The Thing About Helen & Olga - Ep. 2: "The Girls"

Summary

Dateline NBC – “The Thing About Helen & Olga”

Episode 2: "The Girls"

Original air date: February 9, 2026
Host: Keith Morrison

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Overview

This gripping Dateline NBC episode continues the investigation into Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt, two seemingly benevolent elderly women who ingratiated themselves with vulnerable homeless men, only to later become the beneficiaries of suspiciously large life insurance policies after those men died under mysterious circumstances. Episode 2 delves deeper into the lives of the victims, the growing suspicions of investigators, and the elaborate schemes that started to come to light as the web unraveled.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Life on the Streets: Dangerous and Unforgiving

• Keith Morrison opens with a vivid description of daily survival as a homeless person, marked by hunger, violence, and uncertainty.
  • “Each day starts with a quest for food and ends with a hunt for shelter. Rinse and repeat.” (01:00, Keith Morrison)
  • Ed Webster and Sam Mayrose discuss the recurring violence and vulnerability among the homeless population.
• Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vados, two homeless men, became the focus due to their connection to Helen and Olga.

The Illusion of Benevolence

• Helen and Olga are described as “sweet-faced ladies who seemed to understand that the truly destitute needed more.” (02:02, Keith Morrison)
• FBI Agent Sam Mayrose describes their apparent generosity:
  • “They put them up in apartments, paid all their utilities, fed them, took them where they needed to go, would periodically check on them.” (02:13, Sam Mayrose)

Red Flags in the Life Insurance Files

• Ed Webster, a veteran insurance investigator, notes multiple inconsistencies in the life insurance forms for Kenneth McDavid.
  • McDavid is falsely listed as having a substantial income, business partners, and different residences.
  • “I found with certainty that he did not live where he was represented to live. He didn’t work where he was represented to work.” (04:19, Ed Webster)
• Suspicious business: HKO Associates, supposedly co-owned by McDavid, Helen, and Olga, does not exist.
• Both women listed as beneficiaries on multiple policies, raising further suspicions.

The Investigation Deepens

• Ed Webster is methodical and skeptical, refusing to “jump to conclusions” but recognizing a pattern of deliberate misrepresentation. (05:03)
• He revisits the crime scene with Keith Morrison, noting lack of skid marks or vehicle debris.
• Odd details at the scene, like a bicycle with a removed front tire and a helmet placed on top, suggest the accident was staged (09:58).
  • “It was postulated, perhaps it was being set to look like he was changing a flat tire.” (09:58, Ed Webster)
• Helen and Olga refuse to speak with Webster, despite being entitled to large sums of money (10:51).

From Insurance Oddities to Homicide

• Webster meets with Detective Dennis Kilcoyne and the traffic division, laying out the improbable story of two little old ladies with million-dollar policies on homeless men.
  • “Money thing is what was driving it, the amount of money involved.” (12:29, Detective Kilcoyne)
• A cold case file on Paul Vados surfaces, showing identical circumstances and the same beneficiaries (13:08).

Forming the ‘Granny Task Force’

• With the help of FBI and Department of Insurance agents, Kilcoyne and his team assemble a multi-agency task force, recognizing this as more than just insurance fraud (14:34).
• Ed Webster remains a key, unofficial member.

Surveillance: The ‘Girls’

• The homeless community’s nickname for Helen and Olga: “the girls.”
• Surveillance teams tail both women – Olga proves hard to keep up with, nimble at 73 and always active; Helen moves in a regal, patterned way, conducting elaborate, legal financial schemes (credit cards, property flipping). (18:23–19:53)
• Investigators are surprised at how careful Helen and Olga are to never be seen together.

Uncovering the Victims’ Stories

• Detectives find Kenneth McDavid’s sister, Sandra Selman, who shares touching stories of Kenneth as a smart, caring boy who became withdrawn and eventually homeless, possibly due to mental illness.
  • “He was the smart one, but he was also very caring to my mother.” (23:11, Sandra Selman)
  • “He did show some signs of paranoia, but he…was never diagnosed.” (26:09, Sandra Selman)
• Sandra and her family had never heard of Helen or Olga, underscoring how isolated McDavid had become.

