A Promise to Helene

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1:18I'm Lester Holt. Tonight on Dateline, a cold case mystery and a 40-year mission to solve it. What I focus on when I'm working a case, what drives me the most is the victims. I wanted to speak for them. I wanted to speak for Helene. I just turned on the news. A woman found murdered in Denver, Colorado. I just grabbed my son and screamed and cried. Was it somebody she worked with at the radio station? Could it be the boyfriend that she just broke up with in December? You're giving the detectives names of people. Yes. We looked at everything. I was even like, where was Ted Bundy at that time? We have to look under every stone, every pebble.

2:04You're talking about hundreds of names here. Hundreds, thousands. She's driven. Her tenacity is just remarkable. I knew I was going to find him. It was a competition between him and I. The heart is pounding like, oh my God, this is real. I said. I found him. I know who killed Helene.

2:32Here's Josh Mankiewicz with A Promise to Helene.

2:4140 years is a long time. That's 40 winters here in Colorado and countless snowfalls. It was on a day like this that a young woman disappeared. Her name was Helene, and Helene had a friend named Kimberly, a friend who kept her word. Do you have any idea how many years you were signing up for when you made that promise? No. For those nearly four decades, Kimberly LaTourette kept her promise. Forty years looking at faces. Forty years meeting with detectives. 40 years retracing Helene's steps. When I make a promise and make a commitment, I follow through. Helene never knew it, but she had another friend.

3:29You never met Helene. You feel like you know her? I do. I feel like I know her well, as well as I possibly could. Sheenan was three years old when Helene disappeared. It was in 2019 that she accepted a challenge. I had to win. I wanted to win for Helene.

3:52Helene Pruszynski grew up as the baby daughter in a close-knit family of five in Hamilton, Massachusetts. Everybody that met her liked her company. Janet was her older sister by nine years. But you didn't treat her as like this annoying younger sibling. You guys were pretty tight. We were. We were. She was my best buddy. She was a surprise, I think, to the family. And she just brought sunshine and life to our household. I met her my freshman year of high school. She was a sophomore. We both were part of a singing group called Harmony. And that's really where I got to know Helene very well. She loved to sing.

4:37Yes, she loved to perform. I'm involved with Harmony, which is a musical group at the regional. Helene spoke about her school life for a classmate's local radio show. My philosophy on life, yeah, I have one. You should just, I don't know, be yourself and make the best of everything. And smile. Smile. Yeah, that's what I do all the time. Here she is, smiling along with Kimberly in their musical group. Also joining in, Kimberly's older brother, John. There was a real feeling of camaraderie, but also dedication to excellence in our singing. He remembers the day camaraderie turned to something else.

5:22We started talking, and for me, there was an immediate spark. It was that kind of fluttery feeling that you have when you know you're talking to somebody that you realize you really like immediately. They were just in love. They were, you know, each other's first loves in high school, but very genuine. It didn't last beyond high school, but John and Kimberly both kept in touch with Helene after graduation. Helene attended Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she sang in another group, the Wheatones. There she is in the back row with the black dress on. One more thing. As much as she loved her singing, Helene had another passion, journalism.

6:08What did you think was going to happen to her? Where was she headed? For great things. I saw Helene the Christmas December of 1979 at church. She told me that she was going off to Denver to do this internship to further her interests in journalism. and she was very excited about it. Helene arrived in January 1980 to begin that internship at a radio station in Denver, a long way from home. Fortunately, she had some relatives nearby. Your family didn't worry about her going off to Colorado because she wasn't going to be alone and she was staying with your aunt and uncle. Exactly. Then came that day, January 16th.

6:57Helene had barely been there two weeks when she grabbed the bus from the radio station around 6 p.m. to go back to her aunt and uncle's house. She'd made the commute before without a problem. That night, Helene Pruszynski never made it home. My parents called me and said they had just gotten a call from my aunt and uncle, and this was, I think, maybe 10 o 'clock at night. What did you think had happened? We had no idea because this was so unlike Helene. Something had to be wrong. The next morning, the news, none of it good, made its way back to Massachusetts. That was the first thing that came up.

