Dateline Originals - The Thing About Helen & Olga - Ep. 5: Just a Little Red Paint

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

The investigation goes into high gear with the discovery of the murder weapon.This episode was originally published on November 16, 2021. 

Few things reveal a person's character faster than a windfall of easy money. And if you confiscate their money, who cares? Who cares? We have nothing left. Of course, it must be said, Helen Goley and Olga Ruderschmidt had the foul scent of corruption about them long before they cashed their first big insurance checks. And these women, I just, it's incredible to think of their mindset. So maybe what happened next wasn't so much of a fall from grace as the inevitable destination of a long escalator ride to the bottom. Am I going to be taken to jail and put in a jail?

Yes. Helen and Olga were going to jail. From petty crime and frivolous lawsuits, they graduated to insurance fraud. Between the two of them, they'd collected nearly $3 million in life insurance payouts. Would have collected more, too, if they hadn't been arrested. They knew how to work these insurance companies. And what was revealed in the end by that windfall of easy money? Well, a black and bottomless hole where a moral compass should be.

I think if people saw what evil looked like, they would want to turn away from it because it was so horrible. But I do believe it's possible to put up a facade or a veneer, you know, over evil motives. On this episode, you'll hear from the detectives who were determined to prove that these two 70-something women were more than thieves. They were cold-blooded killers. And I'm thinking all the while, holy mackerel, these are killers. I mean, we can't forget that fact, that just whatever their age, whether they're hiring somebody to do it,

they're involved in some pretty evil stuff. You'll hear how the murder weapon was finally found. One of the things we found was a day planner that had been taken out of Helen's Mercedes. And you'll hear about the fateful chain of events that placed at least one of these darkly industrious women

at the scene of the crime. And now we know that Helen called for tow, AAA tow, at the end of this alley the night of the McDavid murder. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is episode five of Dateline's newest podcast, The Thing About Helen and Olga. It was almost 11 months to the day after Kenneth McDavid was crushed to death in an alley

that federal agents arrested Helen Golay and Olga Ruther Schmidt on mail fraud charges. But I haven't done any mail fraud, so I don't know. My partner, Helen Goley, had insurance, not me. That got them off the street. But homicide detective Dennis Kilcoyne had not given up his quest to have them nailed the murder charges. These are murder suspects that we are going after. Even if all we can charge them with is mail fraud, the bottom line is they're murder suspects.

Oh yes, the killing of Kenneth McDavid had been a murder, all right. A murder that had been caught on camera. That's right. Security cameras mounted along the dark alley that night had captured grainy images of what looked to be either a Ford Taurus or a Mercury Sable drive through the alley shortly before midnight, about the time Kenneth McDavid was killed. It starts on Bristol Farms in Ohio, and then we're coming south, and then we're out of

view of that camera. And then it picks it up as the car goes under that camera. Who was driving the car? The images weren't clear. It wasn't even clear if the driver was alone. But what was clear was that the car was a silver-colored station wagon. And as the car comes by, you get a pretty good depiction of the make and model and the color of the vehicle.

For close to a year, the riddle of the car caught on camera had bedeviled the police. But a few days after Helen and Olga were arrested, investigators got the break they'd been looking for. Detectives Kilcoyne and Sanchez were in the FBI property room to see everything the searchers had seized from Helen and Olga's apartments.

Sam Mayrose, FBI's Sam, was there too. And there in that trove of stuff, Sam spied a day planner that had been taken from Helen's Mercedes. He picked it up. I was going through it, and there's this post-it, and it's got a partial VIN number. It says 1999 Mercury Sable Station Wagon, and a tag, and it's got a name on it. The name on the post-it did not ring any bells, though in time it would.

No, what leaped out to Sam, like a sudden revelation, was the make and model of the car, a 1999 Mercury Sable. Of such moments, incomprehensible to the casual observer, a detective's career is made. That was a big eureka moment. That was huge because we knew this guy had been run over. So I gave the information to Dennis. And old FBI Sam Mayrose, he stumbled on this. And so we were able to almost immediately have our detectives figure out the rest of the license plate,

which led us to a 1999 Mercury Sable silver station wagon, just like in the video. The question now was, could detectives prove to the satisfaction of some future jury that this Mercury Sable was in fact the murder weapon that was used to kill Kenneth McDavid? They needed to find that car. And they did. A quick DMV search showed that a 1999 Mercury Sable with that VIN number was owned by a local family who had bought it a few months earlier at a city sale of confiscated or abandoned vehicles. The vehicle had been impounded a few short blocks from Olga's house in early July of 2005, within a couple of weeks of the McDavid murder.