Pattern of Insurance Fraud

• FBI agent Sam Mayrose reveals an extensive pattern of life insurance policy applications by Helen and Olga:
  • “They applied for 26 total policies. On Paul, they ended up getting seven…On McDavid, they applied for 17 policies and got 13.” (29:36, Sam Mayrose)
• Applications falsely claimed the men were employed and healthy; Helen listed as a fiancée, Olga as a cousin.
• Insurance business practices enabled this: minimal background checks, poor inter-company communication, and the critical two-year incontestability window (30:47–31:29).
  • “After that two years, except for non-payment of premiums, it can no longer be contested, even if they discover fraud or misrepresentation.” (31:20, Sam Mayrose)

Chilling Theory: Victims as ‘Livestock’

• Agents propose that Helen and Olga kept their victims alive and cared for just long enough to secure and hold insurance policies until legally contestable windows passed (31:52).
  • “The ladies would find the people that they intended to get the policies on…they would put them up for two years.” (32:10, Sam Mayrose)
• The timeline supports this: both Vados and McDavid died just after their policies became contestable, netting Helen and Olga millions (32:10–33:49).

Relentless Pursuit for Justice

• Ed Webster and Mutual of New York actively withheld policy payouts, citing fraud, and pressed Helen and Olga for explanations. The women remained uncooperative and combative.
  • “Get out of my door before I throw hot water on you.” (36:19, Ed Webster quoting confrontation)
• Insurance companies, now wary, await the homicide investigation’s resolution before payout decisions.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• "If you allow yourself to commit to a certain conclusion, you eliminate all other areas of possibility. And that's not your job." (05:03, Ed Webster)
• "There was a helmet lying on top of the bicycle… It was postulated… perhaps it was being set to look like he was changing a flat tire." (09:58, Ed Webster)
• "I had no idea what we had. I just didn't know. But the money thing is what was driving it." (12:29, Detective Kilcoyne)
• "They applied for 17 [policies] and got 13." (29:36, Sam Mayrose)
• "The ladies would find the people … and they would put them up for two years, knowing that they had to wait that two years before they could apply for the payout." (32:10, Sam Mayrose)
• "Get out of my door before I throw hot water on you." (36:19, Ed Webster quoting)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:00–02:21] – Life on the street and the introduction of Helen and Olga's "generosity"
• [03:02–05:41] – Insurance investigator Ed Webster’s suspicions and methods
• [09:22–10:24] – Scene analysis: Staged accident and the peculiar arrangement of the victim and bicycle
• [12:03–13:59] – Homicide detective Kilcoyne gets involved, ties to an earlier similar case
• [14:34–16:24] – Assembling the multijurisdictional investigative team
• [17:23–19:53] – Surveillance tactics and the uncovering of Helen and Olga’s routines
• [21:06–26:50] – Family perspective: McDavid’s backstory and tragic drift into homelessness
• [29:10–31:29] – FBI findings: Policy stacking, application fraud, and insurance loopholes
• [31:52–33:49] – The cycle of "caring" for then cashing in on vulnerable victims
• [34:44–36:19] – Insurance company’s refusal to pay, direct confrontation with Helen and Olga

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Tone and Style

True to Dateline’s signature approach, the episode interweaves meticulous investigative detail with compassionate character sketches and a noir atmosphere. The hosts and interviewees speak with a mix of professional detachment, moral outrage, and—occasionally—dark humor, particularly when referencing the incongruity of “little old ladies” as suspects in a multimillion-dollar murder plot.

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Conclusion

Episode 2 of “The Thing About Helen & Olga” painstakingly reconstructs how two outwardly benign women exploited systemic vulnerabilities in both the homeless community and the insurance industry for personal gain. Investigators’ growing realization of the scope of the crimes, paired with the poignant backstory of the victims, deepens the sense of unease and anticipation for what further horrors might yet be uncovered.

