Rita Curran
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In the summer of 1971, 24-year-old schoolteacher Rita Curran was found brutally murdered inside of her Burlington, Vermont apartment. But despite an intense investigation, her killer remained at large for over 50 years. It wasn't until investigators got the critical piece of forensic evidence they needed that her killer was finally identified. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 260, The Murder of Rita Curran. ♪

Thank you.

It was a Monday night, July 19th, 1971 in Burlington, Vermont, when Paul Robinson and his girlfriend, Carrie Dwayne, had a dinner date. Paul was 23 and Carrie was 19. The plan was for Paul to meet Carrie at her job and then the two would swing by her apartment so that she could change clothes real quick before heading to the restaurant.

It wasn't a fancy place, the Harbor Hideaway. It was just a quick, casual place to grab a bite to eat on a Monday night. But by 11, Paul and Carrie decided they didn't want the night to end. So they decided to invite her roommates, Beverly Lanphur and Rita Curran, to come with them to get some more drinks. So Paul went back to his girlfriend's apartment to pick them up. But when he got there, Beverly was the only one who was awake. Rita Curran was the only one who was awake.

Rita was fast asleep in the bedroom that she and Beverly shared. So Rita stayed home back at the apartment while Beverly went to the bar with Paul and Carrie. By 1230 in the morning, Paul was ready to call it a night. It's a Monday night and he probably had to be up at some point the next day to go to work. So he paid for his and Carrie's tab and they headed out of the place while Carrie's roommate Beverly decided to hang out at the bar for a little bit longer.

So Paul and Carrie left the restaurant and headed back toward her apartment. But when they got there, they both noticed that Rita's bedroom door was left open just a little bit, only a few inches or so. But they didn't hear any noise coming from inside of the bedroom, so they just figured she was asleep and maybe she accidentally left her door open. So they hung out in the living room of the apartment for a little bit and waited for Beverly to get back home.

They didn't go into Beverly's room or anything to go check on her. They just sat there waiting and they tried to keep their voices down so that they wouldn't wake her up. When Beverly got home a while later, Carrie and Paul went into Carrie's room together and Beverly went to the other bedroom, the bedroom that she shared with Rita. But seconds later, Carrie and Paul heard Beverly scream out, "'Something's wrong with Rita. Her roommate was dead.'"

Rita was lying on her back right in the middle of the room, directly inside the bedroom door. And after Paul heard Beverly scream, he came running into the room and checked for a pulse, but there was nothing. So he told Beverly to run out and call an ambulance.

Two firefighters from the Burlington Fire Department were the first two people to arrive, David Bean and Stephen Olio. At first, they thought they might have some type of medical emergency on their hands. But as soon as they got inside the apartment and saw Rita's body on the bedroom floor, they knew that this was a crime scene. So they right away called the Burlington Police Department and told them there had been a murder. 24-year-old Rita Curran was dead.

Someone had broken into the two-bedroom apartment sometime after her roommate Beverly left around 11.15 and then 12.30 a.m. when Paul and Carrie got back. Before all of this, Rita was born in Brooklyn, New York to parents Mary and Thomas Curran in June of 1947.

She was the oldest of three children. Her sister, five years younger, was named after her mom, Mary, and her brother, three years younger, was named after her dad, Thomas. Sometime when she was just a kid, the family up and moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Milton, Vermont, a city 15 miles north of where she would eventually end up in Burlington.

It was in Vermont that Rita and her sister both attended Mount St. Mary's Academy, a private Catholic girls' school. On top of her schoolwork, Rita kept herself busy by attending weekly choir classes and was an active member of two community groups. By the time she was a senior, she was on the school's yearbook staff and volunteered as a class officer on the student council.

The Curran family was relatively well-known in the community. Rita's dad, Thomas, worked at an IBM facility in Burlington, and both he and Mary owned a diner and rental cabins on Arrowhead Mountain Lake. So people got to know them either through their work or their businesses. And not a single person had a bad thing to say about them. They were your all-American, hardworking people who raised three good kids.

Rita graduated from Trinity College in 1969 and started working as a second grade teacher at Milton Elementary. But working as a school teacher meant she didn't get paychecks all year around. She only got paid when the classes were in session.

