Criminology - Rita Curran

Episode Date: April 2, 2023

On July 20th, 1971, the body of 24-year-old Rita Curran was found in the bedroom of her Burlington, Vermont, apartment. Her body was discovered by one of her roommates. Rita was a highly regarded teacher at Milton Elementary School, and her murder rocked the community. It caused residents to start locking their doors and to run out and buy extra security measures. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the murder of Rita Curran. The police worked on the case for many years with no success. In fact, over 50 years passed before the authorities solved the mystery of Rita Curran's murder. It turned out that a cigarette found at the crime scene in 1971 and logged into evidence was the key. It led the authorities to a man named William DeRoos, who they had questioned on multiple occasions. You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 251 of the Criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Mike Morford, man. What's going on with you? Not too much.

Just celebrated my 52nd birthday yesterday and had a little fun with the family, opening some presents, eating some cake and another year older. Well, they keep coming, which is a good thing, right? We want them to keep coming, but it seems like they go by so fast. But 52, man, congratulations. Oh, thanks. A lot of candles on the cake put it that way. Yeah, I'm turning the big five-o this year. So I'm just right behind you.

You're a spring chicken. Let's go ahead and give our Patreon shoutouts. We had Victoria Olson, Stephanie Ferruly, and Janie Adams. So that's a lot of great new support. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time to support the show. It means a lot to us. And for anyone else that would like to help do that, you can go to patreon.com slash criminology.

Just a reminder, crime con is coming. It's getting closer. The biggest true crime convention in the world is happening at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, September 22nd through the 24th. Yeah, we've talked about it before. There's a lot to do their events to participate in, people to meet, podcasters like us to say hi to. We'll be there. We'll be running an open tab for everyone that comes to our meetup. Just kidding. That's an April Fool's joke since this episode's coming out on April Fool's Day. But we do want to see you there. We do want to meet you there. And we'll definitely

be organizing some kind of meetup like we did last year. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. So come out, join us. Use our promo code criminology at checkout when you go to crimecon.com to register for crime con Orlando and that promo code will save you 10% on your standard badge purchase. So morph now that we have all of that out of the way, it's time to dive into this week's case. And this week, we're discussing yet another case solved by the use of forensic genetic genealogy. These cases being solved are so amazing. We've talked about it. The technology we have today is providing answers for loved ones of murder victims, years, or sometimes, even decades after a murder. But sadly for some families, this technology came along too late,

and many people have died, never knowing what happened to their loved ones. In this episode, we're discussing one of those kinds of cases that happened 52 years ago, the murder of young Vermont teacher Rita Curran. On July 20, 1971, the body of 24-year-old Rita Kern was found in the bedroom of her Burlington, Vermont apartment. Though she should be able to, shared the ground floor apartment with three other young women. She had been alone for a short time the night before when she was attacked. Beverly, the young woman she shared a room with, discovered the gruesome scene. What Beverly found was certainly something she would never forget. Then Chittenden County State's attorney, Patrick J. Leahy, who went on to become a Vermont

Senator, described the scene of the Burlington Free Press in 1971 as one of the most brutal slings he had ever seen. Rita's murder shocked her community. and would stump investigators for decades. Rita Patricia Kern was a highly regarded second grade teacher at Milton Elementary School in nearby Milton, Vermont. The school's principal Merritt Clark Jr. told the Burlington Free Press she was well liked. The boys and girls seemed to like being in her class.

She did a lot of work with the deprived and handicapped children. He went on to tell The Daily Beast. Those who knew her recalled her as quiet, almost painfully shy. But sometimes those adults who are extremely shy come out of their shelves when they are around children. And this seemed to be the case with Rita. Burlington, Vermont had just 38,000 residents. At the time, no one could remember. A crime is violent in the town's history. Rita was born on June 21, 1947 in Brooklyn, New York, to Thomas and Mary Kern. She had a sister Mary and a brother Tom Jr. The current family

moved to Burlington, Vermont where Rita attended high school at Mount St. Mary Academy. She was an active student, where she took part in the choir, glee club, and student council, in which she was class officer. Rida got good grades, and she knew she wanted to be a teacher. She graduated high school in 1965 and went on to college at nearby Trinity College and graduated in 1969 before landing her dream job, teaching second graders at Milton Elementary School. In her spare time, Rita also taught religion classes at her church, St. Anne's. Being out of college and having a new career, Rita decided it was time to become more independent, so she moved out of her parents' home in June 1971 to live with three other women in a shared apartment.