Transcript

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[Keith Morrison]

FDIC it's the routine that numbs the grinding, unrelenting sameness of survival. Each day starts with a quest for food and ends with a hunt for shelter. Rinse and repeat days run together, punctuated only by the terror of random violence.

[Ed Webster]

There was always violence and the potential.

[Sam Mayrose]

For violence among the homeless.

[Keith Morrison]

Unfortunately, oftentimes they would victimize each other. It's the life of fang and claw in the wild. It's the life of countless human souls on city streets in America.

[Ed Webster]

None of us believe that we will.

[Commercial Announcer]

Ever be homeless, but the homeless never.

[Keith Morrison]

Believed that they would be either. Twenty years ago, it was a life Paul Vaddes and Kenneth McDavid lived.

[Ed Webster]

Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vaddes were vulnerable people.

[Keith Morrison]

Then two sweet faced ladies appeared, women who seemed to understand that the truly destitute needed more than a blanket, a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee.

[Sam Mayrose]

They put them up in apartments, paid all their utilities, fed them, took them where they needed to go, would periodically check on them.

[Keith Morrison]

In this episode you'll hear about the life of one of those men and the kindly old ladies who rescued him from the streets.

[Sandra Selman]

Kenneth was. He was very, very good at school.

[Keith Morrison]

The smart one.

[Sandra Selman]

He was the smart one.

[Keith Morrison]

You'll also hear from the investigators who slowly unravel the terrifying secret behind two back alley deaths. Some camera did record what went on.

[Ed Webster]

Here, am I right? Yeah, that's the camera that saw the car come down, stop for a few minutes and then start up and leave.

[Keith Morrison]

I'm Keith Morrison and this is episode two of Dateline's latest podcast, the Thing About Helen and Olga. Life insurance application forms are nobody's idea Of a riveting read. But Ed Webster couldn't stop staring at the forms he held in his hand. Both had Kenneth McDavid hand printed across the top. According to the forms, McDavid was a partner in an investment firm called HKO Associates. Annual income, 65 grand. Two women, Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt, were his business partners. Though Ed had found no trace of HKO Associates anywhere, he did find residential addresses for Helen and Olga. And here's the thing. On one form, Kenneth McDavid is listed as living with Olga in Hollywood. On the other one, he was living at Helen's place in Santa Monica.

[Ed Webster]

I found with certainty that he did not live where he was represented to live. He didn't work where he was represented to work. He didn't earn what he was represented to earn. And then I found where he actually did live. And it was rented and paid for by the beneficiary. And all at the expense of Helen Gulley, the beneficiary and the owner of the contract.

[Keith Morrison]

Well, now, that raised all kinds of questions. But Ed Webster did not jump to conclusions. He left that to amateurs. No, Ed was cautious, Slow and steady as an ox cart sometimes. A real stickler for order and process.

[Ed Webster]

If you allow yourself to commit to a certain conclusion, you eliminate all other areas of possibility. And that's not your job. I mean, anybody could do that.

[Keith Morrison]

All he knew for sure was that Kenneth McDavid's life insurance applications to Mutual of New York contained certain. Well, call it inconsistencies. Were they mistakes or deliberate misrepresentations? Ed needed to know more. So he packed a bag and headed back to California.

[Ed Webster]

I had to find out what the truth was. And I had to determine. If the true situation were known, would the company have issued this contract at this point?

[Keith Morrison]

You're still protecting the insurance company?

[Ed Webster]

Well, throughout the whole thing. That's my objective.

[Capital One Advertiser]

That's.

[Ed Webster]

That's all I do. That's all I do.

[Keith Morrison]

Ed Webster is old school. He needed to be there. He needed to see with his own eyes that back alley where Kenneth McDavid was run down in the dead of night, crushed like some discarded coffee cup. I went back there with him in 2008. Back to that alley where Kenneth McDavid died. It's what you'd expect, really. Pocked pavement and green dumpsters, the back doors of businesses like a food emporium and a coffee shop. All of it neatly out of sight from anyone driving past on busy Westwood Boulevard. So when you come down to a place like this, where something's happened. I mean, what good is it going to do you?

