♪
Friedman: Our story begins in Southern California.
It's about invisible people who preyed on invisible people
and an industry that preyed on them all.
Sometimes the criminal justice system...
It was more like guilty until proven innocent.
...isn't all that just.
Which stage of sleepwalking involves murder?
♪
That's scary.
Of course it is.
You don't give up, do you?
I'm Jena Friedman, and this is "Indefensible."
♪
In our youth-obsessed society, as women age,
we become invisible.
So I hear.
But as you'll learn in this next story,
there are some advantages to invisibility,
like getting away with murder.
♪
Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt
were like a real-life Thelma and Louise,
but instead of running their car off a cliff,
they ran it into...
We'll get to that later.
I had never heard of anything like this.
It was like a movie.
Veteran AP journalist Linda Deutsch
reported on the case.
It was a story that nobody could have sold to the studios
and found plausible.
And do you think nobody could have sold it
because the women in it were over 40?
No, I think it couldn't have been sold
because the story itself was so weird.
What were your first impressions of Helen and Olga
when you saw them?
Well, neither of them was very attractive.
♪
On July 21, 2005,
a body is discovered in an alley in West Hollywood.
There are no eyewitnesses,
but it appears to be a hit-and-run.
The victim is identified as 50-year-old Kenneth McDavid.
Pastor Charles Suhayda
met Kenneth through an outreach program
that Suhayda ran at a Hollywood church.
Ken himself was very much introverted,
and he was still very active in writing.
He was an aspiring writer.
At the time, Kenneth was experiencing homelessness,
and the church's program was a source of support for him.
But one day, Kenneth stopped showing up.
We didn't always see people all the time.
Their lifestyle can be very transient.
It's easy for them to go missing.That's correct.
And no one would even notice.
Nobody's gonna notice.
Kenneth's body is found beside a bike
with one of the tires off, as if he had been changing it.
Only the tire isn't flat.
The scene looked suspicious,
but so do a lot of things in L.A.
Deputy District Attorney Robert Grace.
So many people in Los Angeles are struck
and killed by motor vehicles.
So these hit-and-run investigations
are almost impossible to piece together
because you don't have on-site homicide detectives
who know what to look for.
They're so overwhelmed with so many different types
of hit-and-runs that they might not be able
to have the bandwidth to pay the amount
of attention that they would need?
Absolutely.
There are few leads
until police get a surprising tip from an unlikely source,
as writer Paul Brownfield explains.
The insurance investigator for Mutual of New York
sees that Kenneth McDavid, an apparently homeless person,
has a million dollars in life insurance on -- on him
and the beneficiaries won't talk to him.
The beneficiaries are Helen Golay
and Olga Rutterschmidt.
So he's contacting Olga and Helen,
and they're not returning his calls.
They're not answering his knocks at the door.
So that's, you know, sort of red flag number one.
Once the insurance investigator
reports his findings to the LAPD,
the stalled homicide investigation
gets a renewed focus...
now that insurance fraud
and a [bleep] ton of money might be involved.
Meanwhile, as luck would have it, Helen and Olga
suddenly become a lot more visible.
The detective who was working
Mr. McDavid's hit-and-run incident,
he had an interesting exchange with Helen and Olga,
who are demanding that the police sign off
on the release of McDavid's body.
So Helen Golay got into a big verbal dispute
with the detective.
A colleague heard the name Helen and Olga and said,
"Helen and Olga. I had a case, like, five years ago
where a Helen and Olga
were trying to retrieve the body for insurance claims."
♪
Sure enough, it's the same Helen and Olga.
The man's name is Paul Vados.
He also was experiencing homelessness and also died
in a suspicious hit-and-run. just like Kenneth McDavid.
All the insurance companies remembered Helen based upon
the difficult conversations that they had with her.
She was like the original Karen.
Yes. She -- She would be the --
the -- the grandmother of Karens.
Huh. So what's Olga like?
She was very eccentric. A very difficult personality.
Very self-absorbed. Once she went to a coffee shop,
she got into a confrontation with another customer.
It escalated. The customer tased her.
♪
Friedman: In 2006, Los Angeles police are investigating
the apparent hit-and-run death of a man named Kenneth McDavid
when they discover that two women, Helen Golay
and Olga Rutterschmidt, are beneficiaries
in a life insurance policy they've taken out in his name.
Authorities soon learn that Helen and Olga
are connected to another hit-and-run --
of a man named Paul Vados,
who died 5 1/2 years prior.
Now police and the insurance companies
are looking into both deaths,
and Helen and Olga are suddenly on their radar.
