Dateline Originals - The Thing About Helen & Olga - Ep. 1: Nothing to Lose. Everything to Gain

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Helen and Olga are on a mission to help homeless men in Los Angeles, when tragedy strikes. Twice.This episode was originally published on November 16, 2021. 

The old ladies were as predictable as the California sun. Helen, the rich one, the one with the big bouffant hairdo, emerged from her Santa Monica apartment each morning dressed to kill. Tasteful ensembles, tight skirts, lipstick, jewelry dangling from her ears and jangling at her wrists. From there, she drove her white Mercedes SUV a couple of miles over to Izzy's, a beloved neighborhood deli on Wilshire Boulevard. Potted plants, vaulted ceiling. Everybody knew Helen at Izzy's. She almost always took the same corner booth near the window and wall photos of famous faces. Table 22.

Helen liked her coffee. Hot. Drank it with a straw. At the same time, ten miles away in Hollywood, the other one started her mornings with a white-knuckle drive to the beach in her blue Honda Civic. or a short walk to Runyon Canyon Park. That was Olga, an outdoorsy Hungarian immigrant with a Zsa Zsa Gabor accent and energy. A brisk walk on the shore or a five-to-ten-mile hike in the Hollywood Hills were just what Olga needed to get her motor running in the morning. Though, must be said, Olga's motor consistently purred at a pretty high RPM. Together, Helen and Olga made quite a team on the weekends, doing what they could to help the homeless who haunt boulevards famous for their wealth. Wilshire, Sunset, Hollywood.

They just kind of fit the bill for the kind of volunteer that might be a good fit for our program. That's Pastor Charles Zuheda. He met Helen and Olga 15 years ago at a free meal program he ran in Hollywood.

Two grandmothers wanting to volunteer and serve food. That's pretty normal. That's Two grandmothers wanting to volunteer and serve food. That's pretty normal. That's what grandmothers do. Quite right. This is a story about what grandmothers do. It's the story of Helen and Olga, two little old ladies. Angels, perhaps,

in a city named for angels. Because he loved us and he wanted to be a part of our family. We were like his family. So, yes, Helen and Olga left their mark on Los Angeles, focused the city's attention on homelessness for a while. But, as you might expect from a Dateline podcast, this is also a story about murder of a very gruesome kind.

He is being snapped and crunched and just brutally murdered. This is horrible to think about. This is a horrible, horrible death. There's nothing instant about it. Horrible? Oh, yes, this is a horror story, all right. But not just because of the awful things that happened. No.

It's a horror story for what it reveals about the darkness that dwells within anyone who dares give their worst instincts free reign. But this was someone's father, someone's brother. It's a human being, not a piece of garbage. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Dateline's newest podcast, The Thing About Helen and Olga. Helen Golay, she of the bouffant hair, was born in rural Texas in 1931. She was orphaned young, grew up in other people's houses, relatives, friends, foster homes. After high school, Helen moved to Oakland, California, married a dentist, started a family. She had, I believe, three daughters. She eventually got into the real estate business, first as a salesperson.

Paul Pringle is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He profiled Helen and Olga back in 2006. And then she began investing in properties. She ended up being fairly successful. She had a place in Santa Monica. They get a number of income properties around. They were sort of opposites in a lot of ways. Olga was from, you know, was from Europe.

Born in Budapest, 1934, Olga was just a child when World War II began. It was an Allied bombing raid that destroyed her home, crippled her right hand. In 1956, Olga fled Hungary and immigrated to the United States. In the 70s, she settled in Los Angeles with her husband, Andre. The marriage ended.

I think for a while, she and her husband ran a coffee shop downtown. So they were both divorced, Helen and Olga, when they first met. I recall they met at a gym back then in the 80s when during that whole fitness craze, fitness craze was getting started. It was in spandex at gyms and they hit it off. Hard to know which one suggested helping the homeless, but by the late 1990s, they were, by all appearances, as committed as twin angels on a mission. Naturally, Helen, the rich one, took care of all the bills relating to their homeless outreach.

Olga was more hands-on, bringing food, keeping tabs. It was a division of labor that fit their personalities perfectly. Helen was, you know, just a hardcore business person. Olga was known among people who knew the pair as the muscle in the partnership. So how did the whole crazy saga begin? Well, maybe you could say it was with another Hungarian immigrant. This one down and out and struggling to get by. He was a bantam-sized man, 5'7", 130 pounds. Photos show a grizzled face, thick, dark hair and brows, lines at the corner of his mouth so deep they could have been carved with a knife.