[Ed Webster]

Clearly, this investigation was not going to be completed in a day or two. So the more you familiarize yourself with the situation, the location, everything, the geography, you don't know, at some future point it may make something else come together. So it's always worth the time.

[Keith Morrison]

As we stood there on the spot where Kenneth McDavid died, the sun filled the alley with shadows. We had to imagine what it looked like in the dark, in the dim glow of distant street lights.

[Ed Webster]

There had been passersby in the alley earlier that evening who saw nothing. So between the time the body was found and the time the last person passed by an empty alley is obviously when the accident occurred or the murder, whatever.

[Keith Morrison]

Murder.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Foreign.

[Keith Morrison]

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[Keith Morrison]

Ed Webster had plenty of reason to think the death of Kenneth McDavid was no accident. For starters, he could find no skid marks where someone might have tried to break suddenly. Police photos showed no sign of sudden impact such as broken glass or pieces of car chrome or bumper plastic. But the real telltale sign In Ed's mind was something that was mentioned in the police report and clearly documented in the photographs. There was something odd about the bicycle that was lying near Kenneth McDavid's body.

[Ed Webster]

The front tire had been removed, and there was a helmet laying on top of the bicycle. It was postulated, perhaps it was being set to look like he was changing a flat tire when he was struck by a vehicle. Except, if I recall correctly, the tire that was off was not flat, but.

[Keith Morrison]

It could have been an effort to stage the scene. And then, if that's what it was, it backfired.

[Ed Webster]

Well, it could have been. It could have been. It, you know, it was just. It just. Was it defied? To this day, it defies explanation.

[Keith Morrison]

So much of what Ed was turning up made no sense. No use beating around the bush now. So Ed decided to go straight to Helen and Olga and ask them about all the inaccuracies on Kenneth's life insurance applications.

[Ed Webster]

They refused to speak with me.

[Keith Morrison]

Weren't they entitled to quite a large sum of money?

[Ed Webster]

Yes.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Yeah.

[Keith Morrison]

And yet they didn't want to talk to you in such a way that would allow them to receive the money?

[Ed Webster]

No, they wouldn't talk to me. I can't tell what was going on in their minds, but I think probably they believe that they would receive the money anyway. They filed a complaint with the California Department of Insurance against my company early on that the company was not paying the claim promptly. So I think.

[Keith Morrison]

Did the company react to that at all, by the way? Did they come to you and say, what's going on here?

[Ed Webster]

Well, they have to react. And they knew that there were things going on in this case that may supersede normal insurance issues, and they were willing to allow me to continue to investigate.

[Keith Morrison]

And yet, there are limits to how much a private investigator can do. So Ed arranged a meeting with the Traffic Division detectives who'd initially handled the McDavid case. There were some things Ed thought they should know. The traffic guys, in turn, asked if Dennis Kilcoyne, who's a homicide detective, would mind sitting in.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

So I attended that meeting. And when we did that, I sat and I listened to this insurance investigator, Ed Webster, and he painted this picture of just large insurance policies held by two women who had no known connection as far as family or this and that to one another or to the victim.

[Keith Morrison]

What's the first thing that goes through your mind?

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

I had no idea what we had. I just didn't know. But the money thing is what was driving it, the amount of money involved.

[Keith Morrison]

True, Life insurance policies totaling 1 million bucks on a homeless man. A gruesome accidental death. Two little old ladies. Well, as you might imagine, it was all conversational catnip around the Wilshire station house. But for one detective who was hearing all this, it was more. He'd had a case like this once, five, six, seven years ago. He remembered it was raining the night he saw the body.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

So he goes back and he finds a file from 1999 of a similar death in an alley. Elderly man by the name of Paul Vados. And sure as can be, the same two women were coming back, getting copies of reports and this type of thing.

[Keith Morrison]

Those women, Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt. As they dug deeper, the detectives discovered that Paul Vados had multiple life insurance policies. The beneficiaries, Helen and Olga. What were the odds in less than six years time, two homeless men would die in back alleys after hit and run incidents and leave substantial life insurance payouts to the same two women?