"Helen Golay, 77,
was born Helen Salisbury in Eastland County, Texas,
and grew up between relatives' homes."
Olga emigrated from Hungary in '57.
Brownfield: They met at a gym of all places.
Olga was a fitness buff, and Helen also went to the gym.
The story went that they would, like, go to hotels, sit out --
pretend to be guests, sit out by the pool, stealing purses.
They did clearly seem to be into identity theft.
They found each other in a sense, the two grifters.
Yeah.
It turns out Helen and Olga aren't just grifters.
They're involved in a much bigger scheme.
They took out around seven insurance policies on Paul Vados
and 13 on Kenneth McDavid,
and I think they might have tried to take out more.
It's not even the number of policies
as much as their carelessness
that tips off the insurance investigator.
They were pretty loosey-goosey sometimes with,
you know, the details.
Sometimes Kenneth McDavid's address
was actually Helen's address,
or Olga was Kenneth McDavid's aunt
to sort of create the -- the impression
of a relationship, a beneficiary relationship.
Bolstered by the insurance investigator's findings,
authorities begin to put together their case,
but they have to act fast.
The police were now surveilling Helen and Olga,
and they had determined that they were well on their way
to trying to set up
a third victim for a murder.
They had picked out a guy who was homeless
and actually got him to sign insurance documents.
The police were afraid for this guy's life.
While police don't have enough evidence
to charge Helen and Olga with murder,
they're able to issue an arrest warrant
on federal mail fraud charges.
I have to call my lawyer here.
What is happening here?
On May 18, 2006, the LAPD, FBI,
and a [bleep] load of other people make their move.
Mayrose: Ms. Golay, my name is Sam Mayrose.
I'm with the FBI. You're under arrest for mail fraud.
Mail fraud?! Yes.
That's right, Helen. Mail fraud.
And for a white-collar crime as boring as mail fraud,
authorities sure do pull out all the stops.
There were 20 to 30 police cars,
20 to 30 police cars? Yes.
So it's like raid-on-bin-Laden- level response?
Yes, it's -- it's an unusual amount of law enforcement.
But not when you [bleep]
with the multibillion-dollar insurance industry.
After Helolga's arrest -- can we call them that --
police devise a plan.
They put them together in the same holding room.
[Chuckles] What could go wrong?
♪
I know.
♪
Olga! Shut the [bleep] up. You're on camera.
Do you think had the insurance investigator
not tipped off law enforcement to Helen and Olga
that the women would have gotten away with the second murder?
Yeah, because the first murder is a cold case at that point
and the second murder is of a -- of a homeless person.
I think what was overlooked was, their crimes exposed
shocking loopholes in the -- in the life insurance industry
and the insurance industry as a whole
that, like, people just don't really want to,
I guess, uh, look at.
It almost makes me want to take out a life insurance policy
so that in the event that I get murdered,
somebody will find my killer,
and that somebody is a private insurance company
who has money on the line.
Yeah.
♪
Friedman: After Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt
are arrested on federal mail fraud charges,
police search Helen's apartment
and find a critical new piece of evidence --
a Post-it note with a license plate
and VIN number of a Mercury Sable.
Man: Police were stumped.
They thought insurance fraud might be all they could prove.
But then a big break.
Police say they found one of the murder weapons --
this 1999 Mercury Sable Station wagon.
They say the two women had bought the car
and sold it right after McDavid was killed.
Two sexy senior citizens behind bars on federal fraud charges,
and they are looking down the wrong end of the barrel
of murder one charges, as well.
Friedman: Defense attorney Roger Diamond
represented Helen during the trial.
What was Helen and Olga's greatest error
other than being guilty?
Well, a number of things.
I'm Helen's defense attorney. I still have loyalty to her.
But it certainly didn't hurt the investigation
to have the insurance company
working side by side with the prosecution.
The prosecutors had the full muscle
of the insurance industry to help them.
And you had a tired woman over 70,
who might also be a murderer,
helping you? That's right.
According to the Los Angeles Times,
at trial, Diamond argued that the insurance companies
were colluding with prosecutors and distorting the evidence
because they had a financial interest
in the women's convictions.
In retrospect, it probably was not proper to claim
that the insurance companies had some kind of motive.
I didn't mean to defame an insurance company.
Now you're turning in favor of the insurance companies.
Why the turn?
Because I'm talking to somebody who's very bright and sharp,
and I'm worried
that she might get me to say something inappropriate.
That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.
In April 2008, Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt
are both convicted of first-degree murder.
