Imagine a summer evening in Burlington, Vermont. Brooks Avenue, July 19, 1971. A small city by Lake Champlain, where people didn’t lock their doors, where neighbors knew each other’s names, and no one thought much about the bad things that could happen from people living in the same building.
A 24year-old woman had just returned from a barberhop quartet rehearsal, walked through the unlocked door, and entered her apartment for the last time in her life. Her name was Rita Curran, a second grade teacher, singer, giver. That’s how her sister described her for more than 50 years afterward. And on the night of July 19th, 1971, she was killed in the very apartment she had just moved into for the first time in her life.
This is not a story about a stranger or a criminal hiding in the shadows. Rita Curran’s killer lived right above her. her new neighbor who had been married for just two weeks. The man whose wife lied to the police to protect him. And that lie was kept intact for 50 years. Turning the case into the oldest mystery in Burlington police history.
And yet, for reasons we will explore, the case remained ice cold for 52 years, through the shadow of Ted Bundy, through the death of the killer, through the birth and maturation of an entire forensic science industry, until a cigarette butt left at the scene that night spoke the truth that had been buried for half a century.
But let’s go back to the beginning. Summer of 1971, the antivietnam war movement was at its peak after the Pentagon Papers were published by the New York Times in June of that year. The women’s rights movement was changing how American women thought about themselves and their futures. And in Burlington, Vermont, a small college town by Lake Champlain with about 40,000 residents, where University of Vermont students walked the same streets as locals.
Life had the rhythm of a community that trusted one another, where people didn’t lock their doors and didn’t think much about safety. Rita Curran was born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York. Grew up in Milton, Vermont, a small town about 15 mi north of Burlington. graduated from Trinity College and became a second grade teacher at Milton Elementary School, a job that according to her sister Mary Campbell, Rita was born to do.
In the summer of 1971, having just turned 24, Rita took an additional job as a chambermaid at the Colonial Motor Inn to help cover expenses while taking graduate classes at the University of Vermont. And most importantly, this was the first time in her life she had left her parents’ home to live on her own in an apartment she shared with three roommates on Brooks Avenue, not far from campus.
Rita sang in an all-woman’s barberhop quartet called the Champlain Echoes and was a member of the club. Mary Campbell remembers her sister as someone who never showed up empty-handed when visiting anyone. Always stayed to wash the dishes, always asked about others before talking about herself, the kind of person people described as a giver.
On the evening of July 19th, 1971, Rita attended a rehearsal with the Champlain Echoes, a normal summer evening in her schedule, no different from the ones before it. She returned to her apartment after 10 p.m. Around 11:20 p.m. her roommates left the apartment to go to a restaurant, leaving the door unlocked as usual because that was how people lived in Burlington in 1971, and Rita stayed behind alone.
That was the last time she was seen alive. In the early morning hours of July 20, 1971, a roommate returned to the apartment and found Rita. Burlington police were called. The current family received the news that morning and Mary Campbell, then still a teenager, remembers that moment as something that cannot be explained in ordinary language.
The kind of memory the human brain tries to refuse to process because its content is too big for what language can contain. Rita Curran, 24 years old, teacher, singer, giver. She had come to Burlington to continue her studies to sing, to live her own life for the first time outside her parents’ home. And on that quiet summer night, when the apartment door was left unlocked, someone had walked in.
And the question of who that person was would be what Burlington carried with it for the next 52 years. What Burlington police found in the apartment on Brooks Avenue on the morning of July 20, 1971 would haunt those present for decades. Rita Curran had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death.
Evidence at the scene showed she had fought back in a struggle police described as fierce. Her house coat was torn and physical marks throughout the apartment told the story of a woman who did not submit easily. This was not a quick death. This was the struggle of someone being killed who was fighting with everything she had to survive.
