The Black Widows of Los AngelesTwo elderly women. Two homeless men. Millions in life insurance. And a murder scheme so calculated it seemed almost fictional.

Prologue: The Alley

At 1 a.m. on June 22, 2005, Kenneth McDavid lay dead in a Los Angeles alley. His bicycle was nearby. So was his helmet. Neither appeared damaged. McDavid's body told a different story.

There were abrasions suggesting he had been dragged. Investigators noticed what appeared to be a tire impression across his jeans. Grease stained his clothing. Yet there were no skid marks, shattered headlights or debris scattered across the pavement—the things detectives might expect when a pedestrian is unexpectedly struck by a car.

Even stranger, McDavid's legs weren't broken.

Whatever had happened in that alley didn't look like an ordinary traffic accident.

Surveillance cameras had captured a station wagon entering the alley shortly before midnight. The vehicle stopped near the place where McDavid would be found. Its lights went dark for approximately five minutes.

Then the car backed up.

The headlights came on.

And it drove away.

Within hours, the death would begin unraveling a plot that had been developing for years—a scheme involving stolen identities, apartments, more than a dozen insurance policies, sedating drugs and two killers almost nobody would have suspected.

Their names were Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt.

They were women in their 70s.

And prosecutors said they had discovered a remarkably sinister way to turn society's forgotten men into million-dollar investments.

The First Investment

The scheme appears to have begun with Paul Vados.

By 1997, Vados was around 70 years old and living in a cheap Los Angeles apartment. He had no apparent job, drank heavily and sometimes struggled to care for himself. The apartment manager's family occasionally brought him food.

Then Rutterschmidt entered his life.

She visited Vados regularly and told people she was his sister.

She wasn't.

Between 1997 and 1999, applications were submitted for at least six life-insurance policies covering Vados. On the paperwork, Rutterschmidt was sometimes described as his cousin. Golay was described as his fiancée.

Neither claim was true.

That deception was central to the brilliance—and horror—of the scheme.

The women weren't accused of simply finding someone, insuring him and immediately killing him. Prosecutors said they waited.

That mattered because life-insurance policies generally become much harder for insurers to contest after a two-year contestability period. Prosecutors argued that the women housed and maintained their targets while waiting for that clock to expire.

On November 8, 1999, Vados' body was discovered in an alley.

He appeared to have been struck by a car.

But there was something peculiar about his injuries. His body was positioned perpendicular to the alley. Grease marked his clothing, yet his legs weren't fractured. An officer concluded that Vados had likely been lying down when a slow-moving vehicle drove over him.

Nine days passed before Golay and Rutterschmidt reported him missing.

Then they collected $589,124.93 in life-insurance proceeds.

The death remained an unsolved hit-and-run.

The system had worked.

So they did it again.

Kenneth McDavid

In 2002, the women turned their attention to Kenneth McDavid, a 50-year-old homeless man who had been living outside a Hollywood church.

Golay rented him an apartment.

To McDavid, it could have looked like salvation: housing, stability and two older women willing to help when much of society had passed him by.

But while McDavid was being housed, an extraordinary paper trail was forming behind him.

Between November 2002 and March 2003, Golay and Rutterschmidt submitted 17 applications for life insurance on McDavid.

Thirteen policies were issued.

Again, Golay was frequently identified as his fiancée and Rutterschmidt as his cousin.

The policies potentially made the life of a previously homeless man worth millions.

Then another component appeared.

In January 2004, Rutterschmidt purchased a used Mercury Sable station wagon using identification belonging to another woman. The woman's purse and driver's license had previously been stolen from a Santa Monica health club.

The car wasn't registered to Golay.

It wasn't registered to Rutterschmidt.

It was registered using someone else's identity.

It would eventually become a murder weapon.

A Human Insurance Policy

By June 2005, the policies had matured.

On the night McDavid died, cameras recorded a vehicle consistent with a Mercury Sable entering the alley.

Around the same time, an emergency roadside service received a telephone call from a woman identifying herself as Golay. She needed a 1999 Mercury Sable towed from the intersection near the alley.

She had it transported to an area near her Santa Monica home.

Investigators later recovered the car.

Underneath it they found human blood, hair and tissue.

DNA testing linked the tissue to Kenneth McDavid. The statistical probability of a random person matching that DNA profile was approximately one in 10 quadrillion.

There was another disturbing discovery.

McDavid's blood contained drugs capable of producing sedation, dizziness, drowsiness and confusion. Police searching Golay's home found medications including substances associated with drowsiness, and prosecutors argued McDavid had been drugged before he was killed.

If prosecutors were right, the method was chillingly controlled.

Drug the victim.

Place him in an alley.

Run over him.

Make it look like an anonymous Los Angeles hit-and-run.

Then collect the insurance.

Golay eventually received $1,540,767.05 from McDavid's policies. Rutterschmidt received another $674,571.89.

The Women Turn on Each Other

McDavid's death proved to be their undoing.

Investigators compared his case with the long-forgotten death of Paul Vados and discovered an astonishing coincidence: two vulnerable men, both crushed in alleys, both heavily insured—and the same two elderly women financially connected to both deaths.

Golay and Rutterschmidt were arrested in May 2006.

Police then left them together in an interview room.

A camera was recording.

Rutterschmidt began blaming Golay—not for murder, but for buying too many insurance policies and attracting attention.

Golay warned her to stop talking.

Their partnership was collapsing.

There was evidence the body count might have grown.

A homeless man named Jimmy Covington testified that Rutterschmidt had approached him offering help. She provided shelter and food but increasingly demanded personal information. Covington became suspicious and left.

By then, evidence showed the women had requested an application for an $800,000 life-insurance policy on him.

Covington may have survived because he recognized the trap before it closed.

The Black Widows

In 2008, prosecutors laid out the extraordinary scheme before a Los Angeles jury.

There were no eyewitnesses who could tell jurors exactly what happened during the murders. Prosecutors couldn't even establish which woman was physically driving when the victims were crushed.

They didn't need to.

There were insurance applications. Telephone records. Surveillance footage. False identities. The tow-truck call. The secretly recorded conversation. And underneath the Mercury Sable was Kenneth McDavid's DNA.

Both women were ultimately convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder, with special circumstances including multiple murder and murder for financial gain.

Golay, 77, and Rutterschmidt, 75, were sentenced to consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole.

Judge David S. Wesley described the victims as men sacrificed on the women's “altars of greed.”

But greed alone doesn't explain what makes the case so disturbing.

It was the patience.

Golay and Rutterschmidt allegedly recognized something darker: homeless men could be transformed into financial assets precisely because society had already stopped paying attention to them.

They offered food.

They provided housing.

They called themselves fiancées and relatives.

They waited for insurance policies to mature.

And when the men became worth more dead than alive, prosecutors proved that the women converted automobiles into murder weapons and Los Angeles alleys into carefully constructed accident scenes.

The brilliance of the scheme was also its evil.

For a time, the women weren't hiding the murders from everyone. They were hiding them behind the victims' invisibility.