Every Town - Englewood, CO - 1980 Radio Intern's Killer - Helene Pruszynski

Episode Date: August 14, 2021

Twenty-one year old Massachusetts native Helene Pruszynski had always aspired to be a journalist, and had ventured to Denver, Colorado to pursue her dream.  She wanted to write the next big story, but in 1980, Helene herself became THE big story. She was abducted, sexually-assaulted, and murdered in a random act of unfathomable brutality.. Her story struck an emotional chord among many people because it was a tale of a young woman’s promising life devastatingly cut short, and it took forty long years to achieve closure. In 2020, thanks to a more advanced type of DNA testing that has raised privacy concerns yet provided new leads in long-dormant cases across America, Helene’s case finally became one of Colorado’s notorious cold cases no more.💥 Watch This Episode On Youtube Here: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries💥 Exclusive Content Here: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries 💥 More Creepy Podcasts From Us: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1235579💥 Contact Us [e-mail]  Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Every town has a dark side. Today we head to Englewood in Denver, Colorado, where we check out Helen Prasinski's case in the 2020 conviction through DNA evidence of a radio intern's killer back in 1980. 21-year-old Massachusetts native Helen Prasinski had always aspired to be a journalist and adventured to Denver, Colorado to pursue

that dream. She wanted to write the next big story, but in 1980, Helen herself became the big story. She was abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered, in a random act of unfathomable brutality. Her story struck an emotional chord among many people because it was a tale of a young woman's promising life devastatingly cut short, and it took 40 long years to a woman's promising life. It took 40 long years to achieve closure. In 2020, thanks to a more advanced type of DNA testing, that has raised privacy concerns yet provided new leads in long-dormant cases all across America,

Helen's case finally became one of Colorado's notorious cold cases no more. Hi, I'm Andrew Fitzgerald, welcoming you all to this week's episode of Everytown. Had Helen Prasinski survived her attack back in 19, She would have been 63 years old today, maybe working as a journalist, sharing stories of courage and resilient, perhaps even including her own. Sadly, though, it didn't turn out that way, and Helen had only one surviving immediate family member when her long-delayed justice was served in July of 2020. Let's revisit Helen Prasinski's four decades in the making story that prehistory.

proves there is a silver lining in every dark cloud, no matter how long it takes to appear. A major breakthrough in a crime case may come days, weeks, months, or a few years after it occurs and can send ripples of shock and fear through a community. Some high-profile cases remain dormant and cold for decades. The development of new crime-solving methods and technology has resulted in a turning point for several cold cases, such as in Helen Prasinski's case. It was only in 2017 that investigators of her crime began pursuing solid evidence by leaps and bounds because of the advent of forensic genealogy. Three years later in 2020, 62-year-old Florida truck driver James Curtis Clanton

admitted to brutally killing Helen in 1980. Forty years after her, her attack, the bittersweet news of the break in Helen's case was welcomed and celebrated by her only surviving immediate family member, her 70-year-old sister, Janet Johnson. Helen's older brother, Chester Anthony, known as Chet, died in 2009 at the age of 63. Her 89-year-old mother, Henrietta, and 94-year-old father, Chester, both passed away in 2012. They would never know. who killed their beloved Helen. Helen was the baby of the Prasinski family, born on April 5th, 1958, and South Huntington on Long Island, New York.

She and her older siblings, Chet and Janet, who were 12 and nine years her senior, respectively, grew up in the hamlet, best known as the birthplace of poet Walt Whitman. Janet remembers her youngest sibling as warm, kind, bright and friendly, an avid New York Mets fan, who knew all the players and their positions. When Helen was 14 years old in 1972, Brzezinski patriarch shifted careers, requiring the family to move to Hamilton, a town located northeast of Boston.

