6 – The Bottom Line

November 16, 2021·39 min·2 clips

Helen Diamond blames Keisha Golay for the Mercury Sable, the AAA call, and Kenneth McDavid’s death.

The Bottom Line brings the case of Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt into the courtroom. The prosecution spends three weeks building its case, and it never leans on one dramatic piece of evidence. Instead, it keeps adding witnesses, exhibits, and timelines until the pattern is hard to miss. Ninety witnesses take the stand. Two hundred seventy-seven exhibits follow. The death of Paul Vados is folded into the same body of evidence, with the prosecution tying the women to both deaths. The death of Kenneth McDavid gets the same careful treatment. Investigators place a Mercury Sable at the center of the story. Phone records show Helen calling for roadside assistance on the night McDavid was killed. That call came from less than a thousand feet from the alley where his body was found. Neighbors place the car behind Helen's home before the murder. Police later find it abandoned near Olga's apartment. Insurance representatives break down the mechanics of the policies, and their testimony turns premiums and claims into a ledger of intent. The show keeps coming back to the math of the scheme. Every life insurance form adds another layer of ugliness. Charles Suheda, who ran the homeless program at Hollywood Presbyterian, describes the women volunteering to feed homeless people. That memory sharpens the irony of their public charity. The episode leaves the listener with a bleak arithmetic: people treated as profit, and profit treated as murder's justification.

As heard by us

A cold, careful courtroom account built from witnesses, records, and a prosecution that keeps tightening the screws.

Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt's case plays like a ledger with bodies attached. Homeless men are treated as profit targets, and life insurance becomes a grim sum of premiums and claims.

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Why you'd press play

You want a case that turns insurance paperwork into a murder map.

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