After getting away with murder in LA, retirees Helen and Olga scheme to kill again. But when an unlikely party sniffs out their crimes, the friends turn on each other. Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast! Have a story to share? Email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who are Helen Goulet and Olga Ruderschmidt?
This episode includes discussions of murder consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen Sometimes criminals are the ones you'd least suspect, the ones you never see coming. This was true for Helen Goulet and Olga Ruderschmidt. To everyone around them, they were just two older women with a penchant for fitness classes.
But the truth was they planned, they plotted, and they pulled off a crime that was almost perfect. At least, they would have gotten away with it. But then greed got the better of them. And like all the best criminals, they turned on each other. This is Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. I'm Janice Morgan.
You might recognize me as the voice behind the investigative docuseries Broken and the true crime podcast Fear Thy Neighbor. I'm guest hosting for Serial Killers, and I'm thrilled to be here. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast, and we'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
Last time, we covered how Helen Goulet and Olga Ruderschmidt became fast friends after meeting at an L.A. gym. They bonded over small-time scams and frivolous lawsuits before devising a more sinister scheme. In the late 90s, they took out life insurance policies on an innocent man and killed him.
Chapter 2: What was Helen and Olga's first crime?
Today, we'll see the duo strike again and hear how the LAPD and insurance companies banded together to track them down. Stay with us. In 1999, 68-year-old Helen Goulet and 66-year-old Olga Ruderschmidt had just gotten away with murder. Technically, Paul Vados' hit-and-run death was still an open case, but there were no solid leads.
So in the early 2000s, after years of dead ends, the police shelved the files for safekeeping. Meanwhile, Helen and Olga made off with nearly $600,000 in life insurance benefits. But even though they'd scored a six-figure payout, it wasn't enough. They each had a vague goal of making the most money possible. So they went back to the drawing board to do it all over again. Their plan was simple.
Do exactly what they did before, only better. More life insurance policies, higher premiums, and a way bigger payout. It took them a minute to find the right guy. But finally, in 2002, Olga met him. She'd just finished a workout at the gym. As she made her way out, she spotted 45-year-old Jimmy Covington across the street.
He was sitting on the steps of an office building and appeared to be living on the streets. Olga approached Jimmy and told him about the office she had, conveniently right upstairs. There was a futon to sleep on so he could stay there at night, as long as he was out early in the morning and didn't return until after office hours. There was just one catch.
In order for her to help him, he had to sign a couple of papers. Jimmy didn't have a problem with that. Olga clapped her hands in delight. Then she ushered him upstairs and got him settled. But for him to stay, she'd need a little more detail. His birth date, his social security number, even his parents' social security numbers. Jimmy wasn't eager to hand over such sensitive information.
For days, Olga haggled him for answers. Finally, Jimmy had enough. The whole situation seemed to be more hassle than it was worth. He marched down to the building manager, returned the key, and never came back. When Helen heard from Olga that Jimmy was gone, she couldn't have been happy. She'd already filed an insurance application under his name, and it wasn't cheap.
She requested $800,000 in guaranteed death benefits. more than she and Olga made off their last kill combined. Jimmy was supposed to be their next meal ticket, but they had no idea where he'd gone or how to get him back. That left them at square one, and back at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church. The ladies knew there was always a group of down-on-their-luck men there on Sundays.
A few months later, in the summer of 2002, they prowled the grounds and found 47-year-old Kenneth McDavid sleeping outside. He had no job, no family, and no close friends to lean on. So he accepted Helen and Olga's help. Helen handled all the logistics, the finances, and most importantly, the paperwork. She set their mark up in a Hollywood apartment.
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Chapter 3: How did Helen and Olga plan their next murder?
She paid the rent, utilities, and unbeknownst to Kenneth, his life insurance premiums. Olga was the muscle. She brought Kenneth groceries every week, partly to keep him fed, but mostly to keep an eye on their...investment. After losing their last prospect, she wasn't about to let Kenneth slip through her fingers. So she played it cool and kept him happy.
But the same couldn't be said for Helen and Olga. Trouble was brewing between the two friends. It seemed they both wanted to make more and more money, even if it meant stabbing each other in the back. As planned, they applied for a couple insurance policies together, where they'd take an even cut of the payout.
But in secret, they also took out additional policies where they would be the sole beneficiary. Combined, they held 13 different policies for a total payout of $3.7 million, but only three listed them as co-beneficiaries. From the remaining 10, eight were under Helen's name. Olga only managed to take out two for herself.
Both women knew they had to wait two years before they could cash out, so it didn't do them much good to keep taking out more policies. Each one reset the clock. So in 2003, they moved to the next phase. That spring, Helen got her hands on a purse belonging to a woman named Hillary Adler. Hillary had never met Helen or Olga before, but it appears they all went to the same gym.
