Sixteen Life Policies on One Homeless Man. Two Women in Their Seventies Got Life for His Murder.

Life insurance on a man with no address is unusual. Sixteen life insurance policies on a man with no address, bought by two women who were not related to him, is a stack of paper that answers its own questions.

The man was Kenneth McDavid, 50, killed by a vehicle in Los Angeles on June 21, 2005. The women were Helen Golay of Santa Monica and Olga Rutterschmidt of Hollywood, both in their seventies. Courthouse News Service called them LA’s Black Widows.

Two men, two streets, six years

Paul Vados, 73, was found dead in an alley in Hollywood on November 8, 1999. Kenneth McDavid, 50, died on June 21, 2005.

Both men were homeless. Both were found dead in Los Angeles in what looked like hit and run incidents, struck by a vehicle and left in the street.

Neither death, on its own, produced an investigation that went anywhere. A hit and run with an unhoused victim and no witness is a hard file, and in 1999 it stayed a hard file.

What connected them was not forensics. It was paperwork.

The Los Angeles Police Department later counted three life insurance policies on Vados and sixteen on McDavid. Prosecutors said at trial that the two women collected $2.8 million on the two men.

The relationship on the forms

The policies did not describe the women the same way twice.

On the various applications, as Wikipedia summarizes them, Golay and Rutterschmidt were listed as McDavid’s business partner, his cousin, or his fiancée.

A person can be a business partner. A person can be a fiancée. A person can be a cousin. The same two people are not all three across a stack of forms about the same man.

What turned a hit and run file into a murder case was a remark in a squad room.

A remark in a squad room

Los Angeles police traffic investigators were working the McDavid hit and run. They noted that two women had taken out large life insurance policies on the victim.

Another detective heard that and recalled a 1999 case with the same feature. The Vados file.

They compared the two. Both victims were homeless men. Both files carried the same two beneficiaries: Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt.

The LAPD’s own release describes it that way, and the Associated Press put it in one line at trial: police linked the cases only in late 2005, when a detective investigating one overheard a colleague describe a similar case.

Not a lab result, not a confession, not surveillance footage. Two people in the same room saying out loud what each of them had privately found odd.

Six years of separation between two files, closed by a conversation.

What a task force is for

Once the pattern was visible, the case stopped being local.

Investigators assembled a task force that included the FBI, the United States Attorney’s Office, the California Department of Insurance, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney. The death investigations of both men were reopened and assigned to the LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division.

Insurance claims travel by mail, which makes false claims a federal matter under the mail fraud statutes, meaning using the mail to carry a scheme.

In May 2006, Golay, then 75, and Rutterschmidt, then 73, were arrested. On May 31, 2006, a federal grand jury indicted them on nine counts each of mail fraud and related charges for making false insurance claims.

The federal counts came first because the paper was ready first. A claim form is a dated, signed, mailed object. It does not need a witness.

The physical evidence caught up later. At trial, prosecutors showed that Golay had used her auto club membership to have a 1999 Mercury Sable station wagon towed an hour before McDavid died, and that his DNA was found on it.

The verdicts, April and July 2008

The murder case followed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

On April 17, 2008, the jury convicted Helen Golay of the first degree murders of both Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid, and of conspiracy to commit murder for financial gain in both killings. The same day it convicted Olga Rutterschmidt of the murder of McDavid, and deadlocked on the Vados counts against her.

On April 21, 2008, after further deliberation, the jury convicted Rutterschmidt of the first degree murder of Vados and of conspiracy in his death as well.

On July 15, 2008, Judge David Wesley sentenced each woman to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Golay was 77. Rutterschmidt was 75.

The judge addressed the two women directly from the bench, speaking of the victims: “They needed a helping hand. They thought they were getting this from you. Instead these unfortunate men were sacrificed on your altar of greed.”

Two consecutive life terms each, for a pair of claims that had been paying out across six years.

The ordinary detection

A traffic investigator found a fact odd enough to say out loud, and a colleague remembered an old file. Then a task force read a stack of applications on which the same two women had described themselves three different ways.

None of that required a database alert or a special unit. It required someone listening in a room, and someone else reading the forms.

Two men are the reason any of it mattered. Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid were living on the street in Los Angeles, and both of them were worth more to somebody dead than alive because a piece of paper said so.

The convictions are on the record in Los Angeles County Superior Court, and the May 31, 2006 federal indictment is on the record in the Central District of California.