Original subtitles

[reporter] Miss Pruszynski's body was found early Thursday.

She was last seen Wednesday afternoon when she left work.

She just seems to vanish.

[reporter] Englewood Police have been concentrating

their efforts near this bus stop on South Broadway.

[Joni] Nobody sees anything?

Nobody hears her scream?

[reporter] So far, nothing.

And they're afraid if they don't find something soon,

they may not find anything at all.

[Kevin] Five years, 10 years,

15 years, 40 years go by.

The real mystery is who could have done such a thing.

[dramatic theme music]

[narrator] On an isolated country road in North Florida,

a truck driver is flagged down by police.

The officers want his help solving a financial fraud case

they are investigating,

hundreds of miles away in Colorado.

[narrator] The truck driver is 62 years old.

His name is James Clanton.

The questions all relate to financial dealings.

[narrator] Police then ask Jim Clanton about his past.

@ [narrator] The tone ofnthe interview suddenly changes.

[narrator] The young woman in the picture is a student,

Helene Pruszynski.

In the winter of 1980,

she is working as an intern ata local radio station in Denver.

[Kevin] Helene Pruszynski was 21 years old.

She was a senior at Wheaton College

in Massachusetts,

@ and she had come to Denver to do an internship

@ at one of our radio stationsú in the news department.

She was staying with relatives in Englewood,

which is a suburb about 10 miles south

of downtown Denver.

@ That area where she wasú staying with her aunt,

at that time, ú was a pretty nice community,

a bedroom community suburb of Denver.

On January 16th, 1980,

she worked at the radio station.

She left at her normal time around 5:30.

She rode the bus south down Broadway.

She got off the bus.

She never made it to her aunt and uncle's house.

This is a young lady who is incredibly

@ predictable and reliable.

[Anthony] She would usually get home around 6:30

and she just never showed up.

And there was immediate alarm with her aunt and uncle

and her friend who was staying there,

which her friend recorded in her diary.

[narrator] The diary's author is Helene's fellow intern,

Kitsey Snow.

Helene is somebody that I think everybody really loves

and cares about,

and the fact that she is so trustworthy

and she's so dependable,

I think they would have known

exactly what time she was supposed to be home.

[Anthony] She was reported missing around 10:30

to the Englewood Police Department.

Less than 24 hours,

early morning hours of January 17th,

her body was found in Douglas County.

@ [Kevin] She disappeared in the early evening

on January 16th.

The next morning, somebody was driving down

a two-lane dirt road down in Douglas County,

a ways south of Englewood.

And this person saw something out in the field,

investigated and realized it was the body of a young woman.

[narrator] The heartbreaking news

is broken to Helene's parents.

It was obvious right away she was the victim of a crime.

Obvious right away she'd been murdered.

No mystery to that.

The real mystery is who could have done such a thing.

@ [Joni] When Helene's body was discovered,

a couple things really stood out.

One being that she had been stabbed nine times.

She was laying in a field.

She was nude from the waist down.

Her hands were bound behind her,

and she had a scarf that was wrapped around her neck.

There was a real kind of cruelty to it,

and I don't want to imagine the terror

that must have gone through her mind during this time

when she was in a car with a stranger with a knife,

and then when she's being taken someplace

and sexually assaulted,

and then being stabbed to death.

It's just a very, very grim, painful scene for investigators

They did conclude from an autopsy

that she had been sexually assaulted multiple times,

most likely either there or at another location.

She was clearly murdered at that location

based upon the evidence that was at the scene.

They felt like this was a crime

where she was probably not targeted

because of who she was, but what she was.

She was a person alone out after dark

where it was easy to surprise her

and grab her and get her into a car.

[narrator] News of Helene's murder quickly makes its way

onto the local TV network.

@ [reporter] As snow began to fall in the field

@ where the body of youngú Helen Pruszynski was found,

@ obliterating any clues,

@ authorities called offú their search of the area.

This would have been shocking in Englewood.

It's not that Englewood never had homicides.

They happened from time to time.

