Dwight Emile says his neighbor Olga Rutterschmidt always had a thing for get-rich-quick schemes.
"She'd say, `Dwight, do you want to make some extra money?"' said Emile, a music producer and songwriter who lives in Hollywood. "I'd say, `No, if it's not legal."'
Emile said he would invite Rutterschmidt into his apartment to play Debussy and Mozart on his keyboards, but he said he had nagging suspicions about her.
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"I always used to say to her that one day I'd see her on the 11 o'clock news," Emile said.
Now he has.
Rutterschmidt, 73, and another woman, Helen Golay, 75, pleaded not guilty on June 5 to federal charges of mail fraud and submitting false insurance applications. According to the authorities, the two women extended helping hands to two homeless men, getting them off the streets and putting them up in apartments, while at the same time plotting their deaths.
Posing as aunts, fiancees or cousins, they took out numerous life insurance policies on the men, Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid, with themselves as the beneficiaries, collecting over US$2.2 million after the men died in separate hit-and-run traffic cases, the authorities said.
The women have not been charged in the deaths, but the police said they were the main suspects. Rutterschmidt, who is from Hungary, met Vados, also born in Hungary, at a local Hungarian church, the authorities said.
Sinister
"It's one of the most sinister, evil types of schemes I've ever seen, if it does turn out to be the case," said Lieutenant Paul Vernon, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department. "They had to form a relationship with these men, get to know them, show that they cared, then turn around and kill them."
Vernon said the list of possible victims could grow as investigators combed through unsolved hit-and-run cases and tried to track down the eight or more people whose signatures were engraved on rubber stamps the women had ordered from a Hollywood company. The police said the women used a stamp with the signature of McDavid to authenticate insurance applications.
The FBI said in an affidavit that detectives watched Rutterschmidt in last November as she directed an elderly man to sit in her car and sign a series of documents.
The authorities are also investigating Golay's ties to Fred Downie, a Massachusetts man whom she and her daughter befriended and persuaded to move to California, where they gave him a room in their Santa Monica apartment building.
The Golays obtained title to a house Downie owned in Massachusetts, the police said. Downie, who was in his 90s, later died in a hit-and-run accident in Santa Monica. The police said the women were not suspects in Downie's death.
A lawyer for Helen Golay, Roger Jon Diamond, said she had done nothing illegal. He said she had paid the premiums on the life insurance plans for Vados and McDavid and lawfully collected the benefits when the men died.
Diamond accused the police of trying to "poison the potential jury pool" in the fraud case, which goes to trial July 25, by suggesting that the women had something to do with the hit-and-run deaths.
Court papers suggest a web of relationships, financial dealings and untimely deaths.
Mangled
About an hour before McDavid's mangled body was found in a Westwood alley on June 22, last year, covered with grease and tire tracks, someone identifying herself as Helen Golay requested towing services for a silver 1999 Mercury Sable station wagon, according to the FBI affidavit. The call was placed from a Chevron station a block from where McDavid died.
The station wagon was later abandoned on a Hollywood street, then confiscated and sold by a towing company. Impound records indicated that the car had "front-end damage."
Golay's name appears on a coroner's report vouching that McDavid was unmarried and had no living relatives. Investigators said Golay and Rutterschmidt repeatedly requested copies of the police reports on McDavid's death.
In the death of Vados, the two women stepped forward to claim his body after he was killed in a hit-and-run case in 1999, the court papers said.
After the two men died, the pair began collecting on the life insurance policies -- 16 for McDavid and three for Vados -- they had taken out about two years before each of the deaths.
Under California law, life insurance fraud is more difficult to contest once a policy has been in place for at least two years.
On one insurance application, Golay said she was McDavid's fiancee and that he was a "writer/producer/investor" with an annual income of more than US$100,000. McDavid's actual income was US$889.72 in 2002 and US$42 in 2003, according to the FBI affidavit.
When some of the insurance companies, suspecting fraud, refused to pay, the women sued the companies. A lawyer for one of the companies said the cases against his company and two others were still pending.
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