Homeless killings trial going to jury

LOS ANGELES -- Prosecution and defense lawyers rested their cases Tuesday in the trial of two elderly women charged with murdering two homeless men to collect millions of dollars from life insurance policies.

Superior Court Judge David Wesley scheduled final arguments for Thursday and said the case could be in the jury's hands Friday.

The jury has spent a month hearing testimony about an alleged plot by Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, and Helen Golay, 77, to befriend homeless men, buy big-figure insurance policies on them and then run them over in murders staged to look like hit-and-run accidents.

The lawyer for Rutterschmidt, Mark Sklar, presented no witnesses and said, "We rest on the state of the evidence."

Golay's attorney, Roger Jon Diamond, sought to blame his client's daughter for the two killings. The daughter is not charged in the case.

Each defendant faces two counts of murder and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder for financial gain in the deaths of Paul Vados, 73, in 1999 and Kenneth McDavid, 51, in 2005. Both defendants pleaded not guilty.

The final witness, a video specialist, showed a tape from a security camera in an alley on the night McDavid was killed. It showed a fuzzy image of a station wagon similar to one tied to the killing but he said an effort to enhance it and show the occupants or the license number failed.