Resident testifies in murder trial
Meilisa Thompson was fed up with the eyesore cluster of trash bins outside of her Ocean Park home, blocking the entrance to the alleyway and attracting less than desirable activity.
So when the Santa Monican one day found a can of red paint sitting near the garbage cans, the flashy hue splashed all over the wall and on the front driver side tire of a parked station wagon, Thompson decided to snap a few photos, intending to send it to City Hall and finally get the problem resolved.
On Tuesday, the photos taken in April 2005 were displayed in a Downtown Los Angeles courtroom, a piece of evidence in a criminal case that could tie a former Santa Monica landlord to the murder of a homeless man in a Westwood alley in June 2005.
The landlord, 77-year-old Helen Golay, lived a few doors down from Thompson, who testified in her ex-neighbor’s murder case when it reconvened on Tuesday morning. Golay, who owned three apartment buildings in the Ocean Park neighborhood, and co-defendant Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, are accused of murdering two homeless men in a life insurance scam.
Prosecutors believe the two elderly women concocted a scheme in which they befriended Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vados when they were still homeless, fixing them up in rent-free apartments and gaining their trust. The women then convinced the victims to sign them onto their life insurance policies about two years before they were each found killed in separate yet eerily similar hit-and-run incidents.
Vados was found killed in a Hollywood alley in 1999 and McDavid in an alley behind Westwood Boulevard in 2005.
The two women were arrested in spring 2006.
Throughout the murder trial, Deputy District Attorney Truc Do has tried to link the silver station wagon pictured in Thompson’s photo to the weapon used in McDavid’s murder. During opening arguments last week, Do showed jurors a photo of a 1999 silver Mercury Sable that was disposed and later purchased through a lien. The undercarriage of the station wagon was found to have McDavid’s DNA and the front driver’s side tire had remnants of red paint.
In her testimony, Thompson, who lived about three doors down from Golay’s home on the 400 block of Ocean Park Boulevard and shared an alley, recalled seeing her neighbor driving her Mercedes sport utility vehicle. Golay didn’t seem like the type of person who worked a 9-5 job, Thompson said.
Thompson snapped photos of the station wagon without knowing the identity of its owner, figuring at the time she could give the owner the pictures to use for insurance claim purposes.
Then one day, she saw Golay in the alley, crouching down and examining the red paint, more intimately than a casual passerby would, said Thompson, who hinted at a strained relationship with her neighbor.
481,“I thought it was Helen’s car and it’s karma,” Thompson said.
The same car was cited by the Santa Monica Police Department in January 2005 for being illegally parked in an alley. The car was ticketed while it was parked in the alley on the east side of Fifth Street, half a block away from where Golay lived.
Brenda Heavens was the parking enforcement officer that cited the Mercury Sable. Heavens, who also testified on Tuesday, had worked with the police department for 28 years at that point. She is now retired.
A copy of the $47 citation was displayed for jurors, showing that Heavens had received a radio call complaining about the vehicle being parked in an alley.
In the cross-examination of Heavens, Roger Diamond, Golay’s attorney, pointed out that the vehicle was not parked in the alley behind his client’s residence, but rather was in an alley about a block away.
No family connection
In the various life insurance policies that both defendants took out on McDavid and Vados, the two women claimed to be cousins, fiancés or business partners. Golay was usually the fiancé while Rutterschmidt was the cousin, Do had said last week.
But according to Sandra Salman, McDavid’s younger sister, she has no knowledge of being related to either of the defendants.
In her testimony, Salman gave jurors some insight into her brother’s childhood. Born in New York, McDavid, one of five children, grew up in Sacramento where he graduated from Sacramento High School and attended Sacramento State University. McDavid worked at the college radio station.
The last time the two siblings saw each other was in the mid 1990s, a few years before their father’s death in 1997. The family had attempted to contact McDavid when his father died but received no response, Salman said.
It was in November 2005 when detectives knocked on Salman’s door that she learned of her brother’s death.
Defense attorneys expressed concerns with Salman’s testimony beforehand, questioning whether she would have a financial motive and be biased, possibly filing a wrongful death suit. The district attorney said there was no pending lawsuit and the testimony would speak only to McDavid’s background.
“If the testimony is not relevant to Ms. Rutterschmidt’s conviction, then why is (Salman) here?” public defender Michael Sklar, Rutterschmidt’s attorney, asked.
The murder trial is scheduled to continue today as the prosecution presents more witnesses
Jump hedline - Victim’s sister testifies Golay not a relative
Suggested pullquote - “I thought it was Helen’s car and it’s karma.”
MeiLisa Thompson
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 26, 2008. Read the original PDF.