A secretly snagged beer mug — and the DNA it carried — was the final piece of evidence the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office needed to arrest a Florida man in the 1980 murder of a woman who was raped and stabbed on her way home from an Englewood bus stop.
In a case that spanned nearly four decades, the beer mug was the lynchpin of a web that slowly tightened over suspect James Curtis Clanton, 62, as the years passed from Jan. 16, 1980, when 21-year-old Helene Pruszynski was found fatally stabbed in a field on Daniels Park Road in Castle Pines.
From a 1980 sketch that looks strikingly similar to Clanton made from a hypnotized witness’ description to DNA testing done three decades later, authorities said Monday they are confident they’ve arrested Pruszynski’s killer.
Clanton, who was 22 at the time of the crime, is charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping.
DNA in Clanton’s semen helped tie him to the crime scene, according to an affidavit filed by the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, although Clanton could not be charged with sexual assault because the statute of limitations had passed.
Detectives used online genealogy databases and help from private companies to wade through Clanton’s unorthodox family and numerous aliases to identify him as the suspect.
Clanton moved to Colorado from Arkansas about a year before the killing. He worked as a landscaper and at a vacuum company, and lived just blocks from the bus stop Pruszynski used to get home.
When he moved to Englewood, Clanton was on parole. He’d been convicted in 1975 of raping a woman at knifepoint in her Arkansas home. He forced the woman to drive him to a bus stop in Little Rock and then let her go; she went to police and he was arrested at the bus stop within the hour, according to the affidavit.
Although Clanton was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with 10 years suspended, he was released on parole after just four years.
Pruszynski, a senior at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., was also new to Colorado. She’d been in the state just a few weeks before she was killed, and was staying with relatives in Englewood while working as an intern at KHOW radio in Denver.
Pruszynski normally would leave her job at the radio station at 16th Street and Broadway and catch a bus to South Broadway and Union Avenue around 6:10 p.m. She would then walk the five blocks to the home of her aunt and uncle on South Pennsylvania Street.
When she didn’t arrive when expected on Jan. 16, 1980, her relatives called the Englewood police. Her body was discovered the next day.
She was nude below the waist, her hands were bound behind her back and she had been stabbed nine times in the back. There was evidence she had been raped repeatedly.
Her assault and killing was one of a series of reported assaults in the area around that time, according to the affidavit.
Clanton has not been charged in those cases, but 18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler said Monday he’d like to see local authorities take another look at those cases to see whether they can be tied to Clanton.
Prosecution of those sex assaults would be unlikely given the statute of limitations, he said.
“To the extent we are able to get to some closure on these people, I’d like to know one way or the other, whether it is prosecutable or not,” Brauchler said.
Clanton was arrested in Union County, Florida, where he had been living, and was transported to Douglas County, where he was booked into jail. He is scheduled to appear in court at 1:30 p.m. Monday.
Detectives watched Clanton for several days around Thanksgiving, looking for an opportunity to secretly collect his DNA so it could be tested against a sample taken from the crime scene. On Nov. 30, Clanton went to a bar and drank several beers; detectives worked with the bartender to secretly collect a beer mug he’d used.
Testing of that mug showed Clanton’s DNA matched the DNA in the sample taken from the crime scene, according to the affidavit.
To identify Clanton as a suspect, detectives checked the DNA from the crime scene against an online genealogy website, GEDmatch. That did not yield a direct match, but did list several potential relatives.
Detectives then waded through a convoluted family tree — Clanton’s mother used six last names over her lifetime and had five children with two different men. Clanton told authorities he did not know who his biological mother was. He lived with his father as an infant but then was raised by his uncle and aunt until he was about 13, according to the affidavit.
He was a chronic runaway and also spent time in the foster care system; he told authorities he did not know his mother. He referred to his uncle as his father.
Clanton’s brother also had a lengthy criminal history, and detectives had to eliminate him as a suspect as they narrowed their focus to Clanton.
In addition to the 1975 rape conviction, Clanton was arrested on domestic violence charges in Florida in 1998 and 2001.
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Snatched beer mug, genealogy website help Douglas County detectives make arrest in 1980 murder of college student - The Denver Post
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