Dateline: Unforgettable - How was the Helene Pruszynski murder case solved after 40 years?

In January 1980, 21-year-old Helene Pruszynski was returning to her relative's home, where she was residing during her internship in Denver, Colorado, when James Clanton kidnapped her at knifepoint, took her to an open field and r*ped her before killing her. The following day, her body was discovered by authorities.

Pruszynski's case, however, would only be solved nearly 40 years later, using advanced forensic technology that examined the carefully preserved DNA secured from the victim's body. Genetic genealogy was used to track down possible matches until they reached the killer and extracted a detailed confession from him. Authorities had also placed Clanton in and around the murder scene on that fateful night.

Clanton pleaded guilty to Helene Pruszynski's first-degree murder in 2020 and was sentenced to serve a life sentence in prison, but with the possibility of parole. Now, more than two years later, Oxygen's Dateline: Unforgettable is gearing up to revisit the decades-old case and explore the conscientious efforts made by investigators to bring the killer to justice.

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Multiple attempts were made to re-examine Helene Pruszynski's cold case and the DNA evidence

When Helene Pruszynski's body was located, a woman came to the authorities, claiming to have seen a man near the crime scene. She assisted an artist in creating a strikingly accurate composite of a potential suspect by giving a thorough description of the man. Authorities came up with multiple other theories, trying to link Pruszynski's case with other, similar r*pe cases, but their attempts didn't lead to any significant leads.

Given Helene's brief stay in Colorado of less than three weeks, and the likelihood that she was attacked by an unknown person, the case was quite complex for the investigators. Sadly, the murder investigation was discontinued the following year, and it went cold for over twenty years.

However, the killer's DNA was a crucial piece of evidence that was preserved at the time for use in the future, which was never really tested. Investigators ran tests on the specimen in 1998, and the results revealed the killer's genetic profile. However, no match was found once it was submitted to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System.

In 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2013, the case was reviewed again, and the DNA led to the identification of eight women who promised possible links to the killer. However, this lead also failed to produce any results. Detectives started looking into the case again in 2017 in the hopes of making progress this time.

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One month away from Helene Pruszynski's 40th death anniversary, her killer was arrested in Florida

Shannon Jensen, a Douglas County sheriff's investigator, began investigating the case in 2019 after receiving hundreds of hits when she tested the killer's DNA via the genealogy website GEDmatch. She fixated on William White Jr., a man with a history of "deviant s*xual behavior," before turning to his brother, Curtis Allen White, aka James Clanton, who would ultimately confess to the crime.

They acquired Clanton's DNA from a used beer mug, which was a perfect match to the one authorities found all those years ago. Clanton was tricked by cops who used a financial fraud cover story to persuade him for a recorded interview and arrested him at the Union County Sheriff’s Office in Lake Butler. Although he initially denied that, Clanton eventually confessed to the murder while flying back to Colorado to face charges.

James Clanton pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Helene Pruszynski's 1980 murder case and automatically agreed to a life sentence, given that prosecutors removed death penalty from the table.

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Dateline: Unforgettable will air on Oxygen this Tuesday, November 8, 2022, at 8 pm ET to deep-dive into Helene Pruszynski's case.