And it was impounded after it was sighted a few times. That's right. The car was found, abandoned near Olga's apartment. The next step, figure out how that VIN number for that 1999 Mercury Sable wound up in Helen Golay's day planner. Once again, it was FBI Sam Mayrose who came up with a critical clue. While going through Olga's phone records, Mayrose noticed a phone number he'd never seen before, a number that Olga had dialed way back in January of 2004. So Mayrose picked up the phone and reached a used car lot, Mexicali Auto Sales.

It was a small outfit over toward East LA, yellow and blue concrete building parked by the I-5 freeway. They said, yeah, we sold a Mercury Sable. And I said, okay, we'll be over there. So I got ahold of Dennis and we all went out there and talked to him. And at some point we showed them photo lineup

of Helen and Olga. Well, kind of to my surprise, the guy picks Olga out because we thought that Helen had purchased the car. According to the salesman, Olga had arrived at his lot with cash in hand a couple of years earlier. Wanted to buy a car. Any car, really. And no, she didn't need a test drive. When it came time to show some ID to complete the paperwork,

Olga told the salesman she was buying the car for a friend. And then she showed him a driver's license that had some other lady's picture and name on it. Sam looked at the name and, well, what do you know? It was the same name that had been scribbled in Helen Golay's day planner. So did that mean Helen and Olga had a co-conspirator? Well, no, not at all. When investigators questioned the lady, she said she had never owned a Mercury Sable, didn't know anything about it.

But then she added this. She told us, I had never purchased or owned that car. I don't know anything about it. But my purse was stolen from the gym back in 2003. And I reported it, but I never heard anything about it. And so we talked to the people that run the gym, and we find out that Keisha Golay belongs at that gym. And their records indicated that Keisha had been at the gym the exact same day that this lady's purse was stolen.

Keisha Golay, Helen's daughter. Did Keisha Golay steal that purse? It certainly looked that way to the police, although she was never charged. But as they dug through Olga's apartment, looking for evidence connecting all this perfidity, they found, imagine, a copy of that woman's stolen driver's license. Still, there were other, more pressing questions to be answered. Chief among them, how to confirm that this Mercury Sable was the same Mercury sable used to murder Kenneth McDavid. The first step was to buy the car back from the family who now owned it. We had it taken to our lab on a flatbed truck,

and our lab technicians started going over the car inside and out. And we're not coming up with anything. We were hoping to maybe get Olga's fingerprints inside the car or Helen's fingerprints or something. A while after the fact. It's quite a while. It's ten months later and we're trying to connect the girls to this car and it's not working too well.

The California Highway Patrol has a specialized unit called the Multidisciplinary Accident Investigations Team, or MATE. These detectives are essentially mechanics who know everything there is to know about cars. What to look for when a car has been involved in an accident

and where to look for it. They start working the undercarriage of this car and they start looking at different things and pointing to different things. Like, for one thing, a splash of bright red paint on the right front wheel. Nobody knew how or when the paint got there. At the time, it didn't really seem to matter much. But that red paint would become pretty significant later. But the real evidence, if there was any, would likely be found underneath.

When all four tires are touching the ground, the Mercury Sable only had a clearance of about six inches. Six inches. So, as you might expect, there would be plenty to look for if the car in question had actually driven over a human body. When you think of this car bulldozing over an adult man's body, six inches is not enough. And that's just, it was, it had to be just an incredible death. With the car up on a lift, the car guys could stand straight up and use bright light to peer into all the nooks and crannies.

What did they hope to find? Bits of clothing, hair maybe, even blood. The first thing these forensic mechanics noticed was that the front passenger floor panel had been pushed up a few inches. Further back on the passenger side, they saw wipe marks that disturbed the pattern of road grime that covered the rest of the undercarriage. Those swipe marks, they figured, could have been made by Kenneth McDavid's clothing as the car rolled over him.

Our lab people, they're doing their little swabbing and Q-tips and little pieces of cloth and doing all this work under the car, looking for bits and items that may still be under that car. And there's a few areas that are testing positive for blood, but we don't know if it's human or animal or whatever. I mean, the undercarriage of the car sees a lot of things. As those blood swabs were being placed in test tubes for the crime lab, one of the mechanic detectives found something unusual near the gas tank under the rear section of the car. One of them said, look at this, Dennis, you see that right there? I said, yeah. What are we looking at?

