Signed in Blood: The True Story of Two Women, a Sinister Plot, and Cold-Blooded Murder - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeanne King is an award-winning journalist who covered crime for Reuters for more than forty years. The author of Never Seen Again (also available from St. Martin’s True Crime Library).

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TWO GOLDEN GIRLS

They came from different backgrounds, but when Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt met in the 1980s, they became fast friends. For decades, they made a game of engaging in petty crime bad deals, insurance fraud, robbing wallets. But after years of dabbling in theft, they came up with a way of making their pocketbooks even fatter. They found a way to make murder pay

ONE DEADLY PLOT

It was a plan out of Arsenic and Old Lace: Befriend a homeless man, place life insurance policies in his name and then have him killed. Their scheme worked once but then police started to notice a pattern. Helen and Olga were discovered, and in front of a court of law, their coldhearted pact to kill and cash in would finally be exposed.

SIGNED IN BLOOD

With 8 pages of alarming photos!

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

"Bingo! We Hit Pay Dirt!"

Tuesday, June 21, 2005. The summer solstice. June 21 marks the longest day of the year and is officially the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. For most peo ple, the day represents the occasion when the bountiful harvest yields its abundant fruit. This day, in 2005, was also that of June’s full moon, sometimes called the Honey Moon, because it’s the best time to gather honey from hives.

That night in 2005 started out beautifully with the bright full moon lighting up the city of Los Angeles, California, shining overhead on the well-known HOLLY WOOD sign as the solstice officially made its debut just fourteen minutes before midnight. It was a warm, pleasant evening with the night temperature hovering in the sixties, and patchy low clouds and fog near the Pacific coastline.

But for Detective Nelson Hernandez of the West Traffic Division of the Wilshire police precinct in Los Angeles, who was assigned to investigate traffic accidents, Tuesday, June 21, 2005, was just another night. It was his turn to be on call in the 24/7 business of being a cop.

Nelson was at home, some forty miles from the station when the phone rang in his bedroom, awakening him. It was around one in the morning.

"We have what appears to be a hit-and-run accident. We don’t have a license plate of the hit-and-run vehicle. But we have a dead body in the alley, and it appears that a car ran over this person," said the matter-of-fact voice of the dispatcher on the other end of the phone.

As he got dressed, Hernandez called to tell his partner, Officer Brent Johnson, to meet him at the Wilshire police precinct on Venice and La Brea. Just before leaving home, he placed another call to speak with the watch commander to see if there was any update on the incident. There being none, Hernandez proceeded to the station house.

The 51-year-old Hernandez had wanted to be a pi lot as a young boy, but he’d chosen instead to become a uniformed officer nearly a quarter of a century ago when he’d joined the Los Angeles Police Department, working his way up the ranks, first as a sergeant and now as a detective.

With hundreds of arrests under his belt, Hernandez was the kind of cop who, if something didn’t look right, had to delve further. As he was driving to his office, Hernandez learned that he had his work cut out for him: There were no witnesses and no license plate numbers for him to check out. He didn’t know what else to expect as he headed to the scene in an unmarked detectives’ vehicle.

"This being Hollywood, we’ve been involved with many movie star cases concerning traffic accidents. They run the gamut from A to Z, so I was prepared for anything," he recalled.

Hernandez made the eight-mile trip from the station house to the approach of the alleyway off of Ohio Avenue and Westwood Boulevard behind Bristol Farms, the upscale gourmet emporium, in twelve minutes.

The Westwood area, in the western section of Los Angeles, is best known as the site of the University of California (UCLA). The district is often referred to as Westwood Village because of its cozy small-town atmosphere. It is also home to the Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery, the final resting place of many of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Nearby, located on Santa Monica Boulevard, is the Los Angeles California Temple, the second-largest temple operated by the Church of Latter-day Saints. Major thoroughfares such as Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevards and the San Diego Freeway (I-405) service the Westwood area.

A little more than a quarter of a mile from the center of the affluent and bustling Westwood Village, an innocent bystander, Karen Toshima, a 27-year-old graphic artist, was murdered on January 30, 1988, during a gun battle between rival gangs. It took more than a decade for the perception that the area was riddled with crime to fade. Today, West-wood is again regarded as one of the safest neighborhoods in the city. Or it was, until now.

"One of the first things I observed as I approached the area was that the scene didn’t appear to make any sense. We had this guy dead in the alley, and it was dark. There was a bicycle laying there near the victim with the wheels up to the side of the man’s body from the edge of the alley. One of the tires had been removed and was on the side of the bike.

"On the surface, it appeared that maybe the victim had been working on the flat tire. That maybe he was riding the bike when he got a flat tire, took the tire off, and was about to repair the tire, when this happened—and he was run over."

One of the first things Hernandez checked was the tire that had been removed, and it was not flat.

"That was another thing that didn’t make any sense. Why would the victim take the tire off if it wasn’t flat? The other thing that didn’t make sense was that if he was going to repair a flat tire, you are not going to do it in the dark alley when, if he went just a few feet away to the front of the grocery store, he would have had the use of the street lights."

Hernandez took a closer look at the guy in the alley. He didn’t look like he had been living on the dark side of Los Angeles, on skid row, domain of thousands of homeless. "Those that hang out in the alleys for the most part are transients—they’re homeless—but this guy was clean. I’m talking about, other than grease from the undercarriage of the car, he appeared to have clean clothes. His socks were clean, his shoes were clean, and his hands were clean. The part of his pants that didn’t have grease from the under-carriage were clean. Transients’ hair usually hasn’t been washed for months, but this guy’s hair didn’t appear dirty.

"Here was a clean-looking guy, but he was in the alley, the victim of a hit-and-run."

Hernandez suspected the victim wasn’t homeless—the profile didn’t fit. Besides, the detective theorized, if the guy had been riding his bike for the exercise—and a lot of people do that in Los Angeles—why would he be doing it in the alley? "So that didn’t jibe either."

When the coroner got to the scene, he went through the man’s pockets. Other than a California ID, with his name, address, and picture, and a credit card, there was nothing else on him.

"The victim’s name was Kenneth McDavid, and I can’t remember whether he had a Visa or MasterCard. But he had no money, no coins, no wallet, and no piece of paper. It was as if someone had just planted those two ID documents on this guy, and wanted him to be identified, so we would know who he was.

"We knew the scene didn’t look right, that something was wrong, but we couldn’t get a handle on it. This guy is clean, but he’s in the alley. This guy appears to be working on this bike, but the tires aren’t flat. And if you have a flat tire, you’re not going to be fixing it in the dark. You are going to be working on it in the main street where there is light. So there was just a series of things that just didn’t add up, and made the situation suspicious."

To compound this scenario, Hernandez now had the job of making the notiflcation of death to McDavid’s next of kin. "My partner and I followed the coroner to the 1843 North Cherokee Avenue address we had found on his ID card to see if he had any family.

"When we pulled up to the four-story beige building, it was rather nondescript. The building was probably built in the ’twenties and had never been restored. It had obviously sustained some serious damage from earlier earthquakes, because of the many visible plugs that could be seen on the outside throughout the building that was used to...