Dateline Originals - The Thing About Helen & Olga - Ep. 2: "The Girls"

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

An insurance investigator’s hunch leads law enforcement to assign a task force to tail two little old ladies.This episode was originally published on November 16, 2021. 

It's the routine that numbs, the grinding, unrelenting sameness of survival. Each day starts with a quest for food and ends with a hunt for shelter. Rinse and repeat. Days run together. Punctuated only by the terror of random violence. There was always violence and the potential for violence among the homeless. Unfortunately, oftentimes, they would victimize each other. It's the life of fang and claw in the wild.

It's the life of countless human souls on city streets in America. None of us believe that we will ever be homeless, but the homeless never believed that they would be either. Twenty years ago, it was the life Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid lived. Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vados were vulnerable people. Then, two sweet-faced ladies appeared. Women who seemed to understand that the truly destitute Then, two sweet-faced ladies appeared.

Women who seemed to understand that the truly destitute needed more than a blanket, a bowl of soup, and a cup of coffee. They put them up in apartments, paid all their utilities, fed them, took them where they needed to go, would periodically check on them. In this episode, you'll hear about the life of one of those men and the kindly old ladies who rescued him from the streets. Kenneth was, he was very, very good at school. The smart one. He was the smart one. You'll also hear from the investigators who slowly unraveled the terrifying secret behind two back alley deaths.

Some camera did record what went on here, am I right? Yeah, that's the camera that saw the car come down, stop for a few minutes, and then start up and leave. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is episode two of Dateline's latest podcast, The Thing About Helen and Olga. Life insurance application forms are nobody's idea of a riveting read, but Ed Webster couldn't stop staring at the forms he held in his hand. Both had Kenneth McDavid hand-printed across the top. According to the forms,

McDavid was a partner in an investment firm called HKO Associates, annual income 65 grand. Two women, Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt, were his business partners. Though Ed had found no trace of HKO Associates anywhere, he did find residential addresses for Helen and Olga. And here's the thing. On one form, Kenneth McDavid is listed as living with Olga in Hollywood. On the other one, he was living at Helen's place in Santa Monica.

I found with certainty that he did not live where he was represented to live. He didn't work where he was represented to work. He didn't earn what he was represented to earn. And then I found where he actually did live, and it was rented and paid for by the beneficiary, and all at the expense of Helen Goulet, the beneficiary, and the owner of the contract. Well, now that raised all kinds of questions. But Ed Webster did not jump to conclusions. He left that to amateurs. No, Ed was cautious.

Slow and steady as an ox cart sometimes. A real stickler for order and process. If you allow yourself to commit to a certain conclusion, you eliminate all other areas of possibility. And that's not your job. I mean, anybody could do that. All he knew for sure was that Kenneth McDavid's life insurance applications to Mutual of New York contained certain, well, call it inconsistencies.

Were they mistakes or deliberate misrepresentations? Ed needed to know more, so he packed a bag and headed back to California. I had to find out what the truth was. And I had to determine if the true situation were known, would the company have issued this contract? At this point, you're still protecting the insurance company. Well, throughout the whole thing, that's my objective.

That's all I do. That's all I do. Ed Webster is old school. He needed to be there. He needed to see with his own eyes that back alley where Kenneth McDavid was run down in the dead of night, crushed like some discarded coffee cup. I went back there with him in 2008, back to that alley where Kenneth McDavid died. It's what you'd expect, really. Pocked pavement and green dumpsters, the back doors of businesses like a food emporium and a coffee shop, all of it neatly out of sight

from anyone driving past on busy Westwood Boulevard. So when you come down to a place like this where something's happened, I mean what good is it gonna do you?, this investigation was not going to be completed in a day or two. So the more you familiarize yourself with the situation, the location, everything, the geography, you don't know at some future point it may make something else come together. So it's always worth the time. As we stood there on the spot where Kenneth McDavid died, the sun filled the alley with shadows.

