Rita Patricia Curran was born on June 21, 1947 to Thomas Sr. and Mary (nee Donahue) Curran in Woodhaven, NY; Rita had a younger brother (Thomas Jr.) and sister Mary (Campbell); Mr. Curran worked for IBM. The strict Roman Catholic family eventually settled down in Burlington, Vermont. Described as ‘quiet, sweet, and almost painfully shy,’ Rita was a small girl with a petite frame, dark eyes, and long brown hair she wore parted down the middle. After graduating from Mount Saint Mary’s Academy, Ms. Curran attended Trinity College in Vermont, an all girls Catholic school that was close to home; in 1969 she earned a Bachelor’s degree in education. Described as ‘a person truly dedicated to her profession’, Rita was in her second year of teaching second-grade at Milton Elementary School in Milton, Vermont. After her untimely passing Milton Elementary Principal Merritt Clark Jr. said of his young teacher: ‘the boys and girls seemed to like her being in class. She did a lot of work with the deprived and handicapped children’ … ‘she had a knack about her working with these kids.’ In her spare time Rita participated in ‘The Champlain Echoes,’ an all-female acapella group and taught a religion class at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Milton (which was about 20 miles away from where she was staying the summer she was murdered).
Rita’s permanent residence was in Milton, VT however in the summer of 1971 she was renting an apartment with two roommates in Burlington while participating in a reading and language arts workshop at the nearby University of Vermont graduate school. Ms. Curran found an ad for a ‘roommate wanted’ in a local newspaper and had moved into a first story apartment in a converted three-story Victorian house just about two weeks before her death (it was also the first time in her life she lived away from home). She originally planned on staying the entire summer but Mary Curran said her daughter was planning on coming home just a few days after she was murdered. She went on to say that Rita’s two roommates were friends before she moved in and she felt like she didn’t quite fit in with them. Plus she got into an argument with one of them over a boy spending the night. Mary Curran-Campbell said of her sister: ‘she had actually lived at home all her life until June of 1971, and she found an ad in the Burlington Free Press looking for a roommate part-time for the summer. It seemed to be a good fit and so she moved out about one month before she was murdered.’ While living there Curran was employed at the Colonial Motor Inn as a chambermaid (which is strangely only half a mile away from the ‘Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers’ where Bundy was born in November 1946). The day of her disappearance, Ms. Curran worked at the Inn from 8:15 AM until 2:40 PM then attended choir practice at The Sara M. Holbrook Community Center located at 66 North Avenue in Burlington, Vermont; she may have been there as late as 10 PM. A representative from the Motor Inn said that Curran was extremely well liked there, was very popular among staff, and had been employed there on and off for about 3-4 years, usually during summer breaks. She often complained to her co-workers that she felt like an ‘ugly duckling’ but held onto hope that she would someday find a man, settle down, and get married. Rita also shared with friends that she already went to three weddings at that point in mid-1971 and moved to Burlington with hopes to find a boyfriend because she felt all the good men in Milton were already taken.
One of Curran’s roommate, twenty four year-old Beverly Lamphere, said she last saw Rita alive at around 11:20 PM when she left the apartment to meet up with her boyfriend Paul Robinson (23) at a Shelburne Road restaurant; their third roommate Kerry Duame met up with the couple at some point. Robinson said that ‘we were gone maybe two or three hours. We had asked Rita to join us that night, but she said no.’ Ms. Lamphere took the only set of keys with her when she left but made sure to leave both the front and back doors unlocked; it was their usual practice as they lived in a safe, residential neighborhood. At around 1:00 AM on July 19, 1971 the friends returned to the apartment with no signs of forced entry; they assumed Curran was sleeping as she was nowhere to be found. After arriving the friends sat in the living room chatting for a while, completely unaware that anything was wrong. It wasn’t until around 1:20 AM that Beverly discovered the gruesome scene straight out of a horror movie: the 24 year-old schoolteacher was lying dead on her bedroom floor, naked and on her back, her torn underwear discarded underneath her; Rita’s face and head were badly beaten. Beverly’s boyfriend attempted to perform life saving measures but it was too late. Curran’s hair was styled up in curlers (just like Seattle flight attendant Lisa Wick), and it was as if she’d been attacked while getting ready for bed. There had been signs of a struggle and it appeared Curran fought for her life. When the roommates were questioned, they weren’t able to give very much helpful information, as they were nowhere near the scene at the time of the murder. Burlington Detective Wayne Liberty said they were eventually ruled out as suspects in 1972. Paul Robinson said he can still remember the screams of horror when his friend discovered Rita’s body: ‘I was the one that called the police. I told them there had been a murder. I have always had a question about whether Rita was still alive when we got back into the apartment that night.’…’This kind of horror was unheard of in Burlington, Vermont. It was a very innocent time. I can’t tell you how fast deadbolts flew off the shelves after Rita’s murder.’
Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Lawrence Harris determined Currans cause of death to be ‘asphyxia caused by manual strangulation’ and that she had been beaten in the head and face (most likely with a closed fist); there were no drugs found in her system. The ME pinpointed her time of death to be sometime between 11:30 PM and 12:30 AM and that she had been sexually assaulted with a crowbar (but she was not raped). Detectives also found blood on her throat. Law enforcement said it was evident by the scene that there were ‘signs of an intense struggle.’ Shortly after Rita’s murder Former Chittenden County States Attorney and now US Senator Patrick Leahy (he was elected to the position in 1974) wanted no information on it released to the public and put a ‘blackout’ on the case, meaning no information at all was released to the public about the murder. This devastated the Curran family, who felt Rita’s death should have immediately been a front page story.
At the time law enforcement called Rita’s murder ‘the most intensive investigation in the city’s history’ and that ‘in their memory there had been no crime of such violence in the history of this city of 38,000 persons.’ Police determined that the murderer entered the apartment through an unlocked door and attacked Curran while she was most likely in bed but not yet asleep. Neighbors said they heard nothing out of the ordinary: no screams or anything during the time the murder took place. Police quickly ruled out robbery as a motive, as Currans purse sat untouched on the floor directly behind the door with about $20 inside (as well as her personal items and driver’s license); her car was also found unbothered in its normal spot in front of the apartment building. In the kitchen police found Currans blood smeared on the inside of the door, which most likely had rubbed off from the suspects hand as he was fleeing through the back door. Police found no fingerprints at the scene.
The murder of Rita Curran terrified the residents of Burlington, as it took place during a time of innocence, and when violent sexual murders were infrequent and rare. An unclaimed $3,000 reward was offered at the time for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer of Curran. Her sister Mary said that ‘Burlington was considered a very safe place. It was an unbelievable shock to the city when this happened.’ … ‘The phrase ‘it can’t happen here’ just can’t be used because it will happen here, it has happened here. In any hometown that you hear people say that on the news, they’re not being realistic.’ The ‘Burlington Free Press’ reported that Rita told her friends that on multiple occasions she received strange, almost threatening telephone calls late at night with nothing on the other end but heavy breathing. Several other women in the area reported receiving similar types of calls. Additionally reports of a tall, mysterious peeping Tom looking into windows were made as well as others that reported attempted break-ins, where the intruder ran away after they screamed. There was never an official connection made between Rita’s murder, the peeping Tom, and the obscene phone calls, but they supposedly all stopped in September of that year. Detective Richard Beaulieu of the Burlington Police Department had officers look into a possible connection between several assaults on other local women and Rita’s murder in the area. A week before Curran was murdered, a 20 year old Burlington woman was raped in her bed at 4 AM by an assailant she felt was around 16-17 years old. In October 1970, a woman sleeping in her bed suffered a vicious knife attack only three blocks away from Rita’s apartment. Thankfully, the unnamed suspect got spooked when his victim started screaming; it’s unknown if he was ever caught. In September 1971, police claimed they got their first big break in the case and that evidence would soon be handed over to a grand jury. But, weeks passed by then months, and nothing ever came to fruition from that big announcement. Years later it was determined this ‘major break’ most likely stemmed from the fact that police had polygraphed one of Rita’s neighbors after a prior unrelated rape accusation came to light. However, nothing ever came of it and there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest the unnamed male. In addition to the neighbor there were three other suspects that were looked into but all were eventually cleared. Additionally, Burlington Police looked into all males in the area with any known history of sexual offenses. By 1979, two of the four viable suspects in the Curran case died and another two were in prison for homicides that ‘bore no resemblance to the Curran murder.’ Despite the intense public interest in the young school teacher’s murder the case quickly went cold.
Curran’s case got renewed attention in 1980 after she was named a possible Bundy victim in Ann Rule’s, ‘The Stranger Beside Me.’ In the novel, a retired FBI agent commented that there was a ‘remarkable resemblance between Rita Curran’ and his first girlfriend, Diane Edwards.
