By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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.
Insurance companies look most closely at deaths that occur within two years of a new policy. Police say that explains why Vados did not turn up dead until Nov. 8, 1999. Searching Golay's apartment seven years later, police found a movie ticket stub from the night before his death, for a 10:45 showing of "The Bone Collector."
The women filed a missing-persons report 10 days later, claiming that Vados was a cousin to one and the fiance of the other. They told police they found the TV on in his apartment but no sign of him.
"We are very sorry to learn of your fiance's death," Mutual of Omaha wrote to Golay a month later, enclosing a pamphlet called "Grief and Healing." Eight months later, Golay wrote to the insurance company to threaten a lawsuit over "outrageous delays." Within weeks she received a check for $25,000.
"Helen is a tough negotiator," said Peter Mullins, a real estate agent who sold Golay four properties, including two of the apartment buildings that appeared to provide her with a reasonable living, five blocks from the ocean in Santa Monica. "Helen knew the business inside out, as far as the technical aspects," he said, referring to real estate.
Because of her frugality and attention to appearance, Golay seemed to Mullins "a typical old-fashioned sort of matriarch who ran the show with the Chanel suit and the helmet hair and the handbag."
"But I have a soft spot for all of them," he added, "because they're just so tough."
Rutterschmidt lived across town in Hollywood. It's unclear how the women became friends, though in court filings a detective quoting a relative of one said the pair "came across one another in the '70s and found that they had a common interest in fleecing people."
"Dear Helen," Rutterschmidt wrote in a May 2000 letter investigators found, "I have a few very interesting and good life insurance company listings. They pay regardless of illness, or accidental cause. (No hassle, no investigations.)"
Before signing, Rutterschmidt also hinted at her sense of humor and joie de vivre. "Regards, and kisses, Olga," she added. "I enjoy life to the fullest with my G-string friend who visits me barefoot."
In August 2002, Golay wrote complaining of pain from plastic surgery. "I better look good after this hell and live long enough to enjoy this 'face job.' If only I could get a new 21 year old body for this brain I've been working on for 70 years."
Around the same time, Golay approached McDavid, 50, at an Episcopal church in Hollywood, offering him an apartment in exchange for signing a $500,000 insurance policy, prosecutors say. Rutterschmidt had a rubber stamp made of his signature, used to sign policies that eventually were worth a total of $7 million.
His body was found June 21, 2005, in an alley in Westwood near UCLA. The same night, Golay phoned AAA for a tow a block away. The car was not her Mercedes SUV but a 1999 Mercury Sable registered to a woman whose ID had been stolen, then used to purchase the car at an Orange County lot. A neighbor happened to photograph it parked behind Golay's apartment not long afterward.
Months after McDavid's death, police tracked down the car -- which was abandoned where the tow truck driver testified that Golay said to leave it, eventually impounded and then sold at auction -- and traces of McDavid's blood were found on the undercarriage. A toxicology report said that traces of alcohol and sedatives were found in Golay's medicine cabinet.
"The combination of the alcohol and prescription drugs would have put him over the top," a detective speculated. "They then drove him to the alley, pushed him out of the car and backed up over him." The detective noted the absence of leg injuries usually seen in hit-and-run situations. "In the process, they broke the fuel line."
Insurers paid out $2.2 million for McDavid, most of which went to Golay. "They were paying -- well, most of the time Helen was paying -- premiums on 15 policies, paying rent, paying utilities," Samuels said. "Gotta be $3,000 a month. They've got a huge investment in this guy." Investigators found evidence that Golay tried at least once to get Rutterschmidt's name removed from a policy.
The women were arrested in May 2006, and their time in Los Angeles County jails is marked by their appearance: Each has hair that is gray to her shoulders, where it resumes the darker shade it was colored while still free. Cosmetics are forbidden in lockup, and the judge refused a defense request to allow Golay "to utilize tweezers to pluck her eyebrows and to use eye makeup."
Though police found more rubber stamps with signatures of other names, investigators say they know of no more victims. They did look hard at Fred Downie, 97, who was hit by a car and killed in 2000 after selling his house and giving Golay the profit. But the driver stopped.
"We think that's all of them," Samuels said.
It remains impossible to know for sure, however, given the murkiness of the two worlds the women are accused of exploiting: the homeless and the insurance industry.
"We still get all the mail," said Marlene Blum, 25, who rents Golay's former apartment on Ocean Park Boulevard. "Recently a letter came from an insurance company and I held it up to the light -- and there was a check in it for $45,000."
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