Former Golay tenant looks back on time when landlord turned
OCEAN PARK It was on an afternoon in May 2006 when Barry Cowan was reading a newspaper article about two elderly women who were being investigated for murder when he came to a shocking realization.
He had been living in the same building as a possible murderer for seven years.
“I saw the picture on the front page,” Cowan said on Tuesday. “It finally hit me.”
Today, that accused murderer — Santa Monica landlord Helen Golay — will appear in handcuffs before a judge along with her alleged accomplice, Olga Rutterschmidt of Hollywood, for their arraignment in the murders of former transients Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vados.
Investigators believe that Golay and Rutterschmidt concocted an elaborate scheme in which they befriended the two men when each was homeless, setting them up in apartments and gaining their trust. The women then allegedly convinced Vados and McDavid to sign them onto their life insurance policies before they were killed.
Vados and McDavid were killed in separate, yet similar, back alley hit-and-run incidents in 1999 and 2005, respectively.
It was in 1994 when Cowan, then a free-lance artist, moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the top level of a three-unit building at 424 Ocean Park Boulevard, a building that sold on March 8 for approximately $1.12 million, according to real estate Web site Zillow.com.
He remembers his first meeting with Golay, the landlord who lived in the unit downstairs with her daughter, Kecia, and how she accepted his rental application with little question.
“She was agreeable to letting me move in without a whole lot of difficulty, so I appreciated that,” said Cowan, who now teaches at Olympic High School.
For the most part, living in the apartment was a pleasant experience. After all, it was affordable and in a great location close to the beach.
But toward the final two years he spent in the apartment, he noticed that his relationship with Golay was starting to sour. Cowan recalls a time when he notified Golay that he was throwing a party as a courtesy because she was living downstairs. He had previously thrown a party and figured Golay would have no issues with the idea.
He was wrong. “She told me the previous party was a disaster and it certainly wasn’t,” Cowan said. “It was all adults and they were all behaving.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 29, 2007. Read the original PDF.