48 Hours - The Last Take

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

In 1977, Christa Helm was a model turned actress whose Hollywood story came to a bloody end. She left behind a trove of scandalous secrets, a long list of high-profile suspects, and a daughter who’s been searching for the truth ever since. "48 Hours" correspondent Maureen Maher reports. This classic "48 Hours" episode last aired on 10/4/2008. Watch all-new episodes of “48 Hours” on Saturdays and stream on demand on Paramount+.

She was my movie star mommy. Someone has been walking around for 30 years, having committed this heinous crime on my mother. I want to know what happened to her. My mom was killed February 12, 1977. I was nine. We found all kinds of things. Two huge boxes.

All kinds of evidence, all kinds of interviews, all kinds of information that nobody had looked at before. Nobody had looked at before they were just tucked away. The crime scene where Krista Helm was murdered in 1977, she had left a party in West Hollywood, and she was attacked and stabbed numerous times. She was a very good-looking girl. How's my technique coming?

Oh, you're doing fun. She was not against posing and seductive type photos. She was a young Hollywood starlet, Party girl. She hung out with Joe Namath, Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty. Jack Nicholson, the Shaw of Iran. We knew that she kept a diary.

My mom was a very smart woman. I can definitely see her keeping track of things. We don't know if there may have been extortion. A lot of people have told us that there's a diary that's missing. They think that the diary was what was taken from her body when she died and that she was going to blackmail people with the diary. We don't know all the names in that book. We know that she did have some tapes of famous people sexually.

I could send you into a sexual frenzy. She had intimate relations and intimate knowledge of a lot of famous people. I think it's going to be a huge surprise when people find out who committed this crime. She got in way overhead. She was playing with the big boys. Somebody killed her because of what she knew. The dream was me standing in a room overlooking a parking lot. The wall is glass.

I see my mother walking through. I noticed someone coming up behind her. They've got a knife in their hand. And I just am screaming and screaming and screaming for someone to help her. Krista Helm's daughter, Nicole, doesn't want us to mention her last name. or reveal where she lives, because her mother's killer has never been caught. There was a strength and a drive in me that I always felt from a very young age came from her. And I held on to that as my little piece of my mom.

Where did you come from? She had a charisma that was just overwhelming. She had a warmth that just made people just be drawn to her on a regular basis. She was powerful and strong and took no bull. She was a very complicated, beautiful human. being. And says Nicole, her mother was born to be a star. From the time she was a little girl, she would dance and sing and tell everybody she was going

to be a movie star when she grew up. And of course, in little Milwaukee, Wisconsin, no one believed her. Krista Helm had the kind of story that Hollywood legends are made from. Smart, sexy, and stunningly beautiful. She was the classic small-town girl with a big Hollywood dream. Krista was determined to become a star, and she had the energy and unyielding ambition to make it happen. I remember her one time saying, well, Darlene, I'm not going to be a Midwestern housewife. Darlene Thorson was Krista's lifelong friend.

We had a saying between the two of us, all's fair and love and war, and she lived by those words. Nothing would really stop her from getting what she wanted. Not even a shotgun wedding when Krista was just 17 years old. She was a teenager. He owned a karate studio. They were married in Chicago, and the morning after their wedding, she woke up in their honeymoon suite, and my father was gone. That was back in 1967.

Nicole came along a few months later. But within a couple of years, Nicole's young and ambitious mother grew restless and took off to follow her dream. The first stop, the bright lights of New York, where she found work as a model. Taking the city by storm would be impossible with a toddler in tow, so Nicole was left behind in the care of a good friend. But Krista promised mother and daughter would one day be together. I was supposed to be with her when I turned 10.

Until then, Nicole was a visitor in her mother's life. When I was with her, she made me feel so. so important. The moments that I had with her really strengthened the belief that, you know, I wasn't. She didn't just throw me away. She was really waiting until I was 10, until she felt safe. Her motto good looks and splashy personality made Krista unnatural for New York's party scene in the early 70s. If she walked in a room, if everyone in the room hadn't stopped to notice her walk in, then she would come back in again and get it right. Krista's sister Marisa Rahm was also a sometime actress.

She was often at Krista's side. Very driven, very ambitious. Really, yeah. One of the first people Krista met in New York was a wealthy patron of the arts named Stuart Duncan. He took an interest in Krista's career, opening doors for her. She was throwing parties for big names, the Rolling Stones, for, she actually got bachelor's, of the month with Cosmopolitan, there were definitely big figures in her life. The Shah of Iran, she dated, and he sent her jewels.

