Dateline Originals - The Thing About Helen & Olga - Ep. 6: The Bottom Line

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Fireworks and finger pointing in court as two little old ladies do whatever it takes to beat a murder rap.This episode was originally published on November 16, 2021. 

It was a business venture. A startup, really. The kind of entrepreneurial enterprise that identifies an undervalued resource and exploits it. Visionary, almost. In a wicked kind of way. After all, the city of Los Angeles was awash in raw material. Homeless men, down and out, living on the margins of society, estranged from their families, isolated and penniless.

Some consider them a blight on this shining city of stars by the sea. But to Helen Golay and Olga Ruderschmidt, the homeless and dispossessed were walking, talking gold. He signed for these policies, and we have been punished because of what he wanted. That's not right. Now remember the bottom line. It is so evil and so heartbreaking to think that anyone would decide that the purpose of homeless human beings is to make profit.

Were far more dead than alive? It would seem so. But only if no one paid too much attention to the life insurance paperwork or gave the crumpled bleeding heaps and back alleys more than a passing glance. In this episode, you'll hear from the lawyers who battled in court over the fate of two elderly women the media dubbed the Black Widows. There is circumstantial evidence that the jury considered,

but there's no direct evidence. So we don't have a situation where we have somebody who said, yes, I saw her do this. I've prosecuted all types of cases, consider, but there's no direct evidence. So we don't have a situation where we have somebody who said, yes, I saw her do this. I've prosecuted all types of cases, serial murderers, gang murderers, hate crime murderers. These two individuals were the most egregious actors that I had come across. And you'll hear about the dramatic defense claim that prosecutors had put the wrong person on trial for murder. Someone who's not sitting in the courtroom is the actual perpetrator. That's the thing about Helen and Olga.

There is absolutely nothing they wouldn't do when their backs were against the wall. I didn't see that coming either. I mean, the case was horrifying enough. The question was, would this surprise defense strategy work? I'm Keith Morrison, and this is the final episode of Dateline's newest podcast, The Thing About Helen and Olga. Before their arrests in May 2006, Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt lived large. Helen had a large apartment, large car, and a lifestyle largely dedicated to satisfying her enormous appetite for money. Olga lived less ostentatiously, but maintained a healthy bank balance in spite of having no job,

no visible means of support. Then, one morning, all that changed. Your head or on your chest, okay? I'm not a criminal. I know, but let's just go with the program. Turn around. Turn around. I can't believe this.

This is not true. I have to go to the bathroom. Please. Suddenly, life for the two women got very small. A 12 by 8 foot cell. a stainless steel toilet and sink, hard vinyl covered mattresses, bunk beds. Cellmates. Oh yes, that.

She's supposed to be housed separately. She is, however, they put another cellmate in there with her and the cellmate is interfering with her ability to concentrate on the case of rediscovery and so forth. That's the voice of Helen Golay's attorney, Roger Diamond, speaking at a pretrial court appearance. So she would like an order that would allow her to stay in the cell by herself without having somebody else come in and disturb her and harass her and so forth. Helen Golay hired Diamond after her arrest on the federal mail fraud charges, but now he deftly shifted gears to defend her on murder charges.

Good morning. My name is Roger Diamond. I'm the attorney for Helen Golay. Here's a card if anybody needs it. I spoke with Roger Diamond. I'm the attorney for Helen Golay. Here's a card if anybody needs it. I spoke with Roger Diamond in 2008. I've often thought that the job of a defense attorney is one of the more creative jobs there is. There must be a lot of left-handed people in your business. It's just so interesting. But without giving away too many secrets, how did you propose to go about defending this client?

What was your strategy? Well, we start with the given that Ms. Golay maintains her innocence. Now, I was not there at the scene. I was not with Ms. Golay. I did not meet her until after she was arrested. So I have to go by what she tells me, and she tells me that she's not guilty. As you can probably tell from his voice, Roger Diamond is a defense attorney through and through,

an impassioned advocate who reads dense court opinions for fun. Now imagine the impression. The man is one of a kind. Beneath his unruly mop of wiry gray hair, Roger Diamond's well-lined face is punctuated by a pair of dark, piercing eyes. He frequently arrived in court with the rumpled look of a man who had slept at his clothes and was late to a meeting, as if he wasn't ready. But of course, oh, he was.

