Pennsylvania State Police identified James Richard Clark Sr. as the man who sexually assaulted and killed Brenda Ritter and Susan Rush in separate 1970s cases. Clark died at age 66 on July 17, 2023, of natural causes, according to the supplied report. Police said he was 19 when Rush was killed and 20 at the time of Ritter’s homicide.
Rush, 21, disappeared on Nov. 24, 1976, after leaving a shopping mall. The City of Washington Police Department said she was expected to meet her family at church but did not arrive. Her brother found her car on a street the next morning, Thanksgiving Day. Her body was found in the trunk.
Ritter, 18, disappeared from her boyfriend’s home in 1977. Authorities later found her body on a hillside and determined she had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Investigators’ identification of Clark followed years of evidence testing. The report says evidence from Ritter’s killing was sent to the Pennsylvania State Police crime lab in late 2028, where analysts developed an unknown male DNA profile. The profile was entered into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, and searched weekly, but no match was found. Testing conducted at Cybergenetics’ laboratory in May 2025 indicated that the same man was responsible for both deaths.
Police said Clark left DNA at both crime scenes. The report also credits advances in testing at several laboratories, including Identifinders International, with helping investigators focus on Clark before further testing confirmed the match.
At a news conference described in the report as taking place on a Thursday, Pennsylvania State Police Cpl. James Petrosky said he believed there could be additional victims. The report does not identify any other cases linked to Clark, and police did not announce further victim identifications.
Dr. Kris Mohandie, a former Los Angeles Police Department psychologist and FBI behavioral analysis consultant, told Fox News Digital that serial offenders may have victims who have not been connected to them. He said advances in forensic technology can help investigators identify links between old cases. Mohandie also described periods without known offending—sometimes called cooling-off periods—as potentially associated with a perpetrator’s concern about being caught or changes in personal circumstances. Those comments were general observations, not evidence that Clark committed other crimes or went dormant.
The report’s account contains an unresolved timeline issue: it says the Ritter evidence was sent for laboratory testing in late 2028, although the source publication date is November 2026. The date is therefore in the future relative to publication and cannot be reconciled from the supplied material. The reported identification and DNA findings should be treated with that inconsistency in mind.
