Chapter 1: What entrepreneurial scheme did Helen and Olga devise?
It was a business venture. A startup, really. The kind of entrepreneurial enterprise that identifies an undervalued resource and exploits it. Visionary, almost. In a wicked kind of way. After all, the city of Los Angeles was awash in raw material. Homeless men, down and out, living on the margins of society, estranged from their families, isolated and penniless.
Some consider them a blight on this shining city of stars by the sea. But to Helen Golay and Olga Ruderschmidt, the homeless and dispossessed were walking, talking gold.
He signed for these policies. And we have the guy punished because of what he wanted. That's not right.
Now remember the bottom line. It is so evil and so heartbreaking to think that anyone would decide that the purpose of homeless human beings is to make profit.
We're far more dead than alive. It would seem so, but only if no one paid too much attention to the life insurance paperwork or gave the crumpled, bleeding heaps and back alleys more than a passing glance. In this episode, you'll hear from the lawyers who battled in court over the fate of two elderly women the media dubbed the Black Widows.
There is circumstantial evidence that the jury considered, but there's no direct evidence. So we don't have a situation where we have somebody who said, yes, I saw her do this.
I've prosecuted all types of cases, serial murderers, gang murderers, hate crime murderers. These two individuals were the most egregious actors that I had come across.
And you'll hear about the dramatic defense claim that prosecutors had put the wrong person on trial for murder.
Someone who's not sitting in the courtroom is the actual perpetrator. That's the thing about Helen and Olga.
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Chapter 2: How did the legal battle unfold for Helen and Olga?
Sklar was tall and mild-mannered. His goatee was neatly trimmed, his dark, thinning hair combed to the side. All his professional life, he'd been a public defender.
When do you believe he'd be ready to go forward with the arraignment? September 13th, the day we were busted.
Where the voluble diamond always appeared good for a comment to the press, Sklar avoided the media. And in court, spoke as if each word that crossed his lips was costing him money.
If you receive a discovery in a week or 10 days, you don't think you'd be ready for the arraignment any sooner than September 13th? Well, September 13th is about that length of time. So the answer is yes? Yes. You don't believe you'd be ready?
Because the cases against both women were identical, the same facts, the same evidence, the same witnesses, the cases were joined, meaning Helen and Olga would be tried together. Good for the taxpayer, perhaps. Convenient for the prosecutors. But as you will see, trouble for Helen and Olga. Theirs had always been an uneasy partnership. And now, the old resentments were out in the open.
Helen, that's your fault. You cannot make that many insurances. It's on your name only. Three different extra insurances. I want to ask for a different location if you're going to talk. I don't want to talk. Don't talk.
Remember the last time those two were alone in a room together? In that interrogation room, wired for sound?
I was doing everything for you. But listen, you are talking. Your fault. I know, but your fault that our relationship ended up like this, and you ended up like this. I know. But admit it was your fault.
Now, there would be no common defense here. The trial would play out as their partnership had, with each woman for herself, each willing to do whatever it took to walk away from a murder rap.
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Chapter 3: What surprising defense strategy was proposed in court?
Her family fled Vietnam in 1975 when she was three.
She's one of the finest trial attorneys that our office had at that time. She's now a judge on the appellate court, great at analyzing cases and outlining for the jury what are the particular facts that they need to pay attention to. She's very good at that.
It was a Tuesday morning, March 18, 2008, that the mahogany-paneled ninth-floor courtroom known as Department 102 began filling with lawyers and reporters and spectators in anticipation of the opening act of the People v. Helen Golay and Olga Ruddersmith. The murders of Paul Vadas and Kenneth McDavid would, of course, command center stage, but
One can't help imagining, though, the spirit of 97-year-old Fred Downey was also in that courtroom. Fred's death after being hit by a car, you'll remember, was an accident, a tragic coincidence. After he'd signed over all his money, his property, his estate... At 9.34 a.m., Helen Golay entered through a side door on the right-hand side of the courtroom.
Gone was her trademark bouffant and dangling earrings. Her hair had grown out in streaks of brown and gray. In place of the orange prison jumpsuit, Helen wore slacks and a green sweater. Olga entered a few minutes later, her long dark hair pulled away from her face by a pair of barrettes. She briefly scanned the courtroom, looking for a friendly face, but saw none.
