Pennsylvania State Police have identified James Richard Clark Sr. as the man responsible for the rape and strangulation deaths of two young women in the 1970s, closing cold cases that had gone unsolved for nearly five decades. Clark died in 2023 at age 66 of natural causes, meaning he will never face charges.
Investigators announced the findings at a news conference Thursday, saying advances in DNA testing finally linked Clark to the killings of Brenda Ritter, 18, and Susan Rush, 21.
Rush disappeared on Nov. 24, 1976, after leaving a shopping mall, according to the City of Washington Police Department. She had planned to meet her family at church but never showed up. Her brother found her car parked along a street the next morning, Thanksgiving Day, and her body was later discovered inside the trunk.
Ritter vanished from her boyfriend’s house in 1977. Her body was later found on a hillside, and investigators determined she had been sexually assaulted and strangled, the same manner of death as Rush.
At the time of the killings, Clark would have been 19 when Rush died and 20 at the time of Ritter’s death, police said.
How the case was cracked
Evidence from Ritter’s killing was sent to the state police crime lab in late 2028, producing a DNA profile of an unknown man. That profile was entered into CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, and searched weekly for a match without success.
The breakthrough came in May 2025, when testing at Cybergenetics’ laboratory showed the same man had killed both women. Investigators said Clark left DNA evidence at both crime scenes, and additional forensic genealogy work, including testing at Identifinders International, helped them zero in on him before further lab work confirmed the match.
Could there be more victims?
Pennsylvania State Police Cpl. James Petrosky said he suspects Clark may not have stopped at two victims.
“I believe that once you’re a serial killer, you’re always a serial killer. I believe there could potentially be more victims out there,” Petrosky said.
Dr. Kris Mohandie, a former LAPD psychologist and FBI behavioral analysis consultant, told Fox News Digital that it is common for the number of known victims tied to a serial killer to fall short of the real total, and that new forensic technology is often what eventually closes that gap.
“I think it’s normal and normative that the number of known cases is always less than what has been detected,” Mohandie said. “These kind of guys often have more victims out there than they’ve been known to be connected to. The reality is that there are usually more crimes attributable to serial offenders than they’re ever held to account for.”
Mohandie also said it isn’t unusual for offenders to stop killing for long stretches, sometimes for years, either because they sense investigators are closing in or because their personal lives change.
“There are a lot of cases where they do go dormant, what we call a cooling off period, and that can be because they realize it’s too hot for them to continue to offend, that they’ll get caught, so it’s a strategy to avoid being captured. It may mean that they’ve had a close call with being captured, and it spooked them, so they’ll go quiet for a while because of that,” he said.
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