Less than a month later, she'd be dead. The unit that Rita and her roommates lived in was in a three-story building on Brooks Avenue near the University of Vermont, each floor was a separate apartment unit. This was the first time she had ever lived alone, and it was a temporary situation for the summer break. She had only found this place after finding an ad in the newspaper about someone looking for a temporary roommate, and it seemed like a good fit. Over the summer break from school, Rita took reading and language art classes at the

nearby University of Vermont and worked at a hotel in Burlington. the South Burlington Colonial Motor Inn as a maid. This is also sometimes noted in some reports as the Redwood Motel. On the night of July 20, 1971, Rita arrived back at home at around 10 p.m. She had been at a practice for her barbershop quartet group and headed straight home. Two of her roommates, 19-year-old Carrie Duwami, and Carrie's boyfriend, 23-year-old mechanic Paul Robinson, rowed at a restaurant called Harbor Hideaway. Their other roommate, 24-year-old Beverly Lamp here, was home and awake when Carrie called the house at 1115, inviting her and Rita to come to the restaurant for a drink. Beverly accepted the invitation, but Rita was tired and decided to stay in. Beverly left the apartment at around 1120 p.m.

When she left, Rita was in bed asleep. Beverly didn't lock the door behind her when she left, but she did take what was reported as the only set of keys with her, So it's not clear whether each roommate had their own key to the apartment or not. More if we talked about this a number of times, right? This being a different climate in the 1970s and safe towns, it was 1971. And almost no one locked their doors in Burlington, Vermont. At around 1230 a.m. An hour after Beverly had left the apartment, Carrie and Paul returned to the apartment,

they had left the bar before Beverly because Paul was tired. Not long after Beverly two returned and all three hung out in the living room for a little while thinking Rita was still sleep in the bedroom. About an hour later, when Beverly headed to the room, she shared with Rita, she discovered the truth. Rita wasn't sleeping. She was dead. According to police reports, Carrie and Paul in the other bedroom heard Beverly cry out. There's something wrong with Rita. Police were called to the apartment and officers were on scene at 2.15 a.m. They found Rita's nude body lying on her back on the floor.

She had apparently been beaten with fist and strangled, likely by someone's bare hands during a vicious struggle with her attacker. There were still curlers in her hair when she was attacked, like she had been getting ready for bed or asleep with them in her hair. But chunks of her hair had been pulled out, and most of the curlers were on the floor. The curtains in the room were on the floor as well. They had been ripped down.

A radio had been tipped onto its side. The bed had been moved at least a foot. Rita's underwear had been torn and left underneath her body. Her legs were covered in bruises, and her nightgown had been torn off. It ended up under her shoulder. The housecoat she was wearing was ripped open. The buttons were strewn about the floor. The sheet and blanket off the bed were wrapped in her legs.

It was clear to police that Rita had fought for her life. As police surveyed the scene, they found a cigarette butt next to her body, they thought likely belonged to her killer. The police weren't sure if the cigarette was smoked before or after the murder. It was thought that either the killer smoked it after the murder before leaving or maybe he had been smoking it when he decided to enter the apartment. Lieutenant J.T. Treat, who would be part of the team that solved this case half a century later said at a news conference it hadn't been crushed or put out. It had been dropped there.

He explained to wc aX.com that the cigarette dropped there and burned out on the floor next to her body. Neither Rita nor Beverly were smokers and Paul and Kerry smoked different brands. Investigators carefully collected the cigarette butt into evidence having no idea that it would one day help solve the case. Police determine that nothing had been stolen from the apart Rita's purse with cash inside of it was on the floor behind her bedroom door. Her car was still parked in its spot out front. The killer had fled the apartment using the back door. Rita's blood was smeared in the kitchen on the way marking his escape route.

The trail ended there, though. There was no sign of forced entry, but with both doors having been left unlocked, there likely wouldn't be. The dirt driveway had no footprints on it at all. It had rained on the 19th, leaving the ground soft. so you would think anyone that walked through it would have left footprints, but there weren't any. Whichever way the killer fled, they didn't step into the driveway. There was grass in the yard one to two feet high, and it didn't look like anyone had trampled through it on their way from the scene.