So during the summer break, she split her time between taking graduate classes in reading and language arts at the University of Vermont and working part-time as a housekeeper at a local motel just to make a little extra money.

Rita's 24th birthday in 1971 became a really big turning point for her. She had moved out of her parents' house and into her very first apartment. This would be the first time ever that she had lived away from them, so moving out was a really big deal.

When she first started looking for places, she searched the classified ads in the Burlington Free Press newspaper. Remember, this is the early 1970s, long before people just got on the internet or social media to find roommates. So to find someone to live with, Rita looked in the classifieds. She didn't need an entire place to herself. She just needed to share a bedroom with someone, split the rent.

So that's where she found an ad for someone looking for a temporary roommate just for the summer. That person was Beverly. Rita moved into the apartment in June of that year. It was a pretty typical apartment building for the area. The entire place only had three units.

And to get to Rita's place, you would climb a flight of stairs and then make a left. That was her place. A small two-bedroom unit with a living room and a kitchen. It was Rita, Carrie, and Beverly.

Carrie had one of the bedrooms to herself, and Rita shared the other bedroom with 23-year-old Beverly, who was born just one day before Rita. Before moving in, they had never met before. They were just two people who moved in together from that classified ad. They both needed roommates, so it all worked out.

Plus, Rita didn't spend much time at the apartment anyway. She had her own circle of friends, and when she wasn't asleep, she was at work either at the motel or the elementary school. She also still spent a lot of time with her parents. But even though she didn't spend much time there, the apartment really wasn't working out for her. In fact, she was apparently wanting to move out just a few weeks before she was killed.

She had told her sister Mary that she didn't know her roommates very well, and she just didn't feel like she was getting along with them. So she was planning to move out and find another place as soon as she could. But before that happened, she was killed.

When the police first showed up at the apartment, they told her roommates and the boyfriend to wait in the living room. They needed to get their statements. But first, they had to figure out what type of crime scene they were dealing with. Rita was lying on her back with both of her arms outstretched. Her legs had been spread apart and her head was tilted slightly to the left.

It looked like someone had posed her in that particular position. The front part of her was completely naked. The red and white polka dot robe that she had been wearing was ripped down the front. Even some of the buttons had been popped off like the whole robe was forcefully removed from her. Now underneath the robe, she had a silk nightgown. And just like the robe, it had been ripped down the front.

Part of it was even found near the doorway right next to the closet. Her underwear was found underneath one of her legs, and part of her bed sheet was wrapped around her like she had sort of become entangled in the sheets.

and her hair was in rollers, those soft rollers that you would wear at night to curl your hair. So this is likely what happened. After choir practice earlier in the night, Rita went home, put her hair up in curlers, changed into her pajamas and robe, got into bed, went to sleep. Then sometime after she fell asleep, after her roommate left to go join the others for drinks, she was attacked and killed.

When it came to the forensic evidence, it was virtually everywhere. Blood spatter was on the walls, smears of it were around her body on the floor, and the blood almost created an outline of her entire body.

And based on the blood evidence, the police knew that Rita had been badly beaten. Her face was covered in injuries. She had injuries everywhere. Forehead, cheeks, the entire left side of her face was completely swollen. She also had black eyes in both of her eyes, scratches to her cheeks and face, and bloody teeth and lips.

Inside one of Rita's hands, investigators found a clue, a few strands of hair possibly belonging to the killer. The thought was maybe she had grabbed at her killer's hair while he beat her, and now part of his hair was stuck in one of her hands. So

So they collected the hair and also took fingernail scrapings, as well as bagged her torn nightgown and robe, the bedsheets, the bedspread, the hair curlers, and everything else in the bedroom that had blood on it. It was 1971, but the police even knew back then that they had something here. The Ford Explorer has what you need for the road ahead.

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Everything about the scene told a story. Rita fought for her life. She was probably fast asleep when whoever did this broke into her bedroom, but she fought like hell. Her hair curlers were all over the bedroom, clothes ripped, buttons everywhere, the curtains had been ripped off their rods. And even though she was a very petite girl, barely 100 pounds, she clearly didn't want to die.

