[music playing]
BILL KURTIS: On a cold Colorado morning,
a woman drives through Daniels Park.
TOMMY BARRELLA: She was a foster parent,
and she had several kids in the car.
And she looked out.
And it appeared to be a female body in the fields.
She kept driving.
And she saw a road worker pulled over and told him what she saw.
And he decided to get out of there and call law enforcement.
TONY SPURLOCK: Douglas County officers did arrive.
The investigators found a younger female--
probably, at that point, late teens, early 20s--
lying on her back.
TOMMY BARRELLA: You could see that there
are two sets of footprints going in and only one set coming out.
And they look like they were like a boot,
like a cowboy boot.
So we now know that the crime scene occurred here
because this person is walking.
They're not being carried in and just dropped.
BILL KURTIS: Police in nearby Englewood
say a 21-year-old woman was reported
missing the night before.
The Englewood Police Department had taken a missing
persons report on January 16.
The person that they took a report on
was Helene Pruszynski.
BILL KURTIS: Helene went to high school
in Hamilton, Massachusetts, a small town north of Boston.
WOMAN 1: She very much wanted to be part of the school and part
of different organizations, very much into drama,
very much into the school spirit.
She was into poetry.
She was into singing.
She had a beautiful voice.
WOMAN 2: She was the youngest of three children.
And her mom and dad, especially her dad,
always called her baby.
BILL KURTIS: As a college senior in 1979,
she picked up and moved again, this time
to Colorado, where she interned at a radio station.
MIKE ANTHONY: It was a cold day, and it looked
like it was going to snow.
Helene came in the news booth and said,
it's starting to snow outside, and I'm a little concerned
about my bus ride home.
And she said, can I leave a little bit early if I need to?
I said, if you'll wait 15 minutes,
I'll give you a ride home.
I said, I'd feel a lot better if you let me take you home.
She thought about it for a minute.
And she said, no, I think I'll just ride the bus.
So she left.
I left the station that night to go home, which was about 6:15.
[phone ringing]
The phone rang about 8:30 or 9 o'clock.
And it was Helene's aunt.
And she said, Helene has not come home yet.
Do you know if she went someplace
that I'm not aware of?
And I said, no, she left the station right around 6 o'clock,
said she was going to catch the bus and go straight home.
INVESTIGATOR: My best friend was a captain.
And he said, we just had a call from Douglas County
that they found a body of a young female.
And they want you to go out and see if you can identify it.
I just knew this had to be her.
This was the only reported missing young female.
I was just sick in my stomach.
I didn't want to go to the scene and identify the body
but didn't have any choice.
We drove down to the location.
I had to get out and walk out into the snowy field.
But as soon as I got to the body, I knew it was her.
I instantly knew it was her.
It was the worst thing I ever had to do.
And it's never left my mind.
TONY SPURLOCK: The coroner identified that she had been
stabbed nine times in the back.
TOMMY BARRELLA: Cause of death was from loss of blood,
and both of her lungs had collapsed.
The pathologist was able to confirm that she
was sexually assaulted.
TOMMY BARRELLA: They were able to find
some fluid, some dry fluid, could possibly be saliva
or could be semen.
So they took samples of it, and they preserved it.
TONY SPURLOCK: The way that she was murdered
does give an indication that this is a crime of passion.
And so that sometimes leads to an individual
who might know her.
KIMBERLY LA TOURETTE: We were told
that the brutality of the murder, it was with such rage
that there was an opportunity for it
to be someone that she knew.
It seemed personal.
INVESTIGATOR: But she's brand new to town.
She didn't have friends outside of the radio station.
I was contacted by several investigators after the day
that Helene was found.
And they wanted all the information
I could give them about people that worked for me,
people in the radio station, anybody she had come in contact
with, or if there was anybody I thought
that might want to harm her.
Her aunt and uncle, they were the only people that she had.
She had no one else in her sphere of interest other
than what she had developed for a very short period of time
of two weeks at her internship.
Unfortunately, nobody panned out.
We put out a $10,000 reward for any information.
We ran stories on the air asking people to come forward.
TOMMY BARRELLA: A lady contacted law enforcement.
She had saw a vehicle parked on the side
of the road in the location that the Helene's body was found.