At around 7 a.m., officers went to the other nearby apartments asking neighbors if they heard anything or saw anyone suspicious. No one answered the door on the second floor where four women lived. it's not clear if they were gone or sleeping. On the third floor, the top floor of the building, William DeRuse and his wife, Michelle, talked to police telling them that they had slept through the night without hearing any signs of trouble. Michelle added that she had been awake until around 1 a.m. but hadn't heard anything from Rita's unit. Residents couldn't help police. And because none of them seemed to have seen or heard anything, investigators were initially

suspicious. Of the three people who found Rita Curran, Paul Robinson, who is now in his 70s, told the Daily Beast, the three of us were told we were not allowed to leave Burlington for the first month of the investigation. Paul seemed to understand the suspicion by police, adding no one living in the building or nearby had seen or heard anything. The idea that nobody heard anything is almost impossible. Said Paul, who recalled the walls in the building, in the building as being extremely thin. While police may have been suspicious of Rita's roommates, there had been multiple assaults on female University of Vermont students

and other young women in the Burlington area in the fall of 1970, and some wondered if the attacker was back. Sales of padlocks and other security devices quickly sold out. Investigators came to believe that Rita had been sleeping, were nearly asleep in bed when someone entered the unlocked apartment and attacked her. If Rita had been asleep when she was attacked, there may not have been a lot of noise in the way of screaming. There definitely would have been thumping when her bed was moved and when the curtains were ripped down and the radio was knocked over. But it could have sounded like drunk or inconsiderate neighbors.

If the girls on the second floor weren't home that night, then it doesn't really matter how then the walls were because they wouldn't have heard anything not being home. And more of this is something that we see in a lot of episodes. You know, especially when you go back to the 60s, the 70s, we talked about it, right? A lot of people didn't lock their doors. They felt extremely safe. Well, now you find out that there had been a number of assaults on female University of Vermont students in the fall of 1970. That alone didn't seem to change that feeling of safety because in all the reporting,

It talked about how people weren't locking their doors. Rita and her roommate specifically didn't lock their doors. It wasn't until after Rita's murder that people started going out and buying, you know, locks and other security devices. It changed things. And we often see an event like this change a small town, a community, some area in the way they live. I think as a society, we're often reactive instead of proactive.

A lot of times it takes something shocking like this to grab your attention and for you to look at your situation and say, okay, what can I do to improve my safety and prevent things in the future from happening? Rita's killer had come and gone undetected and carried out his grisly crime in about an hour. According to Lieutenant Trebe, Rita's killer had just 70 minutes to commit the crime. The realization of just how quickly Rita's killer acted, haunted Paul, he told The Daily Beast, I have always had a question about whether Rita was still alive. When we got back into the apartment that night, they had immediately called the authorities when Beverly began screaming upon finding Rita just inside the bedroom doorway. Could they have helped her if they had to be.

gone into her room sooner. She had been cold, but still, what if? And you, you know, you hear this quote from Paul. And this is something that I think a lot of people go through who have an experience such as this, a connection to a horrific crime. Those what if kind of questions have to to crop up and stay with you. And it sounds like they stayed with Paul. Rita was laid to rest at St. Anne's Cemetery in Milton following a church service at St. Anne's Church. As friends, family, and students paid their respects to the fallen teacher. Plainclosed detectives scanned the crowd for anyone that stood out. More than 300 people showed up at Rita's Memorial.

Shortly after Rita's murder, there was a media blackout due to concerns about interference with the active investigation. In 2021, Rita's sister Mary told NBC News 10, Albany. I don't know why there was a blackout, but it was disappointing as a family to not have her in the news every day. Despite the news blackout following the murder, police struggled to find the killer. In 1972, Detective Wayne Liberty finally publicly cleared Rita's roommates and their friend Paul, but also noted that there were no good suspects in the case. By April of that year, investigators had interviewed at least 200 people and administered multiple polygraph examinations.

It came out that multiple women living in the area, including Rita, had received threatening and harassing anonymous phone calls in the evenings leading up to her murder. Paul Robinson told the Daily Beast it was a random occurrence. It wasn't anything that happened every day or at a particular time. But it only was in the evening, from what I remember. Some of the women who had received the anonymous calls had seen a tall man trying to enter their buildings, but he had run off when they confronted him. He wasn't known to have made it farther than attempting to turn a doorknob.

