On the night of July 19th, 1971, a 24-year-old second-grade teacher named Rita Curran was strangled inside her ground-floor apartment in Burlington, Vermont.
Her roommates had been out for barely an hour. >> [music] >> The doors were unlocked, and when they came home, they sat in the living room talking for almost an hour before they found her body in the bedroom.
Burlington police launched one of the biggest investigations the city had ever seen. They polygraphed over 100 people.
They spent more than $200,000. They chased a lead connecting the murder to Ted Bundy himself, and for 52 years, every single lead went nowhere.
But when genetic genealogy finally cracked the case in 2023, the answer wasn’t some drifter passing through town.
It wasn’t a serial killer on a cross-country spree. The man who killed Rita Curran had been living directly above her the entire time.
One floor up. Interviewed the morning after the murder. Cleared by his wife’s alibi. An alibi she kept for over 50 years before she finally told the truth.
This is the story of the longest cold case in Burlington, Vermont history. And it starts not with the crime, but with the woman everyone forgot to remember.
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It was 1947 when Rita Patricia Curran was born in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
The eldest of three children in an Irish Catholic [music] family. Her father, Thomas Curran Sr., was a steady, hard-working man who would eventually spend years at IBM and later become Milton, Vermont’s zoning administrator.
Her mother, Mary, was a nurse. A woman so deeply woven into her community that she’d one day be named Milton’s [music] outstanding citizen of the year.
The Currans relocated to Milton when Rita was still young. Milton was a small town about 15 mi north of Burlington, the kind of place where people knew each other’s names and left their doors unlocked at night.
The family owned a diner and rental cabins on Arrowhead Mountain Lake. >> [music] >> It was a good life, simple, rooted, stable.
Rita attended Mount Saint Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic school in Burlington, >> [music] >> and then enrolled at Trinity College, a small Catholic institution also in Burlington, graduating in 1969.
She became exactly what [music] you’d expect someone like her to become, a teacher. Second grade at Milton Elementary School, making about $8,000 a year, which wasn’t much even in 1971.
She supplemented her income during summers working as a chambermaid at the Colonial Motor Inn on Shelburne Road in South Burlington.
She’d been doing that for three or four years by the time she died. But teaching wasn’t the only thing that defined Rita, she sang.
All through school, she’d been in choirs and glee clubs, and by the summer of 1971, >> [music] >> she was performing with an all-women barbershop group called the Champlain Echoes.
She taught religion classes at Saint Anne’s Catholic Church in Milton. She was pursuing graduate courses in reading and language arts at the University of Vermont.
She belonged to the Milton Women’s Club. And if you talked to the people who knew her, you’d hear the same words over and over again, sweet, kind, hardworking, painfully shy.
Rita was petite, maybe 100 lb, with shoulder-length reddish-brown hair. A manager at the Colonial Motor Inn later recalled that she used to refer to herself as an ugly duckling and talked about hoping to get married someday.
She was 24 years old and by most accounts, she was the kind of person who moved through the world quietly trying to do good without drawing attention to herself.
>> [music] >> In June 1971, Rita did something she’d never done [music] before. She moved out of her parents’ house.
She answered a classified ad in the Burlington Free Press looking for a summer roommate and landed in a ground floor apartment at 17 Brooks Avenue, a converted Victorian house near the University of Vermont campus.
[music] She barely knew the women she’d be living with, a girl named Beverly Lamphear, another named [music] Carrie Dwayne, who was 19.
She told her mother she wasn’t sure she fit in with her new roommates. She was already thinking about moving out again.
The girls were younger, more social. Rita was the one who came home from choir practice, put her hair in curlers, and went to bed early.
She wasn’t unhappy, she was just different. But that was the thing about Rita Curran.
She had always been a little different. The kind of quiet that people mistake for emptiness when it’s [music] actually the opposite.
She cared deeply about her second graders. She cared about her church. She cared about the music she made with the Champlain Echoes.
>> [music] >> She lived a small life, but it was full and it was hers.
This was supposed to be her summer of independence. [music] A shy young woman in her first apartment figuring out who she wanted to be outside the walls of her parents’ house.
[music] She’d been living there for less than a month. Every case on this channel starts with a person who deserved better than what happened to them.
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Monday, July 19th, 1971 started like any other day for Rita. She worked the day shift at the Colonial Motor Inn, >> [music] >> roughly 8:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon.
That evening, she attended Champlain Echoes rehearsal at a community center on North Avenue in Burlington.
Around 10:00, she was back at the apartment on Brooks Avenue. She put her hair up in curlers, changed into pajamas and a red and white polka dot housecoat, and settled into bed.
Her roommate, Beverly was home. Carrie and Carrie’s boyfriend, Paul Robinson, a 23-year-old mechanic, had gone out for the evening.
>> [music] >> Everything was quiet. Everything was normal. Then, around 11:15, Paul Robinson called the apartment from a bar called the Harbor Hideaway, and invited Beverly to come join them.
Beverly said [music] yes. She got ready and left. She didn’t lock the doors behind her.
Nobody did. Burlington in 1971 was the kind of city where violent crime was so rare it barely registered.
Former Burlington Police Chief Brandon Del Pozo would later describe it as a place where that sort of violence was not a common occurrence.
