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INTERVIEW BY JEFF JOHNSON


Do you think they did other things that they didn’t get caught for that were maybe not on this scale? More like petty crimes that they got away with?

There reached a point where we had to consider a number of things. Hit-and-run traffic accident stuff is not tracked like murders. If I’ve got a serial killer who is killing people a certain way and he kills a couple in Los Angeles, and a couple in Dallas and a couple in wherever—there’s a communication system set up locally, at the state level, and there are national systems to track that type of activity and sooner or later, we would start connecting the dots.

If somebody drives over a homeless guy in an alley in New York City today and then a month from now the same thing happens in Los Angeles, that would never, ever be connected. We were like, we’ve gotta keep our eye on the ball here. We have the two murders, we’ve got all of this fraud stuff—and even if we couldn’t make a murder case, which we couldn’t until we did the search warrants on their homes—we’ll at least take them off the street for 10 or 15 years and that would be the end of it because of their age, and also it would have bought us some time to continue the murder investigations. But ultimately everything started to fall into place. Our job wasn’t to do their biography, it was to stop what they were doing. Then along the way we found this other old guy, Fred Downie, and that’s a pretty sad story.

Do you think Helen’s daughter, Kecia—whom Helen tried to blame for the murders of Vados and McDavid in the middle of the trial, to no avail—is completely innocent, or is she kind of shady? She’s the one who hooked up with Downie.

She’s a swindler. I don’t believe that she was in on the murders. I truly don’t believe that.

How do you think Helen pitched the idea of getting Fred Downie to move to California to Kecia?

Well, that didn’t come from Helen, that came from Kecia. What happens is Fred Downie is an elderly guy who retires up in Cape Cod. There’s another daughter of Helen’s up there who’s a chiropractor. And she had apparently, legitimately befriended old Fred Downie. And Fred doesn’t have a soul in the world except a niece, who, if she’s still around, she’s gotta be 80-something. Fred apparently has some means and he buys some medical equipment for the chiropractor daughter’s office—expensive stuff like X-ray machines. And at the time, Kecia is working in Manhattan as a model and would go up and hang out at the Cape now and again. So she ends up befriending Fred Downie and stealing him away from the other daughter.

Was the other daughter romantically involved with Downie?

No. I think Kecia probably lured him that way, but the other gal, no. But he fell for it. He’s got this young, hot woman, and the next thing you know, Kecia and her chiropractor sister aren’t on speaking terms and Fred is en route to Santa Monica, California, because he’s gonna go out where it’s warm and it’s nice and live with this young gal.

When they arrive, Fred immediately purchases a couple of properties in Santa Monica—an apartment complex and another multiple-unit place, little bungalows. And that’s where Kecia lives. So Kecia has graduated into Helen’s league and she has swindled this guy to buy these properties and put them in her name. This sends Helen into orbit. And Helen and Kecia end up getting involved in lawsuits against one another, and magically, Helen ends up with her name on the title to these properties and old Fred is living in an upstairs unit of her triplex where she lives.

Now Fred is in his upper 90s, a frail little man, and he’s out here, and no one’s looking after him, and it’s pathetic. He’s calling back to his niece, “Please, can I come home now? Send me money for a ticket. They won’t give me any money for even a bus ticket.” We talked to his neighbors—they would find him down in the alley where he’d fallen and they would help him up, and he wasn’t eating, and occasionally they would see a Meals-on-Wheels service bringing a plate to him or something. And all the while, Helen is right downstairs and she’s got her hairdo appointments and her high-end life. Basically they’ve milked this guy for every dollar that he is worth. He ended up signing over his home in Cape Cod over to Helen for a dollar. They cleaned him out completely.

How did they con him so bad? I see where he would be lonely, but how did he agree to these crazy terms?

Well, whatever they told him, he thought the world of these people. He even bought plots in the cemetery back in Massachusetts so that Helen and Kecia would be buried next to him. That’s pretty sad. Ultimately, he gets hit by a car, disoriented, in the middle of the afternoon, 20 blocks from the house. They said that he was going to the library, but there’s a library the other direction, just one block from the house. So he gets hit by a car, lingers in the hospital for a couple of weeks and then passes away. This one is legitimate, he stepped out in front of a car and the driver stopped and the whole thing. And that was the end of him.

That is a crazy coincidence. So I guess I’ve veered off. Maybe we should get back to the case itself. How did things fall into place? Whose name was on the Mercury Sable that killed Kenneth McDavid?