Now, as far as motives went, the police weren't sure. Her purse was found in the bedroom and had $20 of cash in it. Her ID was still there. Her car was still parked where it usually was, and no one had messed with it. So robbery didn't really make sense. They also didn't know how her attacker got inside the apartment in the first place.

The driveway leading up to the unit didn't have any noticeable footprints, and the grass in the yard right next door to the building didn't show any tracks either like someone had walked through it. The only thing that immediately stood out was a window. While walking around the outside of the building, detectives found a window right next to the apartment near the front door, and the window was unlocked.

But getting inside wouldn't be easy. The window itself was small and it was really hard for it to fully open. So that was just one idea. But when the roommates and the boyfriend went with investigators back to the police station to be questioned, they all said that they rarely ever locked the front door or the back door of the apartment when they left. The apartment was just usually open.

It had one of those chain locks attached to the door, the front door, but the chain lock was broken at the time. Apparently it had been broken for weeks. So more than likely, the front door of this apartment was unlocked when whoever got inside and killed Rita. It would have been easy.

The police also questioned Paul, Carrie, and Beverly about a shed that was attached to the back of the apartment building. They brought it up because when they searched inside of it, they noticed that one of the trash cans had been tipped over and there was trash all over the ground.

Then there was a second trash bin that was bent in the middle, like someone had stepped on it and used the bin like a step stool. This was a pretty important discovery because this particular shed leads right into the back of the apartment building. So someone could have entered the shed, used the trash can as a step stool, and then got inside the building that way.

Now, that's at least two ways that someone could have got inside, the unlocked front door or this back shed. So the police asked Paul about this trash can, and according to him, he had actually used one of the trash cans to prop open the storm door of the apartment the night before. But when the detectives asked him why he did that, he said he didn't know or he didn't really have a reason.

So this statement sort of made the police look at Paul differently. They started to think that maybe they should look at him as a possible suspect here. They knew that he regularly slept on the couch in the girls' living room, but he never actually paid rent there. He was just the boyfriend who basically stayed over all the time. But when it came down to it, the police really didn't have a reason to suspect him.

He didn't dislike Rita, and he was out with Carrie and Beverly at the time the murder took place anyway, so the police thought it was probably impossible for him to have done this. He just gave them a bad answer when it came to why the back door was open. When the medical examiner got to the apartment, one of the first things he did was flip Rita's body over. She was found lying on her back, so they wanted to flip her over to her stomach.

And when they did that, they found a cigarette butt right underneath her right arm. It was like someone had smoked it and then just let it burn out on the carpet. There was even ashes of it on the ground underneath of her arm. So the cigarette was collected and examined to try to figure out where it could have come from. Rita wasn't a smoker, so it didn't belong to her. And her roommate Beverly, who she shared the room with, also didn't smoke.

It was only Paul and Carrie who smoked, but they only smoked two particular brands of cigarettes, Benson and Hedges and sometimes Winston's. But the cigarette found underneath of Rita's body was different. A very unusual brand called Lark.

It was the kind of cigarette that had a different style of filter that contained small pieces of charcoal in it. They're popular in Japan, but not so much in the U.S.,

In fact, that particular brand of cigarettes hadn't even come to the market until just a few years before Rita's murder. So it seemed very unlikely that it came from either Paul or Carrie. Now let's stop there for a second. For a 1971 crime scene, the police did a pretty good job with the forensic evidence.

I mentioned earlier that they scraped underneath of Rita's fingernails. They collected the bedsheets. They had fingerprint technicians from the FBI come in and look for prints, although none would be found. Even beyond that, they collected soil samples from the ground right outside of the apartment to compare it to dirt found inside of the bedroom. They removed a large section of the flooring that contained blood on it, as well as sections of the wall and the carpet.

So from the police's standpoint, they did the best they could with what little resources they must have had back in 1971. They sure as heck couldn't do much with it back then, but they still collected it. Rita's autopsy was done the next day, and this is what the chief medical examiner Lawrence Harris noted in his report.

Her cause of death was asphyxia by manual strangulation. And on top of that, she had been badly beaten and sexually assaulted. That explains why her pajamas and robe were ripped. So not surprisingly, her manner of death was listed as a homicide.

