2 – “The Girls”

November 16, 2021·33 min·2 clips

Two homeless men died in alleys six years apart, and both named Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt as beneficiaries.

The case starts with insurance fraud. Kilcoyne says he is out of his depth there, so he brings in an FBI investigator and someone from the Department of Insurance to help sort out what is in front of them. Over time, others join Kilcoyne's granny task force, including postal inspectors, auto mechanics, and the like. Ed Webster stays in the loop as the insurance guy. Months pass before a Los Angeles detective phone call changes the shape of the story. Sergeant Hernandez asks whether Webster knows a man named Paul Vados, a homeless man who died in an alley after being run over by a vehicle. Webster does not. Then Hernandez says the body was claimed by Olga and Helen, and Webster realizes there is something there. Kilcoyne sees the same opening. He does not want to wait to learn whether this is only an insurance matter or something worse. So in the fall of 2005 he asks for surveillance on the two women. That means cameras, guns, vehicles, and roughly a dozen to fifteen detectives for two mid-70s suspects, which is the kind of budget request that invites jokes before it invites approval. The office ribbing is loud, but Kilcoyne keeps pressing his bosses. He wants the surveillance because the case keeps suggesting something larger than a routine fraud. The episode keeps tightening around that shift, using police recollection and a remembered threat of hot water to show how quickly the situation can turn. By the end, the mystery is less about whether the case is odd, and more about how far the oddness reaches.

As heard by us

A slow-burn case in which insurance claims lead to something much darker.

This episode follows an insurance-fraud probe as it widens around two elderly women, a dead homeless man, and a stack of suspicious claims. The reporting stays steady and careful.

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Why you'd press play

You start with an insurance-fraud probe and end up tailing two mid-70s women with surveillance teams.

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