The teenage Helen's love for baseball continued there, and she converted to become a Red Sox supporter, in a small suburban town in the eastern part of Massachusetts, the petite, brown-haired and blue-eyed Helen honed her singing and performing skills when she attended Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School. She performed in the school's singing group called Club Harmony and aspired to pursue a journalism major in college. She was well-liked by her peers. One of her choir mates, Kimberly O'Bremski,

described her as such a piece of heaven, an all-American, intelligent, caring individual. After finishing high school, Helen entered Wheaton College, a private liberal arts school in Norton Mass. The college pioneered practical learning opportunities through its semester in the city program that places students in internships around Boston and other cities where they work while taking two related courses for the duration of the semester. It offers students a more real-world living, working learning experience. Wheaton guarantees funding for students pursuing unpaid extracurricular experiences, including internships, research, or any suitable experiential learning opportunity. In January of 1980, 21-year-old Helen was in her junior year and decided to work as an intern in the news department.

of K-H-O-W-A-M radio station in Denver, Colorado. Her move, almost 2,000 miles away from home, was Helen's first big step in pursuing a career in journalism. Together with her friend Kitsy Snow, she moved into her aunt and uncle's house in the suburb of Inglewood in Denver. Since the radio station was located in the downtown area of Inglewood, part of Helen's daily routine was walking to

and from the bus station located a few blocks away from her aunt and uncle's house and taking a bus to and from the radio station. K-H-O-W is a commercial AM station serving the Denver metropolitan area with a talk radio format. A co-worker, journalist Bob Scott, described Helen as very bright with a great sense of humor and a wonderful laugh. It was an accomplishment for Helen to earn such compliments from a colleague in a short period of time, but Bob would have never imagined that just two weeks into Helen's internship, he would be called to identify her body in a field on Daniels Park Road in Castle Pines, Douglas County. Ironically, Helen had won praise for covering the story of a slain secret service agent right before her own tragedy. Little did Helen,

nor anyone in her circle for that matter, know that her story would be covered by the local and national media for 40 years. January is the coldest month of the year in Colorado, but the freezing winter temperature on January 16, 1980 didn't dampen the enthusiasm of Helen Prisinski reporting to work at K-H-O-W-A-M. The eager, aspiring journalist went about her daily grind as a radio news intern, hoping to get a scoop of the day's biggest news. But at the end of that fateful day, Helen became the subject of news which captivated the Denver area for many years. After finishing her tasks, she left the station at the end of the workday and was expected to be home early in the evening. Taking a bus from the station, Helen got off a regional transportation district, or RTD,

bus on Broadway near Union Avenue in Inglewood. But the ever-punctual Helen didn't make it to her uncle and aunt's home a few blocks away, where they waited for her with her friend Kittsey. Kitsy chronicled in her journal their growing concern after Helen had failed to return home by 10.30 p.m. that night. She and Helen's relatives went looking for her at the bus stop and called her boss, who told them that she had left at 6 p.m. At 11 p.m., Kitsy and he wrote, this has been the longest and worst day of my life. I am writing because I don't know what else to do. We waited for Helen to come home and waited.

And that's when Helen's Aunt Wanda reported her niece missing. Initially, they didn't want to inform Mr. and Mrs. Brzezinski yet to spare them from worrying. But after learning from bus drivers that they didn't recall seeing Helen on the bus, they then made the difficult call. At 3 a.m. on January 17th, Helen's parents in Massachusetts learned of their daughter's disappearance. At noon of that same day, a passerby found the girl's dead body in a frozen field on a farm ranch in Douglas County, land that is now the sprawling community of Highland's Ranch. Her wrists were bound behind her back, and she was naked from the waist down.

The young woman had been raped and brutally stabbed to death. Nine of the stab wounds were across her back and it punctured her lungs. By 1.30 p.m., when authorities knocked on the Inglewood house where Helen had been staying and reported that they found her body, Kitsie said, I couldn't cry, just shake. I couldn't stop shaking. Helen's parents arrived to Denver at 2 p.m. that same afternoon and reached their relatives. Inglewood home shortly before 4 p.m. Kitsy witnessed what happened and wrote it in her journal. When they saw the priest, they knew. Mrs. Prasinski cried and said, no, no, not my baby.