One thing I am EXTREMELY thankful for is all the leg work and research other ‘Bundy scholars’ do, largely because I’m just an insurance agent blogging as a hobby. The creator of the ‘hi: I’m Ted’ site said the following about Currans murder: ‘In researching this case, I spoke to a woman who was a teenager in Burlington at the time of the attack and claimed that her parents were close friends with the Currans. The woman (who wished to remain anonymous) said that Rita was found bound with piano wire, which she had apparently struggled against, as her skin was torn and bloodied. She also said that the police suspected the ‘son of a prominent judge’ but did not have enough evidence to charge a high profile member of the community’s son with the crime, and instead his family put him in a mental institution.’ … ‘The piano wire claim is an oddly specific detail that has never been mentioned in any of the news reports from that era or more recently. Binding victims with piano wire while they were still alive was certainly not a known part of Bundy’s modus operandi. The woman I spoke to claimed this detail came directly from the Curran family, but without the case file or the family speaking out, these details cannot be substantiated and may just be rumors. However it is interesting to note that at least some of this information is corroborated by Rita’s mother, who publicly accused the police of a ‘cover up’ in 1979.’
Elizabeth Kloepfer was in a serious, long term relationship with Ted Bundy from fall 1969 to 1975 and she made no mentions of him visiting Vermont in the early 1970’s in her 1980 memoir, ‘The Phantom Prince.’ During that period in July 1971 Liz took Molly and moved into an apartment closer to the Rogers Rooming House even though her and Ted weren’t as strong as they once were. She said their lives were ‘out of sync’ and that they didn’t spend as much time together as they did when they had first started dating. Just as a side note, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to refer to my handy-dandy ‘Ted Bundy Job Chart’ over the last 8 months since I started writing this blog. Anyways, in the summer of 1971 when Rita Curran was murdered Bundy worked as a delivery driver for Pedline Supply Company, a family-owned medical supply company. While there he was once caught stealing a picture from a Physician’s office (he was let off with just a verbal warning). Ted began his employment there on June 5, 1970 and was there until December 31, 1971 when they moved their office across town and he quit. Also at that time in 1971 Bundy was still in his undergraduate days at the University of Washington. So as far as any concrete proof putting Bundy in Burlington in July 1971… there just isn’t any (just a lot of rumors and speculative stories). In ‘The Stranger Beside Me,’ Rule hypothesizes that Ted had some sort of ‘defining moment’ in his 20’s where he went to the Elizabeth Lund home in hopes to track down the truth about his parentage. She further speculates that after Bundy realized he was ‘illegitimate’ and that his birth was the result of a pre-marital tryst he went blind with rage and killed Rita Curran during that brief period he was in Vermont. But this doesn’t seem to make much sense: we know Ted told Liz he already knew about his illegitimacy when they first started dating in late 1969. Rule spoke with retired FBI agent John Bassett who was supposedly ‘intrigued by the remarkable resemblance between Rita Curran and Diane Edwards, the fact that Rita had died of strangulation and bludgeoning to the head, and the proximity of the Colonial Motor Inn where Rita worked to an institution that had wrought so much emotional trauma in Ted Bundy’s life: The Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers.’ Another interesting factoid: there’s supposedly a report from animal control that said someone going by the name of ‘Bundy’ was bit by a dog the same week that Curran died (this is all the information I could find on this event). Does that place him at the scene or is it just another coincidence?
Mary Campbell even wrote Bundy a letter before he was executed asking if he murdered her sister: ‘we asked the FBI when they were interrogating him whether if she was one of his case, and we got a letter back from the FBI that said he did not deny it or acknowledge it.’ Bundy was questioned about Curran’s death for the final time shortly before he was executed the morning of January 24, 1989. Thomas Barton, the warden at Florida State Prison in Raiford, asked him about his involvement at around 6:15 that morning. He said: ‘I can say without any question that there is no, uh, nothing for instance, that I was involved in Illinois or New Jersey,’ then when asked specifically about Burlington, Ted said a simple ‘no’ and that was that. Bundy denied any involvement with her murder right up to the very end.
Because it was so widely speculated that Bundy was in the Burlington area at the time of Rita’s murder, Deputy Police Chief Shawn Burke said Vermont law enforcement felt he may have been their guy for quite some time. However, Patrick Leahy said after Vermont investigators spoke with him in Raiford before he was executed they were finally able to ‘discard him as a suspect.’ Additionally, former Burlington Police Chief Kevin Scully said, ‘we have looked into the possibility of Ted Bundy’s involvement, we’re satisfied that at the time of the Rita Curran murder, Ted Bundy was somewhere else in the country.’