We had to imagine what it looked like in the dark, in the dim glow of distant streetlights. There had been passersby in the alley earlier that evening who saw nothing. So between the time the body was found and the time the last person passed by an empty alley is obviously when the accident occurred or the murder whatever murder To be continued... suddenly. Police photos showed no sign of sudden impact such as broken glass or pieces of car chrome or bumper plastic. But the real telltale sign in Ed's mind

was something that was mentioned in the police report and clearly documented in the photographs. There was something odd about the bicycle that was lying near Kenneth McDavid's body. The front tire had been removed, and there was a helmet laying on top of the bicycle. It was postulated perhaps it was being set to look like he was changing a flat tire when he was struck by a vehicle, except if I recall correctly, the tire that was off was not flat. But it could have been an effort to stage the scene.

And then if that's what it was, it backfired. Well, it could have been. It could have been. It, you know, it was just, it just was, it defies, to this day, it defies explanation. So much of what Ed was turning up made no sense. No use beating around the bush now. So Ed decided to go straight to Helen and Olga and ask them about all the inaccuracies on Kenneth's life insurance applications.

They refused to speak with me. Weren't they entitled to quite a large sum of money? Yes, yeah. And yet they didn't want to talk to you in such a way that would allow them to receive the money. No, they wouldn't talk to me. I can't tell what was going on in their minds, but I think probably they believed

that they would receive the money anyway. They filed a complaint with the California Department of Insurance against my company early on, that the company was not paying the claim promptly. So I think... Did the company react to that at all, by the way? Did they come to you and say, what's going on here? Well, they have to react.

And they knew that there were things going on in this case that may supersede normal insurance issues, and they were willing to allow me to continue to investigate. And yet there are limits to how much a private investigator can do. So Ed arranged a meeting with the traffic division detectives who'd initially handled the McDavid case. There were some things Ed thought they should know. The traffic guys, in turn, asked if Dennis Kilcoyne, who's a homicide detective, would mind sitting in. So I attended that meeting, and when we did that, I sat and I listened to this

insurance investigator, Ed Webster, and he painted this picture of just large insurance policies held by two women who had no known connection as far as family or this and that to one another or to the victim. What's the first thing that goes through your mind? I had no idea what we had. I just didn't know. But the money thing is what was driving it, the amount of money involved. Two life insurance policies totaling one million bucks on a homeless man? A gruesome accidental death? Two little old ladies? Well, as you might imagine, it was all conversational catnip around the Wilshire Station house. But for one detective who was hearing all this, it was more.

He'd had a case like this once, five or six, seven years ago. He remembered it was raining the night he saw the body. So he goes back and he finds a file from 1999 of a similar death in an alley, elderly man by the name of Paul Vados. And sure as can be, the same two women were coming back getting copies of reports and this type of thing. Those women? Helen Goley and Olga Rudderschmidt. As they dug deeper, the detectives discovered that Paul Vados had multiple life insurance policies. The beneficiaries, Helen and Olga. What were the odds? In less than six years time, two homeless men would die in back alleys after hit and run incidents and leave substantial life insurance payouts to the same two women. I wasn't sure what we had.

And I didn't want to make too much of it because it was, you know, you're dealing with what portrayed to be a couple of elderly women at the time. One thing he did know was that the detectives would need some serious help to investigate the panoply of crimes that were now on the menu. Insurance fraud? Mail fraud? Or something far more sinister? The detective knew how to run a murder investigation, but insurance fraud? There, he was out of his depth.

Recognizing that I have no background on that, we had two investigators, one from the FBI and one from the Department of Insurance, join our little team to figure out this case, figure out what do we have here in front of us. Eventually, others would join Kilcoyne's granny task force, postal inspectors, auto mechanics, and the like. But there was one unofficial member of the group that Kilcoyne wanted to keep in the loop,

and that was the insurance guy, Ed Webster. It was months after Ed had met with Kilcoyne and the other detectives that his home phone rang in Peekskill, New York. On the other end of the line was one of the cops he'd met with in L.A. Sergeant Hernandez called me up and asked me if I ever heard of a man named Paul Vados. And I said no. And he told me that he had died in an alley,

having been run over by a vehicle. He was homeless. And that the body was claimed by Olga and Helen. My wife thought I won the lottery or I had a stroke or something. I started screaming and yelling because there was something there. But it was like, how do I describe it? Because I don't get this experience a lot in my work. A thrill, yes.

