Vermont 1971 Cold Case Solved — His Wife of Two Weeks Lied to Police for 50 Years 

Vermont 1971 Cold Case Solved — His Wife of Two Weeks Lied to Police for 50 Years 

Rita Curran was the youngest of five children, raised in a Catholic household in Vermont where faith was not a Sunday formality but the architecture of daily existence. Her parents believed in hard work, in education, in the steady rhythms of a life built around family meals and church attendance, and the quiet assumption that the world, for all its imperfections, was fundamentally ordered.

 Rita absorbed those values and carried them into young adulthood. She trained as a teacher because she loved children and believed that a classroom was a place where futures could be shaped. She had a gift for music, too. She sang, and those who knew her remembered it. She enrolled in graduate courses at the University of Vermont, pushing herself toward a higher degree even as she managed the demands of her second-grade students.

 In the summer of 1971, she was working as a maid at a local motel to supplement her income, a practical decision, unglamorous but necessary. That same summer, she made the decision that so many young adults make. She moved out of her parents’ home and into an apartment on Brooks Avenue, shared with three roommates. It was her first taste of true independence.

 She had her own key, her own room, her own schedule. She was, by every account, a young woman standing at the threshold of a full life, not someone who courted danger or recklessness, but someone who assumed, reasonably, that the world would continue to be what it had always been. The evening of July 19th was warm by Vermont standards, the kind of summer night that lingers well past sunset.

Rita Curran was at home in the apartment on Brooks Avenue. Her three roommates had gone out for the night, down to a nearby bar, the ordinary rhythm of a summer evening, leaving the apartment quiet. Two floors above, on the third floor of the same building, a young married couple had argued and the wife had gone to bed alone.

 The front door of Rita’s apartment was unlocked. She had likely never exchanged more than a passing word with the couple upstairs. She had only moved into the building weeks earlier and neighbors there rarely socialized. Sometime in the early morning hours of July 20th, one of Rita’s roommates returned and discovered a scene that would permanently alter the trajectory of her own life.

 Rita Curran had been attacked and killed. The evidence showed she had fought back fiercely. Her housecoat was torn. Biological material had transferred between victim and attacker. And on the floor, lying next to Rita’s right arm, investigators found a single cigarette butt. Someone had stood in that room after the attack, unhurried enough to smoke before leaving through the same unlocked door he had entered.

 The cigarette was collected, cataloged, and sealed. The officers who handled it could not have known that they were preserving the one piece of evidence that would, 52 years later, unlock everything. The Burlington Police Department responded with the full weight of its resources. Detectives canvassed the apartment building and the surrounding neighborhood, interviewing everyone.

Friends, colleagues, family members, neighbors, anyone whose path had intersected with Rita’s. Among those interviewed was the young couple living directly above her on the third floor. The husband, a 31-year-old man named William DeRue, had a prior criminal record. He told investigators that he and his wife had been in their apartment all night, that they had gone to bed, and that they had heard nothing unusual. His wife confirmed every word.

The detectives had no reason to doubt two witnesses telling the same story. They moved on. What they could not have known was what had happened the morning after the murder behind the closed door of that third floor apartment. According to his wife’s account, which she would not reveal for 50 years, DeRue had left the apartment after their argument the previous night.

 He had come home while she slept. When she woke, he told her that when police came asking, she was to say he had never left. His criminal record, he warned her, would make him look guilty regardless of the truth. She was 20 years old. They had been married for exactly 2 weeks. Over the following years, the investigation drifted toward other possibilities.

The motel where Rita had worked stood adjacent to the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers, the birthplace of Ted Bundy. Similarities between Rita’s murder and Bundy’s known crimes led a retired FBI agent to raise his name. Rita’s sister wrote to Bundy on death row, asking directly if he had killed her sister.

Through the FBI, Bundy declined to confirm or deny. When Detective Robert Keppel, one of the investigators who had tracked Bundy for years, questioned him directly, Bundy appeared to suggest he had killed a young woman in Burlington, though he stopped short of a clear admission. No physical evidence placed him in Burlington on that date, and the matter was never conclusively resolved.

The lead dissolved into ambiguity. In 2014, a DNA profile was finally extracted from the cigarette butt, and matched no one in any law enforcement database. The evidence had given up its code, but the code pointed nowhere. The family was left, again, with nothing. While the investigation stalled and the Curran family grieved without answers, William DeRusse continued his life.

 He and his wife left Vermont not long after the summer of 1971. Their marriage did not last. At some point, DeRusse made his way across the world to Thailand, where he took a path that seems almost impossible to reconcile with what he had done. He became a Buddhist monk. A man who had taken a young woman’s life shaved his head, put on the robes of a spiritual order, and spent years in a monastery dedicated to the extinguishing of suffering. He meditated.

 He studied scripture. He lived among men who had renounced violence in all its forms. Eventually, he left the monastery and returned to the United States. In San Francisco in 1974, he married again. His second wife would later tell investigators that De Rousse was capable of sudden, terrifying violence. That there were at least two incidents during their time together in which he had harmed or attempted to harm people around him.

 One involving a woman at a social gathering and another involving his wife herself. In one instance, after attacking someone he barely knew, he told his wife he had confused the victim for her and offered that as though it were an explanation. He died in 1986 at age 46 in a San Francisco hotel room following a drug overdose. He was cremated.

 His secrets, it seemed, had gone with him. Genetic genealogy is a tool that would have sounded like science fiction to the detectives who first worked Rita Curran’s case. It does not rely on criminal databases. It does not require the suspect to have been arrested or fingerprinted or to have submitted DNA to law enforcement at any point in his life.