People didn’t just leave their doors unlocked, they left them open. Screen doors in summer, front doors unlatched year-round.
The idea that someone would walk into your home uninvited and hurt you simply didn’t exist in most people’s minds.
17 Brooks Avenue was no different. The converted Victorian house sat in a residential neighborhood near the University of Vermont campus.
A quiet street lined with similar old homes that had been divided into rental apartments.
[music] Students and young professionals lived side by side. The building had three units. Rita and Beverly shared the ground floor.
Carrie Dwayne was in one of the other units, and on the third floor, [music] directly above Rita’s bedroom, lived a newlywed couple who had moved in just weeks earlier.
Rita was now alone in the apartment. It was somewhere around 11:20 in the evening.
What happened next took place inside a window of roughly 70 minutes. Sometime between 11:20 that night and 12:30 the following morning, someone walked through the unlocked door of 17 Brooks Avenue, entered Rita’s bedroom, and attacked her.
She was beaten severely about the face and [music] head. She was assaulted. And she was strangled manually until [music] she died.
The evidence showed that Rita fought back. There was blood spatter on the walls of the bedroom.
>> [music] >> She had hair clutched in her left hand. Her curlers had been ripped out.
Her housecoat and nightgown were [music] torn. This was not a quick, silent death. This was a violent struggle [music] between a petite, 100-lb woman and someone who overpowered her.
When Beverly Carey [music] and Paul returned to the apartment around 12:30 in the morning, they didn’t immediately check on Rita.
They sat in the living room talking. It wasn’t until nearly 1:20 in the morning that Beverly opened the bedroom door and found Rita lying on her back on the floor just inside the doorway.
Paul Robinson dropped to the floor and tried CPR. Rita was already cold. He called for help.
The Burlington Fire Department ambulance crew arrived, took one look at the scene, and called the police.
The call to Burlington PD was logged at 1:29 a.m. When the medical examiner rolled Rita’s body during the initial examination, something was found underneath her right arm.
A single cigarette butt. Lark brand. It was uncrushed, meaning it hadn’t been stepped on or stubbed out.
It had simply burned all the way down on its own. The ember dying quietly on the floor of a bedroom where a woman had just been murdered.
Whoever smoked it had either dropped it during the attack or left it behind afterward.
And it had burned itself out while Rita lay dying or already dead beside it.
Lark was an unusual cigarette. Small market share in the United States, more popular overseas, with a distinctive charcoal granule filter.
Rita didn’t smoke. Beverly didn’t smoke. Carrie and Paul smoked Salem, Benson and Hedges, and Winston.
Nobody in that apartment smoked Larks. That cigarette didn’t belong there. And whoever left it had left something else behind.
Something invisible in 1971. Something that wouldn’t have a name for another 15 years. DNA.
There was no forced entry, no broken windows, no jimmied locks. A small smear of blood on the exterior of the back door suggested the route the killer had used to leave.
Rita’s purse sat untouched on a table. $20 in cash and her identification still inside.
This wasn’t a robbery. Nothing had been taken. Whoever entered that apartment hadn’t come for money or belongings.
They had come for Rita. [music] The killing sent shock waves through Burlington. Paul Robinson later recalled how fast the city changed.
“I can’t tell you how fast deadbolts flew off the shelves after Rita’s murder,” he said.
The trusting unlocked door culture of Burlington evaporated almost overnight. In the weeks and months that followed, there were reports of prowlers, break-ins, and attempted assaults on women across the city.
Whether these were connected to Rita’s murder or simply the product of a newly terrified community paying closer attention, the result was the same.
Burlington had lost its innocence. The question that would haunt the city for the next 52 years was simple.
Who walked through that door? This is where the story takes a turn nobody expected.
Because the answer was closer than anyone imagined. And the police nearly had it in their hands before the sun came up.
The murder of Rita Curran became one of the most heavily investigated cases in Burlington Police Department history.
Detective Lieutenant Richard Bolduc took command of the investigation. Patrick Leahy, the 31-year-old Chittenden County State’s Attorney, who would go on to become one of the longest-serving United States Senators in history, personally responded to the crime scene on Brooks Avenue.
He later described the murder as one of the most brutal he had ever encountered.
A media blackout was imposed almost immediately. Investigators wanted to control the flow of information, >> [music] >> keep details from leaking that might compromise the case or contaminate witness statements.
Behind the scenes, the full weight of Burlington’s law enforcement apparatus descended on the Curran case.
Every male in the Burlington area with a known history of sexual offenses was questioned.
More than a hundred of Rita’s acquaintances, friends, [music] colleagues, and casual contacts were given polygraph examinations.
Detectives investigated a possible connection to a string of break-ins and assaults targeting women across Burlington >> [music] >> during the summer and fall of 1971.
A secret witness reward was established at $3,000 and eventually climbed to roughly 13,000 [music] with contributions from the Burlington Free Press, the Chittenden County District Attorney’s Office, and the Secret Witness [music] Program.
Tips came in. None of them led anywhere conclusive. [music] And here’s the detail that makes this case so agonizing to look back on.
>> [music] >> At 7:00 in the morning, just hours after Rita’s body was discovered, Officer Richard Garrow began the standard canvas of the building at 17 [music] Brooks Avenue.
This is textbook procedure. You go door-to-door. You ask every resident whether they saw anything, heard anything, noticed anything out of the ordinary.