Man: Two women, the so-called Black Widows,
will not return to normal free life.
Judge: Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vados
needed a helping hand.
Instead, these unfortunate men
were sacrificed on your altars of greed.
So Helen and Olga are in prison for life
and for good reason.
But what about the insurance companies
that perhaps could have done a little more
due diligence on their policyholders
before anyone got murdered?
Why didn't this tragic, high-profile case
bring about any increased scrutiny of them?
Perhaps because they subsidize the bureau
that's supposed to be scrutinizing them.
The insurance companies as a whole will subsidize
the California Insurance Bureau
because they all contribute to a fund
that helps to try to battle insurance fraud.
Does that fund subsidize police investigations?
They do.
The -- The D.A.'s office has an insurance fraud bureau
that's partially funded by money that we get from the state.
The insurance companies do that.
The entertainment industry does that.
The automobile industry does that.
Did you know that private industries helped fund
law enforcement departments across the country?
Because I sure didn't.
It's so crazy because when you zoom out
and you look at this crisis of homelessness
and all the money kind of going around at the top
and then all the people at the bottom
just kind of falling even further through the cracks.
It's such an interesting system that we live in.
Yeah. Well, it's not cost-effective
to all of the aforementioned industries
that we're talking about to deal with,
you know, a societal problem.Actual...
Actual human lives.
[Chuckles]
Cool.
At least in this case,
the partnership between law enforcement
and the private insurance industry,
which sounds like the worst buddy cop movie ever,
did bring Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid's
killers to justice.
But there is one more person connected to this case
I want to talk to because she's connected
to almost every high-profile criminal case in Los Angeles.
I'm so excited to talk to this next guest
who represented the victims' families in this case.
We're gonna talk about the case, as well as other issues
involving women and invisibility.
I'm just waiting for her to get here.
Does anyone...
Hi. Sorry. I didn't see you there.
That's okay.
Friedman: Iconic victims' rights attorney
and voice for the voiceless Gloria Allred
represented the families of the victims in this case.
I think it's absolutely an outrage,
and I hope that anyone who ever thinks of preying
on the homeless will understand
there are going to be very serious consequences.
You seem to have your hands on everything.
Not in a Cuomo sort of way.
But my question is, how do you do it?
Are there two of you?
I actually have a law firm.
Okay. You've being modest.
And we have 13 attorneys.
This is a team effort.
All credit to the team.
You started practicing law in an era when men
got away with everything.
When do you think that era will end?
Never.
In your mind, who is more hated in America --
women or lawyers?
I'm not a sociologist.
What drew you to this particular case
other than that the men involved were dead?
Well, there was
no ability
for the victims to find the whole truth,
except through this case.
Do you think that invisibility played a role in Helen and Olga
being able to get away with what they got away with for so long?
I do think there is an enormous amount of sexism and ageism
as women get older.
Do you think that they would have gotten away
with murder the third time
had it not been for the insurance companies
sending an investigator to look into the case?
Well, there were many...
fortuitous incidents that took place.
And I might add the two women,
like most unsuccessful felons,
did not commit the perfect murders.
They thought they did.
But they were not smarter than law enforcement.
Which is saying a lot.
[Chuckles] It's -- It's saying a -- a lot.
Do you hope for the future of the criminal justice system
being a little bit more equitable than it is now?
With all due respect, "hope" is a child's word.
And I don't invest my time in hoping.
Because we have to work for change.
Hoping never gives us anything.
I feel the same way, Mom.
Sorry. Gloria.
Actually, many of my clients call me Mama Gloria.
Thank you so much, Gloria, for your time.
Keep fighting the fight.
Thank you.
So what are Helen and Olga up to now?
Brownfield: Olga's really obsessed with, "Helen
can afford a better attorney and, you know,
Helen's gonna get out and I'm gonna rot here,"
and it's hard not to feel sorry for a person like that.
If it's any consolation to Olga, it doesn't look like Helen
is getting out any time soon.
Helen, she recently filed a --
a claim that she was wrongfully convicted.What -- What...
Because our office created a wrongful conviction unit.
So she -- she "let me speak to your manager'd" your office.
[Laughs]
Well, it was weird because when she filed the claim,
I had been named head of the wrongful conviction unit.
The person she asked to speak to the manager is the manager.
[Both laugh]
♪
If this case teaches us anything,
other than don't underestimate women over 70,
it's that in America, sometimes justice can prevail,
as long as private money pays for it.
Brought to you by the National Association
of Insurance Companies of America.