery in Milton. Nearly 300 people attended, including several plainclothes police officers. That same day, the state’s attorney overseeing the case, Patrick Leahy, who would later become a longtime U.
S. senator, announced a media blackout on further news related to the investigation. The leads eventually ran out, and the case slowly became one of Burlington’s oldest unsolved murders. For years, the case remained attached to an unexpected theory: the idea that Ted Bundy could have been responsible.
The connection began with geography. Bundy had been born in Burlington, and the motel where Rita worked was located near the Elizabeth Lund Home for unwed mothers, where Bundy had been born. There were also superficial similarities between her death and some of the crimes later associated with 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 attention that Rita’s family eventually sought an answer from Bundy himself. While he was on death row in Florida, Rita’s sister Mary sent him information about the case and asked if he had been responsible. Bundy did not give the family the answer they wanted. Years later, investigators questioned him, and shortly before his execution in 1989, Bundy again denied being responsible for Rita’s death.
But there was evidence that did not point toward Ted Bundy. In 2014, Burlington police reopened the case for forensic testing. The Lark cigarette that had been sitting in evidence for decades was among the items tested, and for the first time, the case produced a DNA profile. It was male, but when investigators searched law enforcement DNA databases, there was no match.
The science had given them a profile; it had not given them a name. In 2019, a new team of Burlington detectives, crime scene technicians, and investigators decided to look at the case differently—not as an old file, but as if Rita had just been found. They reviewed the original reports and reconsidered old leads. One item stood out: the cigarette.
Instead of searching only for the person whose DNA was in the evidence, they could search for relatives. Genetic genealogy offered a different path: if enough relatives could be identified, investigators could build a family tree and narrow the branches. Burlington investigators worked with genetic genealogy experts, including CeCe Moore of Parabon NanoLabs. The crime scene DNA was analyzed against databases where people had voluntarily submitted their genetic information.
The results did not immediately produce a name. Instead, they produced relatives. The genealogy team constructed family trees, tracing relatives backward through generations and then working forward again. Eventually, the possibilities collapsed toward a single family—a family connected to a man who had lived on Brooks Avenue in 1971.
The trail pointed to William DeRoos. Investigators located a living half-brother of DeRoos, and his DNA strengthened the connection. But they still needed to know where DeRoos had actually been on the night of the murder. That brought them back to the story they had been told in 1971—and to Michelle.
In 2022, Burlington detectives located Michelle in Oregon. When they first interviewed her, she said she didn’t recognize Rita and didn’t remember socializing with the other tenants. Then, in September of that year, they interviewed her again. This time, she told them something very different.
She said she and DeRoos had argued on the night Rita died, and that he had left their apartment to take a walk to cool off. When he returned, she was already asleep. The next morning, police came to their door, and after they left, DeRoos told her to say he had been home all night. She had followed his instructions.
According to detective Thomas Chenette, investigators did not believe Michelle had knowingly participated in Rita’s killing. They believed she had been protecting her new husband because of his criminal history. She was young, had been married to him for only a short time, and had been told what to say. There was another piece of biological evidence that would provide an even stronger connection: Rita’s housecoat.
She had been wearing a red and white housecoat when she was attacked. During the struggle, the garment had been torn and buttons pulled from it. The housecoat was sent for additional testing, this time for touch DNA. Investigators focused on the area where the garment appeared to have been gripped and torn.
The laboratory recovered a mixture of DNA from several people. One profile belonged to Rita. The other matched the DNA profile obtained from the cigarette—the same profile traced through genetic genealogy to William DeRoos. The evidence had become a chain.
The cigarette connected DeRoos’s DNA to the crime scene. DNA from Rita’s housecoat connected the same profile to the attack itself. Investigators also located another woman who had been married to DeRoos after he left Vermont; she described sudden outbursts of violence and incidents in which he had physically harmed people. Those accounts did not prove he had killed Rita, but they provided context.
The strongest evidence remained the evidence from 1971: the cigarette, the DNA, the housecoat, the timeline, and Michelle’s changed account. When Burlington detectives finally connected the DNA to DeRoos, they discovered something they could not change. Their suspect was already dead. William DeRoos died in 1986 at age 46 from a drug overdose in a San Francisco hotel room.
There would be no arrest, no interrogation, no courtroom. By early 2023, Burlington police had assembled the pieces. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George reviewed the paperwork, and according to Burlington police, the evidence established probable cause for aggravated first-degree murder. There was only one problem: there was nobody left to prosecute.
The 2023 supplemental report concluded that the Detective Service Bureau was unanimously certain that the sole perpetrator of Rita Curran’s murder was William DeRoos. For Rita’s family, the announcement carried a complicated kind of relief. There was no celebration. Her sister Mary had spent decades wondering whether they would ever know what happened.
At one point, the family had told investigators they didn’t expect a resolution in their lifetime. Now, more than five decades later, they were finally hearing a name. In the years after the case was solved, people who learned Rita’s story began remembering the young woman behind the headlines. Her family found a way to turn some of the attention toward something positive, directing money raised in Rita’s memory toward helping others.
Time had not erased the evidence. It had simply taken technology long enough to understand it.