Krista also picked up a fancy new best friend for life. A flamboyant New York clothing designer named Lenny Barron. She just had him around sort of feeding her sense of stardom, like the entourage. And then, in 1973, Krista got the break she'd been waiting for. Stuart Duncan gave her a starring role in a movie called Let's Go For Broke. When they were filming hair and makeup and people just fussing over her all around, and she was in control of the whole scenario, and that was my mom. We forgot the customary bow.

The movie opened up in Cincinnati in 1974 and promptly closed in just four days. Undeterred, a few months later, Krista headed straight for Hollywood. But there's only going to be one winner in this contest, and you're looking at her. She landed BitRoles in Wonder Woman. If personal things I'd like to go over with you, it won't take long. And Starsky and Hutch. How about an 8-510 glossy of my 6'2 boyfriend? It was always a great adventure when I'd go to visit my mom.

Nicole remembers visiting her mother at a Beverly Hills home. This was a spectacular mansion. It was absolutely enormous. I'd never seen anything like it. It was the first place I'd ever seen that had maids quarters. That mansion belonged to a famous financier, Bernie Cornfield, who was once profiled by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. Bernie goes no place without companions,

principally female, notably attractive, and inevitably more than one. Sitting on the couch, I was very, very young, and there was a big, huge party going on and lots of smoke in the air. And I kept just staring at this fellow's lips. They were the most fascinating thing I had ever seen. I just stared and stared and stared and stared. It was Mick Jagger. We were hanging out in clubs that Warren Beatty was at, Ryan O'Neill, Jack Nicholson.

If you were a beautiful enough starlet, you know, you would get to go into the in-in-in-in clubs, and so that's where we were usually hanging out. Krista was not only ambitious and adventurous, she also liked to keep score. Her friends say she kept a secret sex diary, complete with a rating system. What she did was she gave it out these people a rating, like, you know, one to ten, so to speak. While Krista partied in Hollywood, Nicole prepared for that much-talked-about mother-daughter reunion. But it would never happen. Krista Helm was stabbed to death. I can still remember it, and it was a, I couldn't tell if it was a screaming baby or a cat being killed.

It was a horrendous, horrendous scream. It was terrifying. Actor John Grise was 19 then. He was staying at his mother's house just down the street from where Krista was attacked. I remember I jumped out of bed, and of course I, you know, my father had recently passed away, and I had his pistol, and I pulled his pistol up. I was frightened to death. It sounded like it was happening right here. Grise stood in his yard, but didn't hear anything more or see anything, and went back inside.

The next day, the sheriff came knocking on the door, and they asked if any of us had heard anything unusual in the middle of the night. And then they told me that somebody had been murdered. And I remember the police officer saying, had I walked. into the street and looked down I would have seen her. But I only looked down the sidewalk. Turns out, Grise had his own connection with Krista. There were a lot of girls like Krista. I met her a couple of times.

Beautiful girls who just kind of seem to work their way through the various corners of Hollywood. The reality hit me that I wasn't going to go have this beautiful life with my mommy that I'd been dreaming about for so long. And I fell to my knees out. outside of the school and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. As the detective started to investigate, they soon realized the case would be very difficult. With Krista's complicated life, there were plenty of people who might want to kill her.

I think that she was a little girl that made it big in Hollywood, a little girl that knew too much. I'll come back with help. It's the only chance for all of us. First, detectives thought Krista Helms' murder, that night back in 1977, might be connected to another sensational killing. The stabbing of actor Salminio, best known for co-starring with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. The papers had a field day with the similarities. Krista had been stabbed and bludgeon to death in front of her agent's house in West Hollywood. Minio was murdered one year earlier on the very same day, February 12th, in the very same neighborhood.

There were no known witnesses in either case. But the Salminio lead fizzled. The suspect in his murder was believed to be in jail when Krista was killed. The 21-year-old murder suspect had to say in his jail cell when advised of his charges last... So, detectives started to look more closely at Krista's celebrity studied, love life and her infamous diary. Research, perhaps, for a tell-all book. She was someday going to write a book, and she was going to expose all these people, and it

was going to be a bestseller. But Krista's scandalous diary had vanished. It may have been in her purse which was missing from the crime scene. With that crucial piece of evidence gone, investigators hit a string of the dead ends. I think the initial investigation was a complete mess. I think that they didn't pay attention. She was a young Hollywood starlet, party girl. Nicole mourned the loss of her mother and the life they were supposed to have together. She raised her own family in the Northeast, but a few years ago, she felt compelled to find out what really happened. I think that it's