Garo knocked on every door in the building, including the one on the third floor.
William DeRusha answered. His wife Michelle was beside him. They were polite, cooperative, and entirely unremarkable.
They told Garo that they had been home all evening, that they hadn’t seen anything unusual, and that they’d slept through the night without disturbance.
No strange noises, no unfamiliar voices, >> [music] >> nothing. This was a converted Victorian house with wooden floors.
>> [music] >> Rita’s bedroom was directly below DeRusha’s apartment. The idea that a violent struggle, a beating, a murder could have taken place one floor below without the upstairs residents hearing a single sound should have raised questions.
>> [music] >> It didn’t. Or if it did, the questions weren’t pursued. Detective Winterbottom followed up at the DeRusha apartment separately.
So did Vermont State Police Trooper Bruce LaHoo. Both times, they spoke only to Michelle.
Both times, she repeated the same account. Home all night. Heard nothing. Knew nothing. The story never wavered.
The details never changed. And in 1971, a consistent alibi from a spouse was treated as solid ground.
William DeRusha had a criminal record. He’d served two prison terms in California, including a two-to-three-year sentence for armed robbery.
>> [music] >> He was 31 years old, had married Michelle just 2 weeks before the murder, on July 5th, 1971, [music] and lived in the third floor unit at 15 Brooks Avenue, the same converted Victorian house, the same front door, the same staircase.
One week after the murder, a confidential informant approached detectives and told them that William De Roos was, in their words, capable of committing a violent crime.
>> [music] >> That should have been a turning point. A man with a record for armed robbery living directly above the victim.
Flagged by an informant within days of the killing. >> [music] >> Under any other circumstances, that combination would have put De Roos at the top of the suspect list.
But the alibi held. Michelle had said he was home. She’d told three different officers the same story on [music] three different occasions.
And investigators with no physical evidence tying De Roos to the crime scene and a consistent alibi from his wife, set the lead aside and moved on.
This decision seemed small at the time. It wasn’t. By September 1971, Leahy announced he would present evidence to a grand jury.
It’s unclear whether one was ever actually convened. And no indictment followed. The investigation ground forward, but without a central suspect, without a confession, and without the forensic tools that wouldn’t exist for decades, it had nowhere to go.
Two years after the murder, Leahy estimated that more than $200,000 [music] had been spent on the case.
The suspect list had grown to 13 or 15 names. A 1979 article in the Burlington Free Press, marking the eighth anniversary of the murder, reported that police had narrowed their focus to four primary suspects.
One had died of a drug overdose. One had been killed in a highway crash.
Two were serving sentences in prison for unrelated murders. A neighbor of Rita’s had been considered a prime suspect and was polygraphed, but never arrested.
>> [music] >> Several men came forward with false confessions over the years, muddying the waters further.
The false confessions deserve a mention because they illustrate just how tangled this case became.
Over the years, multiple men came forward claiming to have killed Rita Curran. Each confession triggered a new wave of investigation.
Each one pulled resources and attention, and each one ultimately collapsed under scrutiny. False confessions are more common in high-profile unsolved cases than most people realize.
The publicity, the reward money, the psychological compulsion to be part of a story, all of it draws people in.
And every single one of them cost the investigation time it would never get back.
Rita’s mother, Mary, publicly alleged that someone was covering up the murder for political reasons.
[music] Whether that suspicion had any basis, or simply reflected a grieving mother’s desperation for accountability, her frustration was understandable.
She had watched a parade of leads, suspects, theories, and promises come and go for years.
She had buried the expectation of justice long before she buried herself. And through all of it, William DeRusset’s name barely appeared in the case [music] file.
He wasn’t formally listed among the 13 to 15 suspects. The informant’s tip from that first week had been noted and filed away.
The alibi from his wife had done its job. The man who had lived one floor above Rita Curran on the night she died had been effectively invisible to the investigation for over 50 years.
[music] The case went cold. While the leads dried up, a different theory took hold.
And for the next four decades, it became the dominant story [music] people told about Rita Curran.
Ted Bundy was born in 1946 at the Elizabeth Lund Home for unwed mothers [music] in Burlington, Vermont.
The home sat roughly half a mile from the Colonial Motor Inn on Shelburne Road, >> [music] >> where Rita worked her summer chambermaid job.
And when you placed a photograph of Rita next to photographs of Bundy’s known victims, the resemblance was hard to ignore.
Petite frame, shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle. Retired FBI agent John Bassett would later note what he called a remarkable resemblance between Rita and Diane Edwards, Bundy’s first serious girlfriend and the woman whose features seemed to define his victim type.
After Ann Rule published The Stranger Beside Me in 1980, the theory gained real traction in the public consciousness.
Investigator Robert Keppel reported that Bundy had claimed to have killed a young woman in Burlington in 1971, allegedly while visiting the city to learn about his own birth.
The story had all the elements that make a theory stick. Geographic proximity, physical resemblance, a serial killer known for traveling long distances, and a murder that had no other explanation.
Rita’s sister Mary went so far as to send a letter to Bundy on death row in Florida.
She reportedly received a response through the FBI, though Bundy neither confirmed nor denied involvement.
On the eve of his execution on January 24th, 1989, when Bundy [music] was confessing to murders across the country in a final attempt to delay his sentence, he explicitly denied killing anyone in Vermont.