Former Senator Patrick Ley, who was then the Chitten County States Attorney and who later served in the US Senate for 48 consecutive years, said he had seen many horrific crimes during his time as a prosecutor. But the Curran family’s case still haunted his mind years after her death. Not because the case was especially complex, but because there was something about the complete ordinariness of the setting.
The medical examiner determined the cause of death was intentional esphyxiation. At the scene, detectives collected evidence according to standard procedure, clothing, Rita’s personal items, biological samples from the body and from surfaces in the apartment, fingerprints, and everything visible and collectible.
Among the items found was a cigarette butt. Detectives collected the cigarette butt because that was procedure, not because they thought it was especially important, not because they had any reason to believe it was key evidence. That cigarette butt was placed in an evidence bag labeled stored at the Burlington Police Department and sat there through decades of change in the city.
Burlington police immediately launched a full investigation, interviewing Rita’s friends and colleagues, graduate classmates at the University of Vermont, staff at the Colonial Motor Inn, where she worked that summer, members of the Champlain Echoes, and most importantly, all the residents in the Brooks Avenue building. Among those interviewed was William Daruse, the 31-year-old man who lived with his wife in the apartment directly above Rita’s.
The couple had been married for just 2 weeks at the time of the murder. Their wedding had taken place right in Burlington, and their marriage certificate listed their address as the same building as Curran on Brooks Avenue, though that detail would go unnoticed for the next 52 years. Darus provided an alibi. He had been in the apartment with his wife all night, hadn’t gone out, nothing unusual.
His wife, the woman he had married just two weeks earlier, sat at the table and confirmed every detail. Police noted it, thanked them both, and continued investigating other leads. At that time, nothing suggested Daruse was lying. This was a young, newlywed man living in the same building with his wife confirming he hadn’t gone anywhere.
And Burlington in 1971 had no surveillance cameras, no cell phones, and no technical means to independently verify or disprove that statement. A wife’s alibi was a valid alibi by 1971 investigative standards. Police added Darus’s name to the list of people interviewed, marked the alibi as confirmed, and moved on.
The murder of Rita Curran shocked Burlington in a way a quiet small city was not prepared to handle. People started locking their doors, adding deadbolts, and women walking alone in the evening felt a new kind of fear that Burlington had never had a name for. Police reports recorded many anonymous worried calls from residents in the weeks after the crime.
An editorial in the local paper at the end of August 1971 began, “We believe that the murder of Miss Rita P. Curran will not be added to Vermont’s list of unsolved cases, then listed some previous unsolved cases dating back to 1958, and concluded with a warning that Vermont investigators need to realize they are under special pressure because of this sad record.
Burlington would carry that question for the next 52 years. The killer had walked out of the scene on the night of July 19 and gone upstairs to his own apartment. In the early months of the investigation, Burlington police pursued many different leads, registered sex offenders in the area, people with violent criminal records, acquaintances of Rita, whose backgrounds seemed suspicious, anyone who had been near the Brooks Avenue area on the night of July 19.
Police also looked into a sexual assault that occurred at the University of Vermont on July 11th, 1971, just 9 days before Rita was killed, to see if there was any connection. None of the leads went anywhere. Darus’s alibi remained quietly in the file, marked as confirmed, and no one revisited it. Then, in the mid 1970s, as Ted Bundy began to be arrested in other states and his list of crimes gradually emerged, a geographical coincidence surfaced.
Ted Bundy was born in 1946 in Burlington, Vermont at the Elizabeth Lond home for unwed mothers, a facility located in South Burlington, only about half a mile from the Colonial Motor Inn where Rita worked that summer of 1971. Bundy grew up not knowing Burlington was his birthplace. His grandfather raised him as his own son, and he grew up believing his mother was his sister, only learning the truth about his real origins as an adult.
