Insurance Fraud

A jury Tuesday awarded $3.6 million to a Marine captain serving in Iraq after concluding that a nationwide company that specializes in insuring military personnel tried to cheat him out of coverage for water damage to his Oceanside home. The San Diego County Superior Court jury found that the United Services Automobile Assn.'s Casualty Insurance Co. had attempted to defraud John Colombero in its handling of his 2004 claim.

A prosecutor told jurors Thursday that two septuagenarian women accused of killing homeless men so they could collect on their life insurance policies saw their victims as "profit," not human beings. "They picked up complete strangers, men who they did not love, men not related to them, men who could not offer them any kind of financial support because they were homeless and destitute, and made them worth millions if dead," Deputy Dist. Atty.

A 75-year-old woman accused of killing homeless men for insurance money had no knowledge that her partner in crime was planning murder as a part of the plot, her attorney argued Friday. Olga Rutterschmidt lacked savvy, was "simple-minded" and even "stupid," said Michael Sklar, the deputy public defender who chose earlier in the week not to call any witnesses, saying the prosecution had failed to tie his client to the hit-and-run deaths of Kenneth McDavid, 50, and Paul Vados, 73.

They have sat at the defense table frail as birds, their faces papery and gray, their hands brittle. The combination of their advanced years and sex makes Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, among the rarest of murder defendants. As stereotypes go, the demographic they represent defies the coldblooded nature of the killings they are charged with.

In an eleventh-hour shift in defense strategy, one of two septuagenarian women charged in a hit-and-run murder case turned on her co-defendant Monday, a move some legal experts said could backfire. Roger Jon Diamond, who represents Helen Golay, 77, told jurors shortly before they began deliberating that co-defendant Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, conspired with Golay's daughter Kecia in the 2005 slaying of Kenneth McDavid.

A Los Angeles jury has convicted a 75-year-old woman of murdering a homeless man for millions in life insurance, but is deadlocked on two charges against her in a second killing. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David S. Wesley ordered the panel to resume deliberations Monday on the remaining counts against Olga Rutterschmidt. She was found guilty Thursday of the 2005 killing of Kenneth McDavid.

Some folks celebrate their last home mortgage payment by setting fire to their loan agreement. Lately, some people behind on their mortgages are simply setting fire to their homes. In what appears to be the latest symptom of the nation's mortgage meltdown and credit crisis, insurers, law enforcement officials and state agencies nationwide report a jump in home and automobile fires in the last year believed to have been set by owners unable to pay their debts.

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.

For a decade, California employers and their advocates in Sacramento complained about the high cost of workers' compensation insurance and condemned abuses of the system by employees, who they said fake claims, exaggerate medical conditions and collect fat disability benefits. But some data suggest that employers -- not workers -- are the bigger workers' compensation cheaters. And the state is stepping up enforcement against businesses suspected of ignoring the law and endangering workers.

A former Los Angeles County probation department clerk who fled the country earlier this year after she was charged with bigamy and insurance fraud was captured in Mexico over the weekend, authorities said Monday. Damaris Ninet Amesquita, 30, was found Saturday by a bail bonds agent in Mexicali, said Los Angeles County district attorney's spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons.