US:A court finds two down and outs were sacrificed for insurance money, writes Victoria Kimand Paul Pringlein Los Angeles.
IN A CASE that drew worldwide attention, a Los Angeles jury has convicted a 77-year-old woman of murder and her 75-year-old co-defendant of conspiracy to commit murder in a chilling slow-motion plot to kill two homeless men for $2.8 million (€1.76 million) in life insurance.
Jurors are still considering two murder charges and a second conspiracy count against the younger woman, Olga Rutterschmidt.
She and Helen Golay, who was convicted of all four counts on Wednesday, were accused of plucking Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vados off the streets, putting them up in apartments for two years and then having them run over in dark alleys. Two years is the period after which most insurance policies cannot be contested.
Golay faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. She buried her head in her hands after the jury's decision was read.
Rutterschmidt could be sentenced to 25 years to life on the conspiracy conviction. As the verdict was returned, she put her chin on her fist and looked blankly around the small courtroom.
The jury, which received the case late on Monday, was continuing yesterday to deliberate the remaining counts against Rutterschmidt. Golay's attorney, Roger Jon Diamond, indicated she would appeal. "The ladies did not do very well today," he said.
Mr Diamond said his case was damaged when Rutterschmidt's lawyer, deputy public defender Michael Sklar, blamed Golay for McDavid's murder.
In prepared statements, relatives of the victims praised Wednesday's outcome. "Their plots were pure evil," Stella Vados, the murdered man's daughter, said of Golay and Rutterschmidt.
At the jury's request, superior court judge David Wesley directed the lawyers to reargue the evidence yesterday for one of the unresolved counts against Rutterschmidt, the conspiracy to murder Mr Vados in 1999.
The defendants' ages kept the case in the headlines, drawing comparisons to the play and film Arsenic and Old Lace. Experts said there was no point in seeking the death penalty because the women would probably die in prison during the appeal process.
After two years in custody, the defendants appeared grey and frail during the trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Prosecutors said Golay, a former Santa Monica real estate agent, and Hungarian-born Rutterschmidt, a Hollywood resident who once owned a coffee shop, targeted the most vulnerable because their deaths would not raise a stir.
The women allegedly were partners in a number of bogus lawsuits before embarking on the murder scheme, authorities say.
No witnesses came forward and details were scant, leaving prosecutors to painstakingly build a case on fragmentary testimony and a long paper trail of insurance documents and rent checks.
The death of Mr Vados (73) was particularly mysterious. The crime scene was washed clean in a downpour and traffic investigators set the killing aside as an unsolved hit-and-run.
The jury appeared to be struggling with Rutterschmidt's alleged role in the Vados killing.
Mr Sklar had maintained that she and the homeless man were friends, but prosecutors said Rutterschmidt lured Mr Vados into the women's web and helped Golay to house and monitor him while the insurance policies turned incontestable.
The evidence in Mr McDavid's murder was much more direct. Three surveillance cameras caught a silver station wagon turning into a Westwood alley on the night that he was found dead there. As in the Vados killing, Mr McDavid had been crushed to death, his body twisted, and police said the scene was free of the skid marks and broken glass typically left by a hit-and-run.
Someone using Golay's car club membership called for the station wagon to be towed around the time that Mr McDavid was killed, according to testimony. After the women came under suspicion, authorities tracked the vehicle down and found Mr McDavid's DNA on the undercarriage.
Prosecutors said the similarities between the two deaths were uncanny. The Los Angeles Police Department concluded the murders were connected when two investigators realised the same pair of women had claimed both men's bodies.
- (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)