Bundy’s DNA was submitted to the CODIS database in 2011; no hits came back on the murder of Rita Curran. In 2016, Vermont detectives said they were taking another look at her case with‘’fresh eyes’ and more modern investigative resources. Leahy told Vermont’s ‘Burlington Free Press’ that Rita’s murder was ‘an extremely brutal homicide. Certainly, one of the most brutal I’ve ever seen in my years as state’s attorney’ and that it was ‘a horrible scene. I can still picture what I saw. A lot of evidence was gathered there. We didn’t have techniques like DNA and thinks like that back at the time. Hopefully, the evidence that was gathered was enough.’ Shawn Burke further commented that, ‘uniquely, there are still witnesses and people of interest who remain alive. It is a case where we have been running down some active leads.’ Since the murder took place in 1971, Vermont law enforcement ruled out dozens of suspects, polygraphed over 100 people and went over hundreds and hundreds of tips related to the case. They also spoke with all of the registered sex offenders that resided in the area close to where she was murdered and still came up with nothing.
Mrs. Curran felt there was some sort of police cover-up regarding her daughters case, saying ‘we felt a lot more could have been done but wasn’t for political reasons.’ Roughly a week before Bundy was executed she sent a telegraph to Bundy begging him to finally tell the truth about his involvement with Rita’s death; it was the FBI who sent her a response, saying Bundy refused to say anything about it, either way. On the 45th anniversary of Rita’s death in 2016, Thomas Jr. and Mary put a notice in the local paper in memory of their beloved sister. It read: ‘we will never forget you. We will never give up hope that we will someday know why you were taken from us.’ The siblings hoped their parents would have answers about their daughters death before they died but sadly that didn’t happen: Mr. Curran died in 1991 and Mrs. Curran passed in 2002. In a July 2021 interview with the ‘Burlington Free Press’, Mary Curran-Campbell said: ‘We’ve lived with this day-in and day-out for 50 years. I can’t say I’m going to give up, but I have to surrender to the powers that be.’ …’fifty years is a long time to grieve, a long time to hope. The fifty-year mark confirms that a resolution in our lifetime to Rita’s murder is not going to happen… We know Rita’s death did not happen in a vacuum. Somebody somewhere knows what happened that night on July 19, 1971 and they will take that information to their grave. May God have mercy on their soul.’
The brutal murder of Ms. Curran remains open to this day and is the oldest cold case that is still under investigation by the Burlington police department. In July 2021, Vermont Detective Tom Chenette said that despite over half of a century going by, that law enforcement could still find justice for Curran. Regarding Rita’s murder, Leahy said: ‘I can only imagine how relieved her family would be if it’s solved.’ Beverly Lamphere was 95 years old when she passed away in late May 2021. Anyone with information regarding the murder of Rita Curran is encouraged to contact the Burlington Police Department Major Crime Unit at 802.244.8781.
Update:
On Tuesday, February 22, 2023 acting Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad made the announcement the Curran family waited almost 52 years to hear: they finally know who killed their beloved Rita. It was a neighbor that lived in the apartment two floors above hers, a man named William Richard DeRoos. DNA collected at the crime scene from a discarded, ‘un-crushed’ cigarette butt ‘laying on the floor’ below Curran’s elbow in 1971 helped law enforcement link DeRoos to the murder. According to the newly released case file, ‘the Lark cigarette butt that was found next to the right arm of Rita’s murdered body had a male DNA profile that was linked to William DeRoos (b. 12.14.1939). This cigarette butt was unique in the sense that it was not crushed, smooshed or butted out. It had burned out there at the scene, as there was ash located on the floor between her body and her right arm. The end of the cigarette butt had jagged paper that was consistent with a cigarette that had burned out on its own.’
An investigative report from February 2023 states that a ‘big break in the case occurred in 2014’ when law enforcement was able to retrieve DNA from the cigarette butt. It is worth mentioning that Bundy’s DNA was among the 13 samples compared to the sample, and he was ruled out. In August 2022, the DNA from the butt was tested against DeRoos’ and investigators finally found a genetic match. Lieutenant Detective James Trieb said ‘that cigarette butt sat in evidence for over 40 years’ until Detective Jeffrey Beerworth sent it to the NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for analysis. It was then that forensic experts found a single strand of male DNA on it, but they ran into another dead end when it didn’t match any results in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). It wasn’t until early 2023 that Burlington law enforcement contacted Parabon Nanolabs Chief Genetic Genealogist CeCe Moore for assistance identifying the unmatched strand, which finally resulted in a positive ID earlier this year. Moore commented that ‘this case is over 50 years old, and it only took a few hours to narrow it down to William DeRoos.’