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

I wasn't sure what we had and I didn't want to make too much of it because it was, you know, you're dealing with a portrayed to be a couple of elderly women at the time.

[Keith Morrison]

One thing he did know was that the detectives would need some serious help to investigate the panoply of crimes that were now on the menu. Insurance fraud, mail fraud, or something far more sinister. The detective knew how to run a murder investigation, but insurance fraud? There he was, out of his depth.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Recognizing that I have no background in that, we had two investigators, one from the FBI and one from the Department of Insurance, join our little team to figure out this case. Figure out what? What are we? What do we have here in front of us?

[Keith Morrison]

Eventually others would join Killcoin's granny task force. Postal inspectors, auto mechanics and the like. But there was one unofficial member of the group that Kill Coin wanted to keep in the loop. And that was the insurance guy, Ed Webster. It was months after Ed had met with Killcoin and the other detectives that his home phone rang in Peekskill, New York. On the other end of the line was one of the cops he'd met with in la.

[Ed Webster]

Sergeant Hernandez called me up and asked me if I ever heard of a man named Paul Vados. And I said no. And he told me that he had died in an alley having been run over by a vehicle. He was homeless. And that the body was claimed by Olga and Helen. My wife thought I won the lottery or I had a stroke or something. I started screaming and yelling because there was something There. But it was like, how do I describe? Because I don't get this experience a lot in my work.

[Keith Morrison]

A thrill. Yes. Validation for a job well done. Yes. That Ed Webster's work was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. How many other homeless men were in danger? Detective Kilcoane was not going to wait to find out. So in the fall of 2005, the detective pulled out all the stops and assigned surveillance teams armed with cameras and guns to tail those two little old ladies.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

What are they up to? Is it just a fraud thing or what else do they have going on in their life? So we have to bring it to the powers to be with the police department here or I do and convince my bosses that I need a surveillance team which consists of anywhere from 12 to 15 detectives vehicles. You know, this isn't cheap. No, it's not cheap. And I want to put them on two mid 70 range women. And as you can imagine, the.

[Keith Morrison]

Are you crazy?

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Oh, yeah, yeah. The ribbing that we took was quite incredible.

[Keith Morrison]

What kinds of things would people do?

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Well, I'm beginning to be one of the senior guys in the office. So the others, these youngsters that stare at their computer screens and blackberries all day, they. Well, they think that this is about the only thing that I can catch anymore is little old ladies. So anyway, that's all right. That's all right.

[Keith Morrison]

The trick in tailing someone is to stay close enough to maintain visual contact of the subject. Never close enough to be noticed, though. But when the subject was Olga Rudderschmidt, those young men struggled to catch a fleeting glimpse of her. They groaned up steep canyon trails as she sailed on ahead of them. It had been like this for weeks. 73 year old Olga Rudderschmidt striding like a thoroughbred over the hard packed sandy beach in Santa Monica or scrambling like a mountain goat over the hills of Runyon Canyon. At the top of the hill, the detectives stopped to catch their breath and gazed briefly at the billowing clouds off to the west. But when they looked back at the trail ahead, she was gone.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

She's very, very active. And these macho detectives that were making fun of me, they're having a hell of a time keeping up with ol Olga.

[Keith Morrison]

Helen Golay, on the other hand, moved at a regal pace. Every hair of her signature do lacquered into place. Her day started in the same way, at the same time, in the same place. Her favorite deli izzies on Wilshire Boulevard.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

She'll be on the cell phone, sitting in the booth at the at the coffee shop, while my detectives are in the booth next to her listening.

[Keith Morrison]

No, go ahead and do it.

[Ed Webster]

That's probably about par for the course.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

And she's moving money around, always business, you know, talking to escrow companies, talking to realtors. And what we begin to realize is that she has, oh, anywhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 credit cards going at one time. And what she's doing is she'll open a credit card account and she will take the large advance that they allow you to take on a credit card, and then she will use this cash to go and get involved in a real estate transaction. And then she may use one of the credit cards to just make minimum payments on all of the other credit cards. And then every once in a while, she'll refinance a property and pay everything off and start over again.

