Evil Life Insurance Beneficaries

The following excerpts are from Cindy Chang, Two Elderly Women Suspected as Femmes Fatales in Insurance Fraud Scheme, NY Times, June 12, 2006.

Ms. Rutterschmidt, 73, and another woman, Helen Golay, 75, pleaded not guilty last week to federal charges of mail fraud and submitting false insurance applications. According to the authorities, the two women extended helping hands to two homeless men, getting them off the streets and putting them up in apartments, while at the same time plotting their deaths.

Posing as aunts, fiancées or cousins, they took out numerous life insurance policies on the men, Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid, with themselves as the beneficiaries, collecting over $2.2 million after the men died in separate hit-and-run traffic cases, the authorities said. * * *

“It’s one of the most sinister, evil types of schemes I’ve ever seen, if it does turn out to be the case,” said Lt. Paul Vernon, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department. “They had to form a relationship with these men, get to know them, show that they cared, then turn around and kill them.”