Based on the timeline given to the police by the roommates, investigators theorized that she was killed sometime between 11.20 p.m. on the 19th and 12.30 a.m. on the 20th. That means the killer only had about 70 minutes to work with. For me, this says the killer was watching Rita or was watching the apartment.

He saw that the roommates all left. He quickly got inside through the either unlocked front door or maybe used that bent over trash can in the back. He startled Rita, who jumped out of bed and started defending herself. He sexually assaults her, beats her, strangles her, and then he leaves. He was in and out within 70 minutes. There were no witnesses and none of the neighbors heard a single thing.

This also meant that maybe the killer knew Rita or already knew how to get inside of her apartment. Maybe they knew one of her roommates and had even been inside before. So that's initially where the police began searching for suspects. They looked at everyone Rita knew, her male friends, her roommates' friends, co-workers at the motel where she worked, anyone and everyone they could find.

But in the end, they did have a pretty good list of suspects. But unfortunately, not a single one of them really stood out among the others. They were just a list.

News about Rita's murder came as a shock to everyone, not just her close-knit family and parents, but also to the entire neighborhood. This wasn't a place known for having crimes like this. Even most of the first responding police officers would later on say that this was one of the most brutal crime scenes they ever had throughout their entire careers. And now, to have very few leads and zero arrests,

People were scared. And with this type of killer on the loose somewhere, I think people had every right to be. Three days later, Rita's funeral was held in Milton at St. Anne's Church. That's the same church where she sang in the choir and taught lessons. Over 400 people showed up, including many of the police officers who were actively working the case.

afterward a procession of over 20 cars followed behind to nearby saint anne cemetery where she would eventually be buried she was just 24 years old she had just moved out of her parents house for the first time in her life

It seems like everything in Burlington changed that summer when Rita was murdered. It became a place where people just didn't want to live anymore. Just two months later in September, more young women in the area found themselves becoming victims. The first happened on September 7th that summer. In that incident, a woman was abducted right off the street by several men.

Fortunately, though, she was able to get away by throwing herself out of the moving car window at a stop sign. But then two days later, there were two more incidents. One attempted kidnapping and another assault on a young woman. Incident number four. A few days later, a woman woke up to find a strange man standing over her while she was asleep in bed. He had broken into her place through a sliding glass door.

And it didn't stop there. Over the next several months, more and more women were being attacked, but none of them had any credible connection to Rita's case. So was the same person responsible? Nobody knows. Support for this episode comes from Smart Labels. Have you ever gone on a hunt for a holiday decoration that you know you have, but you just can't remember where you put it last year? Well, those days are over with Smart Labels.

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Eventually, the investigation stalled out. Despite a $3,000 reward offered up by the secret witness, despite the collection of evidence inside of the apartment, despite interviews with over a hundred people, nothing turned up and the case turns cold. By 1984, the investigation was well over 10 years old, but it was during this year that Rita's family heard about some rumors involving their daughter's case.

Maybe this had something to do with serial killer Ted Bundy. Most of us in the true crime world know that name, Ted Bundy. How could you not? He's one of the U.S.'s most famous serial killers who would eventually confess to killing 30 women, although no one knows the exact number of victims. He usually preyed on the kindness of these young women. He would take advantage of them, and then he would murder them.

Now, the reason why his name came up in connection to this case was because of the motel where Rita worked was only about a half mile away from where Ted Bundy was born. So some people wondered, they came up with this sort of wild idea, wild theory, right?

Ted Bundy didn't know who his father was. He grew up with an older sister who he would later find out was actually his mother. And when he found out about all of this, then maybe he decided to take out his anger on an innocent victim from Burlington. Rita also looked like a lot of his other victims. They had a lot in common from a victimology standpoint.

But that all sounds like wild speculation, internet talk on Reddit. But wait, there's actually more to this Ted Bundy idea that got some people thinking. According to a police detective, Bundy had confessed to him while in prison that he did murder a woman from Burlington sometime in 1971, the same year that Rita was killed.

