After more than 50 long years, detectives with the Burlington Police Department

had uncovered DNA evidence that would finally lead them to the suspect in Vermont's oldest and

coldest case that of Rita Curran. But the investigation didn't stop there.

They had to be sure, and detectives did the legwork, building off the original

investigation from decades earlier so they could finally deliver the news that Rita's family feared might never come in their lifetime.

If you haven't yet, listen to part one of Rita's story on Dark Down East first to hear the details of the investigation into her murder

up until the summer of 2022, 51 years after Rita Curran's life was so brutally taken at just 24 years old. Now Rita Curran's family

finally has closure and this is the story of how they got it.

I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Rita Curran's story part two

on Dark Down East. In late 2022,

2022, Burlington Police Department

sent a DNA profile pulled from a cigarette butt found at the center of Rita Curran's crime scene

to Parabond Nanolabs for sequencing and familial DNA comparison, hoping that it would reveal a possible suspect.

Not long after receiving the profile, Paribond Nanolab's chief genetic genealogist

C.C. Moore shared her results. Here is an excerpt from those results

directly from the report. It is Parabond's hypothesis that the subject is

highly likely to be William Richard de Ruse.

William should be strongly considered as a candidate to be the suspect based on the fact that

genealogical connections were found to all five of the

subject's top genetic matches through both the maternal and paternal sides of his family

tree and three of his grandparents ancestral lines.

Further, documentation was discovered that he resided in the same building as the victim at the time of the crime.

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