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Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: What role did Christa's diary and tapes play in the investigation?
Nicole remembers visiting her mother at a Beverly Hills home. This was a spectacular mansion. It was absolutely enormous. I'd never seen anything like it. It was the first place I'd ever seen that had maids' quarters.
That mansion belonged to a famous financier, Bernie Kornfeld, who was once profiled by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.
Bernie goes no place without companions, principally female, notably attractive, and inevitably more than one.
Sitting on the couch, I was very, very young, and there was a big, huge party going on and lots of smoke in the air, and I kept just staring at this fella's lips. They were the most fascinating thing I had ever seen. I just stared and stared and stared. It was Mick Jagger.
We were hanging out in clubs that Warren Beatty was at, Ryan O'Neill, Jack Nicholson. If you were a beautiful enough starlet, you know, you would get to go into the in-in-in clubs, and so that's where we were usually hanging out.
Krista was not only ambitious and adventurous, she also liked to keep score. Her friends say she kept a secret sex diary complete with a rating system.
What she did was she gave it a...
These people are raiding, like, you know, 1 to 10, so to speak. While Krista partied in Hollywood, Nicole prepared for that much-talked-about mother-daughter reunion. But it would never happen. Krista Helm was stabbed to death.
I can still remember it, and I couldn't tell if it was a screaming baby or a cat being killed. It was a horrendous, horrendous scream. It was terrifying.
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Chapter 4: How did Christa's relationships impact her life and death?
There were no known witnesses in either case. But the Sal Mineo lead fizzled. The suspect in his murder was believed to be in jail when Krista was killed. The 21-year-old murder suspect had to say in his jail cell when advised of his charges... So detectives started to look more closely at Krista's celebrity-studded love life and her infamous diary. Research, perhaps, for a tell-all book.
She was someday going to write a book, and she was going to expose all these people, and it was going to be a bestseller.
But Krista's scandalous diary had vanished. It may have been in her purse, which was missing from the crime scene. With that crucial piece of evidence gone, investigators hit a string of dead ends.
I think the initial investigation was a complete mess. I think that they didn't pay attention. She was a young Hollywood starlet, party girl.
Nicole mourned the loss of her mother and the life they were supposed to have together. She raised her own family in the Northeast, but a few years ago, she felt compelled to find out what really happened.
I think that it's my job to make sure that people know who she was and what happened to her. She went through way too much in her life to have her death be so dismissed.
After years of pressure from Nicole, a new generation of detectives took the case. Larry Brandenburg and Tom Harris are L.A. Sheriff's Department hotshots, homicide detectives with the Cold Case Unit. How do you go about investigating a murder that occurred three decades ago? Well, actually, you try and go back in time yourself.
I mean, you try and go back and look at it the way it looked that night. What we're talking about is in the middle to late 70s. I know back then it was a lot of the free love, a lot of the... Sex. Sex, drugs. Drugs. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Krista's written diary wasn't the only way she kept track of that long list of lovers.
It turns out Krista was tape recording her sexcapades with all those celebrity boyfriends. I promise to cause you nothing but pleasure. She did have some tapes of famous people, sexually. A well-known list of people? Can you tell us any of those names? I don't think it would be fair to those folks at this point to do that. How significant do you consider those tapes?
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Chapter 5: What were the circumstances surrounding Christa Helm's last recording session?
Tony Sirico is the actor best known as Paulie Walnuts of The Sopranos. But 30 years ago, Sirico was a Brooklyn tough guy trying to make it in Hollywood. Here he is in a 1978 movie, Fingers. What's on you, my pal? Back in 1977, Tony Sirico was an upcoming actor and he knew some of the same people that Krista knew.
We know that after Krista was killed, Tony Sirico was sent to her residence to check on the welfare and watch over her roommate for a few days and to make sure that she was okay. According to the roommate, Tony Sirico removed some tapes out of Krista's room never to be seen again.
Krista's roommate, who to this day is too frightened to talk publicly, also told detectives that Tony took some of Krista's furs and clothing. At the time, police never questioned Tony.
That's Tony Sirico right there with the blood, but that's part of a film they were making.
But in 2006, when the new detectives took over, they paid him a visit. Have you spoken to him? Yes, we have. Has he been cooperative? Not exactly. Mr. Sirico told us at first that he didn't even remember the victim. He didn't really know Krista and that he didn't even remember that she had been killed.