Yeah, I know during the 1970s and 1980s, you could sort of be anonymous when you called people, and it seemed like there was a lot of crank calls, obscene phone calls, and it was just hard to trace them. And I wonder if this is a red herring in this case, and it wasn't connected at all to Rita's murder, but I think police probably had to at least consider that it could have been. Yeah, obviously with the technology we have the day, a little tougher, I think, to remain anonymous. My assumption is there are a lot less prank phone calls, obscene phone calls than there were,

you know, back when, when you and I were growing up. But I want to touch on, you know, this subject that you just talked about, you know, was this a red herring or was this? important to the case. My thought is police have that in almost every case, right? Something comes to their attention and they're trying to figure out, is this linked? Does it have anything to do with this murder? Or is it just something that has been happening and is completely unrelated? One man, Philip Hill, seemed to insert himself into the investigation. For some reason, he was one of the leading 13 suspects, but police didn't release much information about him. On October 1976 article in the

Burlington Free Press mentioned that a neighbor of Rita's was a suspect in the case, but no name was given. He had apparently been accused of sexually assaulting a nurse, which led authorities to look into him. On July 28, 1971, someone gave investigators a tip about him. According to police reports, someone believed he was, quote, capable of committing a violent crime. And it was his wife's alibi that kept investigators from leaning on him too hard. She claimed that he had been with her all night. Ted Bundy was looked at and considered as a possible suspect for a long time. Unlike a lot of cases where notorious serial killers are named as possibilities,

Bundy was actually born in Burlington, Vermont, at the Elizabeth Lundholm for unwed mothers. And he was in the area in the summer of 1971. His old home was next to the South Burlington Colonial Motor Inn, where Rita worked that summer. Rita was young, pretty, with long, dark, Auburn hair. She fit Bundy's type. Author Ann Rule mentioned Rita in her book about Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me. According to The Daily Beast, in the book, retired FBI agent John Bassett noted a remarkable resemblance between Rita Curran and Diane Edwards, who was Bundy's girlfriend. Apparently, Bundy had been in Vermont in 1971 on a quest to

discover the identity of his biological father. Rita's family seemed to suspect that Bundy could be involved contacting authorities about him. Rita's sister Mary told News 10 Albany, we asked the FBI when they were interrogating him if he could have been involved. And we got a letter back from the FBI that said he did not deny it or acknowledge it. At one point, Mary sent Ted Bundy a telegram while he was on death row asking for answers. It's unclear if he ever responded to a request. Just before he was executed in Florida in 1989, investigators spoke to Ted Bundy and asked him one last time about Rita Kern. He denied being her killer and denied ever killing anyone in Burlington. Some investigators believed him, thinking that he had no reason to lie, nothing to lose.

he would be dead soon. Others thought that he was lying, toying with them. Rita definitely fit his type, couldn't be rolled out as one of Ted Bundy's victims yet in their minds. Archivist and legal librarian Tiffany Jean calls the connection a stretch in an interview with a Daily Beast, saying, once you look at Kern's case, it's clear that Bundy was not involved. Just like the other potential suspects in the case, the Bundy lead fell apart and went cold. Rita's mother, Mary Kern, passed away in 2002. Before her death, she had been vocal about her disappointment in a lack of leaves in her daughter's case. She told the Burlington Free Press in 1979, we felt a lot more could have been done, but wasn't for political reasons.

That same year, Detective Sergeant Timothy Rawlins explained to the Burlington Free Press that the case was cold. We're not actively working on it, he said. At the time, the suspects included one person who died of a drug overdose, one person who was killed in a highway accident, and two later imprisoned on other murder charges in cases that bore no resemblance to the current murder. For years, police could only sit back and hope for a confession or some other break in the case. Eventually, investigators realized that the clue to catching the killer may be, be lying in their evidence room in the form of DNA. By the 1990s and 2000s, crimes were being

solved on a more regular basis with the help of DNA. In 2014, a DNA profile from the Lark-brand cigarette butt found near Rita's body was developed by a lab in New York City. The profile reignited the investigation in Arita's murder. In 2015, Burlington Police Chief Brandon Del Pazzo described the investigation to the Daily Beast as an extremely active 46-year-old. old investigation. He was also confident that if Rita's murder had occurred in the present day, an arrest would have happened quickly. But sadly, it was just a lack of technology at the time of Rita's murder preventing analysis of the evidence that was left behind. And you hear that quote, you know, if the murder had happened today, an arrest would have happened quickly.

