KEY POINTS:
In Hollywood's take on Black Widows - women who ensnare, then kill men like the namesake spider - the temptresses are invariably young.
But, if prosecutors in Los Angeles are correct, in real life they may be septuagenarians.
Even the most inventive screenwriter might be pushed to concoct
the grotesque scenario - played out in a Los Angeles court drama which now awaits a jury's verdict - in which Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, and Helen Golay, 77, find themselves accused of being ruthless killers.
According to prosecutors, Golay and Rutterschmidt provided food and shelter to two homeless men, Kenneth McDavid, 50, and Paul Vados, 73, before crushing them under cars in dark alleys.
The motive in both murders, contends the LA District Attorney's Office, was greed: millions of dollars in insurance policies the accused took out on the dead men.
"It sounds like Arsenic and Old Lace but it doesn't have Cary Grant," said Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels.
The murders were allegedly committed after the victims were insured for two years, the time after which it is hard for insurers to contest claims under California law.
"They waited for two years with murder on their minds, each of those days," Deputy District Attorney Truc Do told jurors. "They started this murder plot with greed and, you're going to see that even when the jig was up, these defendants remained greedy."
Prosecutors say the accused collected US$2.8 million ($3.5 million) from 23 life insurance policies on McDavid and 13 on Vados. A third scam collapsed when the intended victim, a drifter called Jimmy Covington, grew suspicious. Efforts to insure at least three other transients for US$800,000 each failed.
Golay and Rutterschmidt, who are held without bail and face life without parole if convicted, have each pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and conspiracy.
The tale of how two septuagenarians found themselves on trial for multiple murders began in the 1980s, when the pair met at an LA health spa. Both had known hard times.
Born in Texas in 1931, Golay was sent to a foster home. She eventually moved to California, married and had two daughters.
A second marriage produced a third, Kecia. By the 1980s, Golay was single and working as a realtor. She drove a Mercedes SUV, lived in a US$1.5 million home and owns three Santa Monica rental properties. She also has a reputation among tenants as an abusive landlord.
Rutterschmidt was born in Hungary in 1933, emigrating to the United States in 1957. She later owned an LA coffee shop with her husband, divorced, and shifted into a Hollywood apartment block in the 70s.
The women made a striking, if somewhat grotesque couple. Golay favoured short skirts, bouffant hairstyles and plastic surgery. Rutterschmidt's accent evoked Zsa Zsa Gabor. Both worked out, bleached their hair and used bright lipstick.
They allegedly haunted LA hotels, posing poolside as guests, stealing wallets and credit cards, then running petty scams and fake lawsuits in classic grifter style.
Rutterschmidt boasted of pyramid schemes, using one credit card to pay off another. Golay's dodgy deals included using power of attorney to seize property worth more than US$1 million from a dead business partner, cutting out his daughter.
This ruthlessness extended to her personal life. Obsessed with snagging a rich husband for Kecia, she vetoed boyfriends.
In a 2003 lawsuit bought by Kecia and one swain, Steve Taracevicz, the pair said Golay tried to kill them, following "30 years of psychopathic behaviour".
"You have no idea how evil I am," Golay told a hairdresser, according to the Los Angeles Times. She laid out a scenario where a woman marries an older man, insures his life, then uses Viagra to engineer a heart attack. Homeless people, Golay allegedly said, were parasitic, "useless to society".
But maybe not useless to Golay and Rutterschmidt.
Prosecutors say the pair met transients on the street, offered them shelter, then pressured them to sign life insurance policies naming the women as sole beneficiaries.
Covington said Rutterschmidt found him a room. But she turned ugly when he refused to provide his personal details so she could fill in forms. She badgered him in 3am visits. "She'd say, 'What's wrong with you? You can't remember anything and we need to get this paperwork done'," Covington recalled.
Suspicious, he vanished back into the streets. Jurors also heard from Patrick Lamay, a transient who was friends with McDavid. Lamay testified that McDavid said he had an "arrangement" with the women; Rutterschmidt paid the rent on a Hollywood flat she had found and asked McDavid to sign insurance papers as "an act of good faith". But that good faith allegedly ran dry late on the evening of June 22, 2005.
According to prosecutors, the accused dumped McDavid - who had ingested alcohol, sleeping pills and painkillers - in an alley in west LA. An autopsy showed he had been run over slowly, crushing his chest.
The case remained unsolved until seven months later, when police noted odd similarities to the hit-and-run death of Paul Vedos on November 8, 1999. Like McDavid, his head and chest were crushed, unusual in a hit-and-run. Two elderly women had claimed the bodies of Vedos and McDavid. Checks revealed insurance claims for more than US$4 million.
Later, detectives watched as Rutterschmidt met an old man and took him to a bank. They also saw her try to open a credit card account under someone else's name via the internet at a copy shop. Police found rubber stamps with signatures, including McDavid's, at the pair's homes.
Observing possible fraud, the cops suspected murder. The evidence mounted up.
On the night of McDavid's death, someone using Golay's Auto Club card called a truck to tow a 1999 Mercury Sable station wagon from a garage near the alley to a street near Rutterschmidt's home. Footage from surveillance cameras showed a murky image of a similar car near the alley. The car was traced to Rutterschmidt, who bought it in 2004 using a stolen licence as ID.
Detectives also found a reference to part of the Sable's ID number and licence number in Golay's day planner. The vehicle's floor pan was rammed up and wiped clean but traces of hair and flesh matched McDavid's DNA.
The defence's little-old-lady-unjustly-accused approach insists Kecia drove the death car, used the Auto Club card to call the truck, and her own phone to call the Mercury dealer.
Whether this will fly with jurors is unsure. The judge dismissed some half a dozen witnesses Golay's lawyer had planned to call. Rutterschmidt's lawyer has no witnesses but says the prosecution has failed to prove its case. Maybe.
But prosecutors have a powerful trump card, a 30-minute videotape of the defendants, secretly recorded at LAPD headquarters after their 2006 arrest on fraud charges.
In the tape, the pair argue bitterly. Rutterschmidt, looking angry and far more energised than she does in her mugshot, accuses Golay of greed. "Why did you make the extra insurances?" she demands. "You were greedy - that is the problem."
Golay counters: "All they're after is mail fraud. There is no mail fraud involved." There is no remorse either. It is a chilling, and possibly damning, exchange.