And according to those who studied him, discovering that birth history caused him deep psychological trauma. In 1971, Bundy was 24 years old and had many unexplained gaps in his timeline, enough that no one could rule out the possibility he had been in Burlington that year. The similarities between the reoccurring case and Bundy’s known crimes, young female victim, sexual assault, strangulation, no signs of forced entry into the residence.
victim either opened the door for the attacker or the door was already unlocked. Former FBI agent John Basset, who had studied Bundy’s cases in depth, officially suggested Bundy as a suspect in the Rita Curran case. Author Anne Rule, who wrote the 1980 book The Stranger Beside Me about Bundy.
Someone she had worked with at a Seattle crisis hotline before learning he was a a killer also mentioned the possibility that Bundy was in Burlington in 1971 and noted that Rita Curran shared similarities with his other victims. Detective Robert D. Keell of the King County Sheriff’s Office in Washington who had followed Bundy from the earliest cases and directly interviewed him multiple times in his final years before his execution.
In one interview, Bundy said he had killed a young woman in Burlington in 1971 while there to look for information about his birth. That statement was recorded in the transcript. That statement was sent to Burlington. That statement haunted the case file for years afterward. On January 22nd, 1989, the night before Bundy was executed, FBI agent William Hagmier interviewed him for the final time.
This was the last chance to get answers about all the unsolved cases, including Rita Curran. Bundy denied any involvement in the Burlington case. The next morning, he was executed at 7:16 a.m. For the Curran family, Bundy’s death closed one door and opened no others. The real killer, the man who had lived right above Rita, who had provided a false alibi the very next morning, who had left Vermont and lived in various places before moving to Thailand and becoming a Buddhist monk, had never been in the sights of any investigation during those two decades. While
Burlington was looking toward Florida and waiting for answers from the wrong killer. After Rita’s death, the Curran family, parents Thomas and Mary Curran, Sister Mary Campbell, and other siblings fully cooperated with Burlington police in the first weeks and months, providing every piece of information about people Rita knew, places she went, anyone who might have had reason to harm her, and every time police called with additional questions, the family was there and always answered. In the early 1970s, the
family believed the police would find the answer. They believed it in the first year, then the second, then the third, and every time a new lead appeared in the news or in a call from police, they held on to a little more hope. Rita’s mother, Mary Curran, never really recovered from her daughter’s death.
She continued living, continued doing daily tasks. But something in her had changed permanently on the morning of July 20, 1971, and never came back. Burlington was a small city, and Rita’s ghost was present on every street corner the family passed, the Colonial Motor Inn, where she worked that summer, the University of Vermont campus where she was taking graduate classes, the church where she sang, the streets she walked.
Every year on July 20, the family remembered that morning and the question that never changed from year to year. Who did this? When Ted Bundy’s name emerged as a potential suspect when his list of victims gradually came to light and Burlington police saw the similarities, the Curran family felt a strange combination of hope and horror.
Hope because there might finally be an answer after years of silence. horror because if Bundy was the one who killed Rita, that answer would come with the image of one of the most brutal serial killers in American history. And that was too much. Mary Campbell wrote a letter to Bundy in prison asking directly, “Did you kill my sister?” She waited.
The reply did not come from Bundy, but from the FBI, that he neither confirmed nor denied it. That vague silence wrapped in the bureaucratic language of an official statement was the crulest answer that could be given to a family waiting. Rita’s parents, Thomas and Mary Curran, both passed away before the case was solved. They never learned the name of the person who killed their daughter.
They carried all those questions to their graves. And Mary Campbell, the surviving sister, was the only member of the family left to witness the final answer arrive. Mary Campbell never stopped staying in touch with the Burlington Police Department over the following decades, calling periodically, visiting, asking for updates.
Each time she received the answer that the case was still open, still a priority, not forgotten. In 2019, acting police chief John Murad met with Mary Campbell and made a different promise from all the asurances before it. Not we haven’t forgotten, but we will approach this case as if it just happened. Today with a full investigative team, not a single detective working alongside current cases.