And I agree with it from the evidence they had. My thought is, though, would a killer today knowingly leave a cigarette butt behind because DNA is, you know, very well known about. And my thought is most killers wouldn't. But when you think about 1971, there was no thought on the part of killers about DNA. Nobody knew anything about it. So, you know, to leave a cigarette butt behind. Yeah, they knew about fingerprints, footprints, that type of evidence. but anything to do with DNA wouldn't even have crossed their mind.

Wow, that's a pretty interesting thing you bring up. I've never thought about that. I always think about if police investigate a case, you know, today's standards with technology and everything they know today, what they could do, what they could solve. But then again, the criminals evolve too. The criminals are aware of what police have to work with nowadays. So I think we can always say that the criminals would adapt in present day, too.

So an interesting analysis that you brought up there. But the other thing that I found very interesting is, and I think you see this in a lot of unsolved cases, there's a long chunk of time here where basically not much is happening at all. With Rita's case, there's no new evidence. nobody's coming forward. I think you even said it more, you know, police were waiting, essentially, for something to happen,

either someone to come forward, some new tip, something like that. And it really wasn't until the emergence of DNA, that they were able to kind of pick this case back up. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutal.

murdered. I wonder which emergency. We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, blood and water. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. In 2019, the case was handed to a fresh set of eyes.

the new team headed by Lieutenant Detective Commander Jim Treep decided to work on the case like it was a brand new crime the same way they would work any active investigation of a crime that had just happened. At the time, it was Burlington's oldest unsolved cold case. Burlington deputy police chief Sean Burke said to the Burlington Press, it is a case where we have been running down some active leads. In 2021, Burlington police detective Thomas Chinette told reporters that the case was still active. According to The Daily Beast, he said, all original suspects and persons of interest are on the table at this point,

including those who were previously ruled out based on statements or single pieces of evidence. Sadly, the same year, it seemed like Rita's family members had given up hope. Part of a statement from them read, a resolution in our lifetime. to Rita's murder is not going to happen. But they added, in our prayers, we will never give up, our deepest private hope. Detective Chinette was quoted in The Daily Beast to saying, the reality is that evidence and memories degrade over time. So we decided to give our maximum effort now.

As many of the witnesses and involved parties are still with us and can be contacted, Paul Robinson in the same article was quoted as saying, I still get nightmares about that night. night. I hope they catch whoever did this or figure out what happened. He said that the killer, whoever they were, was pure evil. And Rita's sister married told NBC News 10 Albany, we don't know any more today. 50 years later than we knew the day of the murder. What Rita's family didn't know. What the public didn't know was that behind the scenes, police were reexamining case evidence that would help solve the case. So more for, you know, we were talking about

talking about an article that came out just a couple of years ago. And you can really kind of see the dichotomy between the family and the law enforcement community. The family, rightfully so, was very frustrated. I mean, you know, the murder had happened 50 years ago and for 50 years. They were waiting for answers that had never come. So, you know, at some point, anyone would get discouraged that the murder of their loved one would ever be solved. But then on the other side, you have detective saying, you know, we're back on this case.

We're doing this. We're doing that. And then there's also things behind the scenes that they're not going to tell the paper. And it sounds like maybe they didn't share all of it with the family either, things that they were working on that would ultimately. break the case wide open. Yeah, and, you know, we're talking half a decade for this family to wait for answers. You know, I'm not in that situation, and I don't know how families that are make it through that time without giving up hope because that's just, it seems like an eternity.

But at the same time, you have these police who are refused to give up hope on solving the case that are still working it 50 years later. so that's something positive that even though the chips may be stacked against them, they're still working on it trying to get resolution. In 2022, lab techs in Florida analyzed the DNA left on Rita's housecoat and discovered the DNA on the housecoat and the cigarette butt were from the same person. The DNA did not match the profile of anyone already in the system, though. It also didn't match the leading 13 suspects in the case, including Ted Bundy and Philip Hill.