So Rita is a young, pretty, sweet girl, Bundy's prime target. She lived in Burlington. He was born right down the street. He could have easily done this. He killed so many women and he might not even remember who his victims were.

So after hearing that this might be more than just internet talk, Rita's sister Mary decided to write Ted Bundy a letter while he was in a Florida prison, basically asking him if he had anything to do with this. Mary said later on that she didn't expect to hear anything back from him, but she felt like this was something that she needed to do. She needed to know. But in the end, she was right. Ted Bundy never responded.

Plus, about an hour before he was executed, he was asked by the Florida State Prison Warden about a bunch of other unsolved murders, Rita's case being just one of them. But apparently, Bundy said no, he wasn't the guy responsible. So after that, people stopped talking about the Rita Curran slash Ted Bundy connection.

Following all of this, things died down again. In 1991, Rita's father Thomas passed away from cancer, and 11 years later, in 2002, her mother Mary died at the age of 83. So both of them passed away, never knowing who murdered their daughter.

Even though it had been years at this point, the investigation was never closed. Yes, it was cold, but it always remained open. The original detectives from 1971 may have been long gone, either passing away themselves or simply retiring, but this was a first-degree murder case. There is no statute of limitations on murder. So whenever the police got a lead or a tip, they investigated it.

Or every few years, they would put a new detective on it. Maybe the case just needed a fresh set of eyes on it. But nothing really major happened until 2014. And at this point, one of the detectives assigned to the case was Burlington Police Detective Jeff Beerworth. Rita's case wasn't the only one on his desk.

But it was always one that had stuck with him. So in 2014, Detective Jeff Beerworth sent some of the forensic evidence from their case file to the New York City Office of Medical Examiner for DNA testing. Some of the items that were sent to New York included that Lark cigarette butt, the fingernail scrapings, and eight vaginal slides. If there was any chance of getting the suspect's DNA, it was on these items.

The cigarette butt could have the killer's saliva. The fingernail scrapings might have his blood if Rita was able to injure him or possibly skin cells. And the vaginal slides might contain semen or some type of other biological fluid. So after about a month, Detective Beerworth in Burlington heard back from the authorities in New York. They were able to generate a male DNA profile from the cigarette butt.

They couldn't get enough DNA from the fingernail scrapings or the vaginal swabs, but they had enough DNA from the cigarette butt to get what they needed. But here's the bad news. The DNA profile was uploaded to CODIS, the national database, but no matches were found.

But still, this was the first time in decades that they finally had a solid piece of evidence to work with. Just because the DNA profile wasn't in CODIS yet didn't mean they couldn't figure out who it belonged to some other way.

Over the next eight years, the DNA profile was compared against any and every potential suspect, including Ted Bundy. The sample was either compared for a direct match or through a family member. Not only was Ted Bundy officially ruled out, but...

but so were at least 13 other men on the police's radar over the years. None of the DNA matched. And just to cross their T's and dot their I's, they also compared the profile to Paul, the unofficial roommate, and several of the first responding officers. None of them matched either.

2016 rolls around and it's the 45th anniversary of the case. And on July 19th, 2015, on the anniversary, Rita's brother and sister published a very personal and very emotional letter in the newspaper.

It read, we will never forget you. We will never give up hope that we will someday know why you were taken from us on this day in Burlington 45 years ago. Then it was signed, your sister, brother, and families.

Apparently, this letter did something, somewhere, because they got a phone call from the Burlington Police Department just one week later. They called to tell them that the case was getting a much-needed boost in the way of advanced forensic testing. Now, they wouldn't go into detail about what that boost in forensic testing actually meant. They just reassured them that they were still working on the forensic evidence.

But nothing new would be learned overnight. It took some time. Another five years went by, and still no match in CODIS. And by this point, it had become Burlington's oldest unsolved case still under investigation. It was also a time where her family started to lose hope. They might have stayed positive five years ago on the 45th anniversary, but by year 50, they were feeling defeated.

Instead of radiating hope and positivity on the 50-year anniversary, the family released a statement saying in part, "...the 50-year mark confirms that a resolution in our lifetime to Rita's murder is not going to happen. The Burlington Police Department has worked every lead that they ever received and has been very compassionate to our family."