Campbell remembers that meeting and said it was the first time in many decades. She left not just with reassurance, but with the feeling that something was really changing, different from all the times before. In 2014, 43 years after the cigarette butt was collected from the Brooks Avenue apartment crime scene, the Burlington Police Department made an important decision.
They sent all the evidence from the 1971 case, including the cigarette butt that had sat in an evidence bag preserved for 43 years to the lab for DNA testing. DNA technology in 2014 was strong enough to handle old and degraded samples, and the lab successfully extracted and generated a full DNA profile of the person who had smoked that cigarette on the night of July 19, 1971.
For the first time in the history of the case, Burlington police had real genetic data from someone who had been at the scene that night. The profile was entered into KOTUS, the national DNA database managed by the FBI containing genetic profiles of more than 20 million people who had been convicted or arrested for serious crimes across the United States. Result: no match.
The person who left DNA on that cigarette butt had never been convicted of a felony in America, and therefore his genetic profile had never been entered into the system. This was a particularly cruel kind of dead end in a criminal investigation. They had the killer’s DNA, but no name, no suspect, no one to compare samples against.
The DNA profile was stored and weighted. In 2018, the Golden State Killer case completely changed how American law enforcement thought about cold cases with DNA evidence. Joseph James D’Angelo, the man who had killed at least 13 people and sexually assaulted more than 50 in California in the 1970s and 1980s, one of the longest sought serial killers in American history, was arrested after investigators uploaded his DNA to the public genealogy database Jed Match and a genealogologist built family trees from the matches with distant relatives,
narrowing it down generation by generation until D’Angelo emerged as the only person who fit all the criteria. That method, investigative genetic genealogy, did not depend on whether the suspect had ever been convicted, did not depend on cotus, and only required that the suspect’s DNA or that of his relatives existed somewhere in public genealogy databases that millions of ordinary people were uploading every day to trace their family roots.
After the Golden State Killer case, dozens of police agencies nationwide began revisiting their cold cases with DNA evidence using this new method. In 2019, acting police chief John Murad made a different decision from anything the department had done before with its cold cases. Instead of assigning it to a single detective working alongside current cases in the traditional way, he assembled a team of multiple detectives, specialized technicians, and an outside genetic genealogy expert, and asked them to approach the Rita Curran case as if
it had just happened today rather than 50 years ago. The nonprofit organization Season of Justice, which funds small police departments that lack the budget for expensive DNA and genetic genealogy testing, provided funding for the case. The DNA profile from the cigarette butt was sent to the genetic genealogy expert, and after 52 years, the final process finally began.
The genetic genealogologist received the DNA profile from the cigarette butt and began by uploading it to public genealogy databases Jed Match family tree DNA and similar platforms where millions of ordinary people had submitted their DNA. The process of building a family tree from the match results required patience.
Starting from each match with distant relatives, fourth or fifth cousins, the genealogologist built out branches of the family tree, gradually narrowing it down, eliminating branches that didn’t fit, moving down through each generation by tracking who had children with whom and who those children were until one name began to emerge with higher probability than all the others from both the paternal and maternal sides.
That name was William Daruse. The genetic genealogologist concluded with a sufficient level of certainty. She was certain it was William Daruse who had left the DNA on the cigarette on the night of July 19, 1971. The investigative team ran that name through the case file. William Daruse had been interviewed 52 years earlier, right in the early days of the investigation.
He lived in the same building as Rita. He provided an alibi. The alibi was confirmed by his wife, and he was never considered a serious suspect. As the team dug deeper into Daruse, they discovered a detail that the genealogologist described as truly astonishing. Darus’s public marriage record showed he had gotten married in Burlington, 2 weeks before the murder, right there in the city of Burlington.
And the address listed on the marriage certificate was the same building as Curran on Brooks Avenue. 2 weeks. He was the immediate neighbor living directly above the victim, newly married just 2 weeks before he walked downstairs and killed her. All of those elements had been in the 1971 file, the address, the timing of the marriage, the neighbor relationship, but no one had connected them this way.