She's presumed innocent, and yet she's being punished as though she were guilty of a crime. She has a perfect record, has never been convicted of any crime, and she's being punished. She's miserable there at the county jail. It's absolutely horrible, John. Horrible? Well, nobody's ever confused a county jail with a carnival cruise. But Helen wasn't alone when it came to complaining about the accommodation.

Her partner, Olga Rudderschmidt, complained so much that the jailers reportedly nicknamed her the Kvetch, or Complainer. The food was not to her liking. The TV programs playing in the day room were annoying. Instead of designer fashions and workout clothes, both women wore county-issue orange jumpsuits now. The views from the small windows in their cells somewhat different from the scenery of Hollywood and Santa Monica. Their new home was a graceless concrete jail that squatted in an industrial neighborhood five miles south of downtown LA, hard by a busy

highway and some railroad tracks. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. The conditions that she's living under are deplorable, absolutely horrible. Horrible or not, it might have been a consolation to know that some of Hollywood's more notorious celebrities had bunked at the Central Regional Detention Facility. Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, to name a few. Olga's attorney, Michael Sklar, was in many ways the physical and temperamental opposite of Roger Diamond. Sklar was tall and mild-mannered. His goatee was neatly trimmed, his dark, thinning hair combed to the side.

All his professional life, he'd been a public defender. When do you believe he'd be ready to go forward with the arraignment? September 13th, the day we were busted. Where the voluble diamond always appeared good for a comment to the press, Sklar avoided the media and in court spoke as if each word that crossed his lips was costing him money. If you receive a discovery in a week or ten days, you don't think you'd be ready for the arraignment any sooner than September 13th?

Well, September 13th is about that length of time. So the answer's yes? Yes. You don't believe you'd be ready any sooner? Right. All right. Because the cases against both women were, they were identical, the same facts, the same evidence, the same witnesses, the cases were joined, meaning Helen and Olga would be tried together.

Good for the taxpayer, perhaps. Convenient for the prosecutors. But, as you will see, trouble for Helen and Olga. Theirs had always been an uneasy partnership. And now, the old resentments were out in the open. Helen, that's your fault. You cannot make that many insurances. It's on your name only. Three different extra insurances. You know what? I want to ask for a different location if you're going to talk.

I don't want to talk. Don't talk. Remember the last time those two were alone in a room together? In that interrogation room, wired for sound? I was doing everything for you. But listen, you are talking.

You must be quiet. I know, but you found that our relationship ended up like this, and you ended up like this. I know, but your fault that our relationship ended up like this, and you ended up like this. I know, but admit it was your fault. Now, there would be no common defense here. The trial would play out as their partnership had, with each woman for herself, each willing to do whatever it took to walk away from a murder rap. The different defense attorneys ended up having adverse theories of the case

that brought them into conflict. That's the voice of L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Bobby Grace. Grace was one of two lead prosecutors. And so the attorneys end up playing out in the trial the real-life tension that there was between Helen and Ogun throughout this whole nefarious plot that they had going on. They didn't get along and that spilled out into their defense tactics at trial. Bobby Grace is a formidable looking man, broad shouldered with a shiny shaved head. He joined the L.A. District Attorney's office in 1988.

Homicides and violent crimes were his specialty. But of all the hardened criminals he's encountered over the years, Grace said, it's two old ladies who take the cake. And I get asked this question all the time. I point to Helen and Olga as being the two people that stuck out the most as the worst people that I've prosecuted. Grace's partner was Truc Doe, a brilliant young prosecutor whose own story did not lack for existential drama. Her family fled Vietnam in 1975 when she was three. She's one of the finest trial attorneys that our office had at that time. She's now a judge on the appellate court, great at analyzing cases and outlining for the jury what are