It was a woman named Hillary Adler. She didn’t even know Helen and Olga—her purse was stolen at a workout facility in Santa Monica some years earlier. Kecia was a member at this health spa, and we actually found the records that put Kecia and Hillary Adler in the gym at the same time. They had both signed in on the day that her purse came up missing in the locker room. And they [Helen and Olga] wound up with her driver’s license.

And they registered the Sable in her name?

Exactly.

The 1999 Mercury Sable station wagon driven by Helen Golay in the hit-and-run murder of Kenneth McDavid.

After the tow-truck driver hauled it away from near the scene of the crime, how long was it before you guys went and said, let’s take a look at this car?

Well, originally we didn’t know anything. We had that surveillance tape I mentioned, so we knew we were looking for a Mercury or a Ford Taurus, and when we did the search warrants and were going through Helen’s stuff, we came across some partial information about a 1999 Mercury and we were able to develop enough information to find the car.

The car had been sold by the tow yard to an unsuspecting young Hispanic family in downtown LA. The guy had fixed it up and it was a station wagon for him and his wife and kids. When we went and seized the car from them, I felt so bad about it. I mean we had every legal means to take the car. It was a murder weapon. But I had the police department purchase the car from him so he could go buy another car. I still have the car sitting in a parking lot at work. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it now. We’ll probably auction it off or something.

We didn’t even know that the car had been towed until an insurance investigator told us. There were 20 or more different insurance companies we were dealing with by this time, and one of them was AAA life insurance—the Automobile Club of Southern California. The gal working there got caught up in the stories and said, “Yeah, [Helen & Olga] have life-insurance policies on this guy.” She got curious and did some checking on her own. Then she called back and said Helen is also a Triple A roadside-service member, and lo and behold, one time that she needed service was on the night of McDavid’s murder and it was for a Mercury Sable. Sometimes when it rains it pours, and things fall into place.

Over the long run, in the scheme of things, if they had not been so greedy, if they had just had a couple of policies on each guy, they probably never would have been caught. Greed is what finally got them. In the end, when they were arrested, I don’t know if you ever saw the video [surreptitiously filmed in the interrogation room when the two women were alone, arguing], but Olga lashed out at Helen, “You got too greedy. Your greed is what got us caught.” They knew it.

So if they only had, say, $50,000 on McDavid, they would have just gotten the check, right?

Oh yeah. It never would have even come up. There never would have been an inquiry by an investigator, and they would have sent their claim form in, got a check, and lived happily ever after. That would have been it.

Why do you think, at that age, this stuff was even important to them? Like you said, Helen had money.

But like we said, Helen is psychotic. It’s the thrill of it for her. Olga, as she said in the interview room, was saving. We took like $900,000 from her bank account. Her plan was to save enough money, move to Canada to hook up with an old girlfriend, and open a business. And she was just waiting for the final payoffs. And what happened was once we came on the scene and we started contacting insurance companies, they held back their payments. So in Olga’s case, that caused a delay in her plan because she wasn’t getting the money. You would think at that point, maybe the jig is up, I’ve got to take what I’ve got and get the hell out of here. But greed got the best of them.

What do you think their mindset is now, sitting in prison? Defeated?

Olga will adjust nicely to jail. She will have her little living space or whatever she winds up with and she will have her daily routine. Helen will be scheming all of the time, trying to get something for nothing, and she will stay in touch with the outside world, because she’s still got some capital out there and she will be wheeling and dealing from the jail, just like one of the Mafia guys. But they’re both doing two life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus 50 years. So they’re done.

The first guy, Vados, they buried him for a rock-bottom price, just in a sheet in a wooden box. They cremated McDavid so that there was no evidence trail. The ashes were given to Helen. The family of McDavid would like the ashes. So we’ve been asking where they are. I suspect they went into a dumpster. At the end of the trial, when it was all over, the attorney for Helen came up to me and asked, “Would you be opposed to Helen doing her time in a prison near Los Angeles, so she could have visitation with her granddaughter?” I said, I don’t think I’d oppose that at all, but I’d be more inclined to cooperate if I learned something about the ashes. He said, “I can’t tell you, because of the attorney/client relationship, but if you were to get a call someday from an anonymous source that told you where the ashes were, don’t be surprised.” And I said, if that anonymous call comes, then I will put in a favorable word with the Department of Corrections with regard to her housing location. We left it at that. I haven’t heard anything yet.


THE DETECTIVE WHO BUSTED TWO OLD LADIES... | 1 | 2 |

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