His name was Paul Vados. You could tell he's from East Europe. On Sunday, when we served meals that we prepared ourselves, I mean, that was really a happy time for a lot of folks. That's Charles Suheda again. He was an associate pastor at Hollywood Presbyterian 25 years ago. Paul Vados was one of his regulars at the church's homeless outreach program. I had a chance to talk to him. To a certain extent, he was a little bit guarded

and kept to himself. And that's not unusual with the homeless. Unless they really, really know you, they're not necessarily going to open up. Or if they're really, really in trouble, that's another time when they'll open up to you and ask for help. Some of those stories would rip your heart out. Paul's was like that too. He had a decent life once, four-minute apple. But then his wife died, his two adult children moved away, and, lonely and depressed, Paul found what comfort he could in a bottle. Many bottles.

I knew that, you know, Paul was having difficulty with housing, and I knew that he had other personal issues that he was, you know, working on. And the best I can do is just sort of offer help, offer encouragement. Once a month, Paul Vados would drop by the church and pick up a bag of groceries. On Sunday afternoons, he was there for a free meal. Coffee, plate of spaghetti, maybe a warm serving of shepherd's pie? And a few kind words from Pastor Sujata. Paul was typical of the guests of the church's Lord's Light ministry—male, unemployed,

desperately poor. So, it's easy to imagine Paul's surprise when Helen and Olga appeared like an answer to a prayer and offered him help to get him off the street. I think it would be a very appealing offer that most people would at least listen to. They may not accept it, but I think they'd definitely listen to that kind of offer. Here's the thing about Helen and Olga. They never did anything halfway. They had big plans. Paul Vados would not simply be served a hot meal by these two. No. Helen and Olga wanted to provide free shelter, a place Paul could call home and have as much time as he needed to get his life back together.

It was like Paul had encountered a miracle. The women paid his rent, bought his food. Not just once or twice. They did it for two whole years. And then, Paul Vallis vanished. It was November 8th, 1999, 4.50 in the morning. An on-call detective responding to a 911 call rolled into an alley about a dozen blocks south of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Rain was pounding into the pavement like roofing nails, pebbling the car's windshield with flecks of red and blue light. There in the headlights, he saw it. A man's body lying spread-eagle across the middle of the alley, rainwater puddling beneath it. The detective got out for a closer look. White male in his seventies, by the look of him. He fished around the man's pockets for some kind of ID, couldn't find any.

The dead man's clothes looked clean enough. There was car grease on his hands. There was no obvious sign of death, though the detective figured rain had already washed away any blood or useful evidence. Just another John Doe death in a town that had had its share. This one might be a hit and run, the detective thought. And soon enough, the coroner's report confirmed it. There were massive internal injuries. Upper body crushed. No witnesses. Not a one.

After a couple of weeks, with no sign of her ward, Paul Vattis, Olga Rudderschmidt filed a missing persons report. She told the desk cop at the Wilshire station that she was looking for a 73-year-old white male named Paul Vadas, last seen hanging around Fedora Street in West Hollywood.

It didn't take long for the police to confirm the man Olga was looking for matched the body that had been found in an alley off La Brea Avenue on the pre-dawn hours of November the 8th. Paul Vados was dead. Nothing more to be said. The case was filed away, and for years it gathered dust. I went back to that alley where it all began in 2008. I was with a detective named Dennis Kilcoyne, who has reopened the Vados case.

So this is where it happened, huh? Right up here, right up in front of this power pole here. It was laid out right about here. Dennis Kilcoyne, must be said, was an imposing man. About six foot four, built like a linebacker, groomed like a bond salesman. He combs his brown hair straight back. His upper lip festooned with a thick cookie duster mustache, which he keeps precisely trimmed at the corners of his mouth. Well, this is a typical alley in Los Angeles,

and you can see down here all the potholes and everything, and as we have noticed, a few cars dodging all of these potholes and this and that and the trash and everything else. It was no different in 1999. It was in the same condition. It's an ugly place to breathe your last, this potholed alley. Graffiti tags mark it as someone's territory. Though, in truth,

weeds are the only sign of life here. The major undercarriage of the car would get his vital torso section and his head area. Is it possible that a homeless guy would be just sleeping on the back alley like that, laid out the way he was?

