2 charged in hit-and-run murder scam

Two women in their 70s face trial here on charges that they insured the lives of two homeless men and ran them over with a car in hit-and-run murders to collect millions of dollars in death benefits.

Longtime friends Helen Golay, 76, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 74, are to be arraigned March 29 on homicide and conspiracy counts. Paul Vados, 73, was killed in a Hollywood alley in 1999. Kenneth McDavid, 50, died in an alley near UCLA in 2005. After a preliminary hearing last week, a judge ordered the women to stand trial. The defendants had pleaded not guilty to an earlier criminal complaint in the case.

"Local newspapers have compared this bizarre case to the comical plot of Arsenic and Old Lace, but these were brutal murders," says Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels, who is prosecuting. "The pure and simple motive was greed."

Court documents allege the defendants installed the transients in apartments and paid rent for two years to keep track of them while paying premiums on 24 insurance policies worth a total of $5.7 million.

By California law, after two years, an insurance company cannot contest fraudulent statements on an application for a policy.

Samuels says the women got the alleged victims to sign insurance applications falsely, saying they had yearly incomes of $60,000 to $100,000. The women were named beneficiaries of the policies on false claims that they were the men's cousins, business partners or fiancées, court papers say.

The defendants had collected $2.8 million before FBI agents arrested them on suspicion of insurance fraud last May, court documents say. Federal fraud charges were dropped after the state filed murder charges. Golay and Rutterschmidt have been jailed without bail since their arrests.

Authorities got a break in solving the hit-and-run cases when detectives compared notes and discovered the women were insurance beneficiaries of both victims, Samuels says. Police then found DNA matching McDavid's on a station wagon linked to Golay, affidavits filed in court say. An autopsy found that McDavid was "drugged and heavily sedated," Samuels says.

"The case is unique because of the defendants' age and what they were willing to do," Samuels says. "It kind of boggles people. People tend to think that women of that age aren't going to do something this awful."

Golay's defense is that "she did not do it," says her lawyer, Roger Jon Diamond. "Whether or not there was insurance fraud going on is irrelevant to the issue of murder. She's 76 years old. It's preposterous to say she had the physical ability to commit these alleged murders." Rutterschmidt's lawyer, Michael Sklar, did not respond to requests for comment.

At last week's hearing, Sklar tried to shift suspicion to Golay based on testimony that she tried to delete Rutterschmidt from a policy.

Prosecutors won't seek the death penalty because of the women's ages, Samuels says. If convicted of two premeditated murders for financial gain, Golay and Rutterschmidt would be sentenced to life in prison without parole, she says.