Burlington police said they were satisfied Bundy had likely been elsewhere during the summer of 1971.
Though some detectives kept his name on the suspect list simply because no one could definitively prove he wasn’t there.
And that was enough to keep the theory alive. Over the years, the Bundy connection attached itself to Rita’s case like a parasite.
In online forums, in true crime podcasts, in the memories of Burlington residents who remembered the murder, the story of Rita Curran became inseparable from the story of Ted Bundy.
Search her name online during those decades and you’d find page after page about [music] Bundy.
His birthplace in Burlington. His victim type. His possible movements in the summer of 1971.
What you wouldn’t find in most cases was much about Rita herself, the shy teacher from Milton, the woman who sang barbershop and taught Sunday school and was trying to figure out adult life in her first apartment, the actual human being whose murder had been reduced to a footnote [music] in someone else’s mythology.
The Bundy theory also did something more insidious. It drew the public’s attention and to some degree the investigative attention away from the more mundane possibilities.
When you have a theory involving America’s most famous serial killer, the idea that the murderer might be an ordinary man with an armed robbery conviction living upstairs feels almost anticlimactic.
It doesn’t make for a good story. It doesn’t sell books. It doesn’t generate podcast episodes.
And so it gets overlooked. And that’s the cruelest irony of this entire case. While the world spent decades wondering whether America’s most notorious serial killer had claimed Rita Curran as one of his victims, the actual killer was a man with a record for armed robbery who had lived one floor above her.
A man who’d been interviewed the morning after the murder and walked away without suspicion.
A man who when Bundy’s DNA was finally compared to the cigarette butt profile years later through the CODIS database was proven to have nothing to do with Rita’s death at all.
Ted Bundy was definitively excluded. The theory that had consumed [music] decades of public attention and investigative energy was a ghost.
And the real answer had been hiding in plain sight since July [music] 1971. We’re deep into this story now, and the biggest revelations >> [music] >> are still ahead.
If you want to see how 52 years of silence [music] finally broke, stay with us.
And if you haven’t already, subscribing means you won’t miss the next case. >> [music] >> The years passed, then the decades.
And for the Curran family, the weight of an unsolved murder >> [music] >> didn’t lighten with time.
It compounded. Rita’s parents carried the heaviest burden the longest. Thomas Curran Sr., the IBM man who’d raised his family in Milton and served as the town’s zoning administrator, >> [music] >> watched the investigation stall, restart, and stall again over and over.
He read the newspaper articles. He fielded [music] calls from reporters on anniversary dates. He listened to the Bundy theories and the false confessions and the promises from new police administrations that the case would remain active.
In 1991, Thomas died of cancer. >> [music] >> He was 68 years old. For 20 years, he had carried the weight of his daughter’s unsolved murder.
20 years of waiting for a phone call that never came. A breakthrough that never materialized.
>> [music] >> A name that was never spoken. He went to his grave without the one piece of information that might have given him some measure of peace.
>> [music] >> Mary Curran, the nurse, the community pillar, the woman Milton had named its outstanding citizen, >> [music] >> outlived her husband by 11 years.
And she spent those years doing what Thomas had been too quiet to do. She demanded answers loudly, publicly.
She alleged that there was a cover-up. That the truth was being suppressed for political reasons.
>> [music] >> Whether she was right or simply doing what a grieving mother does when the system fails her child, her frustration was the kind that comes from watching a parade of promises lead nowhere, [music] year after year, decade after decade.
She had spent more years waiting for Rita’s killer to be found than Rita had spent alive.
In 2002, ALS took Mary Curran. >> [music] >> She was 83. She died without knowing that the man who murdered her daughter had lived in the same building, that he’d been interviewed the next morning, >> [music] >> that the answer had been one floor up.
Now, it was Tom and Mary’s turn. Tom Curran Jr., >> [music] >> Rita’s younger brother, stayed in Milton.
He was active in the Knights of Columbus, rooted in the same community where his family had always lived.
Mary Curran Campbell, Rita’s younger sister, settled in Hartland. Together, they called themselves Curran Strong.
They published memoriam notices in the paper. [music] They wrote letters to each new police chief who took command in Burlington.
They kept the conversation alive even when nobody seemed to be listening. Two generations of the Curran family had now grown up without ever meeting Rita.
Nieces and nephews knew her only from photographs and the stories their parents told. Their children knew even less.
The woman who taught second graders to read >> [music] >> and sang four-part harmony on stage, and moved into her first apartment because she wanted [music] to see what independence felt like had become something she never would have wanted to be.
A fixed point of grief. A wound in the family’s history that couldn’t close because nobody could explain how it opened.
Every milestone the family celebrated carried an absence. Every holiday gathering had an empty chair that nobody talked about, but everybody felt.
Tom and Mary didn’t just grieve their sister. They grieved the life she would have had, the career she would have built, the family she might have started, the decades of birthdays and Christmases and ordinary Tuesday evenings that were stolen from her at 24 years old in a ground floor apartment on Brooks Avenue.
And if you’re wondering whether the investigation continued during those years, the answer is yes, technically.
New detectives picked up the file from time to time. Tips trickled in. But the original team, the investigators who had walked the crime scene at 17 Brooks Avenue and knocked on William DeRusset’s door and collected that Lark cigarette butt, they were gone.
