The Last Take
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Who was Christa Helm and what happened to her?
She was my movie star mommy. Someone has been walking around for 30 years having committed this heinous crime on my mother. I want to know what happened to her. My mom was killed February 12th, 1977. I was nine. We found all kinds of things. Two huge boxes. All kinds of evidence, all kinds of interviews, all kinds of information that nobody had looked at before. They were just tucked away.
The crime scene where Krista Helm was murdered in 1977, she had left a party in West Hollywood and she was attacked and stabbed numerous times.
She was a very good looking girl.
How's my technique coming?
Oh, you're doing fine.
She was not against posing in seductive type photos.
She was a young Hollywood starlet, party girl. She hung out with Joe Namath, Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty.
Jack Nicholson, the Shah of Iran. We knew that she kept a diary.
My mom was a very smart woman. I can definitely see her keeping track of things.
We don't know if there may have been extortion. A lot of people have told us that there's a diary that's missing.
They think that the diary was what was taken from her body when she died and that she was going to blackmail people with the diary. We don't know all the names in that book.
We know that she did have some tapes of famous people, sexually.
I could send you into a sexual frenzy. She had intimate relations and intimate knowledge of a lot of famous people. I think it's going to be a huge surprise when people find out who committed this crime. She got in way overhead. She was playing with the big boys.
Somebody killed her because of what she knew.
The dream was me standing in a room overlooking a parking lot. The wall is glass. I see my mother walking through. I notice someone coming up behind her. They've got a knife in their hand and I just am screaming and screaming and screaming for someone to help her.
Krista Helms' daughter, Nicole, doesn't want us to mention her last name or reveal where she lives because her mother's killer has never been caught.
There was a strength and a drive in me that I always felt from a very young age came from her. And I held on to that as my little piece of my mom. Where did you come from? She had a charisma that was just overwhelming. She had a warmth that just made people just be drawn to her on a regular basis. She was powerful and strong and took no bull. She was a very complicated, beautiful human being. And says Nicole, her mother was born to be a star. From the time she was a little girl, she would dance and sing and tell everybody she was gonna be a movie star when she grew up. And of course, in little Milwaukee, Wisconsin, no one believed her.
Krista Helm had the kind of story that Hollywood legends are made from. Smart, sexy, and stunningly beautiful. She was the classic small-town girl with a big Hollywood dream.
What evidence was found after Christa Helm's murder?
Krista was determined to become a star, and she had the energy and unyielding ambition to make it happen.
I remember her one time saying, well, Darlene, I'm not going to be a Midwestern housewife.
Darlene Thorson was Krista's lifelong friend.
We had a saying between the two of us, all's fair in love and war. And she lived by those words. Nothing would really stop her from getting what she wanted.
Not even a shotgun wedding when Krista was just 17 years old.
She was a teenager. He owned a karate studio. They were married in Chicago. And the morning after their wedding, she woke up in their honeymoon suite and my father was gone.
That was back in 1967. Nicole came along a few months later. But within a couple of years, Nicole's young and ambitious mother grew restless and took off to follow her dream. The first stop, the bright lights of New York, where she found work as a model. Taking the city by storm would be impossible with a toddler in tow. So Nicole was left behind in the care of a good friend. But Krista promised mother and daughter would one day be together.
I was supposed to be with her when I turned 10.
Until then, Nicole was a visitor in her mother's life.
When I was with her, she made me feel so important.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who was Christa Helm and what happened to her?
0:13–4:19
2
What evidence was found after Christa Helm's murder?
4:19–8:11
3
What role did Christa's diary and tapes play in the investigation?
8:11–12:52
4
How did Christa's relationships impact her life and death?
12:52–16:37
5
What were the circumstances surrounding Christa Helm's last recording session?
16:37–21:08
6
What connection exists between Christa Helm and Sal Mineo's murder?
21:08–24:04
7
What new leads have emerged in the investigation of Christa Helm's murder?
24:04–32:29
8
How does Christa Helm's story impact her daughter today?
32:29–42:17