Somebody somewhere knows what happened that night, and they will take that information to their grave. May God have mercy on their soul, end quote. Again, they were at their wit's ends. It had been five decades, 50 years. That's a really long time to sit around and wait for answers. They had no idea that the wait was about to be over.

I mentioned earlier that the only DNA they had was from the cigarette. The vaginal swabs and fingernail scrapings didn't yield enough usable DNA. But after those three items were tested, the Burlington police sent additional evidence to be tested also. The drawstrings of Rita's robe, the robe itself, a

a piece of flooring with blood on it, Rita's underwear, two pieces of wood from the apartment with blood on them, and part of her pajamas. This time, though, they weren't sent to New York. Instead, they were sent to a special lab in Florida that worked with new DNA extraction techniques, like the MVAC, a vacuum that basically extracts DNA from pieces of evidence.

One of the items they used it on was Rita's underwear. They were able to find a mixture of three different DNA profiles. One belonged to Rita and the other matched the profile found on the cigarette. So now it seems more and more likely that that's the killer's DNA. The same thing was done on the robe. They found a mixture of four DNA profiles on it.

One of them matched Rita and the other matched the other profile. The profile that we can now confidently say belongs to the suspect. They also explored the idea of using genetic genealogy. If they couldn't find an exact DNA match on the cigarette butt in CODIS, maybe they could find a family member.

So in 2022, the DNA from the cigarette butt was sent to Parabon Nanolabs for sequencing. We've talked about Parabon Nanolabs on the show before, but in case you're new here, there's a private lab based out of Virginia that specializes in forensic genetic genealogy work.

They take unidentified DNA from crime scenes, upload it to databases, and then look for family members. They also work on John and Jane Doe cases if there's DNA. So after Parabon Nanolab got the DNA, the genetic information from it was sent to Family Tree DNA and GEDmatch, two consumer DNA databases, the same type of websites that you and I might use to find out more about our ancestries.

Then once the sample was in both of those databases, Parabon Nanolab's chief genetic genealogist, Cece Moore, another name we've talked about on the show before, was the person responsible for performing the genealogy research.

She was also given a suspect list that the police had been working on for 50 years. Some of the names on the list were old names that got there during the original investigation, but other names on it were new. They had gotten on the list maybe years or even decades later.

One of them being a man by the name of William DeRues. He was one of Rita's upstairs neighbors who had moved in with his wife just two weeks before. At first, he was only added to the list simply because of his physical proximity to the murder. He lived right upstairs. But over the years, he had earned his spot on that list.

Within just a couple of weeks, CeCe Moore from Parabon called the Burlington Police Department with some good news. She had found, in her own words, quote, a high-confidence match to one of the names on the list of suspects. She had identified five relatives going back several generations who shared DNA with the DNA found on the cigarette butt. From there, she narrowed it down to a single person.

His name? William DeRoos, the upstairs tenant. Now, just to make sure she had the right person, CeCe Moore identified a living half-brother to William. She asked the Burlington police to see if he'd be willing to give a DNA sample. He said yes.

and that's when she used that sample to match it back to William. Without a shred of doubt, it was his DNA found on the cigarette and all over the crime scene. William DeRuse is Rita's killer. Here's a direct quote from the report. Quote,

The relative probability that the sibling is related to unknown number one as a half-sibling is 97.03% in the general population. These results support the conclusion that this person and unknown number one are half-siblings. Unknown number one, of course, refers to the killer. So here's the part of the story that I'm supposed to say that the police went out right away and arrested William.

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Greenlight.com slash Spotify. Piece by piece, William's life story came together. He was born in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois. And when he was just two months old, his mother tragically passed away at just 27. So after that, he lived with his father, who remarried about five years later.

Together, William's dad and stepmom had a child together in 1947, William's half-brother who would later provide the police with that DNA sample. Fast forward to 1970, a year before the murder. William was 31 years old and living in San Francisco, California. That's where he met a woman by the name of Michelle. She was 23 and she was also into the Buddhist culture.

At first, William tried to portray himself as this nice, perfect guy. He was religious. He didn't drink or do drugs. He was just this really good guy. So he somehow managed to convince Michelle to date him.