But this kind of thing with a young woman

who got off of a public transit bus

and had just a short walk to the home where she was staying

and vanished was a big deal.

[narrator] But right from the start,

detectives struggle to find clues

that could lead them to the killer.

[reporter] She was last seen Wednesday afternoon

when she left work.

Englewood Police, also in on the case,

@ have been concentratingútheir efforts near this bus stop

on South Broadway.

[Kevin] Detectives rode the same bus the next night.

They just didn't find anybody that saw her get into a car,

or walk a different direction,

or anything that would explain how she disappeared.

It's believed that Miss Pruszynski

got off her bus after work here Wednesday night.

She was abducted sometime after that.

They've been talking with people in the area

looking for some clue, but so far nothing.

And they're afraid if they don't find something soon,

they might not find anything at all.

[narrator] The technology available to crime fighters

back in 1980 is much more limited than today.

[Kevin] There would have been a camera on the bus.

There would have been a camera probably outside the pizza joint

next to the bus stop.

None of that really existed in 1980.

[Joni] It's hard to imagine looking back

for most of us today to think how can any case

get solved unless it happens in front of somebody,

or there are eyewitnesses

because that's what they're relying on.

They're relying on people to see things that are happening.

The idea that you could take a drop of blood or a hair

and get a genetic profile from it

that you could use to identify a suspect

was just years into the future in 1980.

[narrator] But detectives do track down

one potential witness.

Not to the crime itself, but to a man spotted nearby.

So, one of the tools that law enforcement uses

is to go back to the crime scene

at the time when they believe that she was abducted

and just interview everyone who passes through.

So, they did that very thing and contacted a lady

who was coming home from work,

and said that she had seen around 10:30

an individual parked alongside the road in a car.

She couldn't really describe the car,

but gave a description of the individual

standing by the car.

[narrator] Police are keen todevelop a photo fit of the man,

and they resort to an unusual method to create one.

She had a really hard time remembering some of the details.

So, they actually put her under hypnosis

in an attempt to get her to recreate this drawing,

which she was able to do.

@It was a picture of a white manú with kind of dark hair,

light coloured eyes and a moustache.

One of the challenges, I think, is if you can have a composite

and you can compare it to a suspect,

it can be very helpful.

If you don't have a suspect

and you have a composite drawing,

that might match hundreds of people.

[narrator] But it is just about all the evidence

detectives have to go on.

Identifying a suspect in a stranger-to-stranger crime

has always been hard,

and is still sometimes really, really hard.

Everything just dried up. They had just no leads.

[Kevin] By the spring of 1981,

detectives were sort of out of options

and the case languished like that

off and on for years.

[narrator] But decades later,

in a cramped police interview room in Florida,

is that all about to change?

@I can't imagine the frustrationúand the angst for the loved ones

@ as five years, 10 years, ú 15 years, 40 years go by,

and they have no answers

about what happened to their loved one.

And they know the person who did it

@has not been held accountable for their actions.

[narrator] But Helene's friendsand family never give up hope.

Behind the scenes, what happens with these cases

is time goes by and somebody picks up the phone and says,

"Why aren't you investigating this?"

Really?

[Kevin] There was a point in time

some years after Helene's death

@ when some of her loved onesú and friends did a march

@ to try to draw attention to her case.

While it didn't result in any leads,

@ what it did do was keepú her case in the public eye,

which when you haveú a cold case especially,

it is so critical for families to do that.

[narrator] Then science provides detectives

with a new crime-fighting tool.

And using game-changing technology,

detectives move a step closer to finding their suspect.

I was on the police beat and I immediately got

really interested in cold case investigations.

There were a lot of those that were happening

because by the mid-1990s,

DNA was starting to break cases

that had been unsolved for years or decades.

You knew now that if you can find a suspect,

you can get a DNA sample from that suspect

and see if it matches the DNA sample

you have from the evidence.

In 1998,

the Douglas County detectives decided to reopen the case

and send all the evidence to a forensic lab

to have it tested for DNA.