It was back to square one. Authorities still needed to find their suspect. This is another testament to those investigators that listened to their gut and collected or saved evidence that really didn't help at the time, like a cigarette butt that wouldn't have been good for fingerprints. DNA testing in criminal cases wasn't a thing in 1971, but someone scooped that cigarette butt into a bag as part of the investigation, and it ended up solving the case.

Now confident that the DNA from the cigarette butt was certainly, from Rita's killer, the DNA profile was sent to forensic genetic genealogists at Parabond Nanolabs. Parabond's genetic genealogist, C.C. Moore told the Burlington Free Press, the DNA evidence ended up being so incredibly key and they couldn't have possibly imagined the power that we would have at this time to actually use that to narrow it down to one person. Of course, we've talked about C.C. Moore on the show several times. And, we maintain that the work she does is amazing. The Parabond website mentions that she and her team have produced over one positive

identification per week since 2018. The rate that she and other genealogists are able to clear through the backlog of cold cases is truly astounding. After almost 52 years, there was a confirmed DNA match. Rita's case was officially solved. C.C. Moore told the Huffington Post, This case is over 50 years old, but it only took a couple of hours to narrow it down to William DeRuse. Lieutenant Jim Trebe verified it, telling the Daily Mail,

we're all confident that William DeRuse is responsible for the aggravated murder of Rita Kern. So who was William DeRuse? William DeRuse was 31 years old at the time he murdered Rita. He was the same neighbor whose wife alibied him, saying he was in bed with her all night when police questioned them. He lived on the top floor. Rita lived on the ground floor. According to police, on July 19th, 1971, William DeRuse and his new wife, Michelle, had been arguing around midnight. He decided to go for a walk to calm down and clear his head.

Apparently, he only made it two floors down. On this walk, Michelle fell asleep before he returned to the apartment. The next morning, investigators came to the door, inquiring about the murder, two floors below, Daru said they hadn't seen or heard anything the night before. Lieutenant Tree told the Daily Mail that immediately upon closing the door, he turned to Michelle and told her that if the police ever showed up again, she was to tell them that he had been home all night. He told his new bride that due to his existing criminal record,

he would be blamed even though he was innocent due to tunnel vision. His argument was that investigators clearly wouldn't be able to see past a criminal living just two floors above the murder victim and would pin the murder on him no matter what. Police suspicion based on a tip probably seemed to confirm what he said, that they would only look at him. Well, it turned out that he actually was the murderer, but Michelle didn't know that. DeRuth had been able to go home after killing Rita and slip into bed next to his wife like nothing had happened. It now seems that the mention of a tip coming in about one of Rita's neighbors having a... attacked a nurse, was referring to DeRousse, although he was never named publicly. But according to that news article about the tip, police had supposedly cleared the suspect

in Mereda's murder. Unfortunately, the two detectives who received and investigated the original tip to look into William DeRuse had both passed away by the time he was looked into again. It's impossible to know who the tipster was that turned him in back in 1971. And unfortunately, this is the type of thing that happens in a case that spans. you know, 50 years, people pass away. So, you know, some of the original investigators have died. You're not going to be able to get answers from them on certain questions. You know, one is, who was this tipster? But even more important to me is what caused them to clear DeRuse back then as a suspect in Rita's murder. Yeah. And you. And you,

would hope that the answer would be in the report someplace that the original detectives marked on there. Okay, he was ruled out by such and such or alibied by so and so, something in the reports that would help current investigators. But unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. And it could have been as simple as, you know, once this tip came in, they went back, they looked at the file, they saw that his wife had given him the alibi and nothing more. more, you know, came of it. Yeah, I think it's definitely frustrating that the whole time this killer is there living in the same building and somehow just managed to slip through the cracks for 50 years.

Well, and I think a lot of these types of cases are frustrating. It's great that they are eventually solved, but there's obvious frustration on the part of the family. I mean, I think it's even frustrating for people like you and I and, and, and, and, listeners, it almost seems as though, you know, that person was right there. Why couldn't they put it together? But I know it's not that simple. Detective Thomas Chinette, who interviewed Michelle in recent years, didn't think she knew that she was helping her husband at the time get away with murder. He told the Huffington Post, I think that she lied at the time because she was young,