 Instead, it uses the voluntary genetic data uploaded by millions of ordinary people to commercial ancestry websites. People who spit into tubes to learn whether their ancestors came from Ireland or Italy. By comparing an unknown DNA sample against these enormous databases, analysts can identify distant genetic relatives, third cousins, fourth cousins, people who share a great, great, great grandparent with the unknown subject.

From there, a genealogist constructs family trees, tracing backward to find the common ancestor, and then forward through every descendant line. They rule out individuals by age, location, and sex. It is slow, meticulous work, but when it works, it can identify someone who left no trace in the criminal justice system, someone exactly like William De Rousse.

In 2019, Detective Lieutenant James Treeb of the Burlington Police Department made a decision that broke from standard protocol. Instead of assigning one detective to review the Curran file, the department’s usual practice for aging cold cases, he formed a dedicated team, detectives, officers, forensic technicians.

 Their directive was to treat the case as though Rita Curran had been murdered the day before. Funding for the expensive DNA testing came from Season of Justice, an organization that provides grants to law enforcement agencies pursuing cold cases through genetic technology. With that support, the team submitted the cigarette butt for genetic genealogy analysis through Parabon NanoLabs, one of the leading forensic DNA companies in the country.

 The analysis was conducted by C.C. Moore, a genetic genealogist whose work has helped solve hundreds of cold cases across the United States. In August of 2022, Moore delivered her conclusion. The DNA from the cigarette butt showed strong genealogical connections on both the paternal and maternal sides of one family. Across three of the subject’s grandparental lines, five of the closest genetic matches in the database all converged on the same individual. Moore was certain.

The name was William DeRue. To confirm, investigators located a living half-brother of DeRue who agreed to provide a DNA sample. The familial relationship held. Then the DNA recovered from Rita’s torn housecoat, preserved in a sealed evidence bag for more than 50 years, was compared directly against the cigarette butt.

They matched. The same man who had entered that apartment, attacked Rita Curran, and stood over her body long enough to smoke a cigarette was William DeRue, the neighbor who had given police his alibi, gone upstairs, and told his new wife to lie. Detectives then tracked down that wife. She had long since left Vermont, changed her name, and built a new life in Eugene, Oregon.

When Burlington investigators came to speak with her more than half a century after the murder, she told them the truth. Derouchie had left their apartment that night. He had come home while she was asleep. The next morning, he had told her to tell police he had never left, and she had done it because she was young, newly married, and frightened of what his record would mean.

She had not known, she said, what he had done. Detective Thomas Chenette, who conducted the interview, believed her. He said he did not think she had known her husband had killed Rita Curran. He thought she had lied to protect a man she loved and had carried that lie for 50 years. On February 21st, 2023, the Burlington Police Department held a press conference to announce the resolution of the Curran case.

 Acting Police Chief Jon Murad stood before the assembled cameras and spoke directly. The department was confident that William Derouchie was responsible for the aggravated murder of Rita Curran. Because Derouchie had died of a drug overdose in 1986, he would never face criminal charges, but Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George had reviewed the evidence and found probable cause for aggravated first-degree murder.

The case would be closed. CeCe Moore joined the press conference by video and said that what had taken investigators 50 years had taken her team only a matter of hours once the genealogy databases were searched. Rita’s brother, Tom Curran, addressed the room with a composure that moved everyone present.

 He said he no longer thought much about the man who had killed his sister. His thoughts were with Rita and with his parents who had died without ever learning the name. Acting Chief Murad noted that Derouchie would have been 83 years old that day. There is not a cop in this building, he said, who would not happily put handcuffs on him.

Former US Senator Patrick Leahy, who had been the Chittenden County State’s Attorney in 1971 and had stood at the crime scene on Brooks Avenue that July night, attended the press conference in his 80s. He admitted that after 20, 30, 40 years, he had come to believe the case would never be solved.

 Standing there, hearing the name spoken at last, he said it was a reminder that some answers take longer than a lifetime to arrive. Justice is a word that gets used frequently in the aftermath of a cold case resolution. But the Curran case forces a more difficult conversation. What does justice mean when the person responsible died before he could be confronted? Rita Curran’s parents went to their graves without knowing who killed their daughter.

 They did not have the name. They did not have the press conference. They had the confessional and the rosary beads, which is what their son Tom described as their only support system. They prayed, they waited, and they died waiting. Rita herself was denied the full arc of a human life, the career she was building, the children she might have taught, the music she might have made.

William De Russo, by contrast, lived another 15 years after the murder. He walked foreign streets. He wore holy robes. He married again. He experienced the ordinary textures of existence and the extraordinary mercy of a spiritual community that he had stolen from Rita in one night of violence.

 The cigarette butt preserved his identity, but it could not restore what he took. The file is closed now, and that means something real. The official record has been corrected. The suspicion that lingered around other names has been lifted. The family has the answer they deserved for half a century. But closure is a word that fits imperfectly over a wound this deep.

The Curran case is not only the story of one murder and one long-delayed answer. It is a signal to every police department holding cold case files and evidence lockers across the country. The cigarette butt that sat in a sealed container for 52 years is proof that evidence does not expire just because technology has not yet caught up to it.

The officers who collected that butt in 1971, who noted its exact position beside Rita’s right arm, and sealed it carefully away, could not have imagined polymerase chain reaction, or genetic genealogy, or the vast commercial DNA databases that would one day make a match like this possible in a matter of hours.

 They simply did their jobs with care, and their care made everything that followed possible. The Burlington Police Department has stated that the lessons from the Curran investigation are now being applied to other cold cases. The team that solved it has not disbanded. Parabon NanoLabs and CC Moore continue to work unknown DNA profiles for law enforcement agencies across the country.

 The databases grow larger every year. What this case proves, finally, is that time is not inevitably the enemy of truth. Sometimes, time preserves it. And sometimes, the silence that settles over a cold case file is not an ending. It is a long, patient waiting for someone who will finally listen.