Colorado 1980 Cold Case SOLVED — arrest shocks community

 

She was 21 years old, 5 ft tall, weighed 100 lb and had a 1,000 W smile. At exactly 5:30 p.m. on January 16th, 1980, she walked out of a bus at the corner of Union Avenue and Broadway in Englewood, Colorado. Her shift at the radio station had just ended. She was supposed to be home

 by 6:30 p.m. But on this cold evening of January, Helene Pruszynski never made it home. Her body was later found the next morning in a frozen field off Daniels Park Road. Authorities confirmed she was kidnapped, assaulted, stabbed nine times in the back, severe enough to puncture her lungs, her hands tied with nylon straps, and the case went cold almost immediately for 40 years until investigators finally cracked the years of silence with a DNA sample uploaded to a genealogy website by a woman who only wanted to know where her great-grandparents came from.

To understand what was lost, we have to get back to that Wednesday evening and understand who Helene Pruszynski was. Helene grew up in South Huntington, Long Island, New York. She was the youngest of the three children to her father, Chester Pruszynski, who was an Army veteran and engineer. In 1972, when Helene was only 13, the family had moved to Hamilton, Massachusetts, a small town northeast of Boston.

 There, her love for music and theater grew, and she joined a music and theater group in high school. She had the kind of enthusiasm that made the people around her move faster. At Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Helene had the dreams of becoming one of America’s A-list journalists, a dream so dear that she’d do anything to get closer to it.

 She majored in journalism, then music as a hobby. Her classmate Ellie Horlbeck Thompson would say decades later that if you passed Helene on campus, your day was made better just by seeing her smile, even if you didn’t stop and talk. Her friend Monique Shyer remembered her as a mentor. Her professor Darlene Boroviak remembered her as someone who combined a remarkable maturity with a special kind of contagious enthusiasm.

 Nearly everyone has one good thing to say about Hélène. She was that good. On January 1st, 1980, Hélène landed an internship opportunity at KHOW AM radio in Denver. This meant everything for her. She was happy. She packed up alongside her classmate Kitsy Snow and they moved to Colorado together. They lived at Hélène’s aunt and uncle’s house in Englewood.

 The internship started in early January. She was 2 weeks in. On the day she disappeared, she had covered a major story, the aftermath of the fatal shooting of a Secret Service agent inside the Denver field office. She had gone to work that morning as a journalist covering real news. Her lines were beginning to fall into place.

 She wanted to be part of a bigger story. At 5:30 p.m. on January 16th, 1980, Hélène’s shift ended. She walked two blocks to the corner of 14th Avenue and Broadway and climbed onto an RTD bus headed for Englewood. She got off at the stop in front of Frank The Pizza King near Union Avenue and Broadway, six blocks to her aunt’s house, the same six blocks she had walked.

 She should have been home by 6:30. But she didn’t make it home. People were waiting for her at home as the minutes passed. No one worried. After all, buses can arrive late sometimes. She could be delayed. She could stop somewhere. But as the clock edged closer to 10:00 p.m., fear sets in. KHOW radio confirmed she had left office at the usual time.

 At midnight, the fear turned into devastation. The Douglas County Police Department were called. A missing person police report was filed. The news was everywhere and the search for Helene Pruszynski began. Officers began asking important questions, taking notes and recording timelines. The next morning, a woman driving along Daniels Park Road in northern Douglas County had noticed something disturbing.

 From a distance, it didn’t feel right. Within minutes, investigators from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation arrived at the scene and the truth became even more clearer. The body of a young woman has been found. Police secured the scene immediately and what they saw confirmed their worst fears.

 The victim was Helene Pruszynski. She had been sexually assaulted, her hands were tied behind her back. She had been stabbed nine times. The wounds were intentional and fatal. The officers photographed everything. They collected what they could find. An empty milk carton, an old can, a piece of bread. They gathered them all because they had no way of knowing what might matter later.

Most crucially, they preserved the biological evidence from Helene’s body and her clothing. The suspect who killed her had left behind DNA. In 1980, no one in Douglas County, no one in the entire country had yet convicted someone using DNA evidence. The technique would not be used in an American courtroom for another seven years, but the evidence was there and it was kept.

 A witness came forward and said what she saw while driving along Daniels Park Road around 10:20 the night Helene disappeared. A man in the area where her body would be discovered. She provided a detailed description. 20 to 30 years old, possibly Caucasian, medium length brown hair over the ears, possibly wearing a mustache.

