A cigarette butt found near the body of a 24-year-old teacher, murdered 52 years ago in Vermont, has now helped investigators locate the alleged perpetrator of the crime, an upstairs neighbor, who strangled her.
DNA evidence collected by Burlington police from the cigarette butt and investigative work carried out led authorities to the man who allegedly killed Rita Curran one night in July 1971.
The suspect, identified as William Deroos, who was 31 at the time, left his apartment that night to “take another walk.” Then, when he returned, he told his wife to say that he was gone during that 70-minute period of time.
Since the investigation resumed in 2019, inspectors have re-interviewed Deroos’ ex-wife, and she said he had briefly left the apartment, a window of time in which Curran’s roommates were not in their apartment. in Burlington.
“We are all confident that William Deroos is responsible for the aggravated murder of Rita Curran, but as she died in a hotel room from a drug overdose, she will not be held accountable for her actions, however the case will be closed,” the inspector said. Police James. Trieb, commander of the Department of Investigative Services, at a news conference Tuesday morning.
After Curran’s death, Deroos moved to Thailand and became a monk, but later returned to the United States. In 1986, Deroos died of a drug overdose in San Francisco, police said.
Curran’s parents died without knowing who killed their daughter, but the victim’s brother and sister attended the event held at Burlington Police Headquarters.
In the early morning hours of July 20, 1971, Burlington police were called to the Brooks Avenue apartment after Curran’s roommate came home to find his body in the bedroom he shared with her.
Police say Curran resisted fiercely but was strangled. The murder rocked Burlington.
Since then, the case has remained open, but in 2019, Trieb and a team of inspectors, officers, technicians and others began working on the case as if it happened then and there.
Important evidence was a cigarette butt found near Curran’s body.
In 2014, previous researchers submitted the butt and other evidence for DNA analysis. The test determined the DNA profile of whoever smoked that cigarette, but did not match any existing samples in DNA databases collected by law enforcement.
But the investigators who took up the case in 2019 hired a DNA testing company, and the samples were compared to genetic material sent by the general public to commercial DNA testing companies.
So last August, Burlington detectives were told the sample, which was run between relatives on both sides of the Deroos family, pointed to Deroos, even though he had no DNA profile on file.
Inspectors discovered that Deroos and his wife, Michelle, were living upstairs at the time of Curran’s death. They spoke to investigators after Curran’s death, but at the time they said they had not seen or heard anything.
Deroos and his wife, no longer using the Deroos surname, left Vermont shortly after Curran’s death. Their marriage ended when Deroos left for Thailand. Deroos remarried after returning 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 that she lied about her husband leaving the apartment that night. Burlington detectives later interviewed another wife who said Deroos had a penchant for sudden outbursts of violence.
Detective Thomas Chennette, who interviewed Deroos’s first ex-wife, said Tuesday he didn’t think she knew her husband had killed Curran, but that she was protecting him because he already had a criminal record.
“I think she lied at the time because she was young. She was naive, newly married and in love,” Chennette said.
Now-retired US Sen. Patrick Leahy, who was the Chittenden County state’s attorney when Curran was killed and who visited the crime scene that night, attended Tuesday’s event. When asked if he believed the case was solved, he said yes. But “I have to admit that after 20 and 30, 40 years, I imagined it would never be… It was a terrible thing,” he said.
Source: TSF