And what they got back was a very complete genetic profile

of the person that they believed would have

raped and killed Helene Pruszynski.

Now it's just a matter of figuring out who it is.

[narrator] Detectives upload the suspect's DNA

into a central FBI database,

the Combined DNA Index System,

CODIS for short.

You have to give a shout out to those early detectives

and to the coroner and other people

involved in the investigation because they collected evidence.

There's a lot of cases that just don't have

the physical evidence,

@ and those cases go cold and stay cold.

@ So it is very important thatú you collect that evidence

and maintain it and keep it safe.

[Kevin] They collected swabs from Helene's body and clothing.

They collected her clothing.

They collected all of her belongings.

They took good care of them for almost two decades

before there was DNA technology

that would let them look at that material

and come up with a genetic profile.

[narrator] But a match with a known criminal

on the CODIS database proves frustratingly elusive.

The suspect's DNA just isn't in the system.

For a period of time, we were excited

that there might be a possibility.

But then all of a sudden there was no match to the suspect

that had left the DNA on Helene's body.

[narrator] Once again, the case goes cold.

And 15 years pass

before detectives get another opportunity

to find Helene's killer.

There was a breakthrough on a case in California,

the Golden State Killer case.

A detective had a brilliant idea,

@ which is we've got a geneticú profile of the suspect,

and we have these open source genealogy sites

@ where people are postingú their genetic profiles.

Maybe we can

take that profile of the suspect

and compare it

to what's on those genealogical sites

and identify a relative.

[narrator] It's a technique known as genetic genealogy.

You have genealogists

that specialize in tracking people down.

And maybe 15 or 20 years ago

they were tracking down a long lost relative,

and now some of those people have turned their attention

to tracking down suspects in really serious unsolved crimes.

In 2013, I became the elected sheriff

and I developed a cold case review team.

Helene's case was one of the first that we worked on,

and that's when we started to look at genetic genealogy

and how it might play a role in solving our crimes.

We were able to get a company called United Data Connect

to help us with the genetic genealogy.

[Mitch] I'm Mitch Morrissey.

@ I'm the chief of operationsú of United Data Connect.

Before that, I was a prosecutor

in the Denver District Attorney's office.

I realized that this is a science that will help us

solve rapes and murders against women and children

in our community.

[narrator] Genetic genealogy uses DNA data

stored on a commercial database to track down suspects.

There's GEDmatch and there's Family Tree DNA,

and those are two databases.

They're small ones,

but they're big enough to allow us

to help solve these cases.

We start to look at the people in the database

that share a lot of DNA with the individual

that we're looking for.

We start to build family trees based on those people.

And then you start saying,

"Well, where was this person in 1980?"

"Oh, this person was going to college in Florida in 1980,"

so you can cross them off the list.

And it becomes this process of elimination.

And you might get down to two or three or four people

where there are enough genetic markers that you think

one of these people could be the suspect.

[narrator] So, can genetic genealogy

unlock the mystery of Helene Pruszynski's murder?

We started from scratch, building the trees,

and looking at what we could find,

and how we could hopefully give them a lead

that would lead to this brutal killer.

[Kevin] In the beginning,

the detective working on this case,

using genetic genealogy,

had a list of about 3,000 potential suspects.

It's an incredible amount of research.

They sit at their computers

12, 14 hours a day

researching these family trees.

We have an incredible number of volunteers that do this work.

And what they care about is solving these cases.

And they commit their lives to doing it.

And it's really important to recognize them

and their role in solving these cold cases.

[narrator] Thousands of hours of painstaking work

eventually identifies a woman

as a close DNA match to the suspect in Helene's case.

As we came down the tree,

it became more and more clear that this woman

was potentially the mother

of the individual that we were looking for.

[Anthony] What I was briefed on is that they had found

what they believed were family members,

particularly the mother of the suspect,

and that that individual, that mother,

had four children,

and that they were searching for the children.

[Mitch] And so we looked to see what her offspring looked like,

and it looked like she only had girls.

