Lester Holt

I'm Lester Holt, and we're talking Dateline.

Today, I'm here with Keith Morrison to talk about his original podcast series, The Thing About Helen and Olga, and Dateline senior producer Susan Lebowitz, who has been following the story with Keith for nearly 20 years.

It's good to see both of you.

Thanks for coming on.

Hello.

Thank you for having us on, Lester.

Before we get into the discussion, let's tell folks that we're dropping the full series in the Dateline feed as a bonus while Dateline is taking a break for the Winter Olympics.

So go take a listen and then come right back here.

Later, we'll have an extra clip from an interview that didn't make the show with the manager of a mom-and-pop lighting store in Los Angeles who had his own encounter with Helen and Olga.

And Susan has a story about the church where Helen and Olga volunteered.

But to recap, in the late 1990s, Helen Golay and Olga Ruderschmidt appeared to be two kindly old ladies helping homeless men off the streets of Los Angeles.

But as private investigator Ed Webster discovered, along with the LAPD and FBI and the so-called Granny Task Force, the women were actually singling out men.

for insurance policies, then staging their deaths to collect big payouts.

They were convicted in the murders of Kenneth McDavid and Paul Varos and remain behind bars today.

So let's talk Dateline, shall we?

Keith, this story contains so much greed, betrayal, and good old-fashioned detective work.

It was kind of a typical Dateline plot, but not.

Let me let you kind of describe what we're talking about.

It sounds like they kind of played the long game.

You talked about they had patience.