Or passed out or something of that nature. I don't think it would be a good spot to pick to sleep, but you know, possibly intoxicated to the point where he passed out. What was your sense as you were looking at this, the possibility that somebody just came roaring down that alleyway, didn't see him because it was night, it was raining, but you know know, going too fast to stop, and they just kept going. There's no way, especially on a wet night, that anybody was racing through here. And again, the evidence of his injuries, it was not a high-impact account with his body. This was a slow, deliberate bulldozing over this man. His body was crushed?

Absolutely. The death of Paul Vados must have hit the women hard. Olga was crying, apparently, when she told Paul's landlady he was dead. And Helen? Well, she tended to be the more stoic of the two. But she did what she always did. She opened her checkbook, paid for Paul's burial in a plot that she owned.

Emotionally draining? Oh, you bet. But Helen and Olga were undeterred. There were other men who needed their help. Oh, yes. An unending supply. It took Helen and Olga nearly three years to get over the death of Paul Vadis. But by the spring of 2002, they were ready to try again.

Olga spied a young man who looked like he could use their help sitting on the steps of an office building in Hollywood, across the street from Bally's gym. He looked about 40 and fit. A little help, she figured. One might just turn his life around. His name? Jimmy Covington. She was just there right behind me. I looked up and she was standing right there. I didn't see her coming, didn't feel her coming or anything. She was just there. She said, hi, how are you? My name's Ogre. Are you homeless? Just straight out like that. I said, well, why would you want to ask that? She said, well, you don't really look

like you're homeless, but you have a backpack and a sleeping bag. And I thought maybe if you were homeless, I worked with an agency and with a partner that works with guys that are homeless, and we help get you a little money and places to stay and other benefits and things like that. Jimmy doesn't look like anybody's stereotype of a homeless person, though he'd be the first to tell you he has lived that life for years. I'm a person without permanent housing. Homeless, it's just a word they made up with a person without a home, less of a home. Now, aside from a few bumps and bruises, a byproduct of life on the street,

Jimmy Covington is a good-looking guy, showbiz handsome even. Nice smile, clean cut. There are ways to do it. You can search out community showers, or you can go and do the birdbath thing in the fast food restaurants. If Jimmy had learned anything in his time on the street, it was to never take anything at face value. So he tried to size up this Olga when she told him she could help him get off the street.

Gauge her sincerity. She seemed pretty professional. She seemed kind of honest. She was dressed nice, but anxious also. She was kind of fast- fast talking and seemed to be really really anxious and um in a hurry in a hurry to um get the answers that she needed out of me and see if i would i would uh accept her offer and or be interested in what she was offering interested well yes, he was.

Nights spent sleeping on hard and unforgiving concrete had taken their toll. And it was not uncommon to be awakened in the middle of the night by young toughs who seemed to think harassing the homeless was a rip-roaring good time. She said, I have an office space right inside the building upstairs right here. I can come up there and show you the office space, and I got some paperwork you can fill out, and we can get it started right now. She said, I've helped other guys like this before,

and I'm all ready to show you the few pieces of paper and just basic information if you can fill out. Just come on in right now, and I'll show you. Jimmy followed Olga into the building, where she gave him a key to the office. It was nothing fancy, just a 12 by 12 room with office furniture and empty computer desks in the front half and in the back a futon for Jimmy to sleep on. Olga gave him a list of rules, said Jimmy. He'd have to leave the building each morning

and not return until evening. He couldn't have a guest, he had to keep quiet, and he had to keep the place clean. Do all that, said Olga, and he'd get a bonus. The understanding was I was to stay there temporarily until the paperwork was approved and she was going to get me $2,000 within 30 days or less and she was going to pay me $10 a day as I filled out the paperwork.

Such a deal. The paperwork was pretty basic, said Jimmy. Name, age, social security number, that sort of thing. But then the next day, Olga returned with more forms and more questions. She wanted to know my father and mother's social security numbers and their last names and maiden names and just all kinds of personal information. The truth was, Jimmy didn't even know a lot of that stuff. So he played for time.