And so we were kind of like, "Okay, is this a dead end?"

She just a relative, not the mother.

But it turned out that we found a newspaper article

where she had been reunited with one of her sons.

And she actually, in the newspaper article,

said she had abandoned two sons.

Our investigators, they dropped everything else

and focused on this.

Let's identify these two individuals.

Let's find out where they're at and who they are.

[Mitch] What's the criminal history?

What's going on with these two boys?

Was one ever in Colorado?

So, that was very promising

that they had narrowed it down to two individuals.

When you're down to two brothers,

you're gonna solve the case.

[narrator] The older brother is William Fred White Junior,

a man with a criminal history of deviant sexual behaviour.

His DNA is already on file.

It doesn't match.

Right away, we knew the older brother

was not the person that we were looking for.

He was excluded.

And once he was excluded,

then we could focus on the other brother.

As the detective started looking into

the history of the brother,

she discovered that he basically just ceased to exist

in the early 1980s.

And eventually, after a lot of work

and looking at other relatives,

she discovered he actually appeared

to have changed his name

to James Clanton.

I do remember that day

that the commander came into my office

and sat down and said,

"I think we found Helene's murderer."

@ We realized that our primeú suspect lived in Florida

and was in Coloradoú at the time of the murder,

@ had a criminal history,

@and had all the ways and meansú to be our prime suspect.

[Joni] He had served time for rape.

He was arrested in Arkansas in 1975

and served four years for rape

@and then was actually paroled.

We were able to obtain a photograph

of a driver's licence of him,

and that's why it's important to go back into the story

to when the witness in 1980 did a composite drawing

of the suspect that she saw on the side of the road.

That description sketch,

compared to the driver's licence of our suspect in 1980,

were almost a dead match.

It was shocking how close they were.

@ [narrator] Now detectivesú need to conclusively link

@ James Clanton to the killing of Helene Pruszynski.

@ What detectives needed was DNA from James Clanton

@ to see if it matched the DNA they had from evidence

@in the Helene Pruszynski murder.

[Mitch] We had the DNA, we had the genealogy,

we had the guy in the area.

It was time to go look at him

and try to get a DNA sample from him.

Undercover detectives travelled to Florida,

where James Clanton was living.

They followed him around.

He went to a bar,

started drinking beer out of a beer mug,

and they were able to get the owner to set aside

those beer mugs he used.

On the beer mug itself, where he was drinking,

his saliva was found there.

It was a perfect match to the DNA

they had from the murder scene

of Helene Pruszynski.

[narrator] Before they arrest Clanton,

police want to try and question him,

but without tipping him offthat he is their prime suspect.

We made a plan to where we were going to detain him,

try to get him to talk to us

before he was physically arrested,

in hopes that we could get information.

In this case,

the detectives came up with this sort of elaborate ruse,

in which they went to Florida, talked to James Clanton,

and they said, "Hey, your name has come up

in this financial crimes investigation in Colorado.

We'd love it if you'd come and sit down and talk to us.

We're trying to get to the bottom of this thing."

[narrator] During the interview,

Clanton confirms some key facts.

Firstly, he was living in Colorado

at the time of the murder,

but using another name.

What he did is he gave us information that put him

at the general vicinity of the crime scene

and where he would have been at that time.

[narrator] Police can also rule out

that he was in a relationship with Helene.

[Kevin] The DNA came from semen.

And so, you always have to recognize that it's possible

that Helene was in an intimate relationship with this person

and that that DNA sample is not actually from the killer.

[Mitch] And he says, "No, I've never laid eyes on her.

No, I don't know her."

Then you know,

because you already know his DNA is at the crime scene.

You know he's your guy.

[narrator] After invoking his right to an attorney

and bringing his interview to an abrupt end,

James Clanton asked to speak to his interviewers again.

Well, the detective thought once he wanted to have an attorney,

we weren't gonna get and information out of him.

And then as he said he wanted to have further conversation,

they were prepared,

but not prepared for what he started to say.