 Under hypnosis, the woman recalled more details which helped an artist draw a remarkably realistic composite of a possible suspect, investigators noticed something else. Just a few weeks before, a woman had been sexually assaulted not far from Helene’s bus stop. The very night Helene vanished, another woman had been accosted on the street nearby, the same general area, the same general time frame.

 Investigators believed the cases were connected, but they faced the hardest category of crime to solve, a victim new to the city almost certainly killed by a stranger. No prior relationship, no logical starting point, no reason for their paths to have crossed except that Helene happened to walk past the wrong man at the wrong moment.

 Every case on this channel takes weeks of research, digging through court records, tracking down family statements, reading every document that put a name to a killer who thought he had outrun time. If all these efforts matter to you, kindly support us by subscribing to this channel. In 1998, three investigators at the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office made a decision.

Tony Spurlock, who would later become sheriff, along with Holly Nicholson Clouth and Captain Bill Walker, reopened the case. They formed a task force, pulled out every piece of preserved evidence, and applied something that had not existed when Helene was murdered, DNA testing. They tested everything, the biological evidence from her body, the evidence from her clothing.

 They built a DNA profile of the killer. They uploaded it to CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, which by 1998 held millions of profiles from known offenders across the country, but there was no match. The case was re-examined in 2000, in 2005, in 2010, and again in 2013, when a new analysis produced a list of eight women who may have been related to the killer.

Investigators followed those leads, but they went nowhere. Meanwhile, Helene’s family carried the weight of it all. Her elder sister, Janet Prusinski Johnson, was 9 years older than Helene. She had been 29 years old in January 1980 when she got the phone call, a call she will later describe as if someone reached in and tore their hearts out.

 Janet spent four decades not knowing who killed her sister, watching the case get reopened and go cold, tests come back with no match. Investigators try and run out of road and try again. She recalled how they idolized Helene and have come to realize she was a special light in their family and in the world around her.

 They knew Helene was going places. 40 years of not knowing who took her felt devastating. But one thing was clear, the suspect who killed her had lived freely for 40 years, had children, built a life, and watched the years pass with no knock at the door. In 2017, investigators at Douglas County launched another review of the case.

 This time, the landscape had changed. Beginning in the late 2010s, a revolution had taken hold in American living rooms. The home DNA kits were getting popular, and millions of Americans swabbed and mailed their samples to the genealogy companies hoping to learn where their great-grandparents came from, hoping to find relatives they’d never known.

 By 2017, the databases already have tens of millions of profiles, and investigators realized something. Even if a killer’s DNA was not in a criminal database, it might be adjacent to someone who was in a consumer database. Even if the killer himself had never taken a home DNA kit, a cousin might have, a second cousin, a distant relative who just wanted to know if the family really did come from County Cork.

 Forensic genealogy does not work like CODIS. It does not search for the suspect’s own profile in a database of known criminals. Instead, it takes DNA from a crime scene and searches for partial matches, relatives of the unknown suspect who share stretches of genetic material and who have voluntarily uploaded their DNA to public databases.

 From those relatives, a genealogist builds a family tree outward, tracing the branches, narrowing the geography, narrowing the generations until the branches converge on a single name. Even if a killer never leaves a fingerprint in any criminal file, he cannot control the DNA of his cousins. In 2019, Douglas County Sheriff’s investigator Shannon Jensen uploaded the killer’s DNA profile to GEDmatch, an open-source genealogy database where millions of Americans share their results.

 The database returned 3,000 hits. 3,000 people shared some genetic connection to the man who had killed Helene Pruszynski. Jensen worked the family tree branch by branch. She reached a distant cousin who had access to profiles for other family members Jensen hadn’t been able to find. That cousin was willing to upload their DNA to the public database.

 That upload moved Jensen closer. She worked with forensic genealogist Joan Hanlon of United Data Connect, building and pruning, testing and eliminating. There were false leads. Investigators went to Arizona for one possible suspect. Jensen, working undercover, watched him toss a water bottle into a trash can. She retrieved and tested, but it was not a match.

 She turned her attention to a man named William White Jr., a man with a documented history of serious prior offending. The DNA from Helene’s body was tested against his, but was also not a match. Then Jensen looked at his younger brother. Curtis Allen White had been convicted of rape at knife point in Arkansas in 1975. He had served about 4 years in prison.

He had been paroled. In 1982, he had started going by a different name, James Curtis Clanton. He had been paroled from prison on January 16th, 1980, the same day Helene Pruszynski stepped off that bus and never made it home. He had been released to live at the house of a former counselor in suburban Denver.