But not long into their relationship, Michelle found out that a lot of what William had told her was a lie. He had been to prison at least twice, and he just wasn't a good character. So William and Michelle break up, and she moves back to live with her parents in Burlington, Vermont. Her father even worked at that same IBM facility as Rita's father. But William followed her to Burlington, and the two got back together.

So that brings us to 1971. They ended up getting married and moved into the apartment right above Rita and her roommates. This happened just two weeks before the murder. That night, Michelle and William apparently got into a big argument, and he told her he was going to take a walk to go cool off.

But instead of cooling off, the police believe he went downstairs, beat, sexually assaulted, and murdered his downstairs neighbor, Rita. Then after that, he walked back upstairs and went to bed with Michelle like nothing ever happened.

Right after that, Michelle and William left Vermont. And at some point, William moved to Thailand where he became a Buddhist monk and he and Michelle break up and get divorced. Even though the police considered William as a suspect in the early days of the investigation, he had an alibi. He told detectives the day after the murder that he was at home with his wife, Michelle, the entire night and he said he never left the apartment.

And when they went to go speak with Michelle, she backed everything up. She told the cops, yes, my husband never left the apartment. She never mentioned the argument and she never mentioned that he said he was going to go for a walk. So they essentially both lied to the police.

Now, years later, 2023, in an interview with the police, Michelle eventually admitted that, yes, she did lie to them back in 1971. She said William had asked her to lie because he had convinced her that he had done nothing wrong.

He told her he didn't do it, but because of his previous criminal record, those two visits to prison, the police would probably try to just pin this on him. So she said that she believed him and she basically agreed that she would lie to the police and tell them that he was at home all night when she knew that wasn't true.

But now in 2023, she said she didn't know how long he was gone and that when he came back, she didn't remember seeing any scratches or injuries on him. But she also doesn't really remember him ever getting back. And she doesn't even remember what kind of cigarettes that he smoked. She just knows that he did.

So as far as putting any responsibility on Michelle, she told the police in 2023 that if she had any suspicion that her husband William was in fact responsible for Rita's murder, she says she would have said something back then.

She really thought that she was only lying because he was completely innocent and because of his criminal record, the police would try to blame him or pin this on him. And since he had never been physically violent with her, she said she had no reason to suspect that he was even capable of doing something like this.

So with the DNA evidence in hand, interview with Michelle, on February 21st, 2023, the Burlington police officially announced that they had solved Rita's murder. It was this William DeRuse character. They might have solved a five-decade cold case, but getting justice was a completely different story.

After he and Michelle divorced, William remarried a woman by the name of Sarah. And in 1986, he died in a San Francisco, California motel room from a suspected morphine overdose. His body was cremated, so no biological evidence was available for DNA testing. But still, the genetic genealogy that was done earlier proved that he was in fact the killer.

It's just unfortunate that by the time he was identified, he was already dead and couldn't be brought to justice. When it comes to a motive, probably the only person who knows why they did what they did is William himself. We know the killer only had about 70 minutes to commit the murder. So did William see Rita's roommates leaving that night?

Maybe he left the apartment at the same exact time they were leaving, so he knew that Rita was home alone. Or was this about something else? Maybe he had a crush on Rita.

No one knows for sure if William and Rita had ever met before. Michelle and William had just moved into the building two weeks before, and Michelle had told the police that she didn't remember meeting any of her neighbors, let alone Rita. So no one knows if William ever met her or not, or they had just met the night that he assaulted her.

It's terrible enough that this even happened to her in the first place, but Rita wanted so badly to move out of that apartment. She told her sister that she didn't feel comfortable there. Her roommates were fine, but she just didn't feel close with them. But before she could even find a new place, she was killed for reasons that nobody understands.

Renewed interest in the case, DNA testing, forensic genetic genealogy, the work of countless detectives, all of that went into solving a 1971 cold case. Even though it took a half century, Rita Curran's case has officially been solved and is now considered closed.

In 2023, the police released its supplemental report on the case, saying that DNA testing confirmed that the sole perpetrator of Rita's murder was William DeRuse. For Rita's brother and sister, this is closure that they waited 50 years for.

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