Richard Boileau, the lead detective, had retired and eventually passed away. The institutional memory of the case faded with each passing year.
Then, on the 50th anniversary of Rita’s murder in 2021, Tom and Mary did something that felt like a goodbye.
[music] They released a public statement. The words they chose were careful and measured, the kind of language you use when you’ve spent half a century hoping and you’ve finally accepted that hope might not be enough.
50 years is a long time to grieve, they wrote, a long time to hope.
The 50-year mark confirms that a resolution in our lifetime to Rita’s murder is not going to happen.
They went further. Somebody somewhere knows what happened that night, they said, [music] and they will take that information to their grave.
May God have mercy on their soul. They were right about one thing. The person who knew the truth had taken [music] it to the grave.
William DeRusset had been dead since 1986, but they were wrong about the other thing.
A resolution in their lifetime [music] was still possible, and it was closer than they could have imagined.
The first real break in the Rita Curran case came in 2014, and it happened not because of a confession or a witness coming forward, >> [music] >> but because of a FedEx package.
Detective Jeff Beerworth at the Burlington Police Department gathered the preserved evidence from the 1971 murder, including the Lark cigarette butt, fingernail scrapings, >> [music] >> and biological samples collected during the original investigation, and shipped them >> [music] >> to the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The question was simple. After 43 years, was there still viable DNA on that cigarette?
[music] In October 2014, the lab delivered an answer. Yes. A male DNA profile had been successfully isolated [music] from the Lark cigarette butt.
Whoever had smoked that cigarette and left it on the floor of Rita Curran’s bedroom had left behind a genetic signature that had survived more than four decades in an evidence locker.
The profile was immediately run through CODIS, >> [music] >> the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, which contains millions of profiles from convicted offenders and crime scenes across the country.
No match. The smoker’s DNA wasn’t in the system. Investigators then compared the profile against every suspect who had ever appeared on the Curran case list.
All 13 to 15 names that had accumulated over the decades. Ted Bundy’s profile, which had been in CODIS [music] since 2011, was checked.
No match. Roommate Paul Robinson was tested and excluded. The first responders who had arrived at the scene that night were tested and excluded.
Every name on the list came back negative. There was now a DNA profile of the likely killer, a genetic fingerprint sitting in a database waiting for a name to attach to it.
But CODIS only works if the person’s DNA has been entered into the system. Usually through a prior arrest or conviction in a participating jurisdiction.
Whoever smoked that Lark cigarette in Rita Curran’s bedroom in 1971 had either never been arrested in a jurisdiction that collected DNA or had been arrested before the era of routine DNA collection.
Either way, the profile sat there in silence. A ghost with no face. The case stalled again for five more years.
And during those five years, the Curran family continued to wait, continued to write letters, continued to wonder whether the answer would ever come.
By 2019, a new detective had taken command of the Burlington PD’s investigative division. Detective Lieutenant James Treib assumed control of the Detective Services Bureau and made a decision that would prove critical.
He reopened the Curran case, and the way he did it mattered as much as the fact that he did it.
This wasn’t going to be another periodic review, another detective pulling the file off a shelf on an anniversary date, reading through the old notes, shaking their head, and putting it [music] back.
Treib assembled a full team of roughly a dozen detectives and technicians and gave them a clear mandate.
Treat this case as if it had just been committed. Go back to the beginning.
Re-interview every living witness. Re-examine every piece of evidence. And use every tool that exists today that didn’t exist [music] in 1971.
Former Police Chief Brandon Del Pozo had already been laying the groundwork during his tenure, pushed evidence to new labs, tracked down aging witnesses, and keeping the case in active rotation.
When Acting Chief Jon Murad took the helm, he made a personal pledge to the Curran family that the case would not be abandoned.
For the first time in decades, the investigation had institutional momentum. In early 2022, the breakthrough came from an unexpected source.
The nonprofit organization Season of Justice, which provides grants specifically to fund genetic genealogy testing for cold cases, awarded funding to the Curran investigation.
On March 24th, 2022, Burlington PD shipped what they called group one evidence to DNA Labs International in South Florida.
The lab applied new extraction techniques that hadn’t existed during the 2014 testing. They found male DNA on Rita’s torn red and white polka dot housecoat.
The statistical analysis was staggering. The DNA was roughly 65,000 times more likely to belong to the suspect than to a random individual.
Additional DNA was recovered from Rita’s undergarments, though at a lower level of statistical significance.
Then came the step that changed everything. In the summer of 2022, the cigarette butt DNA profile was sent [music] to Parabon NanoLabs in Reston, Virginia.
That’s where C.C. Moore, the chief genetic genealogist at Parabon, and arguably the most prominent figure in the field of investigative genetic genealogy, went to work.
Moore uploaded the DNA profile to the public genealogy databases GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. The process she uses, investigative genetic genealogy, works differently from a standard CODIS search.
CODIS looks for a direct match, one profile against another. Genetic genealogy works with partial matches.
It identifies people who share segments of DNA with the unknown profile. People who might be second cousins, third cousins, fourth cousins, distant relatives who have no idea they’re connected to a criminal case.
Then the genealogist builds family trees backward through five generations of birth records, marriage certificates, census documents, immigration papers, and public genealogy databases, and then forward again.
