With friends like these

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

Here in the vast and wealthy collection of cities by the sea, Los Angeles, are districts of public failure, neglected streets, forgotten alleys peopled by the disappointed and the lost.  A whole sad army of the homeless. But there are angels, too, in the city. Not enough, perhaps.

But once, at least, were two elderly women who opened their lives - and their substantial wallets - to help rescue a lucky few. To give them hope. Two little old ladies, Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt.

Pastor Chuck Suhayda: I first met Olga and Helen, it was either in March or April of 2006.

They were partners in what seemed like their own personal war against poverty. The pastor met them when they showed up at his program for the homeless here at Hollywood Presbyterian Church.

Pastor Chuck Suhayda: They had come sort of late into the program so we had already finished serving the meals. They did seem like somebody's grandmother and the kind of folks you might respect.

Already these women, like good grandmothers, had devoted time and treasure to a homeless man named Ken McDavid. 

Helen actually arranged for an apartment for Kenneth, paid his rent, some of his bills.

And why not?  She could afford it. Helen owned multiple properties in Santa Monica, home to some of the nation's most expensive real estate.

Her friend Olga, a Hungarian immigrant, lived a few miles east in Hollywood, and several notches down the income ladder. But she had her time to offer, and that she did. After all, every life is priceless, including Kenneth McDavid's.   

Keith Morrison: So Kenneth, where did he fit in the family?

Sandra Salman: He was in the middle. 

There were five of them, said his sister Sandra.  And once they were so close.

Sandra Salman: Kenneth, he was very, very good at school.  He was the one that I would go to if I needed help.

Keith Morrison: The smart one.

Sandra Salman: He was the smart one.

But something happened after high school.  He avoided college, worked in radio for a while, but couldn't hold a job. Undiagnosed schizophrenia is what Sandra thinks it was. By the mid-90s things were completely off-kilter, and Kenneth just disappeared.

Keith Morrison: Didn't know if he was okay?

Sandra Salman: No.

Keith Morrison: Alive or dead?

Sandra Salman: He never called, no.

Keith Morrison: What was that like for the rest of you?

Sandra Salman: It was very difficult. 

Helen and Olga had no idea, by all accounts, that Kenneth had a family any more than the family knew that two elderly ladies had rescued him. So when the worst happened, what were they to do? Kenneth McDavid was killed by a car in an alley. It was Helen who went to the coroner’s office to collect his body, who arranged the cremation.

McDavid must have valued their help so much as he named them on a life insurance policy, his way perhaps of giving back in death as they had done so much for him.

End of story? Well, no.  In fact this is where the whole crazy story begins.

Ed Webster is a private investigator with 35 years of experience.  

Ed Webster: For 20 years, I was the Director of Investigations for MONY Life Insurance Company in New York.

Mutual Insurance Of New York is the full name, a.k.a. MONY.

Ed was in L.A. on another case.  And as long as he was there, the company asked, would he run a routine check on the McDavid policy?

Ed Webster: In fact, there was nothin' at first blush to render that situation particularly suspicious.  It was kind of routine, what I was asked to do.

Which was simply verify the facts: hit and run. No witnesses. The facts? Kenneth McDavid was found sprawled in that back alley around 1 a.m. on June 22, 2005. Though he had no wallet,  the police knew right away  it was Kenneth McDavid as there was this odd ID card along with a bank debit card in his pocket. Near him lay a bicycle with its front tire off as if the victim had been in mid-repair when he was hit by a passing car. His glasses, apparently knocked off, were lying nearby.

The LAPD opened a case file, of course. But hit-and-run accidents are difficult to solve if there are no witness.  And in a city famous for its traffic, investigators are busy. Sometimes cases go unsolved. Just like this one. So Ed Webster could have signed off on the police version of events and flown home.

But Ed doesn't do that sort of thing. He was asked to investigate, so that's what he'd do. He went to the alley to look around.

Keith Morrison: So you found somebody in a store over here? Did he see it happen?

Ed Webster: Discovered the body in the alley--

Keith Morrison: Oh.

Ed Webster: --and called 911. He got close enough to see that the man wasn't drunk--

On the face of it, this hit-and-run, there really wasn't anything nefarious. Kenneth McDavid could have been crouching, fixing his bicycle, if, as it seemed, it was his bicycle, when a car raced through this alley, failed to see him in the dark, and struck him dead.  But there was one little thing that bothered Ed.  The tire the man was supposedly fixing wasn't flat.

Ed Webster: Perhaps it was being set to look like he was changing a flat tire.

Had somebody staged the accident?

Probably not.  And Ed Webster isn't one to jump to conclusions. Not ever.

Ed Webster:  I just collect it all.  And then I sit there and I look at it all.  And see if it conforms to what normally would be expected in the situation.

Still, when he looked at the autopsy report, he was puzzled.  McDavid's injuries didn't make sense.

Ed Webster: The bulk of the man's injuries, the fatal injuries, were from the waist up.  It wasn't like a normal hit-and-run, where a guy would be taken down by a moving vehicle. Normally the car knocks an upright person down, and the injuries are below the waist.

Then there was the toxicology report.  McDavid had some alcohol in him, but it was mixed with some sort of sleeping compound and prescription drugs.

And, the more he thought about it, that funny ID card didn't make sense, either.

Ed Webster: You know, either a guy has got no ID, or he's got full ID.  

Keith Morrison:  Almost like an unofficial dog tag or something.

Ed Webster: Yeah, but somebody wanted the finders of this body to know who he was.

Ed read through McDavid's application for life insurance. It didn't say he was homeless, but that he had a business and some income.

Ed Webster: Over the the course of the next few days, I guess, I found with certainty that he did not live where he was represented to live.  He didn't work where he was represented to work.  He didn't earn what he was represented to earn. In this circumstance, nothing seemed to fit exactly as it should have. 

What's that old expression?  Tip of the iceberg?  Ed Webster was standing on it.  No idea how deep this thing went.

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