More than 50 years after Rita Curran’s roommate found her strangled to death in her room, police in Vermont say they have identified the killer using DNA found on a cigarette butt and Curran’s clothing.
Investigators identified William DeRoos, a man who lived in Curran’s Burlington apartment building, as the person responsible with the help of advances in DNA technology and genetic genealogy, police in Vermont’s most populous city announced Tuesday. DeRoos died of a drug overdose in San Francisco in 1986, police said. The case is now closed.
That meant the person with that DNA likely never had genetic material entered into the database, possibly because the person didn’t have a felony conviction. In 2019, Trieb reopened the case and decided to take a new approach. Instead of having a single detective work the cold case alone – the department’s usual strategy – he treated the crime as if it had just been committed, bringing in a team of detectives and expert technicians to review and discuss it, his investigation report says.
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