my job to make sure that people know who she was and what happened to her. She went through, way too much in her life to have her death be so dismissed. After years of pressure from Nicole, a new generation of detectives took the case. Larry Brandenburg and Tom Harris are L.A. Sheriff's Department hotshots, homicide detectives with the cold case unit. How do you go about investigating

a murder that occurred three decades ago? Well, actually, try and go back in time yourself. I mean, you try and go back and look at it the way it looked that night. When we're talking about it's in the middle to late 70s, I know back then it was a lot of the free love, a lot of the... Sex? Sex, drugs.

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Krista's written diary wasn't the only way she kept track of that long list of lovers. It turns out Krista was tape recording her sex capades with all those celebrity boyfriends. I promise to cause you nothing but pleasure. She did have some tapes of famous people sexually. A well-known list of people? Can you tell us any of those names? I don't think it would be fair to those folks at this point to do that. How significant do you consider those tapes?

They're a very significant part of this case. Nothing but pleasure. because those sex tapes could have supplied a motive for someone to kill Krista. We don't know if there may have been extortion or a thought of extortion. That scared me a lot. Her friend Darlene warned her against making the tapes. I thought it was dangerous. I thought she was playing with fire. But here's a shocker. Just like Krista's diary, most of those tapes have also disappeared.

The hunt for the missing tapes has led detectives to another new twist. It's an angle right out of the Sopranos. You're a mate guy now. It's your time to make some real money. And I get to relax a little. Tony Sourico is the actor best known as Polly Walnuts of the Sopranos. But 30 years ago, Sourico was a Brooklyn tough guy trying to make it in Hollywood. Here he is in a 1978 movie, Fingers.

What's on you, my pal? Back in 1977, Tony Serico was an upcoming actor, and he knew some of the same people that Krista knew. We know that after Krista was killed, Tony Seriko was sent to her residence to check on the welfare and watch over her roommate for a few days and to make sure that she was okay. According to the roommate, Tony Serrico removed some tapes out of Krista's room. never to be seen again. Krista's roommate, who to this day is too frightened to talk publicly, also told detectives that Tony took some of Krista's furs and clothing. At the time, police never questioned Tony.

That's Tony Serico right there with the blood, but that's part of a film they were making. But in 2006, when the new detectives took over, they paid him a visit. Have you spoken to him? Yes, we have. Has he been cooperative? Has he been cooperative? Not exactly. Mr. Serico told us at first that he didn't even remember the victim.

He didn't really know Krista and that he didn't even remember that she had been killed. And then his memory got a little bit better that, yeah, I think I had heard about her being killed, but I didn't really know her that well. Just met her in passing. According to detectives, Serrico denied going to Krista's apartment and denied he even knew the roommate. We started getting to the point of where he was on that day and asked him those type of questions and the interview was abruptly stopped by his attorney.

And we explained to Mr. Srikal also that he was not, was not a suspect in this investigation. He was considered a witness and someone that we were trying to glean information from. Later, most of Krista's missing things did turn up. At the home of Krista's closest friend, Lenny Barron, her designer and confidant. All of the furniture, all of the crystals, the Shaw of Iran had given my mom a lot of crystals and jewels and beautiful things. She had fur coats, all of which were found in his home. Police now think it was Lenny who sent Tony Serrico to clean out Krista's apartment to protect her. We believe that he didn't want her reputation soil, didn't want the information out there about her surreptitiously recording people, or even her sexual activities. If he had so many of her things, her personal effects, is it possible that he may have been the one who had the audio tapes and the written diary? It's possible.

Possible, but Lenny can't tell us. He died about 10 years ago. And Tony Serico's manager says Tony didn't want to talk to us. But there's another new clue. This time from Krista's friend, Darlene, who never spoke with police until now. Right before Krista died, she sent Darlene a postcard with a cryptic message. She said, Dar. I am in way over my head here. I'm into something that I can't get out of.

Rocky is the one that said that Krista's sitting on $300,000 worth of dope. If we could find her, it might be helpful. This is another gentleman. We haven't been able to locate. Can't talk to him because he's dead. Without Krista Helm's sex diary to guide them, detectives Tom Harris and Larry Brandenburg have had to dig deeper to find people who were involved with her.