she was naive, she was newly married, she was in love. The two had been married for just two weeks. when Rita was killed. Michelle, who split with her husband soon after the murder, was confused. When police contacted her, she had no idea why her ex-husband would have targeted the neighbors. According to police reports, she told detectives, we had no relations with those people. Why would he do that? Never asked for a cup of sugar, nothing. She said it was inconceivable that he had killed Rita because she could think of no reason why he would have. There wasn't much of a chance for Michelle to question William about why he asked her to cover for him with police, because as we mentioned, they split soon after the murder. She changed her name and moved across the country. William fled the

country. He moved to Thailand, supposedly to become a Buddhist monk. William DeRuss eventually returned to the United States and remarried, this time to a woman from San Francisco in November 1974. There's a gap in his history, but we know that by then he was back in the United States. The relationship between Darius and his second wife, Sarah Hepting, was short-lived due to his sudden outbursts of violence. She recalled one instance where the two had been walking with a third friend, a female, and Deroos randomly, literally out of nowhere, stabbed their friend with a pocket knife. He was arrested for stabbing her in the stomach, but she refused to press charges against him, so he was released.

According to OKBliss.com, he later said to Sarah, I thought I was stabbing you. In the summer of 1978, Sarah caught DeRuse in bed with another woman. The final straw for Sarah was when he lunged across the dinner table at her and started to strangle her again for no reason and without warning. She left him after that attack, thankfully, and never looked back. It's possible that she may have ended up like Rita at the mercy of his rage if she had stayed. So I think there are definite signs that, you know, this guy was a violent person.

You know, that's what the tipster said way back in the very beginning. Now, I'm sure a lot of this wasn't known, didn't come out until much later, but you can see that William DeRuse was a violent individual. And it seems at least according to his second wife that this violence would just come on spur of the moment without warning, which is, I think it just proves that. he was dangerous and unpredictable. Well, I think you can also see why his relationships didn't seem to last very long. You're stabbing people with pocket knives, you know, allegedly saying to your wife,

I thought it was you strangling her over dinner. Okay, that's not being a loving husband. That relationship is not going to last. Unfortunately, like with many of the perpetrators who forensic genetic genealogy and law enforcement finally catches up with, William DeRuse had already already passed away. He died when he was 46 years old, just 15 years after he killed Rita Kern. He overdosed on heroin in the San Francisco hotel room on August 7, 1986. His remains were cremated. Obviously, to current investigators, it was a gut punch to find out that Rita's killer

lived in the same building and had been questioned by police, and had later been the subject of a tip to them. Yet with all of that, he still managed to elude identification. But the detectives would gladly arrest him today if he was still alive after DNA finally connected him to the murder. Chief Murrah had told OKBliss.com, he would be 83 today, but there is not a cop in this building who would not happily put a handcuffs on him. Unfortunately, because he is dead, he can't be held responsible or punished for what he did to Rita, but there's still a small silver lining that our case is finally solved. There's finally an answer of who the monster was and what happened to them. Chittenden County State's attorney Sarah George looked into the case even though

DeRuse was already dead and found that there was enough evidence to obtain a probable cause warrant for aggravated first degree murder and believes that she could have won the case if he had still been alive to arrest and prosecute according to vTdigger.org. Chief Murad said, we have caused to believe that he continued to hurt people to be a dangerous person. although there is no evidence of anything as horrific as his murder of Rita Curran. And my thought morph is always that, you know, with these types of individuals, what is the chance that they have so many other crimes that they perpetrated that, you know, police don't know about?

I always think the chances are, are pretty high. Is it possible that this is the one and only murder that William Dereuse committed? Yes, it is possible. But to me, isn't it more likely that he went on to do a lot of really bad things? Maybe he didn't commit any more murders, but I would be shocked to find out that he didn't commit more crimes during his lifetime. Yeah, much of his time is unaccounted for, and he spent time overseas. So I think it's definitely a possibility that there were other horrific things that he did that would be very

hard to track down. When asked by the Daily Mail what he thought of DeRuse's arrest, Rita's brother Tom Kern had little to say about the man responsible for killing a sister. 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, he said. In 2020, Rita's sister Mary Kern Campbell met with Burlington Police Chief John Murrod, who promised they would solve the case. According to vTdigger.org, when they finally did solve it, it. She said, we're happy that the chief's word came to fruition. At the same time, you can sense Mary's frustration. She told Oxygen.com, 51.5 years, and it's the guy upstairs. Well, we said that

there was a lot of frustration on the part of the family, and I think you can see why. Frustration for, you know, obviously so many years going by, nothing really moving, happening in the case. and then all of a sudden when there is that break and they find out who did it, it was a guy that lived just, you know, two floors up. And a guy that had been on police radar had been questioned. That would be frustrated. One of Rita's roommates, Beverly Lampeer, passed away in May 2021. Her other roommate Carrie changed her name but was alive in late 2022.