Now, in the light of the DNA profile from the cigarette butt, those facts no longer looked like coincidence. The investigative team sent Rita Curran’s torn house coat preserved from the night of July 19, 1971 and stored in evidence for 52 years to DNA Labs International for further analysis. The result, the DNA found on the house coat matched the DNA on the cigarette butt.
There was no longer any room for doubt. William Daruse had not only smoked at the scene, he had made direct physical contact with Rita Curran’s body on the night she was killed. The team then located Darus’s ex-wife, the woman who had provided the false alibi in 1971 and later moved to Eugene, Oregon, and changed her name after the divorce.
When re-entered by detectives and confronted with the DNA evidence, she confessed that she had lied, that Darus had left the apartment that evening after arguing with her. That the next morning, he told her to tell the police he had never gone anywhere, warning that his criminal record would unfairly make him a suspect, and she had gone along with it.
52 years after the night of July 19, 1971, the Burlington investigative team now had the name of the killer. All from a cigarette butt left at the scene, carefully preserved by the 1971 detectives, who had no idea they were preserving the key to the entire case. After leaving Vermont with his wife shortly after the murder, Darus continued to show a pattern of violence.
A woman in San Francisco whom Dus married in 1974, his second wife, whom Burlington police reined many decades later, described him as having a propensity for sudden violent outbursts and said she had witnessed at least two incidents of violence firsthand. In one particularly disturbing case, while the two of them were sitting and talking normally with a female friend, Daruse suddenly pulled out a pocketk knife and stabbed the woman in the stomach for absolutely no reason.
The second wife recounted using that exact phrase. As if there were no other way to describe what she had witnessed except to acknowledge that there was no rational explanation for the act. This was not the first time and not the last. At some point in the years after leaving Vermont, William Daruse moved to Thailand and became a Buddhist monk.
A detail that created a contrast ordinary language is not designed to contain. The man who had beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled a 24-year-old second grade teacher later lived the life of someone seeking spiritual enlightenment. Wearing robes, chanting in the mornings, living in a Buddhist community in Thailand, pursuing the peace that Buddhism promises can be achieved through letting go and accepting impermanence.
Buddhism teaches that all suffering can be liberated through enlightenment. Rita Curran remained forever 24 years old. Her family lived 52 years with an unanswered question. And William Daruse never confessed to what he had done, never took responsibility to anyone, never faced the Curran family or the police or any form of justice.
William Daruse died of a drug overdose in San Francisco in 1986, 15 years after killing Rita Curran, 37 years before his name was entered into the Burlington case file as the confirmed killer. He was cremated. There was no grave, nowhere to go, no way to prosecute a dead man. The killer had escaped because he died before the technology could read the truth held in the discarded cigarette butt.
On February 21st, 2023, the Burlington Police Department held a press conference at their North Avenue headquarters. Acting police chief John Murad stood at the microphone alongside the prosecutor. Scientists from the DNA lab and members of the Curran family, including Mary Campbell, the sister who had called Burlington police periodically for decades and now stood in the press room to hear the answer her parents never got to hear.
Murad announced Burlington had solved its oldest cold case, the case that had haunted the city since the summer of 1971. Rita Curran’s killer was William Daruse, her upstairs neighbor, the man who had been married for just 2 weeks. The man who had argued with his wife that night left the apartment to cool off, walked downstairs, and committed one of the most brutal crimes in Vermont history.
She was a teacher, a singer, a giver, and she was loved. Morad said the random violence of her murder left a stain on our community and devastated her family. Murad also confirmed that Chittenden County States Attorney Sarah George had reviewed the entire investigative file and found sufficient probable cause to charge Daruse with first-degree murder with aggravating factors.