the particular facts that they need to pay attention to. She's very good at that. It was a Tuesday morning, March 18, 2008, that the mahogany-paneled ninth-floor courtroom known as Department 102 began filling with lawyers and reporters and spectators in anticipation of the opening act of the People v. Helen Golay and Olga Ruddersmith. The murders of Paul Vattis and Kenneth McDavid would, of course, command center stage. One can't help imagining, though, the spirit of 97-year-old Fred Downey was also in that courtroom. Fred's death after

being hit by a car, you'll remember, was an accident, a tragic coincidence, after he'd signed over all his money, his property, his estate. At 9.34 a.m., Helen Golay entered through a side door on the right-hand side of the courtroom. Gone was her trademark bouffant and dangling earrings. Her hair had grown out in streaks of brown and gray. In place of the orange prison jumpsuit, Helen wore slacks and a green sweater. Olga entered a few minutes later. Her long, dark hair pulled away from her face by a pair of barrettes.

She briefly scanned the courtroom, looking for a friendly face, but saw none. Relatives of the two murdered men were there, though. Sandra Salmon, Kenneth McDavid's sister, and Stella Vados, Paul Vados' daughter, sat on the left, behind the prosecutor's table with their lawyer, Gloria Allred. They ran over him with a car in an alley, as though he was just a piece of garbage that didn't matter. But this was someone's father.

And Kenneth McDavid was someone's brother. And he was a human being, not a piece of garbage. At about 9.40, the jury of nine men and three women filed in and took their seats in the jury box. Court was called to order. And Judge David S. Wesley took his seat on the bench beneath the circular seal of the state of California. At 9.45, the raven-haired prosecutor, Truck Doe, rose from her seat and faced the jury.

These two women looked at their victims and saw profit in their plight, she began. For 75 minutes, she spoke to the jury about the witnesses they would hear from and evidence they would see, which would lead them to only one conclusion, she said, that the two little old ladies sitting before them were guilty. Guilty of two murders in the first degree. As for the defense, Michael Sklar and Roger Diamond chose to say, nothing at all, leaving prosecutors to guess what defense strategy they had up their sleeves. Crime stories are about the unusual, each revealing its own brand of pathology. Murder trials, on the other hand, follow a familiar script.

They begin at the scene of the crime, at the moment when the deed was discovered, the natural order of things disturbed. And that is how the murder trial of Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt unfolded. Over the course of three weeks, the prosecution presented a virtual tsunami of evidence, 90 witnesses, 277 exhibits. With little physical evidence to present in the murder of Paul Vados, the prosecutors intended to show that a strong pattern of evidence existed that connected Helen and Olga with the deaths of both Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid. Starting from the night Kenneth McDavid's body was found crushed to death in an alley,

to the day investigators found his blood beneath that mercury sable, prosecutors wove a meticulous story. mercury sable prosecutors wove a meticulous story phone records documented helen's call for roadside assistance on the night of kenneth mcdavid's murder less than a thousand feet from where his body lay in the alley dead neighbors testified they'd seen the car parked behind helen's home before the murder and police officers testified they had found the car parked behind Helen's home before the murder, and police officers testified they had found the car, abandoned, blocks from Olga's apartment, after the murder. Insurance reps explained the tedious ins and outs of the life insurance business, the computations that reduced the lives of Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid

to numbers on the bottom line. Premiums paid in, claims paid out, calculations that made murder an inescapable cost of doing business. Charles Suheda, the pastor who ran the homeless program at Hollywood Presbyterian, told the jury about the day Helen and Olga showed up saying they wanted to volunteer to help feed the homeless. Such thoughtful, kind women. Like grandmothers, they seemed to him back then.

Now, they sat feet away from him. Elderly women accused of killing two vulnerable men, men he had known well. As I recall, they had a slide of Hollywood Presbyterian Church. They established that there was a church, and this church is doing this work with the homeless, etc., and they're trying to help these folks. And then on the other hand, you got this story of two women who are, they're destroying the lives of the people that came to the church for help.

