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 THE DETECTIVE WHO BUSTED TWO OLD LADIES WHO KILLED HOMELESS GUYS IN LOS ANGELES - PART 1INTERVIEW BY JEFF JOHNSON
This year, in Los Angeles, two senior citizens, Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, were convicted of murder. They were both sentenced to consecutive life terms. On two separate occasions, they had taken homeless men—Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid—under their wings, housed, fed, and looked after them for two years, then killed them with cars, hit-and-run style. They had also taken out millions and millions of dollars in dozens of separate life-insurance policies on each man. LAPD homicide detective Dennis Kilcoyne was part of a task force that broke open the case. Vice: You happened upon this case by accident, right? You were looking into a simple hit-and-run? Dennis Kilcoyne: Within the Los Angeles Police Department, we have a traffic division, and they handle just that—traffic situations. So the uniformed traffic officer goes out and is investigating and writing a report on the death of Kenneth McDavid in June of ’05. And then, because it is a fatality, the traffic detectives are called out and they do a little investigation. The only thing substantial that came out of that investigation was that they obtained a time-lapse video from a couple of businesses whose cameras overlooked the alley. Anyway, it is generally thought of as a transient, homeless-type person that got hit in the alley, probably rummaging through the trash cans, and whoever hit him, you know, didn’t stop and there’s no clues, no witnesses, and basically, it’s a shelf case. Unless someone comes forward, not a lot is gonna happen with it. But then, a week or so later, a couple of old women start making inquiries and want copies of case reports. They end up at the coroner’s office, claim the body, and say that they’re the only people in the world that care about this guy. He [McDavid] had identification on him at the time of his death—and the coroner’s office ultimately made notification to Olga. That caused them to come in. They don’t talk to the traffic detectives at all, they just talk to the coroner’s representative to claim the body. So it’s not like they were so concerned about what may have happened to the guy, or if there were any leads? They just wanted proof he was dead. Exactly. So they claim the body, and in the days that follow, they return to the police station and get the traffic-accident reports—unbeknownst to the detectives, this is what the ladies need to make insurance claims. And they mention to the detectives that they have a little bit of life insurance on McDavid, and that one, Helen, is the fiancé, and the other, Olga, is the long-lost cousin, and that the guy has no other family. A week afterward, an investigator from Mutual of New York life insurance, Ed Webster, pops up at the station and wants copies of the reports and he lets the investigators know that there’s a $500,000 life-insurance policy on McDavid, and that the old women are the beneficiaries. Over the next couple of days, this causes discussion in the traffic squad room. It was just… unusual. What was unusual? The dollar amount on the policy? Here’s a guy that they think is probably picking up cans or bottles in the alley, and he’s got a half-a-million-dollar life-insurance policy on him. And the insurance investigator, Webster, comes out to LA because of the amount of the claim. His company’s policy requires an in-person interview with the beneficiaries. He attempted that, but he couldn’t make contact with the women. They wouldn’t call him back. It would have behooved them to talk to this guy though, if they wanted their money, right? Probably. So, anyways, Webster makes his inquiries and this causes more discussion in the traffic squad room—this is weird, but weird things happen all the time in police work. Another detective overhears this, and says, “You know, I had a case like this years and years ago.” It takes a few days for him to clear out the cobwebs and find his old file from 1999. He had a duplicate case, a guy by the name of Paul Vados, and sure enough, it’s the same two women that were making the claims for the reports and everything else. So now we’re into August of ’05, Webster of Mutual of New York calls back and says he wants to come out and meet with the detectives because once he got back to New York, the company realized that there’s a second $500,000 policy on McDavid, so now these old gals are into this company for a million dollars. The detectives realize that this is more than a traffic thing, so they call homicide. I agreed to go and sit in on a meeting in early September of ’05 with Webster and all of the traffic detectives that were involved in the two cases and just listen in because when they first called, it sounded a little bizarre. What’s your job with LAPD? At the LAPD we have different stations, and each station has a detective bureau, as well as a homicide section. I work at the robbery/homicide division at the Parker Center in downtown LA. And we only handle special cases, like officers that are murdered, the OJs, the Ennis Cosbys, and the Barettas. Plus, anything that seems unusual comes to us. So that’s why this case came to my office. My partner and I ended up working directly with Webster. In the insurance world, I could tell what you’ve done with your car insurance and tickets and what cars you’ve owned since you were 16 years old, but on life insurance, there’s no central index and there’s no sharing of information between companies. So there’s no way I could call some government entity and find out that you have three different policies and that you are a beneficiary on four other ones. There’s nothing like that. It was a gray area. So that loophole represented an opportunity for Helen and Olga to do what they did. Exactly. They were very schooled in this business, and they knew things that the average person would not know. For example, the two-year contestability window—the courts have decided that if life-insurance companies issue a policy on you, and they ask you all of the standard things: Do you have life-threatening diseases? Do you smoke? Are you a race car driver? No matter what you put down, the company has two years to figure out if that’s truthful and/or contest the policy. And if it’s two years and a day, well, then the courts have decided they’ve got to pay the policy. And Helen and Olga knew that, and that was the reason that they housed these guys in an apartment, paid their bills and gave them some spending money for two years. They had quite an investment in each one of these guys. And all the while, they were looking at them, smiling at them, knowing that they’re fattening them up, just like livestock.