I said, you see that fuel filter right there? It's been repaired. Ford doesn't build them like that, and they aren't allowed to repair them like that. That is a crude little repair for the fuel line of this vehicle. And he said when that pulled off, the car would stop. That was kind of a big deal. A big deal because of what they knew Helen did on the night of Kenneth McDavid's death. She placed a call to AAA. It was right there in her phone records. Just a few minutes before midnight, June 21st, 2005. The location? A Chevron station at the corner of Westwood and Santa Monica,

about 900 feet from the alley where Kenneth McDavid was at that very moment, lying crumpled up in a spreading pool of blood. And now we know that Helen called for tow, a AAA tow, at the end of this alley the night of the McDavid murder. And the vehicle we think is this vehicle that we're standing under right now was towed back to her residence at Fifth and Ocean Park in Santa Monica. Oh my, how the chickens come home to roost. A few days after investigators finished examining the Mercury Sable, Detective Kilcoyne got a call from the crime lab.

The results of those three specks of blood were in. Not only were those specks of blood human, they were a positive DNA match for Kenneth McDavid. Ten months after the murder, the detective had finally found the murder weapon. Almost as incredible as these two old gals doing this stuff is the results we're getting from our lab. You know, detectives often complain about the CSI effect. Everybody expects to get that kind of results, but you actually got them. Yeah. That was a huge piece of evidence. Huge enough that in mid-August 2006,

the Detective Kilcoyne Granny Task Force charged Helen and Olga with murder. The federal mail fraud charges? They were put on hold. There was no way they were going to escape. But we had them called on the other charges, on the federal charges, so they were going to go to jail no matter what. It's just they needed to go to jail for the murders.

Detective Kilcoyne may have had a smile as wide as a two-car garage with both doors open, but this was no time to let up. Few murder cases are watertight. There can never be too much evidence. He knew now it was Olga Rotterschmidt who bought the Mercury Sable in January 2004. Knew also that on the night of the McDavid murder in June 2005, the car was towed from a gas station near the murder scene to a curbside near Helen's place in Santa Monica. What Detective Kilcoyne wanted to know now was,

who was driving the car? And where had that car been for those 18 months between the purchase and the killing? We had detectives go out and canvas Helen's neighborhood as well as Olga. Such an underrated tool, cops knocking on doors. It was a woman in Helen's neighborhood who answered the question of where that mercury sable had been for 18 months. It was involved in a residential garbage dispute. And we stumble on a witness, a neighbor of Helen's. She doesn't like where these big trash dumpsters

for an adjacent apartment complex are being left by the city. They create a problem, an odor for her house, and this type of thing. And one day she looks out, and there's red paint all over the side of the dumpsters and the alley, and look, it even splashed on a car that's parked there and so she goes out with her trusty little camera and she takes some photographs because she's going to now she's going to prove it to the people down at city hall look at now there's paint all over and you've damaged somebody's car and will you please move the trash

cans the somebody who actually parked the car didn't seem to mind the red paint on the front left wheel. Didn't even try to scrape it off. No. That car, it seemed, was destined for another purpose. One that would not be affected by a bit of paint.

So my guys, months later, are out pounding on doors. And what do we know? Have you ever seen this Mercury Sable parked around here? This type of thing. Well, this young lady, she goes to her computer and says, look at this. And she actually has the front of the vehicle parked behind Helen's house. And it has red paint splashed on the wheel cover of the left front tire of the Sable. Well, here we are. We've

got the vehicle in our garage now, we've got the DNA underneath, and lo and behold, right on that front left wheel cover is still that red paint. That's one thing that the new owner didn't take the time to scrape off. That became a significant piece of evidence, putting the car back at Helen's house.

A few weeks later, that same car was abandoned in Hollywood, five blocks from Olga Rudderschmidt's apartment. The final pieces of the puzzle were falling into place nicely. But the emerging picture? Well, that made even hard-nosed cops blanch. This was incredible. The calculation, the pure evilness of this is incredible. You know, I've been doing this a long time, and I've never, ever seen anything that involves this much planning and this degree of just evil.

I mean, to buy a vehicle 18 months out, to be signing up somebody for insurance, to sit and have a meal with people and look them in the eye, knowing that, you know, in 12 months and three days, you're done, buddy. For more than two years, Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt had controlled Kenneth McDavid's fate. Soon, a jury would be asked to control theirs.

So the majority of what we're going to do is going to be in that alley right there. It's a fall evening in 2007, six months before Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt were to go on trial for murder. On this night, the long, dark alley where Kenneth McDavid's life ended in 2005. Looks like a movie set. What we need to tell this other guy is we'll block off here, block off up there. But we're going to have to wait until Bristol Farms closes it, I think, 10.

Filling the role of director was Detective Dennis Kilcoyne. His crew of police cameramen and investigators were producing the ultimate niche film, heavy on measurements and statistics, light on plot. The goal? Document their theory of the case. Prove, mathematically and visually, that the point where a security camera showed the car's brake lights flashed is the spot where Kenneth McDavid's body was found.