[Keith Morrison]

A high wire act, perhaps, but not illegal. In fact, Helen and Olga both had perfectly clean records. And throughout the surveillance, the shadow teams never once saw them together. Nothing apparent to connect the two women at all, aside from that one strange, incontrovertible fact. Both of them had been listed as life insurance beneficiaries of two down and out men, both of whom had been crushed to death by cars in back alleys six years apart. Kenneth McDavid was the most recent. So the detectives started there trying to learn what they could about his life. Wasn't much online, but investigators did find a couple of very old clues about Kenneth McDavid from the 1970s.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Mr. McDavid had a few old addresses up in the Sacramento area and in the San Francisco area. So we knew that, that that was an area that we were going to have to concentrate on to find a little bit of background on Kenneth McDavid.

[Keith Morrison]

That, of course, called for a road trip. And after knocking on a lot of doors and running down a lot of dead ends, Detective Kilcoyd and his partner, Detective Rosemary Sanchez, finally found Kenneth McDavid's sister, Sandra Selman, in Sacramento.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

So we find Sandra and her husband, and we sit them down and we talk to them, and we actually make the death notification. They had no idea that brother Kenneth was no longer with us.

[Keith Morrison]

And by then he'd been dead for.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Some time, almost six months. And they knew that Kenneth had had a tough life. But the unusual thing is, just prior to his death, Sandra received a phone message on her home answering machine from him, just calling to say hello, that he was in Los Angeles and just kind of, hey, how you doing? Type, checking in with the family. And then she didn't hear from him again. And then we come on her, knocking at her door in November, in November, late November, I believe it was, and bring this news.

[Keith Morrison]

How'd she take it?

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Oh, she was devastated. I mean, it's not obviously not a pleasant thing to answer your door and hear that a family member is no longer with us. So we inquired about this Olga Rudderschmidt or Helen Golay. How do they fit into your family tree?

[Keith Morrison]

Never heard of it.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Of course not. They never heard of any such people.

[Keith Morrison]

Sandra dug up some old photographs. Kenneth is a 10 year old black and white. But they could see that the dimpled, sandy haired boy must have been a colorful cutup. Precocious too, said his sister. Kenneth was the third of five children. Sandra was the youngest.

[Sandra Selman]

We were all pretty close growing up. Yes.

[Keith Morrison]

I talked to Sandra a few years later and she told me Kenneth had always been the one she went to for help with her homework.

[Sandra Selman]

He was the smart one, but he was also very caring to my mother. He would fix dinner because both of my parents worked full time, 40 hours a week. I remember also on one occasion when he was 17, he didn't have a job to get my mother a Mother's Day present. So we went around the neighborhood and we gathered up some old Pepsi bottles and took them in and saved up money to buy paint and he painted her kitchen. That was a very big deal.

[Keith Morrison]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sandra Selman]

For Mother's Day. She was very, very happy. Yeah.

[Keith Morrison]

Sandra Selman was in her mid-40s by the time we talked, but she looked younger with her shoulder length auburn hair and easy smile. Sandra's a nurse by trade and as she sat there telling me about her parents and her big baby boomer family, I had the feeling she must be a good nurse in the same way that she had been a good kid sister to Kenneth even after his troubles began.

[Sandra Selman]

After he graduated from high school, he started going to Sacramento State College. And I think as he got closer to 2022, he started getting disinterested in college, kind of not really doing that well, which was really unusual for Ken.

[Keith Morrison]

Is he bored?

[Sandra Selman]

I don't know.

[Keith Morrison]

I mean, sometimes kids will go to college and think, oh man, this is just well.

[Sandra Selman]

And he became less and less verbal. Like he became a little bit more angry and was very interested in radio and music. He learned how to play the piano. He took that up and he was very good at it.