The detective was recording it on his cell phone

while they were driving,

and he confessed

that he had murdered Helene.

[narrator] Clanton then starts going into detail

about what he did to Helene.

@ [Anthony] He had just leftú his parole office in Denver.

He was searching for someone to have sex with forcibly.

He saw Helene walking down the street,

so he drove his car past her and one block away

and got out of the car and then came up behind her.

He got her in the car and according to him,

she asked what he was doing.

He told her that he was kidnapping her for ransom.

He drove her to this secluded shed,

sexually assaulted her,

and he took her to this field, he said, and he killed her.

He said that he walked her out into the field

and was just going to let her go,

and he told her, "I'm just gonna let you go.

Just stay right here until you know I'm gone."

And then he claims that everything changed then.

He's not sure what happened.

And then she was stabbed with a knife that he had with him.

He did not articulate how many times that he stabbed her,

but he said he stabbed her.

And then he walked away and then drove back home.

[narrator] Clanton's confession

continues on the plane journey back to Colorado.

[narrator] As Clanton talks,

detectives are eager to find out more about his background.

He talked about the fact that he had no idea

who his parents were.

That the woman he thought was his mother

turned out not to be his mother.

He talked about how angry he had been his whole life.

He described a history of animal cruelty starting at age eight.

You know, one of the things that struck me

in hearing his confession,

his tone never changes.

It never changes through the entire thing.

His statements, when you have the opportunity to hear those,

they can be a little chilling.

It was a full confession,

as much as he could remember.

He even remembered that he would have been wearing cowboy boots.

And back in '80, they found footprints that indicated

there was a cowboy boot probably around the crime scene.

I figured we would be in a lengthy trial for years.

And so, it was relieving to me

when they landed at Centennial Airport

that we knew that he had confessed

on the flight from Florida.

@ It's a forensic story worthyú of any national TV show,

@and it led to a recent arrestúright here in Northeast Florida.

The suspect in a murder-rape in Colorado 40 years ago

was arrested just days ago in Union County.

A crime covered by KUSA in Denver.

[narrator] Police announce their breakthrough

at a news conference.

One month shy of 40 years ago,

a 21-year-old girl was kidnapped,

sexually assaulted,

and murdered.

And to put in perspective how long ago that was,

before we can get to this first formal step

of achieving justice on her behalf,

is to know that back then

the President of the United States was

Jimmy Carter.

Empire Strikes Back

hadn't even come out in the movie theatres yet.

Obviously, we understand that the suspect

that we have in custody is going to get some attention,

but the key is that we remember

and we remain that we have Helene

in our thoughts and prayers and her family.

[narrator] Detectives call Helene's family

with news of the arrest.

When I was thinking about it this morning

and I just got off the phone with...

Helene's sister,

it was kind of one of those bittersweet moments

because this has been a long time,

almost 40 years.

It was a sad, emotional,

but also a satisfying phone call.

She was driving home

and we had to ask her, "Are you driving?"

Yes? Could you go to a parking lot

and park your car, please?

And just sit there for just a moment."

I was coming home in my car,

and I saw the phone number coming from Colorado.

I think maybe she thought this is gonna be more bad news

with the case which she had heard for 40 years.

Bad news that the case was cold again.

And she, you know, she broke down.

[Janet] And I just had a feeling it was this news.

So I pulled off and they said, "Now be calm."

And so they told me and I just lost it.

And because it was just a relief.

And my parents are no longer alive.

My brother's no longer alive.

So it was like...

they are sharing in this moment, even though they're not here.

It was one of those phone calls

that was a very difficult call to make,

but also satisfying to make,

to say we could put closure to this,

to that degree of closure.

He could have stepped forward a long time ago

and helped this family out,

admitted what he'd done,

but that's not the way these guys operate.

He changed his name.

He did a lot of things to avoid getting captured,

but we got him.

We got him with his DNA,

and we got him with the genealogy,

and we're able to successfully prosecute him.

[narrator] Back in Colorado...

[officer] Today's a new day.