We've got to find Rocky. They've discovered that Krista may well have been in. may well have been in over her head. She had a lifestyle that was provocative. She had a lot of upscale friends that were famous, some of them. And then she also had a lot of friends that were on the seedy side of life, if you will, street people. So Job 1 has been tracking down all those people

Krista socialized with in her two years in Hollywood. If someone is violently murdered, you're never going to forget that. So far, though, few of them remember much or are saying much. It's very interesting to go back and talk to these people because people can't remember what their lies were. They can remember what the truth is. The neighborhood that responded to in 1977 was a pretty upscale neighborhood.

I was the lead detective on the case. I think we came in from this direction. We drove in this way. Brandenburg and Harris returned to the crime scene with the one witness who is happy to cooperate. She was probably about like this. Okay. 83-year-old retired Los Angeles detective, Larry Gansy. Earrings.

She had earrings on, I know that. They're hoping to jog the memory of the original investigator. She had no identification. We don't know who is it. About the night, Krista died. We found out that she was a party girl. She had come from a party with a girlfriend. She was headed over to see her agent,

Sandy Smith. The house looks the same now as it did then, didn't? Exactly. This is me right here. They also opened the box of evidence Gansy started 31 years ago. Bringing back some memories? Well, yeah.

She was bleeding quite profusely there. You could see that she had numerous stab wounds in the chest. Our thoughts then we had a rage killing. That somebody was really upset with this girl. What strikes you is... odd or unusual or interesting about this case? Well, the way she was attacked really sticks out. It was violent, a lot of passion involved.

She was stabbed 22 times. 22 times. Yes. Bludgeoned also. This doesn't strike you as a random act of violence. No. It would be more of somebody was very mad at her. There was a sigh to Krista that seemed.

to provoke people. You sound almost charming. Because while many thought she was a barely passable actress on camera, off camera, she was an infamous drama queen. Krista was the role of her lifetime. She loved the daily drama. One of her recurring dramas start her beautiful and younger sister, Marisa, who learned the hard way the lengths Krista would go to.

We'd party together and we'd go to this party and that party. I was excited that I was meeting this actor and dating that actor and they were calling me and she knew that and was really upset that it was me. When she started to see that I was attracting more attention than her, that started to wear on her. In an apparent jealous rage, Krista cut her sister off and threw her out of the apartment. She basically said, okay, now you're out on your own. She didn't care if I didn't have any money or a place to live. That sounds like there was a very cold side to her.

Oh, just a definite cold. Cut it off and get back in her own world and push you aside. Would she step over bodies to get what she wanted? Would she use people? Yes, I would say so. Is that possible that that has played into what happened to her? I've always presumed that that was a part of what happened to her. Harrison Brandenburg thinks so too.

I wonder if Krista might finally. have crossed the wrong man. As they dig deeper into the case, they find a startling confession of sorts. This guy bragged about doing the killing. His name, Rudy Mazzella. And he was known for his Anything Goes parties where Krista was a frequent guest. He was very flamboyant, very strange. He would do certain things like wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and a gun belt with a six gun on it. the way he walked around the house. But Mazzela was also a known drug dealer. He was a thug.

With a bad reputation. He's a violent kind of guy. He's known to carry guns and knives. We spoke to his ex-wife, who were deathly afraid of him, said that he would threaten her. What was Krista doing with him? He was in that other circle of friends,

what we call the dark side of her life, the street people, the drug dealers, that would come to these parties. Rudy is a pretty big guy, pretty powerful and scary guy. In this interview in July of 1977, a woman who frequented Mazzella's house told police what she had heard about him. My boyfriend told me Rudy had told him that he had murdered Krista. He didn't give a reason, but he said that he had murdered Krista. And was that followed up on back then?

They did question Rudy, yes. They questioned him. He denied many involvement. Rudy was the kind of guy that would brag about things that maybe he didn't do just to get some notoriety and to boost his standing with people. With no other evidence, time is eliot to the crime. The original investigators left it at that. Was he serious? We don't know because the person he bragged to is deceased, and so is Rudy. So we can't talk to either one of them anymore.

And now, three decades later, the Cold case squad can only wonder, is there a, any other lead. I don't know that we can actually eliminate anybody at this point. It does seem like something or someone had Krista spooked. My last visit with her, she had actually said that she was leaving Hollywood. Nicole now believes her mother realized she was in some kind of danger. I think that the fight just got to be a little too difficult for her. It got ugly.

