The murder of a Vermont teacher more than half a century ago was solved after authorities linked a discarded cigarette butt to a suspect who became a Buddhist monk after the killing, authorities said Tuesday.
The suspect, William DeRoos, died in San Francisco 15 years after Rita Curran, 24, was strangled in 1971, said Jon Murad, the acting chief of the Burlington Police Department.
A combination of genetic genealogy, DNA testing and a recent interview with DeRoos’ former wife allowed authorities to identify him as the suspect, Murad told reporters.
“The random violence of her murder left a stain on our community, and it devastated her family,” Murad said. “For 50 years they have waited for justice.”
Curran’s roommates found her dead in their apartment on July 19, 1971, said Jim Trieb, the commander of the police department’s detective services bureau.
DeRoos lived with his wife two floors above Curran, but he was never considered a suspect at the time, Trieb said. In an interview with authorities the day after the killing, DeRoos and his wife, Michelle, provided an alibi, saying they’d been home the night of the killing and didn’t hear or see anything, Trieb said.
The case went cold, but authorities who investigated the case in 1971 collected a piece of evidence — a cigarette butt — that became key to the resolution, Trieb said.
The item was discovered by Curran’s right arm and submitted for DNA processing in 2014, Trieb said. A male DNA profile was found, but a search of the country’s law enforcement repository for genetic material returned no matches, Trieb said.
The department worked with Parabon NanoLabs, a genetic genealogy firm that combines historical research with genetic analysis, to search publicly for clues about the killer’s identity, Trieb said.
CeCe Moore, the company’s chief genetic genealogist, told reporters Tuesday that, working from a publicly available database, she was able to narrow the list of potential suspects to DeRoos within a few…
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