And then his memory got a little bit better that, yeah, I think I had heard about her being killed, but I didn't really know her that well. I just met her in passing. According to detectives, Sirico denied going to Krista's apartment and denied he even knew the roommate.
We started getting to the point of where he was on that day and asked him those type of questions, and the interview was abruptly stopped by his attorney. And we explained to Mr. Sirico also that he was not, was not a suspect in this investigation. He was considered a witness and someone that we were trying to glean information from.
Years later, most of Krista's missing things did turn up at the home of Krista's closest friend, Lenny Baron, her designer and confidant.
All of the furniture, all of the crystals, the shawl I ran had given my mom a lot of crystals and jewels and beautiful things. She had fur coats, all of which were found in his home.
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Chapter 6: What connection exists between Christa Helm and Sal Mineo's murder?
And then she also had a lot of friends that were on the seedy side of life, if you will, street people.
So job one has been tracking down all those people Krista socialized with in her two years in Hollywood.
If someone is violently murdered, you're never going to forget that.
So far, though, few of them remember much or are saying much. It's very interesting to go back and talk to these people because people can't remember what their lies were. They can remember what the truth is.
The neighborhood that we responded to in 1977 was a pretty upscale neighborhood. I was the lead detective on the case. I think we came in from this direction. We drove in this way.
Brandenburg and Harris returned to the crime scene with the one witness who is happy to cooperate.
She was probably about like this.
83-year-old retired Los Angeles detective Larry Gansey.
She had earrings on, I know that.
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Chapter 7: What new leads have emerged in the investigation of Christa Helm's murder?
And she knew that and was really upset that it was me But when she started to see that I was attracting more attention than her, that started to wear on her.
In an apparent jealous rage, Krista cut her sister off and threw her out of the apartment. She basically said, okay, now you're out on your own. She didn't care if I didn't have any money or a place to live. That sounds like there was a very cold side to her. Oh, just a definite cold. Cut it off and get back in her own world and push you aside. Would she step over bodies to get what she wanted?
Would she use people? Yes, I would say so. Is that possible that that has played into what happened to her? I have always presumed that that was a part of what happened to her. Harrison Brandenburg thinks so, too, and wonder if Krista might finally have crossed the wrong man. As they dig deeper into the case, they find a startling confession of sorts. This guy bragged about doing the killing.
His name, Rudy Mazzella. And he was known for his anything-goes parties where Christo was a frequent guest. He was very flamboyant, very strange.
He would do certain things like wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and a gun belt with a six-gun on it. And that's the way he walked around the house.
But Mazzella was also a known drug dealer. He was a thug. With a bad reputation. He's a violent kind of guy. He's known to carry guns and knives. We spoke to his ex-wife, deathly afraid of him, said that he would threaten her. What was Krista doing with him?
He was in that other circle of friends, what we call the dark side of her life, the street people, the drug dealers that would come to these parties.
Rudy is a pretty big guy, pretty powerful and scary guy.
In this interview in July of 1977, a woman who frequented Mazzella's house told police what she had heard about him.
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Chapter 8: How does Christa Helm's story impact her daughter today?
I told them that she had a female lover that seemed that she was extremely jealous. That was my first thought, that maybe her female lover killed her. Because every time that I was around her, she seemed so threatened and so dark. Just days after Krista's murder, Debbie packed up her entire LA life, disguised herself in a wig, and then made a mad dash out of town.
I didn't want anybody to know who I was. I was afraid that somebody had killed her because she knew something she wasn't supposed to know. I thought, well, what if they think she told me?
You know, I had never been around anybody that had been murdered.
And I just wanted to be away from it. Frankie Crocker is now dead. Still, the cold case squad is left to wonder, could Krista's killer have been a woman? It just seems like a pretty violent, really vicious attack for a woman. I don't think I would characterize it as that.
I think when somebody is in a violent rage, I think their gender doesn't matter.
Then investigators get a break. One of Krista's fingernails, preserved for three decades, yields DNA. It's obvious to us that she put up quite a fight. And a lot of times in that situation, you're going to find skin cells or blood or something from the other person under the fingernails. Even more intriguing, that DNA is from another woman. Did you try to match the DNA to a specific person?
Well, we are requesting from people that we interview, at times we're requesting oral swabs.
One of those people is Debbie Danilo. Do you consider Debbie Danilo a suspect?
Everyone's still a suspect.
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