But Daruse had died in 1986, 37 years before that press conference. There would be no trial, no conviction, only probable cause on paper, a name and a community hearing for the first time the name of the person who had done it. The Curran family stood beside Murad and received the news with emotions that Mary Campbell later described as mixed.
Relief that after 52 years, the question finally had an answer. Pain that the answer had come too late for any form of legal justice, and gratitude that at least the Burlington community finally knew what had happened in the Brooks Avenue building on the night of July 19, 1971.
Campbell announced that the family was launching a fundraising campaign to repay the season of justice organization for the money it had provided for the DNA and genetic genealogy testing so that money can be given to other police departments on their journey to solve their cold cases, she said, turning her family’s private pain into something that could help other families still waiting for answers elsewhere.
During the press conference, a reporter asked whether Darus’s ex-wife, the woman who had lied to police for 50 years, whose lie had helped the killer live freely until his death, would be prosecuted. Mured answered with five words. Lying to the police is not a crime. Then he added, “It’s not helpful. That was the shortest and crulest sentence of the entire case.
Not because Murad lacked emotion or empathy for the Curran family, but because he was describing a reality of the American legal system. A woman had protected a killer for 50 years with a lie spoken on the morning of July 21, 1971, and the legal system had no mechanism to address it. Not because someone decided to forgive her, not because she received any special favor, but because the law was simply not written to handle this situation.
This was the second injustice of the case. Not that Daruse died before he could be prosecuted, which was beyond anyone’s control, but that the person who helped him evade detection for 50 years faced no consequences at all. And the question remains, if Darus’s wife had told the truth in 1971, if she had told police that her husband left the apartment that night after an argument and didn’t return until late, would Burlington police have identified him? And if so, would Rita’s parents have lived to hear a sentence pronounced? No
one can answer that question. The Rita Curran case ended not with a conviction or a trial, but with a name placed in the file and a truth spoken aloud for the first time in 52 years. And in these circumstances, that was the only thing left that could be done. Brooks Avenue, Burlington, Vermont.
On the night of July 19th, 1971, Rita Curran had just returned from rehearsal, walked into her apartment, and had no idea that the man living right above her was the one who would walk down that night through the door she left unlocked. 52 years later, we know his name was William Daruse. He lived upstairs. He walked down that night after arguing with his wife of 2 weeks, and he never paid for what he did.
The final question of this story is not about Daruse, not about genetic genealogy or the cigarette butt or the 52 years of waiting, but about the five-word statement by acting chief Murad at the February 21, 2023 press conference. Lying to the police is not a crime. A woman lied for 50 years. The law had no answer for that. And the question of justice, what real justice is, whether knowing the killer’s name is enough when he died free, whether the legal system truly serves families like the Currans, is a question this story does not answer. The Rita Curran case
leaves behind specific lessons that anyone living in America can apply today. First, if you rent a house or live in an apartment building, pay attention to the people in the same building, especially those who are new. not to suspect everyone, but to notice unusual behavior, uncontrolled emotional outbursts, or signs of violence in relationships.
William Daruse displayed a pattern of violence toward many people throughout his life. If someone in the 1971 community had known about his criminal record and reported concerning behavior, history might have been different. Second, if you know something relevant to a case, whether from 50 years ago or from last week, speak up. Darus’s wife stayed silent for 50 years out of fear and love.
And that silence had a price. Even if the law does not call it a crime, conscience has different standards than the law. Third, if your family is the victim of an unsolved case, do not stop contacting the investigative agency and do not hesitate to ask them to re-examine existing evidence with new technology, especially investigative genetic genealogy.
The method that has solved hundreds of cold cases nationwide in recent years. Nonprofit organizations like Season of Justice can fund DNA testing for police departments that lack the budget. Information about them can be found online and shared with the agency handling your family’s case. If Rita Curran’s story touched you, please hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next cases.
Every name behind those cold files deserves to be told, and your presence here is the reason we continue. Thank you for listening all the way to the end of this story.