Okay. That's an incredible juxtaposition. That is really high contrast of, if you want to call it good and evil, I think I could call that, you know, good and evil, you know. And then finally, Jimmy Covington had his say. Remember Jimmy? He was the guy who slipped the hook. The guy they lured with the same deal they later offered Kenneth McDavid. But Jimmy didn't like Olga's snoopy questions,

her demands for more and more personal information. And Jimmy survived to tell his tale in court. All of a sudden, I'm seeing her there, and it's dawning on me, this is actually real. There she is, and there's her partner, and it's all coming together. It's starting to feel more real to me now, you know, I mean, majorly real. Majorly real? Oh, yes, as real as it gets. When they asked me if this was her over there, I looked at her and I nodded, yeah, that's her in the blue coat right there.

And she looked at me with those eyes like that time when she opened that door at 3 o'clock in the morning. She had those eyes. She kind of looked at me and glanced to the side like that and looked up, and that was it. She never looked at me again. Couldn't believe it, how real this was. At the end of the prosecution's case, there was a palpable feeling that this had been a rout, as if LeBron and the Lakers had just demolished a pickup team from the local Y.

But was it enough to convict two elderly ladies of murder? You never want to get too full of yourself or to assume, because anything that involves human endeavors are unpredictable by their very nature. And so, although we had all the cards in the case, we weren't counting our chickens before they hatched. Counting chickens? No, it was the defense's turn now, and the souffle they were serving would require a lot of broken eggs. Helen's attorney, Roger Diamond, went first. In what was effectively his opening statement, Diamond seemed to concede the obvious. Yes, he told the jury perhaps the ladies were involved in some insurance shenanigans,

but he said that was not the question here. The real question was who killed Kenneth McDavid, the only case in which real physical evidence existed? Who did it, he asked, staring intently at the jury like a revival preacher preparing for the altar call. Well, after a dramatic pause, he answered his own question, his voice rising. Keisha Golay, Helen Golay's daughter. Well, shock pulsed across the courtroom like ripples on water. Investigators in the courtroom, like the FBI's Sam Mayrose, were stunned.

The thing that shocked me the most was when Helen threw her own daughter under the bus, accusing her of being the one that drove the vehicle that killed Kenneth. That really surprised me. In law school, that kind of tactic is called third-party culpability. It means pinning the blame on someone who has not been charged and is probably not even in the courtroom. Bobby Grace has a more colorful name for it. The Saudi defense, which is some other dude did it. And prosecutors like all over the country, they know the Saudi defense. And we spent a lot of time making sure that we are able to counter claims that somebody else did. But this kind of took us a little bit by surprise, given what we knew about the evidence so far. As Helen sat with her head down, staring with blank eyes at the table before her,

Diamond told the jury that it was Helen's daughter who stole the driver's license from that Santa Monica gym and gave it to Olga Rudderschmidt. It was Keisha, he claimed, who called the used car dealership and arranged the purchase of the Mercury Sable. It was Keisha who used her mother's AAA roadside assistance card to call for a tow on the night Kenneth McDavid died. In fact, he claimed he had evidence that the phone used to make that call to AAA

was registered to Keisha Golay. Oh, he had the undivided attention of everyone in the courtroom now. Diamond argued that Helen Golay could not possibly have killed Kenneth McDavid. She was 75 years old at the time, thin and feeble, too weak to have muscled a man who weighed nearly 200 pounds, out of her car and into position to be run over. But Keisha? Oh yes, according to Diamond, Helen's iron-pumping daughter was more than capable of that.

A plausible theory? Yes. Even the investigators like FBI Sam Mayrose had to concede. Could be. Quite frankly, it's not out of the realm of possibility that that's what happened, but we could never, we could never develop the evidence that showed that Keisha was involved in that. Was this Helen's last con? The bottom rung on the long ladder of shame? Well, in spite of all of his promises of proof, Roger Diamond produced not one whit of evidence to support any of his allegations against Keisha Golay. No phone records, no evidence at all that Keisha Golay had ever been charged

with stealing a driver's license from the gym, and certainly no evidence that Keisha Golay had ever been charged with stealing a driver's license from the gym. And certainly no evidence that Keisha was ever in the car that killed Kenneth McDavid. But? Well, we don't have to have any evidence at all. A rule Roger Diamond knew, as well as his own name. The jury is properly instructed at the beginning of a criminal case that the burden is never on the defendant

to produce any evidence, and the burden is never on the defendant obviously to testify. Fortunately, in our American legal system, the defendant does not have to testify.

