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.
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., DNA testing and a recent interview with DeRoos' former wife allowed authorities to identify him as the suspect, Murad told reporters.
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. 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 hours.After the discovery, detectives interviewed DeRoos' then-wife again, and she told them that on the night of July 19, 1971, she and DeRoos had actually gotten into a fight and he'd left, Trieb said.
After the killing, DeRoos left his wife and moved to Thailand to become a Buddhist monk, Trieb said. By 1974, he'd returned to the U.S. and was living in San Francisco, where another woman he married recently told authorities she knew him as a guru named Dutch, Trieb said.
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