I want to read you your rights again.

[narrator]...Clanton signs away some of his rights,

agreeing to let detectives search his trailer in Florida

and his cell phone.

[officer] Your cell phone is your personal property.

[narrator] Clanton then agrees to show detectives

what happened where on the night of the murder.

We did have detectives take him to the route

of where he abducted Helene

@and to the area of where she wasú staying at her aunt's home.

Keeping in mind that, you know,

we had 25,000 people in that community

when he committed the murder,

and over 400,000 when we were driving him around.

[narrator] He points out the street

where he first abducted Helene,

and the rough location of a woodshed

where he assaulted her.

[narrator] And finally, the spot where he killed her.

[Anthony] I did go down to the jail

prior to one of his appearances in court.

I wanted to go into the jail cell

and see him sitting in the jail that I was responsible for,

in the orange suit.

@ [narrator] Three months after his arrest,

@ Clanton faces his first court hearing...

[narrator]...and once again, he springs another surprise.

[narrator] An arraignment is when a judge

asks the defendant for a plea.

[reporter] This plea was 40 years in the making.

That's how long Helene Pruszynski's

family and friends have waited for justice.

And after all those years,

it only took about 15 minutes this morning

for James Curtis Clanton to plead guilty

to murdering Helene on January 16th, 1980.

[Kevin] He could have made it much more difficult.

He could have gone to court and said,

"I'm innocent. I didn't do this."

And instead, he came forward

and confessed all of this stuff.

@ Then he went into court and pled guilty.

And that meant an automatic sentence

of life in prison without parole

in Colorado.

Barring something really unusual happening,

he will be in prison until the day he dies.

[narrator] The COVID pandemic

delays his sentencing hearing for months.

@ [judge] Everybody ready on 19CF-51-6.

[narrator] It eventually takes place online.

[reporter] This day in court should have happened long ago

for Helene Pruszynski's sister.

My name is Janet Pruszynski-Johnson.

And we should note that Clanton's sentence

is a foregone conclusion at this point.

Life in prison.

[narrator] It was a moment Helene's friends and family

had been waiting for for 40 years,

five months, and 15 days.

[narrator] Clanton lets his lawyer

do the talking for him.

[narrator] But the apology is too late

for Helene's parents and older brother.

Her parents and her brother all went to their graves

without knowing that her killer had been identified,

arrested,

pleaded guilty and went to prison.

While that didn't change anything about

what happened to her,

I have to imagine they would have had

more peace in their lives

if they had been alive to see that happen,

and they weren't, and that's very sad.

@And that's one of the hardestú things about these cases

that we solve 30 or 40 years later,

is that the people that really cared

@ for this 21-year-old girl

were her mother and her father,

@and they had died before we wereú able to get her the answers.

[Janet] I'm Janet Pruszynski-Johnson.

My sister Helene was the victim,

and I'm here today

to have justice for my sister's death.

I am deeply indebted to all these people

who have helped solve this case over the 40 years.

Helene was a...

a shining star in the lives of my family

and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.

Now, today we have a person in jail

who will be there for the rest of his life

and I'm so grateful for that.

[Kevin] There were more than a hundred detectives

that worked on this case over time.

The fact that all of the stuff

that they did in 1980s and in the '90s

all built to the point

to where once genetic genealogy came along,

they had the evidence they needed

to prove that James Clanton killed Helene Pruszynski.

[Kimberley] I think we're just very grateful to Douglas County

for all of the hard work that they've done.

It's mind-boggling of the team effort

@ across all of Colorado.

Today is about Helene.

It's not about her killer.

It's about finally giving her some peace

and bringing the rest of us some peace

so that we can just enjoy the memories,

the cherished memories we have of her.

It gives me some peace knowing that this beast is in jail,

but I don't think we'll ever have closure,

because Helene's not here and, you know, that void will

remain with us forever.

So there's a chapter that is ending,

but the book continues on.

We'll just have to continue on as we have.

But knowing that justice has been served is

a relief.

(♪)

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