The deliberations got loud at one point, and a couple of holdouts delayed the final two verdicts. But in the end, jurors plowed relatively quickly through a mountain of circumstantial evidence to convict a pair of elderly women in the life insurance murders of two homeless men.
On Monday, jurors found Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy in the 1999 killing of Paul Vados. Last week, the panel convicted Helen Golay, 77, of the same charges, and returned guilty verdicts against both women in the 2005 murder of Kenneth McDavid.
Jurors were unmoved by the defendants' advanced ages, according to prosecutors.
The women were accused of killing the destitute victims in staged hit-and-run accidents to collect $2.8 million in life insurance. The prosecution said the defendants enticed the men off the street with promises of help, and then put them up in apartments for two years -- the period after which insurers cannot contest most policies.
Jurors left the downtown Criminal Courts Building without commenting Monday, but prosecutors who spoke to them related some details of the two to three full days of deliberations, which capped a monthlong trial.
"They seemed to be a very cohesive group," Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Grace said. "They were pretty convinced of the McDavid murder right away."
Two jurors had more trouble deciding whether Rutterschmidt was guilty of Vados' murder. On Thursday, the foreman said they were hopelessly deadlocked, by votes of 11 to 1 and 10 to 2, on the Vados counts against Rutterschmidt.
Superior Court Judge David S. Wesley had asked them to try again after a three-day weekend, and that appeared to have done the trick. The jury reached Monday's verdicts within an hour of reconvening.
"I think it just took the weekend for those one or two jurors to realize that the evidence as to the Vados count was not any different than the McDavid murder," Deputy Dist. Atty. Truc Do said.
Jurors had asked for more argument on Rutterschmidt's involvement in Vados' death. Do said the jury might have been slower to convict Rutterschmidt because some evidence showed that she had a "care-taking relationship" with the victim.
She also said that a challenging element of the case for the prosecution, as well as for the jurors, was that all the evidence was circumstantial.
