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17 episodes listed below
Insurance, alleyways, and a lethal bottom line.
The Thing About Helen & Olga follows investigators as hit-and-run deaths begin to look less accidental. The story moves from alleys and apartments to insurance files, surveillance teams, vehicle mechanics, and a murder trial built on accumulation.
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The Thing About Helen & Olga is a Dateline true-crime series about an investigation that begins with deaths that could be mistaken for urban tragedy. It does not stay there. Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt move through the story as two older Los Angeles women whose relationship with vulnerable men attracts mounting suspicion. The men are isolated, aging, homeless, or dispossessed. Their lives become paperwork. Policies are opened. Premiums are paid. Claims follow. The series traces how investigators came to see pattern where coincidence once seemed possible. Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid become the central names in a case built from alleys, vehicles, insurance files, and stubborn unease. The storytelling is measured and evidence-minded, with interviews placed like exhibits rather than conversation. Ed Webster’s insurance work provides one early line of alarm. Detective Kilcoyne’s team expands the case with surveillance, mechanics, postal inspectors, and testing. The Mercury Sable becomes almost a crime scene of its own, lifted high enough for mechanics and lab workers to search beneath it. Red paint, disturbed road grime, blood swabs, and a crude repair all receive their turn. None of it is treated as decoration. Each detail is asked to explain itself. The later trial gives the story its grim ledger: witnesses, exhibits, phone records, roadside assistance, and insurance math. The show’s central horror is not only the violence. It is the practicality around it. The women are presented through the case as figures who allegedly turned human need into opportunity, then reduced lives to numbers at the bottom of a claim. The series suits listeners who prefer true crime with legal texture, investigative patience, and a controlled narrative voice. It is bleak. It is also methodical enough to make the bleakness legible.
Made for: For true-crime listeners drawn to investigative reporting, courtroom structure, vehicle detail, and cases where motive emerges through paperwork as much as confession. It suits an audience comfortable with a grave, methodical story about vulnerable victims.
What sets it apart: The series stands apart by treating insurance administration, vehicle evidence, and surveillance logistics as the engine of the drama. Its menace comes from ordinary systems being bent toward extraordinary harm.
Helen and Olga are kindly old ladies who open their hearts and wallets to down-and-out men in Los Angeles. In a city named for angels, the two women seem heaven-sent. After one of the men is killed by a hit-and-run driver -- and then another suffers the same fate -- investigators uncover a horrifying and twisted plot that stuns even the most seasoned detectives. Listen to all episodes of The Thing About Helen & Olga now completely free, or subscriber to Dateline Premium to listen ad-free: DatelinePremium.com
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · August 2026
A focused case run where insurance paperwork, vehicle evidence, and courtroom testimony pull a homicide investigation into shape.
The Thing About Helen & Olga is a tight serialized true crime show about Helen Golay, Olga Rudderschmidt, and deaths connected to life insurance claims.
A six-inch car clearance becomes horrifyingly persuasive, if that is your preferred flavor of evidence.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Fred Downey's California start gradually hardens into a story about isolation, trust, and mounting suspicion.
Fred Downey's move to California reads at first like a clean reset: the weather sits in the 60s, the apartment is the best he has had, and the new routine has him walking more, eating less, and losing weight. But the mood shifts by degrees.
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.
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.
A forensic true-crime puzzle where the car leads the way before anyone else does.
Helen Goley and Olga Ruderschmidt anchor a corrosive, detail-led death investigation that keeps widening instead of resolving, with insurance checks, a Mercury Sable, and a chain of forensic clues that only grows stranger.
Helen and Olga turn a routine of help into something colder, one burial at a time.
Helen and Olga begin in ordinary routines, and then the story tilts. Helen is the wealthy one, leaving her Santa Monica apartment each morning in polished clothes for Izzy's on Wilshire Boulevard. Later, Olga spots another man in Hollywood and decides he might need their help.
True stories of scams, aliases, frauds, and lives built on lies.
Payne Lindsey and Tenderfoot TV revisit the Atlanta Child Murders and the wider Monster franchise.
Host Jake Brennan traces the crimes and scandals behind musicians from Elvis to Taylor Swift.
Karina Longworth narrates the Manson murders as a story about Hollywood's collapsing 1960s dream.
iO Tillett Wright investigates her mother's boyfriend's unsolved 1982 East Village murder.
A wilderness hoax, a trusting BC town, and the brothers who fooled it.
This is a short promotional preview of the Dateline podcast Trace of Suspicion, hosted by Josh Mankiewicz.
A Marine's widow becomes a murder suspect after neighbors judge her post-funeral behavior and spending habits.
Fred Downey arrives in California convinced he has found a better life.
Paul Thaddeus lay in a rain-slick alley, and the injuries did not fit the easy version.
The Bottom Line brings the case of Helen Golay and Olga Rudderschmidt into the courtroom.
Red paint looked minor at first.
A fraud inquiry opens the episode.