When I looked at Mr. Prasinski, I ached more than I ever thought possible. So many people turned out for Helen's funeral in Massachusetts that some had to pay their respects from the steps of the church. mourners remembered the youngest Prasinski's sibling as a creative young woman whose deep kindness and ready smile made everyone feel welcome and whose loss was deeply felt. Her sister Janet said that elder brother Chet retreated and suffered in silence after their younger sister was killed and Janet often cried herself to sleep worrying about her parents

and their grief over the loss of Helen. To the day my dad died he was a protective father He felt guilt, deep guilt for letting Helen go off to her internship. Janet shared in one of her recent statements. Police worked tirelessly on Helen Prasinski's case. DNA was collected from the crime scene, including semen samples from her coat. However, no analysis was done immediately after the slaying and later yielded unsuccessful matches. Police questioned and canvas locally throughout the first crucial 48 hours.

but didn't obtain information or solid leads that could point them in the direction of a suspect. All they had to go on was a sketch, the details of which were provided by an individual who, under hypnosis, was able to provide a description of the suspected perpetrator. The sketch depicted a Caucasian male with dark hair, light eyes, and a mustache. It eliminated suspects, including two men who separately confessed to the crime. The sketch did not lead to a suspect, thus no one was charged, and Helen's case quickly went cold. It was reopened in 1998, and the DNA collected and preserved from a crime scene was developed and uploaded to the FBI's National DNA Database. However, with no matches identified and no new information to go with, on, the case went cold once again. Police continued to try through the next decade, but just

couldn't seem to get a break. Even Helen's former high school friends in Massachusetts were determined that her case wouldn't be forgotten. In 2006, a group of them flew to Colorado to retrace Helen's final steps and to encourage authorities to keep looking for her killer. After a renewed effort to solve the case started in 2017. Investigators turned to modern forensic genealogy to try to find relatives who had uploaded their DNA profiles to online public databases like Ancestry.com and GED match in order to trace their way back to a possible suspect. One of those who uploaded her profile to GED match was Jesse Still, a self-described true crime investigations enthusiast.

I didn't really think anything would come of it, she said. I just uploaded it on there. Kind of forgot about it. Within two months, though, a cold case investigator from the Douglas County Sheriff's Department in Colorado sent Jesse an email, identifying her as a familial match to the suspect in Helen Prasinski's 1980 murder. Investigators had found a new lead using her deed. DNA profile and fleshed out a family tree.

Detectives were able to zero in on two men, both sons of a woman who had used six different surnames in her lifetime, and at one point, I lived with her husband and children in Salt Lake City. Investigators learned from relatives that her family had splintered after the woman had a nervous breakdown, and her sons were sent to live with an uncle. One was Curtis Allen White, now known as James Curtis Clinton, who bore a striking resemblance to the suspect's sketch drawn many years earlier. Court records showed that he changed his name to James Curtis Clinton in Florida two years after Helen's murder. Finally, authorities had found their most fitting suspect, and all it took was a beer mug to prove that James Clinton was their right time.

target. Before we proceed to the big revelation, let's first trace back the life of Helen Prasinski's alleged murderer. James Curtis Clanton had a troubled upbringing and a history of violence against women. As a youth, he had spent time in a children's home in Arkansas. It was called Southern Christian Home, where he met a kind-hearted counselor, who would later become a mentor. James committed his first crime in 1975 when he entered a woman's Arkansas home on the pretext of using her phone. Forced her into the bedroom then at knife point and sexually assaulted her. James pleaded guilty to first degree rape but served only four years of his 30-year jail sentence after he was released on parole.

I want to be paroled because I have people that care about me now and I have adjusted myself. James said in a parole hearing, according to court records. He got his wish of getting a parole on March 6, 1979. His counselor from the Southern Christian home believed James could be rehabilitated under his guardianship and in a good home environment, so he allowed James to live with him and his family in Littleton, Colorado. James busied himself working at landscaping and vacuum companies.

