Vermont police use cigarette DNA to solve woman’s murder, 52 years on

Officials say DNA evidence led them to killer of Rita Curran, in case that baffled investigators and was formerly linked to Ted Bundy

In 1971, Rita Curran, a 24-year-old schoolteacher, was found strangled to death in her apartment in Vermont. The college town of Burlington, where Curran taught second grade, was devastated. Police interviewed Curran's neighbors, investigated hundreds of tips and collected evidence including a single cigarette butt found near her arm, but were unable to name her killer.

Curran's murder, unsolved for more than five decades, became one of Vermont's most notorious cold cases. That changed this week, when police detectives announced the identity of her murderer - a male neighbor, police say, who later became a Buddhist monk and countercultural guru before dying of an overdose in 1986.