Keisha Golay did not respond to Dateline's requests for comment. As for Olga's defense, her attorney, Michael Sklar, never even made an opening statement. His defense was best summed up by Olga herself

on the day she was arrested. Helene, that's your fault. There's that interrogation room recording again. I know. You were greedy. That's the problem. Your fault that our relationship ended up like this. again. The attorney for Olga Reuterschmidt, he was trying to get as far away from Helen as possible in order to make the argument that Olga was like really a dupe in this whole situation.

According to Olga's attorney, the whole scheme was Helen's idea. Helen was the boss. Olga, he said, was too slow-witted to even guess what Helen was up to. Olga was the one who cared for them, checked up on them, brought them food, felt genuine grief when they died, said Olga's attorney. Just look at the interrogation room tape, Sklar told the jury. Olga never once hinted at knowing anything about murder, even though she blabbed freely about everything else.

I should have taken my passport. It's expired. And get the f*** out of here. That's what I should have done. See what greediness leads you to? As for the murder weapon, the mercury sable, who had possession of it before and after the murder of Kenneth McDavid, he asked? Helen Golay.

Who had raked in the big bucks? Helen Golay It was late on a Monday afternoon, April 14, 2008. More than a month since jury selection began, the Chosen Twelve finally started their deliberations. Late the following day, they sent a notice to the judge. They were hung on some of the criminal

counts, but decided on others. The next morning, Judge Wesley assembled the jurors and opened the envelope that contained their partial verdict and read it to a packed courtroom. Helen Golay, convicted of conspiracy and murder of both Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid.

And Olga Rudderschmidt? Well, maybe her attorney's plan to pin it all on Helen worked. Because when it came to the question of the guilt or innocence of Olga, the jury was deadlocked. The jury's decision to find Helen Golay guilty on all counts came quickly. She was the mastermind, after all. But perhaps there was something in Olga's befuddled face as she sat at the defense table that convinced at least one or two jurors that she was different. A thief, perhaps, but a murderer? I believe that the jurors were having

some trouble as to whether Olga was part of the actual murder aspect. And there were some votes that were taken, apparently, where the jury was hung, meaning not all the jurors agreed with the murder liability of Olga. There was a stalemate. The jury needed more. And so the judge did something very unusual. He allowed the attorneys to, in effect, make another round of closing arguments. Olga's attorney, Michael Sklar, urged the wavering jurors to hang tough, take pride in rendering a split decision. Prosecutor Bobby Grace argued that Helen and Olga had always been partners in crime. All the crimes, even murder. I tried to lean very heavily on the conspiracy aspect of it and that, you know, that we did not have to prove that Olga struck the fatal blow,

only that she was part and parcel of the conspiracy. And it was almost impossible for the jurors to divorce her from all aspects of the larger conspiracy. And it would have been inexplicable that Olga would not have gone along for the entire ride because she wanted to get as much money as possible. So she wouldn't have left herself out in terms of the killing part because Helen could have cut her out of the deal if she wasn't stepping up to the plate all the way. So then the jury went away again and closed the door for one tense hour. Olga Ruderschmidt, her expression unreadable, scribbled on a yellow pad

as the jurors finally made their announcement on two counts of murder and two of conspiracy. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. Bobby Grace remembered the moment and said... Among the many cases that I have tried, they are the two most egregious actors, the two people that have stuck out the most as being the worst people that I have prosecuted.

Three months later, Helen and Olga were back in court, manacled and in their prison orange now for sentencing. Because of their age and the hurdles involved in imposing the death penalty, death had been taken off the table. As is almost always the case on such a sentencing day, the ninth floor courtroom was packed with investigators and reporters and the families of the victims and curious court watchers. Before pronouncing their sentences, Judge David Wesley asked Kenneth McDavid's sister, Sandra, and Paul Vadis's daughter, Stella, if they had anything they wanted to say.