She saw a male suspect that was--
appeared to be kneeling down by the rear of the vehicle
and looked toward her, and the hazards were on.
TONY SPURLOCK: Investigators used hypnosis and a crime scene
sketch artist to develop a composite of a suspect
that she thought she had seen.
TOMMY BARRELLA: They have a composite
of this white male with thick hair kind of parted
to the side with a mustache.
But it was aired, and nothing ever came of it.
KIMBERLY LA TOURETTE: I made a promise to her parents
that I would not rest until we found out who, why,
how, and get the answers for them.
Anything new that happened in forensic science,
anything new that happened in investigations, she
was on top of it.
She was searching it.
She was trying to find an answer to whoever
killed her friend Helene.
BILL KURTIS: In 1980, that DNA wasn't useful.
But decades later, investigators have new tools that might
help identify Helen's killer.
We gave them DNA of our suspect to create from
that genetic data family tree.
BILL KURTIS: Detectives build the branches
of that tree using commercial genealogy sites
like ancestry.com or 23andMe.
They simply run DNA from the crime scene
through those sites, looking for anyone with even partial DNA
matches based on centimorgans.
Centimorgans is a unit for measuring DNA.
You and I may not be related at all,
so there'd be no centimorgans.
If you and I were siblings, it would be a very high number.
BILL KURTIS: Investigators work on the DNA sample
and the genealogy sites for weeks,
and they finally get a promising lead.
We found who we thought was the mother
of the person that did this horrible act in Douglas County.
She was the mother of multiple kids,
but the women could be thrown out right away.
They didn't commit this crime because it was a male sample.
It was a semen sample.
But by all accounts and all records,
she didn't have any boys.
BILL KURTIS: When detectives questioned
the woman's relatives, they get one step closer to the truth.
They discover she'd given up two sons for adoption.
MITCH MORRISSEY: My genealogist and this detective dug deeper.
And what they came up with was a very old
newspaper article about a reunion
between this woman and her son.
And in that article, they mentioned another son.
Now, we knew she had two boys.
We were able to eliminate one of the sons
very quickly because his DNA was already in the CODIS DNA system
and was no match.
The younger brother that we focused on,
his name was Curtis Allen White.
Mr. White had committed a rape before 1980.
He had gone to prison for that rape.
In fact, he used a knife.
This was long before DNA, so there was no DNA
database for him to go into.
He served a very short sentence for such a violent crime,
and then he paroled to Colorado.
TOMMY BARRELLA: He was out here during the time
that Helene came here in 1979 and was
out here during the time that Helene
would have been murdered.
So now we're feeling like, OK, this could be our guy.
We check his fingerprints, and they
come back to a guy named James Curtis Clanton down in Florida.
So detectives follow up on that.
And James Curtis Clanton is arrested
in 1998 for domestic violence.
And once they send the booking photo to us,
when it was compared to the composite drawing that
was given to us by a lady under hypnosis in 1980
were almost identical.
You see him look at it, and his demeanor changed.
BILL KURTIS: Investigators are now certain they are face
to face with Helene's killer.
When the sergeant said, your semen
was found on her and in her, he kind of paused and just said,
oh.
I think that was a very pivotal moment in Mr. Clanton's heart.
BILL KURTIS: Police arrest James Clanton on the spot.
Police bring Clanton to Colorado to face murder charges.
During the flight, he opens up about that night in 1980.
TOMMY BARRELLA: He said he saw Helene
stand up to get off the bus.
He made a U-turn.
And as she's crossing the street, he shows her the knife.
She says, I see it.
He walks over, puts his arm around her,
and says, come with me, and ties her hands behind her back
with the strap from her purse.
We just talked about, in six hours on a plane, I mean,
anything and everything.
And there was nothing that was off limits.
And one thing that we asked several times was
did you commit any other crimes, and did
you commit any other sex assaults or rapes
or murders or anything?
And he was adamant that he didn't.
He had in his mind that he was going to grab a girl,
and he was going to kidnap her and rape her.
That was his plan.
CICI FOGNER HUNT: It was a relief,
but there's never closure on something
that's so heinous like this.
BILL KURTIS: James Clanton pleads
guilty in a Colorado courtroom.
63-year-old Clanton is sentenced to life in prison.
He will be eligible for parole after 20 years.