William DeRoos has been identified as the suspect of the 1971 Burlington murder of Rita Curran. A disregarded cigarette butt collected from a grisly Vermont crime scene in the 1970s has helped investigators finally identify the killer of a 24-year-old Vermont school teacher killed in July 1971.

Using DNA identification, Burlington Police were able to identify the killer of Rita Curran as William DeRoos, the upstairs neighbor who strangled Curran to death after having a fight with his wife.

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Rita Curran was 24 years old when she was killed on July 20, 1971. She was a teacher. Curran had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled and was discovered by her roommates, according to Burlington Police.

DeRoos lived just two floors above Curran, Acting Police Chief Jon Murad said at a press conference on Tuesday. He was 31 at the time.

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Murad said DeRoos and his wife, Michelle DeRoos, were questioned by police after Curran was found. They told investigators they had been inside the apartment together when Curran was killed but that wasn’t the truth.

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Michelle told Burlington, detectives, five decades later, she and William has fought that night, and he left to take a “cool down walk.” Eventually, he returned after she had gone to bed, and she didn’t know about Curran’s murder until the next morning when police knocked on their door and asked them questions.

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After that initial meeting, William told his wife not to say that he had been out. After Curran’s death, DeRoos moved to Thailand to become a monk, later returning to the United States and dying of a drug overdose in 1986. He emerged in San Franciso in 1974, where he remarried. He died from acute morphine poisoning in a San Francisco hotel, Murad said at the press conference.

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Police said that the original investigators’ thorough work at the crime scene ultimately led to the resolution of Curran’s case.