In L.A., a Case Straight Out Of 'Arsenic And Old Lace'

LOS ANGELES -- As prosecutors tell it, the two women would almost certainly have gotten away with driving over one homeless man to collect on the insurance policies they coaxed him into signing. But then they drove over a second one.

And so Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, found themselves in Los Angeles Superior Court recently, facing life in prison on charges of murders that challenge even Hollywood's powers of diabolical imagination.

The pair are accused of killing Paul Vados, whose body was found in an alley on the city's west side in 1999, and Kenneth McDavid, whose body was found in an alley a few miles away six years later. Each had been crushed beneath a car. And each had been housed, fed and heavily insured by the women, who together collected almost $3 million from policies they had taken out on the men's lives.

The women wore matching black pantsuits to a courtroom filled to overflowing for the selection of jurors not yet tainted by the torrent of publicity around the case.

"It sounds like 'Arsenic and Old Lace,' " said Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels, "but it doesn't have Cary Grant."

It has almost everything else. As police and prosecutors lay out the story in court filings, Vados's death raised no particular suspicion. He was 73, had fallen out of touch with his family and spent time living on the street.

"If they had just stopped there, they never would have gotten caught," Samuels said of the women. "They just did it one too many times."

When McDavid's body turned up in 2005, his head crushed by the undercarriage of a car that was later linked to Golay and Rutterschmidt, the Los Angeles police officer who caught the call mentioned it to a colleague. The colleague thought, " 'God, I had a case like that in '99,' " the prosecutor said. "So he pulls it. Sure enough, it's the same women, same method of death."

The discovery triggered a joint federal, state and local investigation that detailed a scheme that, if proved, was extraordinary in its coldbloodedness.

"All they have is circumstantial evidence," said Roger Jon Diamond, who is defending Golay. "They don't have any eyewitnesses. They don't have a confession. They don't have any fingerprints."

The defense attorney predicted acquittal, noting that California jury instructions say that if two reasonable explanations can be drawn from evidence, jurors must accept the one that points toward innocence.

But court documents show a lot for the defense to explain away. Prosecutors say Rutterschmidt took Vados under her wing in 1997, approaching him as one Hungarian immigrant to another. She found him an apartment and persuaded him to sign life insurance policies totaling $760,000.