Relatives of the two murdered men were there, though. Sandra Salmon, Kenneth McDavid's sister, and Stella Vados, Paul Vados' daughter, sat on the left, behind the prosecutor's table with their lawyer, Gloria Allred.
They ran over him with a car in an alley, as though he was just a piece of garbage that didn't matter. But this was someone's father. And Kenneth McDavid was someone's brother. And he was a human being, not a piece of garbage.
At about 9.40, the jury of nine men and three women filed in and took their seats in the jury box. Court was called to order. And Judge David S. Wesley took his seat on the bench beneath the circular seal of the state of California. At 9.45, the raven-haired prosecutor, Truck Doe, rose from her seat and faced the jury.
These two women looked at their victims and saw profit in their plight, she began. For 75 minutes, she spoke to the jury about the witnesses they would hear from and evidence they would see, which would lead them to only one conclusion, she said, that the two little old ladies sitting before them were guilty, guilty of two murders in the first degree.
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Chapter 4: How did the prosecution build their case against the two women?
As real as it gets.
When they asked me if this was her over there, I looked at her and I nodded, yeah, that's her in the blue coat right there. And she looked at me with those eyes like that time when she opened that door at 3 o'clock in the morning. She had those eyes. She kind of looked at me and glanced to the side like that and looked up, and that was it. She never looked at me again.
Couldn't believe it, how real this was.
At the end of the prosecution's case, there was a palpable feeling that this had been a rout, as if LeBron and the Lakers had just demolished a pickup team from the local Y. But was it enough to convict two elderly ladies of murder?
You never want to get too full of yourself or to assume because anything that involves human endeavors are unpredictable by their very nature. And so although we had all the cards in the case, we weren't counting our chickens before they hatched.
Counting chickens? No, it was the defense's turn now, and the souffle they were serving would require a lot of broken eggs. Helen's attorney, Roger Diamond, went first. In what was effectively his opening statement, Diamond seemed to concede the obvious. Yes, he told the jury perhaps the ladies were involved in some insurance shenanigans, but he said that was not the question here.
The real question was who killed Kenneth McDavid, the only case in which real physical evidence existed. "'Who did it?' he asked, staring intently at the jury, "'like a revival preacher preparing for the altar call. "'Well, after a dramatic pause, he answered his own question, "'his voice rising. "'Keisha Golay, Helen Golay's daughter.
"'Well, shock pulsed across the courtroom like ripples on water.' Investigators in the courtroom, like the FBI's Sam Mayrose, were stunned.
The thing that shocked me the most was when Helen threw her own daughter under the bus, accusing her of being the one that drove the vehicle that killed Kenneth. That really surprised me.
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Chapter 5: What role did insurance play in the murders?
I tried to lean very heavily on the conspiracy aspect of it and that, you know, that we did not have to prove that Olga struck the fatal blow, only that she was part and parcel of the conspiracy. And it was almost impossible for the jurors to divorce her from all aspects of the larger conspiracy.
And it would have been inexplicable that Olga would not have gone along for the entire ride because she wanted to get as much money as possible. So she wouldn't have left herself out in terms of the killing part because Helen could have cut her out of the deal if she wasn't stepping up to the plate all the way.
So then the jury went away again and closed the door for one tense hour. Olga Ruderschmidt, her expression unreadable, scribbled on a yellow pad as the jurors finally made their announcement on two counts of murder and two of conspiracy. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. Guilty.
Bobby Grace remembered the moment and said... Among the many cases that I have tried, they are the two most egregious actors, the two people that have stuck out the most as being the worst people that I have prosecuted.
Three months later, Helen and Olga were back in court, manacled and in their prison orange now for sentencing. Because of their age and the hurdles involved in imposing the death penalty, death had been taken off the table.
As is almost always the case on such a sentencing day, the ninth floor courtroom was packed with investigators and reporters and the families of the victims and curious court watchers. Before pronouncing their sentences, Judge David Wesley asked Kenneth McDavid's sister, Sandra, and Paul Vadis' daughter, Stella, if they had anything they wanted to say. They did.
Sandra was first to walk to the microphone.
My brother, Kent, did not deserve to die the way he did.
At times, choking back tears... Sandra turned to the one topic that felt particularly raw, the one Helen and Olga could still remedy if they wanted to. They could tell her family where they could find Kenneth McDavid's remains.
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