There were a lot of dark people and dark lifestyles that she didn't do. really want to be part of. Years into the Christa Helm case, detectives Larry Brandenberg and Tom Harris have uncovered a long string of boyfriends and girlfriends that Krista left in her wake. They now suspect jealousy may have been a motive in her murder. We've identified people that she was involved with

who had other girlfriends, and those girlfriends found out about Krista. There were a couple other females that we believe that she was involved with sexually. They were upset because she would be with men. So she had relationships with both men and women. Yes. And felt no compunction or loyalty to be with any one person. Yeah.

And no one person was off limits to her. Yeah, I mean, that was her lifestyle. The detectives are now focusing on Krista's final stab at fame. A recording session, she said. set up in the winter of 1977. Go on and dance, dance, dance, child. They've gotten a firsthand account of the session from backup singer Debbie Danilo. She and Krista became good friends.

Once in a while you meet someone and it's like you've known them forever. Soulmates, maybe. And when I met Krista, it was like she was an instant soul sister. The detectives now believe that the session exploded in a storm of jealousy and betrayal. It began when Krista apparently got involved with the records producer. The top 10, the top 25.

Well-known DJ Frankie Crocker. With Fast Ranking in the city. And I think that she was probably a boyfriend or sleeping with him. And so he had a beautiful Beverly Hills mansion and part of the music scene, part of the party crowd. And what was he like? Oh, very full of himself, rich.

I'm somebody in Hollywood, you're not. Debbie says Krista flaunted the relationship. I remember that day telling Krista, I said, I don't think that it's going to work out with Frankie because I don't think he likes the way I'm handling the songs. And she said, don't worry about Frankie. I've got him by the balls. Debbie also claims Krista was having an affair with the other backup singer.

Her name was Patty Collins, and Patty didn't like to share. Patty was very, very jealous of anyone being around Krista. Very jealous, very, you know, just watch your step kind of thing. As if things weren't complicated enough, the Sessions keyboard player Blair Aronson has told detectives that he was casually involved with Debbie. We were told originally that they were, boyfriend, girlfriend, some come back and say maybe casual dating, some come back and say, well, that, you know, they were a pretty heavy item. I believe that Debbie had a more serious commitment

to Blair than Blair did to Debbie. Then Blair dropped a bombshell. He told detectives that he slept with Krista the night before she died and that Debbie caught him. We interviewed Blair Aronson and he explained to us that he and Krista had. I'd spent the night together, we're in bed, and they got up, were sitting on the edge of the bed and happened to look over, and saw Debbie looking through the window waving at him. Blair and Krista were startled, obviously, by seeing her outside the window, but they laughed about it, and she ran away. Debbie adamantly denies any involvement with Blair, or that she saw him in bed with Krista, and Blair declined to speak to 48 hours. But detectives find the entire recording session suspicious, especially since Debbie and Patty were both abruptly pushed out. It seems Patty took the news especially hard.

And apparently she was very upset about it at that time. We don't know if she was removed by Frankie Crocker or by Krista herself. When Debbie talked to the original investigators about Krista, she pointed the finger squarely at Patty. I told him that she had a female lover that seemed that she was extremely jealous. That was my first thought that maybe her female lover killed her. Because every time that I was around her, she seemed so threatened and so dark. Just days after Krista's murder, Debbie packed up her entire L.A. life, disguised herself in a wig and then made a mad dash out of town. I didn't want anybody to know who I was.

I was afraid that somebody had killed her because she knew something, she wasn't supposed to know. I thought, well, what if they think she told me? You know, I had never been around anybody that had been murdered. And I just wanted to be away from it. Frankie Crocker is now dead. Still, the Colkeh squad is left to wonder. Could Krista's killer have been a woman?

It just seems like a pretty violent, really vicious attack for a woman. I don't think I would characterize it as that. I think when somebody is in a violent rage, I think their gender doesn't matter. Then investigators get a break. One of Krista's fingernails preserved for three decades yields DNA. It's obvious to us that she put up quite a fight. fight. And a lot of times in that situation, you're going to find skin cells or blood or something from the other person under the fingernails. Even more intriguing, that DNA is from another woman.

Did you try to match the DNA to a specific person? Well, we are requesting from people that we interview at times we're requesting oral swabs. One of those people is Debbie Danilow. Do you consider Debbie Danilo a suspect? Everyone's still a suspect. It's in my heart to remember songs I've left behind. For nine long months I questioned why my God would forsake me. Debbie Danilo put Hollywood and Krista Helm behind her many years ago.

But she never really got over the murder that struck so close to home. It changed me. It changed the way I looked at everybody in the group. You know, you start looking around going, who did it? Who did this? Who could have done this? You know? And it's scary.