Validation for a job well done, yes. But Ed Webster's work was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. How many other homeless men were in danger? Detective Kilcoyne was not going to wait to find out. So in the fall of 2005, the detective pulled out all the stops and assigned surveillance teams armed with cameras and guns to tail those two little old ladies. What are they up to? Is it just a fraud thing?

Or what else do they have going on in their life? So we have to bring it to the powers to be with the police department here, or I do, and convince my bosses that I need a surveillance team, which consists of anywhere from 12 to 15 detectives, vehicles, you know. This isn't cheap. No, it's not cheap.

And I want to put them on two mid-70 range women. And as you can imagine... Are you crazy? Oh, yeah, yeah. The ribbing that we took was quite incredible. What kinds of things would people say? Well, I'm beginning to be one of the senior guys in the office, so the others, these youngsters that stare at their computer screens

and BlackBerrys all day, they think that this is about the only thing that I can catch anymore is little old ladies. So anyway, that's all right. That's all right. The trick in tailing someone is to stay close enough to maintain visual contact of the subject. Never close enough to be noticed, though. But when the subject was Olga Ruddersmith, those young men struggled to catch a fleeting glimpse of her. They groaned up steep canyon trails as she sailed on ahead

of them. It had been like this for weeks. Seventy-three- Rudderschmidt, striding like a thoroughbred over the hard-packed sandy beach in Santa Monica, or scrambling like a mountain goat over the hills of Runyon Canyon. At the top of the hill, the detectives stopped to catch their breath and gazed briefly at the billowing clouds off to the west. But when they looked back at the trail ahead, she was gone. She's very, very active, and these macho detectives that were making fun of me, they're having a hell of a time keeping up with old Olga.

Helen Golay, on the other hand, moved at a regal pace. Every hair of her signature do lacquered into place. Her day started in the same way, at the same time, in the same place. Her favorite deli, Izzy's, on Wilshire Boulevard. She'll be on the cell phone sitting in the booth at the coffee shop while my detectives are in the booth at the coffee shop while my detectives are in the booth next to her listening. And she's moving money around, always business, you know, talking to escrow companies, talking to realtors.

And what we begin to realize is that she has, oh, anywhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 credit cards going at one time. And what she's doing is she'll open a credit card account and she will take the large advance that they allow you to take on a credit card. And then she will use this cash to go and get involved in a real estate transaction. And then she may use one of the credit cards to just make minimum payments on all of the other credit cards. And then every once in a while, she'll refinance a property and pay everything off and start over again. A high wire act, perhaps, but not illegal. In fact, Helen and Olga both had perfectly clean records.

And throughout the surveillance, the shadow teams never once saw them together. Nothing apparent to connect the two women at all. Aside from that one strange, incontrovertible fact, both of them had been listed as life insurance beneficiaries of two down-and-out men, both of whom had been crushed to death by cars in back alleys six years apart. Kenneth McDavid was the most recent, so the detectives started there, trying to learn what they could about his life. Wasn't much online, but investigators did find a couple of very old clues about Kenneth McDavid

from the 1970s. Mr. McDavid had a few old addresses up in the Sacramento area and in the San Francisco area. So we knew that that was an area that we were going to have to concentrate on to find a little bit of background on Kenneth McDavid. That, of course, called for a road trip. And after knocking on a lot of doors and running down a lot of dead ends, Detective Kilcoyne and his partner, Detective Rosemary Sanchez, finally found Kenneth McDavid's sister,

Sandra Selman, in Sacramento. So we find Sandra and her husband, and we sit them down and we talk to them, and we actually make the death notification. They had no idea that Brother Kenneth was no longer with us. And by then he'd been dead for some time? For almost six months. And they knew that Kenneth had had a tough life,

but the unusual thing is just prior to his death, Sandra received a phone message on her home answer machine from him. Just calling to say hello that he was in Los Angeles, and just kind of, hey, how you doing, type, checking in with the family. And then she didn't hear from him again. And then we come knocking at her door in November, in late November, I believe it was, and bring this news.

