Life Insurance

Taking what they described as a significant step to protect senior citizens, state regulators have persuaded the biggest seller of annuities in California to promise to stop targeting the elderly with pitches allegedly designed to sell them pricey policies that could never pay off. The agreement between Allianz Life Insurance Co.

Robert Mannheim was stunned when he found out that strangers wanted to lend his mother in West Los Angeles money to buy her a $2-million life insurance policy and pay her premiums. The deal got better after two years: She would sign over her death benefits to investors and collect $200,000. The idea of leveraging the value of her newly acquired insurance into a big cash payoff tickled Selma Mannheim, a child of the Great Depression, who knows the importance of having money in the bank.

A Los Angeles judge sentenced two elderly women to life in prison without the possibility of parole Tuesday, saying greed was at the heart of their coldblooded, years-long scheme to murder homeless men for $2.8 million in life insurance money. "These unfortunate men were sacrificed on your altars of greed," L.A. County Superior Court Judge David S. Wesley told Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, who were convicted of murder in April.

A trust representing the 3-year-old daughter of movie star Heath Ledger, who died Jan. 22 at age 28, is suing a life insurance company that the trust contends is balking at paying a $10-million death benefit. A New York City coroner's report ruled that Ledger, who played the Joker in the summer smash "The Dark Knight," died from accidental causes involving his "abuse of prescription medications."

Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is being credited with a novel -- some would say morbid -- financing plan that his fellow Oklahoma State University fans hope will lift their beloved Cowboys football team to the top of the Big 12 Conference standings. Over the course of the last year, Pickens, 77, steered his alma mater's athletics department to buy life insurance policies for himself and a posse of aging Cowboys donors.

A judge Friday ordered a new trial for a 34-year-old mother of four who was convicted in January of fatally poisoning her Marine husband so she could use his life insurance to indulge in a libertine lifestyle. Superior Court Judge Peter Deddeh ruled that the defense attorney for Cynthia Sommer made a serious error in presenting evidence that allowed prosecution witnesses to talk about Sommer's behavior after her husband's death.

Two women in their 70s were arrested Thursday after they allegedly befriended two homeless men, took out 19 life insurance policies on them and filed claims worth more than $2.2 million after the transients mysteriously died in hit-and-run pedestrian accidents in Los Angeles. One of the men was hit by a car and killed in an alley off La Brea and Melrose avenues in 1999, and the second victim was run down in a Westwood alley last June.

A pair of elderly women accused of fraudulently collecting more than $2 million in life insurance on two homeless men demonstrated a remarkable knowledge of the intricacies of life insurance policies, officials said, and aggressively used this expertise in pressing their claims.