Tracing the branches of each tree toward the present, looking for the single point where they converge on one individual.
It’s painstaking work in most cases. Hundreds of hours of genealogical research, cross-referencing records from multiple states, and sometimes multiple countries.
Eliminating branches one by one until only one name remains. The process, which had taken months of evidence collection and years of preserved forensic material, reached its conclusion with remarkable speed.
More narrowed the profile to one person, William Richard DeRoos. As she would later tell the press conference in Burlington, “This case [music] is over 50 years old, and it only took a few hours to narrow it down to William DeRoos.
At first, More didn’t know that DeRoos had any connection to Burlington, Vermont. He was simply a name at the bottom of a family tree.
Then she pulled his records and found a marriage license dated July 5th, 1971, issued in Burlington.
The address listed on the license was 15 Brooks Avenue, the same building where Rita Curran had been murdered 2 weeks later.
Investigators needed one more piece, confirmation. DeRoos was dead. He’d been cremated. There was no body to exhume, no direct DNA sample to collect, but he had a living half-brother named Douglas McGinty.
When McGinty’s DNA was tested against the cigarette butt profile, the result came back at a 97.03% probability of a half-sibling relationship.
The cigarette had spoken. After 52 years in an evidence locker, the Lark that burned out on the floor of Rita Curran’s bedroom had finally given up the name of the man who smoked it.
So, who was William DeRoos? And how did a man who lived directly above his victim walk away from the investigation and never come back?
William Richard DeRoos was born on December 14th, 1939 in Chicago. [music] His mother died when he was just 2 months old.
Whatever his childhood looked like after that, the records are sparse, but by the time he reached adulthood, DeRoos had already built a criminal record that should have raised alarms anywhere he went.
He served two separate prison terms in California. One of them, a sentence of 2 to 3 years, was for armed robbery.
He was not a man without a history of violence and crime. He was a man with a documented pattern of it.
By 1970, DeRoos had drifted to San Francisco, where he began practicing Buddhism at the San Francisco Zen Center.
That’s where he met Michelle. She was from Burlington, Vermont, and when she moved back east, DeRoos followed her.
They married on July 5th, 1971 in Burlington. They moved into the third floor apartment at 15 Brooks Avenue.
Two weeks later, Rita Curran was dead. According to the reinvestigation, here’s what happened that night.
DeRoos and Michelle got into an argument. He left the apartment for what Acting Chief Morrell later described as a cool-down walk.
During that walk, police believe, he entered Rita’s unlocked ground floor apartment and killed her.
When he came back upstairs, he told Michelle what to say, that he’d been home all night, that they’d heard nothing.
His reasoning, according to what Michelle would eventually tell investigators, was straightforward. He had a criminal record.
If police found out about his past, they’d make him a scapegoat whether he was guilty or not.
Michelle was young. She was a newlywed of 2 weeks. She was, by every account that emerged from the reinvestigation, naive and deeply in love with a man who had a kind of charismatic hold on the people around him.
She told the police what her husband told her to say, and she kept telling it for over 50 years.
Officer Garrow heard the alibi the morning of July 20th. Detective Winterbottom heard it again.
Trooper LaHue heard it a third time. Three separate officers, three separate opportunities for the truth, and three times the same l i e.
If DeRusha had stopped there, if he’d stayed in Burlington and kept his head down and lived out a quiet life in the third floor apartment above the woman he’d murdered, this might be a very different story.
Somebody might have noticed something. Somebody might have talked. The informant’s tip might have led somewhere.
But DeRusha didn’t stay. And nobody stopped him from leaving. In the fall of 1971, just a few months after the murder, DeRusha abruptly left Burlington and traveled to Thailand.
There was no legal reason he couldn’t. He wasn’t a suspect. He wasn’t under surveillance.
He wasn’t on any watchlist. His wife’s alibi had removed him from the investigation so thoroughly that his departure didn’t raise a single flag.
A man with a record for armed robbery, living directly above a murder victim, flagged by a confidential informant within a week of the killing, simply packed his bags and flew to Southeast Asia.
And nobody blinked. He entered a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, shaved his head, and took on the rituals and discipline of monastic life.
To the monks who accepted him, he was a seeker, a man looking for peace.
They had no way of knowing what he was running from. He was eventually disrobed, the formal term for being expelled from a monastic order, though the specific reasons aren’t clear from the available records.
He joined another monastery. Michelle, still loyal, still believing in the man she’d married, followed him to Thailand months later.
For a brief and strange period, they lived together in the monastic system, she as a nun and he as a monk.
But whatever bond had held them together was dissolved. The marriage fell apart overseas. Michelle had to obtain a divorce without his signature, navigating foreign legal systems to free herself from a man who had, in every practical sense, already left her behind.
By 1974, DeRoos resurfaced at the San Francisco Zen Center. Going by the name Dutch, >> [music] >> he married again, this time to a woman named Sarah Hepting.
And it’s Sarah Hepting’s testimony that provides the most chilling window into who William DeRoos really was.
Hepting described DeRoos as charismatic in a way that bordered on coercive, a man with what she called mental hypnosis, almost power over the people around him.
He drank heavily. He used drugs, including Thorazine, and he was violent. Hepting reported two incidents that would take on new meaning decades later.
