Solved cold cases in Vermont
2 documented cases.
Rita Curran
Rita Curran, a 24-year-old schoolteacher, was beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled in her Burlington, Vermont apartment in July 1971. The case went unsolved for more than 51 years until, in 2023, investigative genetic genealogy identified her killer as upstairs neighbor William DeRoos, who had died in 1986 and was never charged.
Sarah Hunter
Sarah Hunter was the golf professional at the Manchester Country Club in Manchester, Vermont. A co-worker reported her missing on September 19, 1986, after she did not arrive for work, and her body was found in a wooded area in Pawlet on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1986. Her car had been found near a gas station in Manchester where David Allen Morrison, then 26, worked. State police said Morrison was a top suspect from the start but that investigators could not find the evidence to charge him. He left Vermont in January 1988 and was later convicted in California, in a separate case, of kidnapping, attempted murder and sexual assault. In 2012 he was charged with Hunter's murder after DNA testing appeared to link hair from his car to her, but the Bennington County state's attorney dismissed the charge in February 2015 because the hair had come from Hunter's own car. In the summer of 2024 Vermont and Massachusetts investigators interviewed him in a California prison, and prosecutors said he confessed. On December 9, 2025, he pleaded guilty to murder in Bennington and was sentenced to life without parole.