[Keith Morrison]

After the piano, Kenneth took up Rachel Radio, spinning records on Sacramento's highly regarded pop station, K R O Y His on air alter ego was Bow McCambridge, and photos from that time show Kenneth wearing headphones and clowning around as he cues up a record on the turntable. Those days, it seems, were Kenneth's high water mark. After kroy, he bounced around the dial but never managed to hold on to another radio job for long, and soon his career in radio was over.

[Sandra Selman]

He could be hurt very, very easily, take things very personally, and some people are just like that. They're just really sensitive. And I think he was really sensitive.

[Keith Morrison]

There were a few odd jobs after that, mostly dead end telemarketing gigs, but by then Kenneth McDavid's path toward eventual homelessness was set. According to Sandra, mental illness runs in the family, and she suspects that's what caused Kenneth to drift away from Sacramento, lose touch with the family.

[Sandra Selman]

He did show some signs of paranoia, but he, to my knowledge, was never diagnosed.

[Keith Morrison]

Did Ken recognize that? Did the family recognize that? Was there anything that anybody new to do?

[Sandra Selman]

Unfortunately, in the state of California, if a person is mentally ill, you cannot force them into treatment. They have to go in voluntarily. It's called 5150 hold and the only time you can get that is if they're a danger to themselves or someone else. He never went across that line though. He was never a danger to himself and he was never threatening to hurt anybody else.

[Keith Morrison]

No, Kenneth wouldn't hurt a fly. But unfortunately that couldn't be said of some of the people he would meet while living on the street.

[Saeed Jones]

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[Keith Morrison]

And I'm Zach Stafford and we are the hosts of a podcast called Vibe Check where we make sense of what's going on in news, culture, entertainment and more.

[Saeed Jones]

From thoughts on protest strategies to friendship, breakups and trying to figure out clothing trends or the economy, we check the vibe of what's going on in the world and how it all feels. It's like you and your bestie's text chain come to life.

[Keith Morrison]

Join us for a Kiki every Wednesday and Friday. You can listen to and follow Vibe Check wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Keith Morrison]

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[Ed Webster]

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[Keith Morrison]

Now open your eyes, go to Monday.com, start for free, and finally breathe. Around the squad room, detectives had a nickname for Helen and Olga.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

We start referring to them just as the girls. What are the girls up to today?

[Keith Morrison]

Well, surveillance teams followed Helen and Olga. Other investigators were scrambling to find out all they could about the life insurance policies they'd taken out on the two dead men, Paul Vallis and Kenneth McDavid. FBI agent Sam Mayrose was one of those, and what he found. Helen and Olga typically started small with life insurance policies that banks offered as an inducement to open a checking account.

[Sam Mayrose]

They were offering, you know, generally small life insurance policies. Basically, all you had to do is give them your name, your address, and your phone number, pretty much, and you could get a policy because there were no medical questions because there was so low payout.

[Keith Morrison]

Sam Mayrose is a slender man, about six foot tall, earnest, straight arrow sort of guy, with light brown hair, graying at the temples.

[Sam Mayrose]

Well, they applied for 26 total policies. On Paul, they ended up getting seven. They applied for eight policies, and they got seven. And on McDavid, they applied for 17 policies and got 13.

[Keith Morrison]

The applications for those policies read like fantasy fiction. According to them, the homeless men were in perfect health, had substantial assets, and earned reasonable incomes on most of the applications. Helen is listed as the fiance of the dead men, Paul vados and Kenneth McDavid. Olga was usually tagged as a cousin.

[Sam Mayrose]

They put them up in apartments, paid all their utilities, fed them, took them where they needed to go, would periodically check on them.

[Keith Morrison]

Why, you might ask, would some of the largest and best known companies in the insurance business accept such poppycock at face value? Why would they issue life insurance policies for men who were already clearly overinsured? Well, in part, that's because the insurance business is cutthroat, competitive, and the companies don't share information with each other.

[Sam Mayrose]

Several of the policies that the ladies were getting were not particularly expensive policies. So there's virtually no background information asked for or even checked on by the insurance companies. And it wasn't until the insurance companies were starting to have to pay out that they really started looking into what was going on here.