And then recently, out of the blue, she got a letter from Krista's daughter, Nicole. And it said, hi, my name is Nicole. I think you knew my mother as Krista Helm. And I am trying to find out information about her because I didn't know her. Shortly afterwards, Debbie heard from the cold case squad. Of course, they had gotten my name from Nicole. And they said, can we talk to you? I said, sure. But detectives Harrison Brandenburg didn't just want Debbie's memories.

They wanted her DNA. And what they really wanted to know was if it matched the scrapings they had found under Christa's fingernails. We did collect DNA from Debbie Danilo, and it was not her DNA that was under the fingernails. So now I'm letting go once again. There is no other evidence tying Debbie to the murder either, and she has told police she had nothing to do with it. Tom and I are in agreement. Debbie Danilo is much farther down on the scale as a person of interest in this case now. With the help of an anonymous tip,

The Kolkai squad finally tracked down the woman they believe was Krista's girlfriend, Patty Collins. Patty and Krista had a relationship according to more than one person. They had a close sexual relationship and a professional relationship. At some point, they had a falling out with one another, it looks like, according to these people. And was it serious enough for a murder? We don't know that. But we'd like to talk to Patty about that. Hopefully she's home.

Hopefully we can get an interview and maybe collect a sample of her DNA. Patty was happy to talk to the detectives and willingly gave them a DNA sample. But they were stunned by what she had to say. I do not know Christy Hell. I have no idea who she is. They showed me a photograph they thought was me and it's not me. Not only that, Patty claimed she was never in Southern California. She was in Southern California. We know that.

We know that, but for some reason she's denying ever being there in her life. I got a feeling we'll be back to talk to her game. I really do. But not until they get the DNA results and confirm her identity. Meanwhile, they'll go after other leads. It's an ongoing process. We still have a lot of work to do. She was probably about like this.

The Colcay Squad's best lead might turn out to be the oldest lead of all. And it comes from the man who first first worked the Christahelm case, 83-year-old Larry Gansy. Sal Minio's killer is the same killer that killed Krista Helm. In my own mind, I'm so sure of that, I bet the deed to my house that he is A1 number one suspect. Remember, Salminio was murdered a year before Krista on the same day, and in the same way, a stabbing, and in the same neighborhood. Method of operation, the area of operation, was so similar to Salminio's killing, it's almost identical. The man ultimately convicted of Minio's killing was 21-year-old Lionel Williams,

and he was thought to be in jail at the time of Krista's murder. But the Kolké squad recently learned that Williams wasn't arrested until after Krista's death. Even more surprising, he was never quite. question about Krista's death. I don't even know what he looked like. He never saw him. Never got the chance to talk to him. Shortly afterwards, Gansy and his partner were reassigned.

And then, Gansy left the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department for good. That's when the Krista Helm case went cold. I think this case has affected me personally more than any I worked, and you're not supposed to get involved. You're supposed to put everything behind and you're neutral. You're just doing a job. But with me anyway, I couldn't put this one to bed. Meanwhile, Lionel Williams served 12 years for the murder of Salminio.

In 1990, he was released from prison. He has been in and out of jail since this occurred. He's been arrested for other crimes. We believe we have an idea where he is living. We believe that he's not that far away, and we're going to go talk to him. So after sifting through all the drama of Krista Helms' life, the myriad lovers, the diary and the sex tapes, the tales of jealousy and betrayal,

could it really be that detectives will discover that Krista was simply the victim of a random, late-night street robbery at the hands of a career criminal? She was so young. She had so much time left. Krista's daughter Nicole, now 40, hopes that discovering the truth about the murder will finally bring solace.

She was 13 years younger than I am right now when she died. All Nicole has to remember her mother by are a scrapbook, a couple of B movies, and the stuff nightmares are made of. It's in the end of one of her films, the legacy of Satan, she's stabbed to death at the end of the film. And that was a little eerie as well.

All I know is that she had told several people that she was terrified of Nyes, and she believed that was the way she was going to die. That's kind of freaky. Yeah. But Nicole still has a child's hope that justice will somehow be served, even after all this time. I believe that the person is still out there, and I believe that we're going to find closure one day for my mom and we're going to find justice.

And I believe that this person is, they know that they did it. And we're ready. Detective Larry Brandenberg says the connection to Salmoneo's killer has been discounted because the crimes were so different. He said he and colleague Tom Harris would focus their attention on people who knew Krista Helm personally.