How'd she take it? Oh, she was devastated. I mean, it's obviously not a pleasant thing to answer your door and hear that a family member is no longer with us. So we inquired about this Olga Rudderschmidt or Helen Golay. How do they fit into your family tree? Never heard of them? Of course not.

They never heard of any such people. Sandra dug up some old photographs. Kenneth is a 10-year-old, black and white, but they could see that the dimpled, sandy-haired boy must have been a colorful cut-up. Precocious, too, said his sister. Kenneth was the third of five children. Sandra was the youngest.

We were all pretty close growing up, yes. I talked to Sandra a few years later, and she told me Kenneth had always been the one she went to for help with her homework. He was the smart one, but he was also very caring to my mother. He would fix dinner, because both of my parents worked full-time 40 hours a week. I remember also on one occasion when he was 17, he didn't have a job to get my mother a Mother's Day present. So we went around the neighborhood and we gathered up some old Pepsi bottles and took them in and saved up money to buy paint. And he painted her kitchen.

That was a very big deal. Yeah. For Mother's Day. She was very, very happy. Yeah. Sandra Salmon was in her mid-40s by the time we talked, but she looked younger with her shoulder length auburn hair and easy smile. Sandra's a nurse by trade, and as she sat there telling me about her parents and her big baby boomer family, I had the feeling she must be a good nurse,

in the same way that she'd been a good kid sister to Kenneth, even after his troubles began. After he graduated from high school, he started going to Sacramento State College. And I think as he got closer to 20, 22, he started getting disinterested in college, kind of not really doing that well, which was really unusual for Ken. Was he bored?

I don't know. I mean, sometimes kids will go to college and think, oh, man, this is just... Juan became less and less verbal. He became a little bit more angry and was very interested in radio and music. He learned how to play the piano. He took that up, and he was very good at it. After the piano, Kenneth took up radio, spinning records on Sacramento's highly regarded pop station, K-R-O-Y. His on-air alter ego was Bo McCambridge, and photos from that time show

Kenneth wearing headphones and clowning around as he queues up a record on the turntable. Those days, it seems, were Kenneth's high-water mark. After K-R-O-Y, he bounced around the dial, but never managed to hold on to another radio job for long. And soon, his career in radio was over. He could be hurt very, very easily, take things very personally. And some people are just like that. They're just really sensitive, and I think he was really sensitive.

There were a few odd jobs after that, mostly dead-end telemarketing gigs. But by then, Kenneth McDavid's path toward eventual homelessness was set. According to Sandra, mental illness runs in the family, and she suspects that's what caused Kenneth to drift away from Sacramento, lose touch with the family. He did show some signs of paranoia, but he, to my knowledge, was never diagnosed. Did Ken recognize that? Did the family recognize that? Was there anything that anybody knew to do? Unfortunately, in the state of California, if a person is mentally ill,

you cannot force them into treatment. They have to go in voluntarily. It's called a 51-50 hold, and the only time you can get that is if they're a danger to themselves or someone else. He never went across that line, though. He was never a danger to himself, and he was never threatening to hurt anybody else.

No, Kenneth wouldn't hurt a fly. But unfortunately, that couldn't be said of some of the people he would meet while living on the street. Around the squad room, detectives had a nickname for Helen and Olga. We'd start referring to them just as the girls. What are the girls up to today? While surveillance teams followed Helen and Olga, other investigators were scrambling to find out all they could

about the life insurance policies they'd taken out on the two dead men, Paul Vallis and Kenneth McDavid. FBI agent Sam Mayrose was one of those, and what he found? Helen and Olga typically started small with life insurance policies that banks offered as an inducement to open a checking account. They were offering, you know, generally small life insurance policies. Basically, all you had to do was give them your name, your address, and your phone number, pretty much, and you could get a policy. Because there were no medical questions because there were so low payout. Sam Mayrose is a slender man, about six foot tall, earnest, straight arrow sort of guy, with light light brown hair graying at the temples Well they applied for 26 total policies

on Paul they ended up getting 7 they applied for 8 policies and they got 7 and on McDavid they applied for 17 policies and got 13 The applications for those policies read like fantasy fiction. According to them, the homeless men were in perfect health,

had substantial assets, and earned reasonable incomes. On most of the applications, Helen is listed as the fiancé of the dead men. Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid. Olga was usually tagged as a cousin. They put them up in apartments, paid all their utilities, fed them, took them where they needed to go, would periodically check on them. Why, you might ask, would some of the largest and best-known companies in the insurance business accept such poppycock at face value?

