Murder Trial Recalls Tale of Arsenic and Old Lace

For two septuagenarians, they certainly displayed a sprightly energy as they went about their retirement. Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, befriended two homeless men, found them places to live, fed them - and then murdered them, prosecutors claim.

The trial of the two older women, which opened in Los Angeles yesterday, has been likened to the Frank Capra film Arsenic and Old Lace in which Cary Grant's two maiden aunts are discovered bumping off lonely old men. Prosecutors are set to tell the jury that the defendants amassed almost $3m (£1.5m) in life insurance from the victims they championed only to kill them for their own financial benefit.

Prosecutors say that Paul Vados became their first victim. Rutterschmidt befriended Vados, a fellow Hungarian immigrant, in 1997, and helped him find an apartment. Then she arranged for him to take out a life insurance policy, after which the women duplicated his signature on a rubber stamp to generate multiple policies amounting to $760,000.

According to the prosecution, the women, waiting for the next two years to avoid suspicion, then ran over him with a car in an alley on the west side of LA. Presenting themselves 10 days later as Vados' fiance and cousin, they went on to claim the insurance benefits.

That might have been the end of the story, with no one the wiser. But as is so often the case, greed allegedly got the better of them. The prosecution will play to the jury a tape recording of a conversation between the two women at the time of their arrest. Rutterschmidt complains to Golay: "Why did you make all these extra insurances? You were greedy. That is the problem. That's why I get angry."

In 2005 a group of LA police officers were sitting around their office discussing a case that had just come in. Kenneth McDavid's body had been found in an alley with head injuries having apparently been hit by a hit-and-run driver. One of the officers had a dim recollection of a similar incident six years previously, and when he looked into the matter discovered that the same two women were claiming life insurance from McDavid.

Further investigation uncovered further parallels: the same befriending of a homeless man; the same rubber stamps used to copy McDavid's signature; the same two-year wait to claim on multiple insurance policies amounting in McDavid's case to $2.2m.

Detectives also claim a similar pattern of injuries on both the victims' corpses - wounds are seen only above the waist, suggesting the victims had been sedated and were lain down before they were killed. "The victim was laid down and run over," a leading prosecutor Truc Do told a pretrial hearing last week.

Golay and Rutterschmidt, who have been in jail awaiting trial since May 2006, have both pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and conspiracy to murder for financial gain. Golay's lawyer, Roger Diamond, told the Washington Post that the prosecution was weak. "All they have is circumstantial evidence. They don't have eyewitnesses, they don't have a confession, they don't have any fingerprints."

What the prosecution does have is a Mercury Sable car that they will attempt to link to the murder of McDavid, telling the jury his blood is on the undercarriage. Police say they have evidence that the two women bought the car in 2004.

They will also produce a letter from Rutterschmidt to Golay dated May 2000 in which she said she had found "a few very interesting and good life insurance company listings. They pay regardless of illness, or accidental cause. (No hassle, no investigations.)"

At the preliminary hearing the court was told that Golay first met Rutterschmidt at a health spa in Santa Monica. Over the 20 years of their friendship, they are alleged to have engaged together in a variety of money-making wheezes, including theft of purses in gyms and posing as rich guests at luxury Beverly Hills hotels in order to attract wealthy men.

Golay had a desire to regain her youth. In 2002 she had plastic surgery, writing to her friend: "I better look good after this hell and live long enough to enjoy this 'face job' ". If only I could get a new 21-year-old body for this brain I've been working on for 70 years."

The trial is expected to last for up to five weeks.