A year later, the paroled sex offender moved to. to Englewood, where Helen had also recently moved for her internship. That same year, James married his old girlfriend from Arkansas, but she left him after just a month. He returned to Florida in 1982 with a changed name, got married and divorced for a second time. His second chaotic marriage culminated in a domestic violence charge in 1998. His arrest was a blessing in disguise because his mugshot was kept on file and was later compared to the sketch of a suspect in the Helen Prasinski investigation. James Clanton carried the heavy burden of secret guilt for 40 long years, but the lengthy time of being weighed down by it made him realize the only way to

lighten up his load was to finally reveal the truth. Following the unprecedented lead that detectives discovered through modern DNA technique, which identified Helen Prisinski's most like killer. They traveled in late November, 2019, to Lake Butler, Florida, where James Clanton was living and working as a truck driver. Armed with an arrest warrant, the investigators spent the Thanksgiving week monitoring James in order to obtain his DNA sample. They first tried to collect his DNA from a discarded milk carton, but didn't succeed. Next, they followed James to a local dive bar, where they were able to get his DNA off a beer mug that he had been drinking from. On December 4, 2019, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation announced that analysis had shown the

DNA from the beer mug matched the sample taken from Helen's coat 40 years ago. Finally, 62-year-old James Clanton was charged with first-degree murder and second-degree kidnapping. However, he wasn't charged with sexual sexual. assault because the statute of limitations had expired by the time of his arrest. In order to get James to come with them for a voluntary interview, detectives made up a story that he had been the victim of a financial crime in Colorado, according to Sergeant Attila Denz with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office. During the interview, they worked to establish that James was in Colorado when the crime against Helen occurred.

Sergeant Den said When he paroled from prison in Arkansas He stayed in Colorado Actually in the home of a counselor That he'd been working with in Arkansas prison That was in Acres Green Which is in Douglas County, Colorado That put him right in the immediate vicinity of the crime

When James was shown Helen's picture He initially declared his innocence But two days later He then confessed to the crime In Den's opinion, James gave a thorough, graphic, and detailed confession of every aspect of the crime. There was a lot of remorse. He shed a lot of tears, he said. James told investigators that he decided to take a woman to have sex with him after he had met with his parole officer. James admitted killing Helen, telling detectives he abducted her at knife point, intending to rape her,

then bound her hands behind her back and drove her to the field where her body was found. James described Tellen as staying as friendly as she could, asking me not to hurt her. He then instructed his victim to get on her knees, telling her she could walk home after he left, even as he prepared to kill her. According to James' attorney, his client's remorse for the killing has grown over the years, particularly after he became a father himself and that he pleaded guilty to the crime in order to offer the Prasinski family some closure.

James Curtis Clanton pleaded guilty to a Class 1 felony that currently carries a life sentence. However, due to the laws that were in place in 1980 when Helen's killing occurred, James may apply for parole after serving 20 years of his sentence. On July 1st, 2020, James, was sentenced to life in jail with the possibility of parole by Douglas County Judge Teresa Slade during an emotional, nearly three-hour hearing in which more than a dozen people testified

about the lasting impact of Helen's killing over the past four decades. But James didn't say anything in court. During sentencing, the judge urged him to try to build on his expressed remorse to live a better life. It was a day of reckoning. Expectedly, It was Helen's only surviving family member, sister Janet, who was most overwhelmed with mixed emotions. Now 70 years old, she spent more than half of her life waiting and fighting for justice for her beloved younger sister. So it's fitting that we end this story with Janet's statements during James Clanton's sentencing that surely echo the sentiments of her family members. Oh, how they wished, hoped, dreamt of this day. A day of reckoning and arrest, a conviction, justice.

I will try my best to speak for all of us. We were tormented by this tragedy. Our sadness was so deep. He took our kind, loving, sweet Helen from us. It couldn't be true. Our family would never be the same. It gives me some peace. knowing that this beast is in jail.

But I don't think we'll ever have closure because Helen is not here. The 40 agonizing years of seeking justice for Helen has ended, and her family and friends made sure she will be immortalized through the Helen Prasinski scholarship, which is given to a Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School senior who excelled the most in music and drama production. Through this fund, Helen will continue, you to be remembered and make it different in the world.

So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Tune in next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. And who knows, maybe your town will be next.