[Keith Morrison]

In many cases, that was too late, because most states have laws that make life insurance policies virtually irrevocable after two years.

[Sam Mayrose]

But after that two years, except for non payment of premiums, it can no longer be contested, even if they discover fraud or Misrepresentation.

[Keith Morrison]

Given what he now knew, Sam Mayrose began mulling over a disturbing theory. Had Helen and Olga simply regarded Paul vaddos and Kenneth McDavid and possibly other men as livestock to be cared for until the time for slaughter?

[Sam Mayrose]

What was going on was the ladies would find the people that they intended to get the policies on who would ultimately be their victims, and they would put them up for two years, knowing that they had to wait that two years before they could apply for the payout.

[Keith Morrison]

They say the distance between hindsight and foresight is as vast as the Pacific Ocean. And that was certainly true in this case. Looking back now, investigators could see a troubling and predictable pattern. The first life insurance policies on Paul Vados had been issued in the fall of 1997, and two years later, he was crushed to death in an alley. The first life insurance policies on Kenneth McDavid had been issued in the winter of 2003. And two years later, in June 2005, McDavid was crushed to death in an alley. Policies on both men had just passed that two year window before which they might have been rescinded for fraud. But after, within months of both deaths, Helen Gole and Olga Rutterschmidt collected hefty insurance checks.

[Detective Dennis Kilcoyne]

Vados, the first time out, they were, I think they had applied for in the neighborhood of 2 million, and they collected something like 800,000, which was still pretty good money. But McDavid, it was off the charts. They had applied for, you know, upwards to $6 million. And they, between the two, they had collected almost $3 million. Wow. Three million bucks between both cases. That's a lot of money for two little old ladies. And Helen, financially, was in a position where she didn't need to be doing this. She was pretty well off.

[Keith Morrison]

Pretty well off, one would think. So within a few months of Kenneth McDavid's death, Helen's haul had amounted to 1.5 million. Olga had raked in nearly 700,000. But was it enough? Oh, no, not nearly. Greed is an itch. The kind of itch that doesn't go away when you scratch it. Companies that were slow to pony up got letters from Helen's attorney threatening lawsuits. Which is not to say that Ed Webster, that dogged detective from Mutual of New York, had given up on his investigation. Mutual of New York still had serious money on the line. Two life insurance policies totaling a million bucks. No, no, the company had no intention of writing those checks as long as Ed Webster had questions for Helen and Olga.

[Ed Webster]

I tried desperately to Meet with them, left cards for them, called them, knocked on their doors, did everything.

[Keith Morrison]

That's Ed Webster.

[Ed Webster]

There was no particular reason to believe that the police investigation and the homicide investigation would come to fruition before the company was required to make a claim decision. And there's a lot of money involved, and if they make a claim decision, it has to be the right one.

[Keith Morrison]

In late December 2005, Mutual of New York had decided to rescind both of the Kenneth McDavid policies for fraud. But they didn't tell Helen and Olga they had something else in mind.

[Ed Webster]

They asked me to deliver the letter to both of them. Explain. And that's done for a reason. That's not done for drama and it's not done for effect. It's done for a legitimate reason. Because. Because when you make a decision like that and somebody's not going to get the proceeds that they had felt they had a right to or expected, you outline the reasons in a letter and then you deliver it to them and afford them the opportunity to challenge what you've said and offer evidence to the contrary if it exists. And the company is perfectly willing to reconsider. So there's a reason for that.

[Keith Morrison]

But you were kind of offering yourself up as a punching bag, which. Something for somebody who's pretty angry at this company.

[Ed Webster]

Well, you know, to this day, really, I really wanted to deliver. I wanted to sit down with them.

[Keith Morrison]

Ed had no idea what he was in for. The kindly old ladies were anything but.

[Ed Webster]

Get out of my door before I.

[Keith Morrison]

Throw a hot water on you. El programa nacional de vecas a serde McDonald's. Esta esma Historia de generaciones. And McDonald's Punta com yagonal hacer.