7:36Hamilton, a woman found murdered in Denver, Colorado. And then from there, it was just horror and chaos. I went crazy. My son was 16 months old. I just grabbed my son and screamed and cried. And I just couldn't believe it was happening. Not to Helene. That moment would launch a 40-year quest for justice. To find Helene's killer. And to learn what happened on that wintry night. When we come back, detectives, family, friends, desperate for clues, grasping at straws. She gets off the bus, and then she just disappears. She just disappeared. Was it somebody that she worked with at the radio station?

8:26Could it be the boyfriend that she just broke up with in December? I thought I would be a suspect, actually.

8:47In Helene Brzezinski's small Massachusetts town, her family and friends sat stunned. She'd been found murdered in a snowy field in Colorado. She was my first love, so she had a very special place in my heart. And what happened to her was so devastating. Her wake was just horribly sad. I mean, no one could even speak. What could you say? You just go through the motions, and then when it's all over, And then you sit and you still say, I can't believe it's happened. Murder changes everything. Oh, it does. It changed the mood in rural Douglas County, Colorado. A high-profile murder case will do that.

9:36As snow began to fall in the field where the body of young Helen Pusinski was found, obliterating any clues, authorities... Back in 1980, Tony Spurlock was a rookie sheriff's deputy in Douglas County, Colorado. He later became the sheriff. What was Douglas like then? You know, Douglas County was a completely rural community between Colorado Springs and Denver. Not a lot of homicides back then. Maybe one every four years. Investigators determined Helene was last seen alive getting off that bus after work. From the bus driver, we knew that she got off that bus. From there... And nobody got off with her.

10:16She didn't have any trouble on the bus. There was no indication from any witnesses there that she was in any distress or anyone was following her. She gets off the bus and then she just disappears. She just disappeared. Helene's body was found the next day in a field nearly nine miles from that bus stop. She'd been stabbed nine times. An autopsy revealed she was also raped. What did you learn from the body, the scene, the autopsy? A number of her clothes were missing. She was wearing a mid-sized winter jacket for Colorado at that time and a scarf. She was lying on her back. She had no defensive wounds, but she had wounds on her knees and lower leg area, which would tell us that she had either crawled on her knees at some point into that rough area of the grass based upon the injuries.

11:11And she didn't have defensive wounds suggesting that she was not fighting her attacker. She was trying to go along with him, maybe get him to let her go. Right. And some of the forensics that they shared with us led some of us to believe that it wasn't a stranger, that it must be somebody that she knew. But she didn't know anybody there, did she? She didn't know anybody there, but she was working at a radio station. So was it somebody that she worked with at the radio station? Could it be somebody that she turned down for a date or a ride or something that got angry? Helene's friend Kimberly started thinking about the men in Helene's life.

11:49They were mostly just friends, but she passed their names to investigators anyway. You're giving the detectives names of people and saying, you need to check out this guy and this guy and this guy. Yes. We said, could it be the boyfriend that she just broke up with in December? Could it be, you know, I looked at my brother. I said, John, you know, could it be you? Of course, John was Helene's ex-boyfriend. As John worked through his own grief, it occurred to him police might come knocking. I thought they would. I thought I would be a suspect, actually. But they never contacted me. That's because investigators quickly determined John was in Massachusetts when the murder happened.

12:36Back in Colorado, investigators focused on what little evidence they had. Different world of law enforcement back then. No surveillance cameras, no license plate readers, none of that. This was during the age of law enforcement where we still did not have DNA. There was no technology that would help us track where she was at. Their old school police work did turn up something. A witness had seen a young man of medium build in his 20s or 30s. 5 '9", maybe 5 '10". He was standing by a car at the side of the road. It wasn't much. Investigators wanted more from the witness. Investigators put that person under hypnosis and used a sketch artist to draw a rendition of the person that she saw standing next to a car on Daniels Park Road, which would have been 100 yards or so away from where the body was found.