As with any good production, the director gives the crew a pep talk and shares his vision. Okay, here's what we're going to do tonight. Everybody can introduce one another, but basically, so everybody's on the same page here. The murder that occurred here, June 22nd of 2005, of Kenneth McDavid, occurred up the alley here. From the night that it happened, we have surveillance, time-lapse photographs from a number of different cameras along the businesses facing Ohio Street and then coming south in the alley.

Kilcoyne is wearing a blue windbreaker with Los Angeles police written in big white letters on the back as he addresses the dozen or so investigators gathered around him. This is what we're going to, we're going to go back with the actual car and with our television crew from LAPD, we're going to take the measured locations of these time frames here and we're going to film we're just trying to show the points in the alley where the car was

in reference to where the evidence was found later. Waiting in the wings, the star of this production, the 1999 Mercury Sable station wagon. The keys are in it, right? Yes. Oh, good. That splash of red paint still graces its front left wheel.

But much has changed. On this night, the driver is a police officer. The cameras are recording in color. And members of the California Highway Patrol's mate unit, tape measures in hand, are preparing a precise map of what happened here. He's just putting a basic outline of where the body was as it was found back in June of 2005. Now, from the calculations that they were able to provide,

this is exactly where the body was found. Just a pair of eyeglasses there. What number was that? What number was that? Physical evidence number what? Though the purpose of this recreation is science, not cinema, one gets the impression that everyone in the alley feels somehow like a witness to the crime. As though, through imagination and measurement,

they can both know the truth and convey it to a jury. We want to try to recreate the six minutes of time from the time stops here, backs up, does all that stuff. I got a script for that portion. Ready? Rolling. It's about midnight when the silver Mercury Sable makes its left turn into the alleyway, just as it did two and a half years earlier. This time, as the car passes the first of the security camera locations,

the images are clearer and in color. As the car moves further away, the taillights grow smaller until they glow red in the darkness, like the burning ends of a pair of midnight cigarettes. See the white light coming out from there? And the brake lights? Four minutes and 29 seconds. The blackout period. The time in which the detectives believe

a drugged and possibly unconscious Kenneth McDavid was pulled from the car and positioned for death. Cut! What had that last evening been like for him? Had he been invited to dinner with one or both of his benefactors? Had he been excited to finally have a meal that didn't come from a bag? Had he been offered a glass of wine as a friendship toast. Had the wine been laced with a

sedative that made him drowsy, unconscious even? We may never know. But investigators did know this. When he died, Kenneth McDavid had food in his stomach, a small amount of alcohol in his

system, and a large amount of prescription sedatives and painkillers in his stomach, a small amount of alcohol in his system, and a large amount of prescription sedatives and painkillers in his blood. Perfect. Perfect. It's about here, during this night of recreation, that a critical part of the detective's case is tested. I mean, this is a severe drop. Yeah.

I mean, if this was snow, we'd have a good sled ride right here. Yeah. Remember when the highway patrol's mechanics found the fuel line on the sable had been recently repaired? Well, the detectives had a theory. When Helen rolls over Kenneth, we believe his head disconnected or damaged the fuel line. That's the voice of FBI Special Agent Sam Mayrose. So she couldn't get the car started, died on her, so there was enough slope in the alleyway to where she could roll down the alleyway, and as luck would have it for her, there's a Chevron station

down there. A lucky break for the killer, who needed to make the murder weapon disappear. And sure enough, there was just enough slope that the mate team was able to coast the mercury sable out of the alley and down the block to the Chevron station, where a tow truck later picked it up, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the detective's theory of what actually happened that night was indeed plausible. It had been a good night's work. Okay, I think we got it. We're good. Good job, thank you.

Good job, thank you. The story of the rest of that fateful evening in June 2005 could now be told through phone records, Sam Mayrose's specialty. It was at the Chevron station that the driver of the Mercury Sable called for help. So she calls AAA and says, hey, I need a tow. My car stopped. I can't get it going again. And they send a tow truck and they tow the car. Then one last call from that phone, 1 a.m., to Olga, Olga Rutter Schmidt, the FBI's Sam Mayrose.

That night, Helen had contacted Olga, which I figured probably, and of course I don't know this, was probably telling her, hey, the deed is done, would be my guess. This case had more angles and edges than a three-carat diamond. But after more than two years of intense investigation, Detective Dennis Kilcoyne and his team were satisfied that they had covered them all. But here's the thing about Helen and Olga. There was no bottom. Literally nothing they wouldn't do.

Nobody they wouldn't blame. To save their own necks. Thank you.