Rita's case went unsolved for over half a century. And that is kind of hard for me to imagine as a family member of someone who was murdered, you're trying to hold on to hope for over 50 years. As Mary said of her sister at Oxygen, I had only 22 years with her. And it's been 50. And that quote right there, Morph, kind of puts it into perspective for me. Rita's sister, you know, only had her for 22 years and then spent 50 years. wondering what happened to her.

I think Rita's case proves that it can be worth it to be optimistic, even in the face of time, odds, and lack of evidence. A savvy detective 52 years ago decided to properly collect evidence, not having any forethought of DNA, and it didn't get lost or thrown away due to the age of the case or contaminated because someone didn't find it worth keeping in the file. and that's something that we see in a lot of cases. Yes, authorities collect evidence.

They don't know what that evidence could ultimately hold later on down the road. But then at some point in time, because the case is so old, the evidence degrades, it gets lost, it gets thrown away. And so it's never able to be used. That didn't happen in this case. According to law and crime.com, lieutenant. Trebe said of the original investigators who responded to the scene that night, they collected a lot of stuff way ahead of their time. Rita's case is a truly tragic and sad one. She was so young and her short life touched many people's lives, especially those of the children she taught. They were robbed

of what she had to offer them. And Rita was robbed of her entire future, getting married, having kids of her own, and everything else she would have gotten to experience. And Rita's family was robbed of time with her. hopefully those that loved or cared about Rita take some solace and knowing that the killer's name didn't go unrevealed and that although there will never be an answer as to why he did it. At least they know who did it. The Rita Kern Memorial Education Fund was launched in 1971 by the Milton Women's Club to honor Rita's memory. So morph as we wrap up this case, to me I think there's both optimism and frustration in covering cases like this one, the case of redoccurrant.

Optimism because, you know, the police are solving cases after so many years. And then frustration because, you know, when you look back at this William Dereuse, he was on police radar. He had been questioned. He lived just two floors up. And it sounds like he, he had a history, a criminal history. But he also had a. alibi. And we really didn't talk a whole lot about his wife at the time, Michelle.

It must have been extremely tough for her when she found out the truth. As we mentioned, the police don't believe that she knew that she was helping her husband get away with a murder, but at the same time, by hovering for him at all, it really delayed a closer look at him. Because who knows, had she said, oh, he went out for a walk or something at the time, they may have looked very closely at him, and this case could have been solved early on. Yeah, I mean, you know, an alibi is a pretty powerful thing.

And maybe even more so in 1971, without the technology that we have today, how do you get past that alibi? You know, is someone going to want to prosecute knowing that, you know, this man's wife is saying, no, he was in bed with me all night. No, probably not. So it's hard to get too frustrated with police in this one because of that alibi. And I don't want to put too much on, on Michelle either. I don't know that she was doing anything, you know, maliciously. It's just, it's just a frustrating situation. And I think you have to at least give the police

credit by originally being on scene and collecting the evidence properly because we mentioned it. They didn't know what the future would hold technology-wise that would help them solve the crime. They just picked up the pieces, the clues, the evidence at the scene and stored it as they were supposed to do. So I think at the end of the day, it just shows that good police work, good evidence collection is so important in these kind of cases, just like today. Investigators today don't know what technology is going to be available 50 years from now. All they can do is properly collect evidence and store it and hope that in the future,

something comes along that helps solve cases that are taking place today. If you love the show and haven't done so yet, go out, take a minute, leave a review, give us a rating. Keep telling your friends about the criminology podcast. That really helps us out. If you want to find us on social media, we're on Twitter with the handle. at Criminology Pod. You can also find us on Facebook by going to

Facebook.com slash criminology podcast. You can also join our Facebook discussion group for a criminology podcast discussion and fans. So that's it for another episode of criminology. But Morf and I will be back with all of you next Saturday night with a brand new episode. So until then, for Mike... And Morph.

We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.