And that month, someone broke into Hillary's locker. Then, in January of 2004, Olga used Hillary's ID to purchase a silver Mercury Sable. After buying the car, Olga parked it in the alley behind Helen's Santa Monica apartment. It sat there for the rest of the year, waiting for its big moment. Once that was taken care of, there wasn't much left to do except wait.
Helen and Olga now had their murder weapon, the mercury sable. They had their insurance policy times 13. And their victim, Kenneth McDavid, had no idea about any of it. In fact, he'd gotten a little too comfortable. At some point, he decided it was his turn to pay it forward. When someone needed a place to stay, he opened his doors, or I should say, Helen's doors.
Eventually, Olga found out what was going on. To make sure no one else moved in, she hired an armed security guard and ordered him to remain in the apartment with Kenneth. By the start of 2005, Kenneth was over the strict living conditions. He took his bike and his belongings and returned to the streets. This caused a problem for Helen and Olga.
The insurance policies they'd taken out on Kenneth wouldn't mature until later that summer. The women had to keep him within their grasp for another six months. So they tracked him down and made a new offer. Helen would give Kenneth money to stay in various motels around Los Angeles, all so she could keep tabs on him. For a while, Kenneth went along with that.
But by June of 2005, he was getting harder to keep track of, and Helen and Olga worried he'd disappear entirely. So even though not all of the policies had hit the two-year mark, they decided they had to act. If they didn't, they'd lose everything. And losing was not an option. The time had come to kill Kenneth McDavid.
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Chapter 4: Who was Kenneth McDavid and how did they target him?
Half an hour later, a tow truck arrived and drove her back home to Santa Monica. According to the driver, there was nothing suspicious about his passenger that night. You'd never have known she'd just killed a man in cold blood. When she got home, she phoned Olga, presumably to tell her it was done. Unbeknownst to Helen, someone had already found Kenneth's body.
His bike was positioned off to the side of his body, and one of the wheels was completely off. It almost appeared like he'd stopped to change a flat tire before he was hit by a car. While Helen was getting towed home, paramedics raced to the scene, but it was too late. Kenneth was dead.
Fortunately, he had his ID on him, so by the following day, investigators traced his last known address to his old Hollywood apartment, the one Helen paid for. The cops got a hold of Helen's name and notified her of Kenneth's death. They hoped she'd be able to help them answer some questions. And she did. She pretended to be Kenneth's cousin and soul next of kin.
She identified his body at the morgue. The 74-year-old didn't seem like a killer, so it wasn't questioned when she paid to cremate him. Around the same time, the LAPD discovered that a security camera had recorded part of the alley on the night of Kenneth's death. The footage showed a silver vehicle passing through the alley, but it was too blurry.
They couldn't make out a license plate, let alone the specific model of the car. With no other real leads, the case fell to the wayside in the overworked traffic division. And that would have been that if it wasn't for one pesky insurance investigator. 59-year-old Ed Webster worked for Mutual of New York Life Insurance. He traveled the country and looked into questionable insurance claims.
And this one fit the bill. Red flag number one. Helen told the police she was Kenneth's cousin, but on Kenneth's insurance application, she wasn't listed as a relative. Red flag number two, Helen and Olga were both listed as beneficiaries, but neither would take the time to talk to Ed.
Usually, if there were questions about a claim that was legitimate, the beneficiaries were more than happy to clear the air. Red flag number three, the crime scene itself. The bike positioning didn't make any sense. Maybe at first glance, it looked like Kenneth was changing a flat tire, but it was fully inflated, good as new.
Not to mention Kenneth's injuries, which were consistent with being run over by a car, yes, but not a hit and run. If a vehicle had come at him fast and accidentally hit him, there should have been lower body injuries. Instead, he had marks all over his chest. That meant he'd likely been on the ground when he was driven over.
And a toxicology report showed alcohol and a notable amount of prescription sedatives in his system. He may not have even been conscious when he died. After a few months of sleuthing, Ed went to the LAPD and presented his case. He believed that Helen and Olga were not only trying to commit insurance fraud, he was certain that the duo had killed Kenneth McDavid.
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Chapter 5: What led to Kenneth's tragic death?
Then she stormed out of the diner and reportedly reached out to Olga to let her know what had happened. Olga had also scheduled a meeting with Ed for that morning. But after Helen's alleged phone call, she blew it off. So he went to her. Later that day, Ed stood at Olga's apartment door and handed her a letter that explained why Mutual of New York wasn't going to honor her policy.