 He was supposed to report to that house. Instead, at some point after his release, he drove to the corner of Union Avenue and Broadway in Englewood. Helene stepped off the bus at 6:00 p.m. Shannon Jensen sat in Douglas County knowing all of this. She had the family tree. She had the timeline. She had a man with a rape conviction released from prison the day of the murder living in Denver whose DNA had not yet been confirmed. She needed one thing.

In November 2019, Douglas County deputies flew to North Central Florida. They followed James Clanton for days waiting, watching, looking for a moment when he would leave his DNA on something without knowing it. He went to a bar. He ordered a beer, poured it into a mug, and drank. Then he ordered another. After he left, detectives walked to where he had been sitting and picked up the mug.

 They sent it to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and it returned a match. On December 11th, 2019, Douglas County Sheriff Sergeant Attila Dens and Detective Mike Trendel stood along a quiet road outside Lake Butler, Florida. They lured Clanton in with a cover story, a financial fraud case, someone using his identity in Colorado. He agreed to sit for an interview.

 He answered their questions for an hour. Then Detective Trendel pulled a photograph from his notebook and slid it across the table. Clanton looked at the photograph of Helene Pruszynski and immediately realized his past had finally caught up with him. Sergeant Dennis told him they had a warrant for his arrest for first-degree murder and kidnapping.

 The next day, he was flown back to Colorado. While on the way, he began to talk. “I knew that was going to come up and get me one day,” Clanton said. He was asked why and then he goes, “Cuz I did it,” he said. “I killed the girl they’re accusing me of killing.” He confessed in the car, on the plane, and during a drive with investigators in Colorado.

 He described approaching Helene at the bus stop, telling her he had a knife. She said she could see it. He told her to get in the car. He drove her to a woodshed and assaulted her. Then he drove to a two-lane road off Daniels Park Road, walked her out into the field, told her to get on her knees, told her she would walk home from there, and told her not to get up until he left, but changed his mind and stabbed her nine times in the back.

In February 2020, James Curtis Clanton stood before Judge Teresa Slade in Castle Rock, Colorado and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison in July 2020. Janet Pruszynski Johnson stood in that courtroom and spoke directly to James Clanton after 40 years of waiting. “We were tormented by this tragedy.

 Our sadness was so deep.” And then, when the judge had asked whether she found any peace in the outcome, “They told me and I just lost it because it was just a relief,” she said. James Clanton pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. That is justice. But there was a problem.

 Clanton is eligible to apply for parole after serving 20 years of his life sentence. 20 years. The man who stalked and murdered a 21-year-old woman on the first day of his parole from a prior rape conviction, who lived freely for 40 years while her family suffered, who changed his name and moved across the country and built a life he had no right to build.

 That man can apply to walk free again before he turns 90. This is not a technicality buried in the fine print. It is the direct consequence of an era when the laws governing violent crime were fundamentally different and when the victims of that era had no voice in changing them. Colorado has since overhauled its sentencing laws for violent crimes, but those reforms do not reach back to 1980.

 They do not protect Helene. Another thing this case also exposes is the gap between what forensic science can now do and what law enforcement budgets actually fund. Douglas County investigators cracked this case, but only after decades of reopenings, resource constraints, and failed CODIS submissions. Genetic genealogy is not yet standard procedure in every cold case unit in America.

Evidence from thousands of unsolved murders, biological evidence that could today be put through the same process that found James Clinton, sits in storage rooms across the country waiting for someone to have the budget and the will to try. Support legislation in your state that funds cold case DNA testing for unsolved violent crimes, particularly crimes from before 1990 when biological evidence was preserved but never tested, and when the tools to use it properly did not yet exist.

 There are evidence boxes sitting in storage rooms right now containing the biological signatures of killers who are still alive, still free, still building lives they had no right to build. The The to identify them exists today. The funding to apply it does not always follow. On the evening she disappeared, Helene Pruszynski had covered the shooting of a federal agent for a radio news desk in Denver, Colorado. She was 21 years old.

She had been on the job for 2 weeks. She was exactly where she had always wanted to be, doing exactly what she had come to do, her sister said 40 years later. We knew Helene was going places. In February 2020, James Curtis Clinton stood before a judge in Castle Rock, Colorado and said he was guilty. But Janet doesn’t think they’ll ever have closure because Helene is not here and that void will remain with them forever.

She was a special woman whose life was taken way too soon. Justice came 40 years late, but it came because a stranger in Georgia uploaded her DNA to a website because an investigator in Douglas County spent years building a family tree one branch at a time and because the people who loved Helene Pruszynski never stopped saying her name.