The office space wasn't exactly homey, but it was private and clean and secure. And Olga pretty much left him alone. At first. But she didn't give him any money either. And on his third day in the office, Olga started nagging him about that paperwork. So she said, come on. She took me outside into the car. And she took me in the car and went down the street.

I went to a Burger King place. I think it was somewhere around Sunset in La Brea. She said, OK, I'll take you to lunch. I thought, oh, great, she's going to treat me right. And she spent like $7 on a burger to be back and gave me $10 and said, I made this paperwork, all of it done. Jimmy had had enough. His way of thinking, life was simpler out on the streets. I left, I went down the hall and I was going to turn the key into the manager and he

said, you're not supposed to be sleeping there anyway. And I said, oh, well, here's the key. I'm leaving right now. And I did. I didn't feel I'd see her again. On that count, Jimmy was wrong. A few months after Jimmy Covington walked out on them, Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt were looking for someone else to help. It was the late summer of 2002 when fate laid its fickle finger on Kenneth McDavid. He was 47, had no family, no job, no prospects of ever finding one, as far as anybody could tell. There was no emotion in his voice. I mean, I would say it was flat or it was somewhat monotone. There was really no emotion in his voice. Pastor Charles Sujeda. So I took him to be maybe a serious guy, somewhat reclusive.

I didn't know if he had any friends and I didn't know if he had any family. You know, my attitude and my strategy with dealing with people was just to engage them and let them tell me their story. It was on one of those sun-kissed Sunday afternoons at Hollywood Presbyterian that Helen and Olga approached Kenneth with an offer he couldn't refuse. Come with us, they said in effect, and we will put a roof over your head and buy you food and pay your bills. Why? Because we care. Too good to be true? Well, as Bob Dylan says, when you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. So, of course, Kenneth said, yes, yes to free food. Yes to a free apartment. That was a 550-foot studio in a three-story 1920s-style building that badly needed an update. But it was a roof over his head, and a bed, and a door he could close.

And it was surrounded by palm trees. And for Kenneth McDavid, it was home. Helen, who was 71 at the time, promptly paid Kenneth's $900 rent each month with a personal check. Olga, then 68, made sure he had groceries and was keeping the place clean. For more than two years, Kenneth McDavid was sustained by Helen and Olga's unstinting generosity. Then, it was the night of the summer solstice, June 21st, 2005. Longest day, shortest night of the year.

A perfect night, really. Full moon, mid-60s, light ocean breeze. Around midnight, a backgammon game was breaking up in Westwood, just south of UCLA. As one of the backgammon game was breaking up in Westwood, just south of UCLA. As one of the backgammon players was leaving, he noticed something lying in a back alley off Westwood Boulevard. The shape of it looked like a man. Drunk, maybe? Passed out? Sleeping it off? He moved closer for a better look. It was a man's body, all right. He was dressed in a light gray t-shirt and white sneakers, and he was most assuredly dead. His body grotesquely twisted, blood pooling around his head.

When the police arrived, they discovered two pieces of ID in the dead man's pocket. Kenneth McDavid was the name on them. Hit and run, apparently. There were tire marks across his chest, car grease and road grime on his face, and deep gouges in his scalp. Near his body lay his glasses and a bicycle, its front tire removed. The obvious implication was that Kenneth McDavid had been hit while trying to fix his bike.

No one knew, really, since there were no witnesses. But it seemed reasonable to assume that the driver who ran over Kenneth McDavid in that alley simply panicked and fled, trying to put as much distance as possible between their car and that body. Since Kenneth McDavid had no known family, it was Helen who stepped forward to claim his body and arrange for his cremation. For the purposes of expediting the whole thing, Helen told the medical examiner she was Kenneth's cousin, his next of kin. A white lie, perhaps.

What else could she do? She and Olga were the closest thing to kin that Kenneth McDavid had at the end. In fact, Helen had spent upwards of $60,000 on Kenneth since he'd come into their lives. It was a grim business, of course. Yet another tragic blow to Helen and Olga's homeless mission. But the ladies weren't without consolation. They had the satisfaction of knowing that at least rescued Kenneth from the streets

and given him a better life for a time. The death of Kenneth McDavid was sad, to be sure. But L.A. is a big town. Occasional carnage in the streets and alleys is an unforgettable fact of life. But it was a death not entirely forgotten, at least not by a New York-based private investigator named Ed Webster. I'm a private investigator. I've done it for about 35 years. For 20 years, I was the director of investigations for Money Life Insurance Company in New York. Life insurance. That's how Ed Webster got tangled up in the back alley death of Kenneth McDavid.