Helen and Olga had just lost everything they'd spent the last two years working for. It felt like they'd hit rock bottom. Which might be why they turned on each other.
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After two long years of planning the perfect murder, Helen Goulet and Olga Ruderschmidt were back to square one. They weren't getting the big payout they'd hoped for, at least not when it came to Kenneth McDavid. But for someone else, that was up to fate to decide. So by early 2006, the two septuagenarians had already started hunting for a new victim.
Around this time, Olga sparked a conversation with 74-year-old Yosef Gabor. He was a fellow European immigrant and didn't seem to have any close friends or family members around. And though he wasn't homeless, he lived alone. When Olga offered to help him get settled in the city, he happily accepted. Step one was setting him up with a bank account that she and Helen could deposit money into.
All she needed from him was to sign a few documents before they drove down to Bank of America and opened a checking account. It was all so simple. Except, unbeknownst to Olga and Helen, undercover cops had been tailing them for months, and they even got pictures of the whole encounter. It was clear to authorities that Yosef was their next victim.
But suspicion of a future crime isn't enough to arrest someone. And the LAPD still didn't have enough to bring the pair in for either Paul Vados' or Kenneth McDavid's murders. Fortunately, the FBI was more than happy to lend a hand. Homicide charges might have to wait, but they could nab the women on mail fraud, which was a federal crime.
At least that would get the women off the streets, and it would give the LAPD time to amass all the evidence they needed for the real charges. So in the early morning hours of May 18, 2006, law enforcement officials from the LAPD, FBI, and the California Department of Insurance all gathered together, then split in two. Half of the task force headed toward Hollywood, the other to Santa Monica.
There, officers knocked on Helen's door. She answered in her pajamas, dazed and confused. A moment later, an FBI agent arrested her for mail fraud. Across town, task force agents swarmed Olga's apartment in Hollywood and accused her of the same crime. She was barefoot, dressed in nothing but a nightgown, and she was absolutely irate. This was outrageous, she screamed. She'd done nothing wrong.
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Chapter 6: What evidence linked Helen and Olga to the crime?
At this point, nearly 11 months had passed since Kenneth's death, so investigators couldn't find any useful prints on the car. But they did notice that the fuel line had been crudely repaired. And since they already knew that Helen had placed a call to AAA the night of the murder, the car was looking more and more like a smoking gun. Then they found the last piece of the puzzle —
On the undercarriage of the car were trace amounts of blood that were a match for Kenneth McDavid. The police knew then. They'd found the murder weapon. With that, the FBI hit pause on the mail fraud charges and the LAPD booked Helen and Olga on murder charges. The women were held without bail until their trial started nearly two years later.
In March of 2008, both women pleaded not guilty, although neither spoke in their own defense. The trial itself was a finger-pointing extravaganza. Olga's lawyer made the case that she was an innocent, impressionable woman who'd been dazzled by Helen's lifestyle. She'd gone along with the insurance fraud for the money, but she had no idea about the murders.
Helen, on the other hand, shocked everyone by blaming her 40-something-year-old daughter for the crimes. Her lawyer argued that Helen's daughter had killed Kenneth, possibly with Olga's help. No one understood why Helen and her legal team chose that strategy. The prosecutors never even considered the daughter a suspect. The flimsy defense didn't sit well with the jurors.
Still, when they were sent off to deliberate, they had to reconcile the facts of the case with their strong feelings toward the elderly women. At the time of the trial, the LA Times interviewed Jonathan Simon, co-chairman of the UC Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. He told them gender and age biases could play a big role in the deliberation process.
Most people have an innate belief that older women are either nurturers or in need of protection. And age is seen as, quote, proxy for non-threateningness. But Simon also noted that those same biases can also work against people like Helen and Olga. Even if a juror initially believed they were innocent, the second they changed their mind, their opinions took a sharp turn.
As Simon explained, juries can be less forgiving of women when the allegations run counter to the nurturer ideal. Like, say, how Helen threw her own flesh and blood under the bus, and Olga lured invulnerable men only to hurt them. Together, the duo went against everything that older women are supposed to represent, and it certainly painted them in a new light.
Three weeks after the trial commenced, the jury found 77-year-old Helen and 75-year-old Olga guilty of murder. Both received life sentences. They were sent to the same prison in Central California, about 250 miles north of Los Angeles. But even behind bars, they lived very different lives. Helen was placed in a special unit for seniors where she wrote drafts of a memoir.
Olga was sent to general population. She told journalists she felt she was getting the short end of the stick and begged for legal help. And although their paths have diverged, Helen and Olga remain united on one front. To this day, they maintain their innocence. They don't have much in common anymore, but at least they have that. That and the fact that they'll likely die behind bars.
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