Why would they issue life insurance policies for men who are already clearly overinsured? Well, in part, that's because the insurance business is cutthroat competitive, and the companies don't share information with each other. Several of the policies that the ladies were getting were not particularly expensive policies, so there's virtually no background information asked for

or even checked on by the insurance companies. And it wasn't until the insurance companies were starting to have to pay out that they really started looking into what was going on here. In many cases, that was too late, because most states have laws that make life insurance policies virtually irrevocable after two years. But after that two years, except for non-payment of premiums, it can no longer be contested, even if they discover fraud or misrepresentation. Given what he now knew, Sam Mayrose began mulling over a disturbing theory. Had Helen and Olga simply regarded Paul Vettus and Kenneth McDavid, and possibly other men,

as livestock to be cared for until the time for slaughter? What was going on was the ladies would find the people that they intended to get the policies on who would ultimately be their victims and they would put them up for two years knowing that they had to wait that two years before they could apply for the payout They say the distance between hindsight and foresight is as vast as the Pacific Ocean, and that was certainly true in this case. Looking back now, investigators could see a troubling and predictable pattern.

The first life insurance policies on Paul Vados had been issued in the fall of 1997, and two years later, he was crushed to death in an alley. The first life insurance policies on Kenneth McDavid had been issued in the winter of 2003 and two years later, in June 2005, McDavid was crushed to death in an alley. Policies on both men had just passed that two-year window, before which they might have been rescinded for fraud.

But after? Within months of both deaths, Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt collected hefty insurance checks. Vatos, the first time out, they was, I think they had applied for in the neighborhood of two million, and they collected something like 800,000, which is still pretty good money.

But McDavid, it was off the charts. They had applied for upwards to $6 million and between the two, they had collected almost $3 million. Wow, three million bucks almost $3 million. Wow, $3 million. Between both cases. That's a lot of money for two little old ladies. And Helen, financially, was in a position where she didn't need to be doing this.

She was pretty well off. Pretty well off? One would think so. Within a few months of Kenneth McDavid's death, Helen's Hall had amounted to 1.5 million. Olga had raked in nearly 700,000. But was it enough? Oh no, not nearly. Greed is an itch, the kind of itch that doesn't go away when you scratch it. Companies that were slow to pony up got letters from Helen's attorney threatening lawsuits. Which is not to say that Ed Webster, that dogged detective from Mutual of New York, had given up on his investigation.

Mutual of New York still had serious money on the line. Two life insurance policies totaling a million bucks. Oh no, the company had no intention of writing those checks as long as Ed Webster had questions for Helen and Olga. I tried desperately to meet with them, left cards for them, called them, knocked on their doors, did everything. That's Ed Webster. There was no particular reason to believe that the police investigation and the homicide investigation would come to fruition before the company was required to make a claim decision. And there's a lot of money involved.

And if they make a claim decision, it has to be the right one. In late December 2005, Mutual of New York had decided to rescind both of the Kenneth McDavid policies for fraud. But they didn't tell Helen and Olga. They had something else in mind. They asked me to deliver the letter to both of them. And that's done for a reason. That's not done for drama and it's not done for effect. It's done for a legitimate reason. Because when you make a decision like that and it's not done for effect. It's done for a legitimate reason because when you make a decision like that and somebody's not going to get the proceeds that they had felt they had a right to or expected, you outline the reasons in a letter and then you deliver it to them and afford them the opportunity to challenge what you've said and offer evidence

to the contrary if it exists and the company is perfectly willing to reconsider. So there's a reason for that. But you're kind of offering yourself up as a punching bag or something for somebody who's pretty angry at this company. Well, you know, to this day, really, I really wanted to deliver. I wanted to sit down with them. Ed had no idea what he was in for. The kindly old ladies were anything but. Get out from my door before I throw a hot water on you.