In 1977, actress Christa Helm was found stabbed and bludgeoned outside her agent’s home in West Hollywood, California. Detectives would learn about her infamous “love diary," which kept track of her lovers, but it had vanished. There were also tape recordings of her trysts with her celebrity boyfriends, but those were also missing. After sifting through Christa's past romantic relationships, detectives wondered if she was simply the victim of a random street robbery at the hand of a career criminal. “48 Hours" correspondent Maureen Maher reports. This classic "48 Hours" episode last aired on 10/4/2008. Watch all-new episodes of “48 Hours” on Saturdays, and stream on demand on Paramount+. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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 12, 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.
They think that the diary was what was taken from her body when she died and that she was going to blackmail people with the diary. We don't know all the names in that book.
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Chapter 2: What details emerged from the crime scene investigation?
I remember I jumped out of bed and of course my father had recently passed away and I had his pistol and I pulled his pistol up. I was frightened to death. It sounded like it was happening right here.
Grise stood in his yard but didn't hear anything more or see anything and went back inside.
The next day the sheriff came knocking on the door and They asked if any of us had heard anything unusual in the middle of the night. And then they told me that somebody had been murdered. And I remember the police officer saying, had I walked into the street and looked down, I would have seen her. But I only looked down the sidewalk.
Turns out Grise had his own connection with Krista.
There were a lot of girls like Krista. I met her a couple of times. Beautiful girls who just kind of seemed to work their way through the various corners of Hollywood.
The reality hit me that I wasn't going to go have this beautiful life with my mommy that I'd been dreaming about for so long. And I fell to my knees outside of the school and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
As the detectives started to investigate, they soon realized the case would be very difficult. With Krista's complicated life, there were plenty of people who might want to kill her.
I think that she was a little girl that made it big in Hollywood, a little girl that knew too much.
Help me, Nikki. I'll come back with help. It's the only chance for all of us.
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Chapter 3: Who were Christa Helm's notable relationships?
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.
Police now think it was Lenny who sent Tony Sirico to clean out Krista's apartment to protect her.
We believe that he didn't want her reputation soiled, didn't want the information out there about her surreptitiously recording people or even her sexual activities.
If he had so many of her things, her personal effects, is it possible that he may have been the one who had the audio tapes and the written diary?
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Chapter 4: What evidence suggested a motive for Christa's murder?
She was probably about like this.
Okay. 83-year-old retired Los Angeles detective Larry Gansey.
She had earrings on, I know that.
They're hoping to jog the memory of the original investigator.
She had no identification. We don't know who is it.
About the night Krista died.
We found out that she was a party girl. She had come from a party with a girlfriend. She was headed over to see her agent, Sandy Smith. The house looks the same now as it did then, doesn't it? Exactly. This is me right here.
They also opened the box of evidence Gansey started 31 years ago.
Bringing back some memories? Well, yeah. Yeah. She was bleeding quite profusely there. You could see that she had numerous stab wounds in the chest. Our thoughts then, we had a rage killing, that somebody was really upset with this girl.
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