They did. Sandra was first to walk to the microphone. My brother Kent did not deserve to die the way he did. At times choking back tears, Sandra turned to the one topic that felt particularly raw, the one Helen and Olga could still remedy if they wanted to. They could tell her family where they could find Kenneth McDavid's remains. The defendants have never said where his remains are.

Olga Rutter Schmidt signed his death certificate. And Helen Golda is listed on the death certificate as the place of final disposition. How cool have the nuts been where he is. Then a woman in black approached the microphone. In her eyes, the stricken look of a still grieving daughter. He didn't deserve that. No one does. Stella Vados remembered the good father Paul Vados was before life took a downward turn. And then she told the court what she thought of the women who killed him.

The defendants were greedy, selfish. I think they should live the rest of their lives in prison. Would they? The judge got down to business. You'll rise, please. Ms. Golay, the jury has convicted you. You are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. You may be seated.

Ms. Rudderschmidt, please rise. The jury has found you guilty. You are hereby sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Then Judge David Wesley paused and glared directly at Helen and Olga and said, I don't usually comment on sentences when I give a sentence, but during this trial, Ms. Rudderschmidt, you recognized something in Ms. Golay but did not recognize it in yourself when you pointed your finger at her and you said,

you're greedy. Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vedos needed only food, water, and shelter. They needed a helping hand. They thought they were getting that help from Ms. Golay and from you, Ms. Rudderschmidt. They thought you were going to give them the help they wanted. Instead, these unfortunate men were sacrificed on your altars of greed. Therefore, each of you is sentenced and remanded to the custody of the sheriffs for transportation to the Department of Corrections forthwith.

With that, Ellen Golay and Olga Rutter-Schmidt were led from the courtroom to serve out the rest of their days behind bars. Though both later appealed their convictions, those appeals were denied. It's been 13 years since Helen and Olga were sentenced to life without parole. In that time, they have no doubt met and mingled with others of their ilk. Serial killers, husband mutilators, kidnappers, thieves.

Both are still alive, serving their sentences in separate prisons. Helen is 90 now, Olga 87. We've reached out to both of them over the years to see if they had anything to say at all about this. Olga once seemed game, though she said she couldn't talk on the phone and did not respond to a follow-up letter from Dateline sent earlier this year. As for Helen, she wrote us last year saying that she has, quote, bona fide and verifiable evidence proving her innocence. And, quote, I can only look forward to the day I am a guest on your program, Dateline,

and reveal the truth of my unlawful conviction. She closed by asking us to find her an attorney and pay her legal fees. Naturally, she promised to reimburse us once she is exonerated. Of course, that's something Dateline would never do. Helen did not respond to a follow-up letter we sent her this past summer. As for the investigators who were instrumental in unraveling Helen and Olga's murder-for-money scheme, many, like Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, are retired now. So is the FBI's Sam Mayrose, though he still moonlights from time to time on cold cases in Oklahoma.

Sadly, Ed Webster, the insurance investigator whose persistence started it all, passed away in 2019. Ed could have and should have been somebody that taught at Quantico. Former FBI agent Sam Mayrose. It was just our honor to be able to work with a guy that was just that good. And he'd never been in law enforcement. He'd never been a sworn officer. But man, oh man, he knew what he was doing. And it was just really great to be able to work with a guy that knew what he was doing and was so kind to everybody.

Someone who was kind to everybody? A fine way to be remembered. And perhaps the best way to end a story that, sadly, had so little kindness in it. The Thing About Helen and Olga is a production of Dateline NBC and NBC News Audio. From Dateline NBC, Tim Beecham is the producer of this podcast, with help from Susan Lebowitz. Rachel Lagon is the associate producer. Thomas Kemen is our assistant audio editor.

Susan Nall oversees our digital programming. Adam Gorfain is the co-executive producer. Liz Cole is our executive producer. And David Corvo is our senior executive producer. Thank you. and operations manager Nick Offenberg. Original music by Andrew Eapin. you