According to a recently unearthed marriage certificate, William and Michelle (nee Roach) DeRoos (who now goes by the name Kylas Nagaarjuna) were wed on July 21, 1971 in Burlington, which helps place him near the scene of the crime around the time of Rita’s death. Additionally, his official mailing address proves he lived in the same house as Curran at the time of her murder. DeRoos was 31 years-old when he took Rita’s life and at the time was married for only two weeks; Michelle was only twenty-four and was several years younger than her new husband. The night of the homicide DeRoos and his wife had an argument and he ‘left for a cool-down walk.’ Almost immediately after the murder William’s wife gave law enforcement an alibi, telling them he was with her the entire night and never left. Chief Murad said during a Tuesday press conference that: ‘five decades later, she gave our detectives a different story: the truth.’ Kylas later admitted to investigators that DeRoos had convinced her to lie so they would not connect him to Curran’s murder. Nagaarjuna elaborated that she didn’t recall exactly how long William was gone but the next day he ‘told her not to mention that he was not at home’ when the murders took place due to his sordid criminal past and because of it law enforcement ‘would try to accuse him of it.’ She told The Daily Beast that she is still ‘overwhelmed’ by the news and that she doesn’t ‘wish to speak to the public about this;’ she further elaborated that she ‘has conveyed a message’ to Curran’s family. In September 2022 law enforcement met with Nagaarjuna who said that her ex had been in prison twice prior to their marriage and that he definitely had a violent streak. On one occasion he went after his second wife’s throat, briefly strangling her and even stabbing one of her friends unprovoked. Law enforcement feels she had no previous knowledge that her husband was involved in the murder.
Chief Murad said that Curran ‘put up a vicious struggle’ with DeRoos and that she ‘fought for her life.’ The morning after the murder, law enforcement asked the newlyweds if they had heard anything suspicious the night before, and they both denied seeing or hearing anything out of the ordinary: ‘they heard nothing and Mrs. DeRoos stated that she had been up around 1:00 AM but had heard no unusual noises or anything else.’ Paul Robinson found this strange because the walls in the two-bedroom apartment were extremely thin: ‘I have to believe that someone heard something that night.’ Shortly after taking Rita’s life, DeRoos left his new wife and ‘moved to Thailand and became a Buddhist monk.’ She eventually followed him there to become a nun, however their relationship fizzled out largely because it was ‘against the rules’ and the couple divorced. DeRoos reappeared in the San Francisco area sometime during 1974 and he married for a second time. He died in 1986 at the age of 46 from ‘acute morphine poisoning’ in a seedy hotel room in San Francisco.
Former Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo was on the case from 2015 to 2019 and shared with The Daily Beast that ‘Rita’s killer may be dead but if this is all the justice Burlington police can offer her spirit and her loved ones, then so be it. Unless the police keep their memory alive and continue the investigation, the victims of unsolved murders are often lost to time. I’m so proud of the Burlington detectives who kept Rita’s case open while I served as chief, traveling in (and around) the country to collect comparison DNA and re-interview witnesses, and who never stopped until today. The Burlington Police Department never forgot about Rita.’
In September 2022, law enforcement met with Nagaarjuna who said that despite her ex-husband being in prison twice prior to their marriage he had never been violent with her. Things changed with his second wife Sarah Hepting, who told police that DeRoos had an extreme propensity for violence. She shared with them an incident where William stabbed a friend of theirs for no apparent reason, which she thinks he was arrested for (police are still trying to confirm this as she is unsure of the time it happened). Hepting also reported that on a separate occasion he strangled her to the point she nearly lost consciousness (again this was unprovoked).
As I said earlier, both of Rita’s parents passed away waiting for their daughter’s killer to be caught. Her siblings thanked the Burlington Police for the compassion they showed their family over the five decades long investigation. Tom Curran said: ‘my mother came here from Ireland and my father from Newfoundland. We were an old-fashioned, strong, Catholic family. I don’t think so much about the guy who did this as I do about Rita and my parents and what they went through. I pray to my parents, and I pray to Rita.’
Chief Murad told The Daily Beast: ‘when people doing an ancestry or genealogy test check the box saying it’s okay for law enforcement to use the results, they are helping solve murders. They are bringing evil-doers to justice. They are delivering closure to families. I am tremendously proud of the detectives who did this for Rita and her family.’
What’s incredibly helpful is Burlington PD finally released the file for Rita’s case; I attached it in a separate piece: https://jjeannejurewicz.wordpress.com/2023/02/22/rita-patricia-curran-case-file/
Rita in the 1964 Mt. St. Mary’s Academy yearbook.
Rita in the 1964 Mt. St. Mary’s Academy yearbook.
Rita in the 1964 Mt. St. Mary’s Academy yearbook.
Another Bundy Blog. 