In one, DeRoos stabbed a female friend named Ophelia with a pocket knife completely without provocation.
When Hepting confronted him, he told her, “I thought I was stabbing you.” In the other, De Rousse strangled Hepting herself to near [snorts] unconsciousness.
The method was manual strangulation, the same method that had killed Rita Curran. Hepting left De Rousse in 1978.
She survived. Rita had not. On what is reported as August 7th, 1986, William De Rousse was found dead [music] in a San Francisco hotel room.
The cause of death was acute morphine poisoning. He was 46 years old. His body was cremated, >> [music] >> which meant there would never be remains to exhume, never a grave to visit, never a direct DNA sample to collect.
Even in death, De Rousse made himself harder to find. >> [music] >> He would never sit in a courtroom, never face a jury, never hear a judge read a verdict, never look into the eyes of Tom and Mary Curran and answer for what he did to their sister.
The man who Burlington police are now fully confident murdered Rita Curran escaped the one thing the criminal justice system is supposed to deliver.
Not by fleeing the country, not by clever lawyering, not by beating the evidence. He escaped by dying.
And dying is not justice. It’s just the end of a story that never got its proper conclusion.
And the alibi that protected him it was still holding. For over 50 years, Michelle’s lie had stood like a wall between William De Rousse and the investigation that should have found him.
She had moved on with her life, changed her name, built a new identity far from Burlington and far from the memory of that summer in 1971.
Whether she understood the full weight of what her alibi had protected, whether she knew, or even suspected that her husband had killed the woman who lived downstairs is a question that only she can answer.
Detective Chinette, who eventually re-interviewed her, would later say he believed she didn’t know. But when Burlington detectives finally tracked her down, armed with DNA evidence and 50 years of unanswered questions, Michelle DeRues gave them something she hadn’t given Officer Garo in 1971, or Detective Winterbottom, or Trooper LaWho.
She gave them the truth. Five decades late, but the truth. February 21st, 2023. Burlington Police Department headquarters on North Avenue.
The room was full. Acting Chief Jon Murad stood at the podium alongside Detective Lieutenant James Trieb and Detective Corporal Thomas Chinette.
Genetic genealogist CeCe Moore appeared by video link from Virginia. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George was there.
So was Patrick Leahy, now 82, retired from the United States Senate after nearly 50 years, but still carrying the memory of that night on Brooks Avenue in 1971, when he’d been a 31-year-old prosecutor standing in a dead woman’s apartment.
And standing beside all of them, finally, were Tom Curran and Mary Curran Campbell, Rita’s brother and sister, the last two people alive who had grown up with her, who remembered her voice, who knew what she sounded like when she laughed.
Murad spoke first. “She was a teacher and a singer and a giver, and she was loved,” he said.
“The random violence of her murder left a stain on our community, and it devastated her family.”
Then he said the words that everyone in the room had been waiting to hear.
“The case was solved. The killer was William DeRues, the man from the third floor.
Today, William DeRues would be 83,” Murad told the room, >> [music] >> but there is not a cop in this building who would not happily put handcuffs on him.
Trieb was blunt. We’re all confident that William DeRusha is responsible for the aggravated murder of Rita Curran, he said.
But because he died in a hotel room of a drug overdose, >> [music] >> he will not be held accountable for his actions.
The case would be closed posthumously. States Attorney Sarah George confirmed that had DeRusha been alive, he would have been charged with aggravated murder.
I would have felt perfectly comfortable going to trial, she said. Thomas Chinette, the detective corporal who had re-interviewed Michelle DeRusha, offered an assessment of the woman whose false alibi had shielded a killer for half a century.
>> [music] >> He said he did not believe Michelle knew about the murder when she lied to police.
She was young. She was naive. She was newly married. She was in love. When asked whether Michelle would face charges for lying to investigators, Murad gave a simple answer.
Lying to the police is not a crime. Somewhere in that room, or maybe in a phone call after, or maybe in the quiet of a car on the way home, Mary Curran Campbell said the sentence that [music] cuts through everything else in this case like nothing else can.
We were numb. 51 and 1/2 years, and it’s the guy upstairs. Think about that for a second.
51 and 1/2 years. Three police chiefs, multiple district attorneys, a future United States senator who responded to the crime scene personally, over 100 polygraphs, 13 suspects, Ted Bundy rumors, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent.
And the answer was one flight of stairs away the entire time. Tom Curran, Rita’s brother, took a different tone.
He didn’t dwell on DeRusha. I don’t think so much about the guy who did this,” he said, “as I do about Rita, my parents, and what they went through.
I pray to Rita, and I pray to my parents.” Patrick Leahy, the man who had walked through Rita’s apartment as a young prosecutor in 1971 and gone on to become one of the most powerful legislators in American history, had just retired from the United States Senate weeks earlier after a career spanning nearly five decades.
He’d been a young man when he knelt beside Rita Curran’s body. He was 82 years old now, and he admitted what 50 years of silence had done to his expectations.
“I must admit,” he said, “after 20 and 30, 40 years, I figured it never would be solved.”
The press conference lasted about an hour. Reporters asked questions. Officials gave careful, measured answers.
The news spread fast. Local stations in Vermont carried it live. The AP picked it up.
True crime communities online, many of which had spent years debating the Bundy connection, suddenly had a name nobody had been discussing, William De Rousse, the man from the third floor.