13:37That works, putting somebody under hypnosis? Here's the thing. I've been doing this business for 40 years, and I heard where it worked, and I've heard where it didn't work. The result was this sketch. Was it the killer? And would it lead anywhere? Coming up, a chilling new possibility. I was even like, where was Ted Bundy at that time? Could a serial killer have committed this crime? You're being questioned in connection with the crime of homicide. These prolific serial killers, that certainly fit. It certainly fit. When Dateline continues. The first few weeks of school are the best time to catch up on last year's skills.

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16:16In the weeks after Helene Brzezinski's murder in 1980, police at last had a possible image of their suspect, except it wasn't leading them any closer to her killer. You start showing that sketch around and you put it up every place and nobody knows who that is. That is correct. No one came forward and said, oh, I know who that guy is. Months went by, and detectives just hit a dead end. It was clear that they had exhausted all of the leads by the wintertime of 1980. Going into 81, the case had gone cold. For a victim's family, there may be no greater frustration than having a loved one's case go cold.

17:00Often someone needs to play the role of the tireless advocate. Even at only 26, Kimberly realized that and made her promise. Which was? I saw Helene's parents and I just promised them that I would not stop for as long as I was living and doing everything in my power to find Helene's killer. Everything to Kimberly meant constantly calling detectives, generating press coverage. Anything to keep a laser focus on the case. I didn't want to see her parents or her sister or her brother have to not only deal with just day-to-day living, take some of that burden off of them, and for them to feel good that somebody was still actively working on it and keeping that case alive.

17:56And then in 1983, the case did seem to gain new life. Throughout the 70s and early 80s, a number of serial killers had been grabbing headlines. We looked at every serial killer. I was even like, where was Ted Bundy at that time? You know, was he in Colorado? And so we even looked at every known serial killer that was active at that time to see if they could possibly have been in Colorado. And then there were these two men, Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole. They were drifters, arrested and jailed in the early 80s. and began telling law enforcement something astonishing, how they had killed more than 200 women in a dizzying spree across the country.

18:41Crime analysts there have painstakingly recorded hundreds of details of dress, mode of travel, and method of killing in the Lucas Toole murder cases. That's Dennis Murphy reporting on the pair for NBC Nightly News. They're known as serial killers, and according to law enforcement officials, there are at least 35 of them roaming the country now. And these two admitted killers told police about one particular victim in Colorado. They confessed to committing the murder of Helene Pruszynski. What was unique about them is that detectives often thought that there might have been another person maybe in the car waiting for whoever they took out into the field.

19:26That was one of the theories. And so these two guys who work together, these prolific serial killers, that certainly fit. It certainly fit. It's pretty seductive when a couple of serial killers who are on the hook for a lot of other murders confess to your murder because you can close a lot of cases if you can link them to these guys. That's right. Obviously, they were like, this is awesome. We've got a confession. Colorado investigators headed for Texas to interview Lucas themselves. Did there be any question in connection with the crime or homicide? The detectives showed him a map and asked him to pinpoint where he and Tool picked up Elaine.

20:05We stopped her on the street and took her out of the car. And we took her on the way out the country. Took her a bunch of rocks and stuff out in there. She was stabbed to death and raped and covered up with, I think, a sheet and some plywood. Then Lucas added another detail. She was stabbed to death and shot once, I think, in the head. Who shot her? I shot her in the head. At that moment, they had a problem. Helene was stabbed, not shot. To detectives, this confession was starting to sound phony. They dug deeper, looking into Lucas and Toole's long trail of arrest records. We could link them to other jurisdictions by other legal documents that could be authenticated, that there would be impossible for them to be in two paces at one time.

21:05So they weren't in Colorado at the time that Helene was killed? They were not in Colorado at the time she was killed. Why would somebody confess to a murder that they did not commit? What would be in it for them? They were becoming famous. And they knew that they were going to spend the rest of their life in prison, if not on death row. So why not be there as the most prolific serial killer in the country? Exactly. As for any other serial killers on the prowl back then, none could be placed in Colorado at the time. Ted Bundy actually had spent time there in the late 70s, but he was behind bars in Florida at the time of Helene's murder.

