40-Year-Old Cold Case Killing of Aspiring Journalist Helene Pruszynski Is Solved Thanks to New Technology.



Helene Pruszynski was a 21 year old student 
at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts and had been working as an intern at a radio station in Denver called KHOWAM. She had only been in town for a little over two weeks, staying with her aunt and waiting for classes to resume. On January 16th, 1980, she was on her way home from another exhausting day at her internship when she mysteriously disappeared. - Police also in on the case have been concentrating their efforts near this bus stop on South Broadway. It's believed that Miss Pruszynski got off her bus after work here Wednesday night. She was abducted some time after that. Last seen at a bus stop in Inglewood. The following day, Helene's body was found in a field in present day Highlands Ranch in Colorado, her arms tied behind her back. She had been stabbed to death. Investigators were able to recover and collect DNA samples from the scene, but since the technology wasn't that advanced at the time, they were unable to carry out an analysis. The case quickly grew cold despite a profile being developed and uploaded to the criminal database years later in 1998.
 

 

In 2017, the case was once again reopened with detectives conducting forensic genealogy, 
matching the preserved samples from the 1980 crime scene to DNA profiles uploaded by people from all over the world to online public databases like ancestry.com and gedmatch.com. Investigators were hoping to find individuals related to the killer in the hopes of finally bringing justice to a murder that had remained unsolved for nearly three decades. They came back with several positive matches, which allowed them to identify distant relatives, two of whom allowed authorities to access their family trees. An intense process of elimination followed until investigators narrowed it down to James Curtis Clanton, previously known as Curtis Allen White, who is a truck driver living in Lake Butler, Florida. He was quickly put under surveillance and detectives were able to secretly collect his DNA from a discarded beer mug. That DNA was a complete match to those gathered from the 1980 crime scene. At the time of Helene's murder, Clanton was working for a local landscaping business, having been previously imprisoned in Arkansas. In an interview with detectives, he admitted to murdering the young college student, saying that he had abducted her at knife point. He had then bound her hands and drove her to the field where her lifeless body was eventually found.
In the chilling confession, 
he said that he had instructed Helene to get on her knees, promising her that she would be allowed to return home after he was through with her. He had no intention whatsoever of allowing the young woman to live. In 2019, the 62 year old was charged with first degree murder and second degree kidnapping, although charges for assault fell through because the statute of limitations had already expired. Authorities also claimed that a composite sketch of Helene's killer, based on an interview with an eyewitness, significantly resembled Clanton's booking photo when he was previously arrested in Florida. In court, Defense Counsel Daniel Cunny argued that Clanton's remorse over the murder had increased through the years, especially after he became a father. Moreover, he claimed that Clanton had pleaded guilty to finally afford the Pruszynski's some closure. After the emotional three hour hearing on July 1st, 2020, where more than a dozen of Helene's family members and closest friends came forward to testify about the impact of her murder,Douglas County judge, Theresa Slade, sentenced Clanton to life in prison with the possibility of parole, a punishment agreed upon when he had pleaded guilty to the crime.



There was a poem that Helene wrote that was read by one of 
her friends, and it said, "Let us live today with every hopeful promise of tomorrow," said, Judge Slade as the hearing came to a close. "And Mr. Clanton, you get to keep having that. How you face that is up to you." In the end, a reopened investigation that saw the combined efforts of 22 detectives from local and federal law enforcement, as well as from the Metro Denver Crime Stoppers brought Helene Pruszynski's murderer to justice, 40 years after she was brutally stabbed to death.

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