Yeah, they are. Helen is most definitely the brains of the operation. She’s worth millions of dollars. I don’t know what caused her to do stuff like this. Do you think her millions came from illegal activities? Absolutely. To back up a little bit, there was a man that she worked for by the name of Artie Aaron, and he was a real-estate investor, broker, just wheelin’ and dealin’. She worked for him for 15 or 16 years. And when he died in the ’80s, she ended up mysteriously owning a number of his properties that he supposedly had quick-claimed over to her. There was some civil litigation with his family members. She’s always been deceitful. So she reached a point where she owned a number of buildings within blocks of the beach in Santa Monica, and that’s a high-rent district. What’s going to happen to that property now that she’s in jail? She sold a number of the properties, and I suspect what her lawyer didn’t get, she’s stuffed away in other places. I had a guy from the FBI join the investigation, Sam Mayrose, and his expertise was paper trails, bank records, fraud, that type of stuff. And we brought in a guy from the California State Department of Insurance because this was their cup of tea, life insurance and bank fraud and tracking the paper trail. In homicide, we deal with blood and bullets. Anyway, between Helen and Olga, we seized around $2 million from their bank accounts when we arrested them. We froze those assets, but we weren’t able to seize any of the properties, because that becomes very intricate. If you have a hundred dollars in the bank, and you put in another hundred dollars that you obtained illegally, and then go purchase something for $120, I can’t prove the hundred dollars that you used was not the legal money. Once you commingle money, you can’t separate it out and start seizing things. The courts won’t let you. So a lot of people were upset about that—she was selling properties for millions of dollars, and she still convinced the court out here in California that she was penniless, and the taxpayers paid for her attorneys. Sorry, where were we? Were Helen and Olga friends? What I learned sitting through this whole thing the last couple of years is that they weren’t friends. Helen used Olga, because Olga did the dirty work. She would find these people, she would go by and pay their rent, bring a check from Helen. Helen was always the money. The bank. But Olga would be the one to check on people and be a nuisance, just keeping tabs. And Olga wanted to live Helen’s lifestyle, and she got caught up in that, and she was always trying to get Helen to invest in properties so that she could elevate herself to Helen’s status. Olga lived in a little apartment in Hollywood. Yeah. And she’s so crazy, that the whole apartment, since ’75, ’77, somewhere in there, had never been painted. It still had pink countertops and the olive-green 1970s carpet and she would never let anybody in there, even though the rest of the building had all been upgraded. Meanwhile, Helen had expensive, fine furniture, and very nice things. Early on, that’s what was unusual about these women. It’s not like they’re convicts or gang members where you put their names in the computer and you learn their life story. All we could tell is that they each had a driver’s license. Even though I took a lot of shit over it, I had one of our surveillance units follow them for a while, just finding out who these people were. Where do they go? Do they work? Who are they visiting? Do they get together? And not once over a couple of months of off-and-on surveillance did these women ever hook up together. So it wasn’t like every Saturday morning they met for breakfast. It was nothing. Never. And then we learned that years and years earlier they were both swindlers and they would hang around the very expensive high-end hotels in Hollywood and in Beverly Hills. Olga, for example, would pack a bag and go into the hotel and go to the dressing room out at the pool, change into a bathing suit and just hang out at the pool all day like she was staying in the hotel. She and Helen came across one another doing that type of stuff, and they developed a strange relationship. They were both using one another. And they were very cautious about their relationship. But they fed off of each other, and kind of continued to do so until they got onto this [the killings] in 1997—when they started with Paul Vados, grooming him for his death. Were they blinded by greed or psychotic or what? I think Helen is a completely psychotic person. She is probably one of the evilest minds I have ever come across in 31 years of doing this. I’ve never seen anyone who was that calculating and evil. And Olga, she’s got an evil twist to her, but she’s not stupid—just easily manipulated. Olga had a cafe in downtown LA a long time ago. Do you think there was ever a point in her life when she was an honest person? Probably. She had a husband back in those days and then she chased the husband off and even though he had been gone for 15 years or more—he was Hungarian, as was she—she was always working it, stealing people’s mail and applying for credit cards. There was a lot of identity-theft stuff with Olga. And she never got caught? No. Never. And the husband—he’s dead—he hadn’t been around in a long time, but he was still voting, he still had a checking account, and he was still doing things, and it was just like, this is nuts! And Helen, some of the great crime stories we’ve heard over the years, those guys have got nothing on this woman. She will calculate for years as to how she is going to kill you and what her bottom line is, and figure out like a budget and... She seemed more concerned with the financial part of it than the execution of the actual crime, though. The Mercury Sable wagon she ran over McDavid with had to be towed when she was done. And later, there was still evidence on the undercarriage of the vehicle, connecting it to the crime. So it seems that she was hasty about the crime itself, but pragmatic about the money end of things. Oh, yeah. When things would happen that would deviate from her calculated plan, that’s what caused her trouble. Because if she had just parked that car and walked away from it that day, we would have never caught up with her. There was no connection between her and that car. But she didn’t. She panicked, and that’s what brought her down. Same with Olga. That and the constant greed. They were up to like $8.5 million in policies on people. If they hadn’t got so completely out of hand, we never would have caught on to it. Because the insurance companies—look, the insurance industry didn’t cause this to happen, but the greed of the insurance industry created the atmosphere for it to happen. Everything is commission-based, everything is driven by sales... Yeah. I guess it’s like if you have a half a million, or a million bucks in life insurance on a guy, you’re not just sitting around waiting to kill him and collect your money, you are paying that premium every month. Or premiums. Exactly. There was anywhere between $40,000 to $60,000 invested in each one of these guys before they killed ’em. That’s quite a lot. And that’s where Olga came in, because they were not about to let that investment slip away from them. CONTINUED THE DETECTIVE WHO BUSTED TWO OLD LADIES... | 1 | 2 |
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