But the thing that lingered afterward wasn’t anything the police said or the prosecutors clarified or the genealogist explained.
It was the family, Tom and Mary, standing in a police station in Burlington more than half a century after the worst night of their lives, hearing for the first time the name of the man who killed their sister, learning that the answer had been in the same building, that the alibi that shielded him had been a lie, that their parents, both of them, had died carrying a question whose answer was, in a sense, right upstairs.
One flight of wooden stairs in a converted Victorian house on Brooks Avenue. CeCe Moore, appearing by video, offered a tribute not just to the science, but to the people who made it possible.
She credited the original 1971 investigators, the ones who collected and preserved evidence at a time when DNA was a concept that existed only in academic laboratories, for being way ahead of their time.
They couldn’t have known what that cigarette butt would one day reveal. But they collected it anyway.
They preserved it. They documented it. And because they did their jobs with care in 1971, genealogist sitting at a computer in 2022 could do what 50 years of traditional police work couldn’t.
In the weeks that followed the press conference, the Currant family established a GoFundMe campaign.
Not for themselves. They raised money to repay the Season of Justice grant that had funded the genetic genealogy testing.
They wanted to pay it forward. To make sure the same science that gave them answers could give answers to another family waiting in the same silence they had known for 52 years.
There’s a moment in every cold case that gets solved where you have to sit with a strange, uncomfortable truth.
The answer is here. The name is known. The evidence is conclusive. And yet the thing that was lost can never be returned.
William De Rousse will never be arrested. He will never stand trial. He will never hear a jury foreman read the word guilty.
The justice system, in the strictest [music] sense, has not been served. The man who killed Rita Currant escaped accountability by dying in a hotel room of a morphine overdose in 1986, 37 years before anyone would connect his DNA to a Lark cigarette butt on a bedroom floor in Burlington.
But something was served on February 21st, 2023. Maybe it wasn’t justice in the courtroom sense.
Maybe it was something closer to what this channel is named after. Redemption. Rita Curran spent 52 years as a cold case file, a number, a folder in a cabinet.
The woman whose name showed up in the same sentence as Ted Bundy’s, not because she had anything to do with him, but because in the absence of answers, the most dramatic theory fills the vacuum.
Now her name stands on its own again. She was a second-grade teacher at Milton Elementary.
She sang in a barbershop quartet called the Champlain Echoes. She taught Sunday school at St.
Anne’s. She was shy, kind, hardworking, and 24 years old. She moved into her first apartment because she wanted to try being independent.
Her parents died without knowing who killed her. Thomas in 1991. Mary in 2002. They carried the weight of it for 20 and 30 years, respectively, and it never got lighter.
But their children, Tom and Mary, lived long enough to hear the answer. Less than 2 years after they released that 50th anniversary statement, the one that essentially said goodbye to hope, a detective lieutenant named Treeb, a genetic genealogist named Moore, and a Lark cigarette butt that had been sitting in a plastic evidence bag since the Nixon administration proved them wrong.
And what did the family do with their answer? They paid it forward. Tom and Mary established a GoFundMe campaign to repay the Season of Justice grant that had funded the genetic genealogy testing.
They didn’t keep the goodwill for themselves. They wanted to make sure the same science that gave them closure could give closure to another family somewhere else, another set of siblings who had been waiting decades for a phone call, another mother or father who had died without knowing.
The Currans understood something that a lot of people miss when they talk about cold case [music] investigations.
The technology is there, the willingness is there. What’s often missing is the money. And they wanted to make sure money wouldn’t be the reason another family had to wait.
“Somebody, somewhere knows what happened that night.” The Currans had written in 2021. “And they will take that information to their grave.”
They were right. William De Rousse did take it to his grave. But science found a way to dig it back up.
The original investigators who processed 17 Brooks Avenue on the night of July 20th, 1971 couldn’t have imagined the technology that would one day exist.
They didn’t know what DNA was. >> [music] >> They didn’t know what a genetic genealogy database was.
They didn’t know that a cigarette butt could hold a killer’s identity for half a century, waiting patiently for the world to invent the tools to read it.
But they collected the evidence anyway. They labeled it. They stored it properly. They maintained the chain of custody across half a century through multiple police administrations, through building moves and storage transfers, and the slow erosion of institutional memory.
And because they did their jobs with care in 1971, a genetic genealogist sitting at a computer in Virginia in 2022 could do what 50 years of traditional police work could not.
There’s a lesson in this case for every law enforcement agency in the country sitting on unsolved cases with preserved biological evidence in storage.
The technology exists now. The funding mechanisms exist. Organizations like Season of Justice are specifically designed to bridge the gap between evidence and answers.
The science that solved Rita Curran’s murder didn’t exist when she died. But it exists today.
And somewhere right now in evidence lockers across across this country, there are cigarette butts and clothing fibers and biological samples waiting to give other families the same thing the Curran’s finally received.
An answer, a name, an ending. Rita Curran waited 52 years. Her family waited 52 years.
The city of Burlington waited 52 years. And the answer was never more than a staircase away.
If Rita’s story meant something to you, share this video with someone who cares about cases like hers and subscribe to Cold Case Redemption.
Every case we cover here is a promise that the forgotten won’t stay forgotten.