21:44the serial killer leads had dried up. Was that disappointing when that didn't pan out? That was disappointing because we knew at that point we were again back at point zero with nothing to work on. It wouldn't happen quickly, but over time this case would go from point zero to a hundred with a young detective up for a challenge. Coming up. What I focus on when I'm working a case, What drives me the most is the victims. A new investigator and a bold new approach. You're talking about hundreds of names here. Hundreds, thousands. I knew I was going to find him. Really, it was a competition between him and I.

22:40Helene Pruszynski's murder had become the textbook example. of a cold case. But in 1998, a ray of hope sprang up. It came from a somewhat newer textbook. The use of DNA evidence had become a revolutionary tool in criminal investigations. And Douglas County detectives realized there was DNA from their suspect in evidence. There was body fluids on these pieces of material or swabs from the autopsy that had not been tested. And so we were very excited at that time because we had an abundance of DNA evidence available to us. Investigators were able to put that DNA kit into the FBI's database of criminal profiles, known as CODIS.

23:28That's a huge lucky break. Very huge. Except it doesn't match anybody in CODIS. Doesn't match to anyone. Spurlock and his team were disappointed, and so was Kimberly. but always mindful of the promise she'd made. Kimberly wasn't about to let the case freeze up again. I would jump on it and shake the trees, and I was never met poorly. I was always met with welcome arms by the Colorado detectives. She was key in connecting us to other people that we felt was very important to the case. In 2004, Kimberly was arranging a reunion concert of their singing group Harmony. to celebrate Helene's birthday when she had an idea.

24:14I said, it's time, we need to get this solved. Let's fly out on the anniversary of Helene's murder and retrace her steps in real time. I mean, you know that detectives had done that before, probably right after the murder and probably a bunch of times since. What did you think you were going to get out of it that they hadn't done? Create a media stir in the news, hoping that the killer would see us, would know that there's eyes still on the case, make a lot of noise. Four high school friends of a young woman murdered 26 years ago say there is still hope that their friend's killer will be found.

24:53The plan worked. They made all the local newscasts. 30 of us decided to band together to do whatever we could to make sure that this case is reopened and solved. They also set up a website about the case, hoping the killer might click on it and reveal his internet address. That was our hope, was just to get the worm to crawl out from under the rock. That didn't happen. The worm stayed hidden. He did. In 2009, Helene's brother died. Then her mom and dad followed in 2012. Sister Janet was the only one left. You've settled into this life where you don't know. Right. It was heartbreaking. By June 2019, Helene had been dead almost 40 years, the coldest of Colorado cases.

25:48That's when a new detective, Shannon Jensen, was assigned to the case. What I focus on when I'm working a case, what drives me the most is the victims.

26:01Jensen had been a competitive rower at Cal Berkeley before she enrolled at the police academy and joined law enforcement. She got to know Helene through all the pictures and information in the case file. And she was hoping to get to know someone else. What do you know about your unknown suspect? You know it's a man. You know he's between the ages of... We don't know his age. We know that the witness said he was in his early 20s. But ultimately, nobody else saw him. Detective Jensen decided the key to all of this was that DNA profile. She decided to consult with a genealogist and upload the suspect's profile into a website called GEDmatch, a site people use to track down relatives.

26:45But it's also a tool for law enforcement. Absolutely. They allow law enforcement to upload kits or DNA. That DNA is matched with other kits who opt in who want to assist law enforcement. So Jensen started looking for any people with DNA similar to that of the suspect. This is not just a matter of plugging jumbles of code into a computer. It's the equivalent of old-fashioned shoe-leather detective work, but for the 21st century. That's because a similar DNA profile is just another lead that needs running down. So instead of knocking on doors, Jensen was picking up the phone. Interesting. Thank you for returning my call.

27:29Asking for cooperation from possible distant matches. You're this disembodied voice on the phone saying, tell me about one of your relatives who might be a murderer, and I need you to help me. And I need you to give up some personal information. Yes. Would they be willing to share their entire family history on the chance they were related to a murderer? It's a big ask. And I would contact these matches, and they would give me their family trees and any family history that they had so that we could fill in, say, for adoptions or unknown pregnancies. You're talking about hundreds of names here.