They had received a claim for the proceeds of a life insurance policy. It was a violent death, an unattended death. In order to get a sense of Ed, you do well to keep in mind the film noir private eyes of the 1940s. Think Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon. Ed was a solidly built 60-ish guy with a penchant for suits and cowboy boots. He had a license to carry. Though it must be said his ancient.32 caliber pistol was really more for show. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed straight back from a face that read like a street map of lower Manhattan. The thin line of his mouth bracketed north and south by a mustache and soul patch. Computers, internet

searches, and databases were not Ed's thing. No, his method was simple but surprisingly effective. Watch doors until the person he wanted to talk to came home, and then he would knock. I've been doing the same thing for so many years, because you just go down a lot of dead ends, and people won't talk, and you just have to keep trying. And if you keep trying, and you apply your intelligence, you will ultimately come to the truth. The truth? Well, for Ed Webster, the first step in finding the truth started with a file labeled Kenneth McDavid. He opened it and took a quick glance. White male, age 50, cause of death, hit and run.

The guy's bio looked thinner than the gold on a weekend wedding band. But Ed Webster knew what he had to do next. He packed a bag and boarded a flight to L.A. Those six hours, New York to L.A., feel long. Ed had plenty of time to reflect on the long career that had led him to this moment. Getting out of the Marine Corps in the mid-60s, looking for what to do next. That ad from the Travelers Insurance Company, they were looking for entry-level trainees to work in their claims department. Sounded good to Ed. It was at Travelers that Ed learned the fundamentals of his craft. Later, he opened his own private investigations firm in Manhattan's

Chinatown, where he investigated everything from two-timing spouses to cheating business partners. He named his company Orion, after the constellation known as the Hunter. Now he was back in the insurance business, this time with Mutual of New York. And soon enough he'd be hunting again. This time in sunny Southern California. Hunting what exactly? He didn't know. But first things first. Soon as Ed was on the ground in L.A., he dug up all the available reports on the Kenneth McDavid hit and

run case. The accident report, the coroner's report, death certificate, and, well, he couldn't help but notice. The bulk of the man's injuries, the fatal injuries, were from the waist up. It wasn't like a normal hit and run where a guy would be taken down by a moving vehicle. What happens in a normal hit and run? Well, you know, there'd be some lower extremity injuries. Like a broken leg or something? Yeah, or a hip, you know, or something. But his crushing injuries were all in his chest and in his head, suffered massive trauma. That, you know, but that could happen. You know, that in itself means nothing. According to the toxicology report, Kenneth McDavid had a little alcohol in his blood and urine,

but not enough to make him impaired. No, the eye-opener was the prescription drug cocktail. It looked as though Kenneth had loaded himself up on a combination of sedatives and painkillers, enough, in fact, to knock him out. He had a liter or so of undigested food in his stomach, and I think it takes about three hours for the food to go. So he ate, he had a drink, and he had some drugs.

Within, proximate to his death. Ed could feel suspicion rising like an insect bite on the back of his mind. Itchy, demanding attention. So Ed paid a visit to the LAPD to talk to the cops who actually processed the accident scene two months earlier. He had no wallet. He had an ID card. It said State of California, but it wasn't a California-issued document.

It just had his name and date of birth and another small miniature credit card, which is strange. You know, either guy's got no ID or he's got full ID. But to have, you know, a card and a little, I don't know, it looked like a keychain thing. Almost like an unofficial dog tag or something. Yeah, but somebody wanted to know, wanted the finders of this body to know who he was. You don't make judgments, you just kind of put it all together and think, wait a minute, this needs to be explored. So Ed flew back to New York to tell his bosses what he'd learned about the McDavid case. And while he was there, he learned there wasn't one survivor's claim on the life of Kenneth McDavid.

There were two. And totaled up, they amounted to a million bucks. The beneficiaries? Two women who were listed as McDavid's partners in some kind of investment business. Their names? Helen Golay and Olga Rutter Schmidt. Ed Webster made a note. He needed to talk to these women. Thank you.