Talking Dateline: The Thing About Helen & Olga
Dateline NBC
NBC News
4.4 • 40.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everyone. I'm Lester Holt, and we're talking Dateline. Today I'm here with Keith Morrison to talk about his original podcast series, The Thing About Helen and Olga, and Dateline senior producer Susan Liebelowitz, who has been following the story with Keith for nearly 20 years. |
| 0:21.7 | It's good to see both of you. Thanks for coming on. |
| 0:24.0 | Hello. Thank you for having us on, Lester. |
| 0:26.9 | Before we get into the discussion, let's tell folks that we're dropping the full series |
| 0:31.3 | in the Dateline feed as a bonus while Dateline is taking a break for the Witter Olympics. |
| 0:37.0 | So go take a listen and then come right |
| 0:39.2 | back here. Later, we'll have an extra clip from an interview that didn't make the show with the |
| 0:44.5 | manager of a mom-and-pop lighting story in Los Angeles, who had his own encounter with Helen |
| 0:50.1 | and Olga, and Susan has a story about the church where Helen and Olga volunteered. |
| 0:56.9 | But to recap, in the late 1990s, Helen Goulet and Olga Ruddershmidt appeared to be two |
| 1:02.7 | kindly old ladies helping homeless men off the streets of Los Angeles. |
| 1:07.8 | But as private investigator, Ed Webster, discovered, along with the LAPD and FBI in the so-called |
| 1:14.7 | Granny Task Force, the women were actually singling out men for insurance policies, and staging |
| 1:22.2 | their deaths to collect big payouts. |
| 1:24.6 | They were convicted in the murders of Kenneth McDavid and Paul Vados and remained behind bars |
| 1:30.7 | today. |
| 1:31.9 | So let's talk dateline, shall we? |
| 1:34.2 | Keith, this story contains so much greed, betrayal, and good old-fashioned detective work. |
| 1:39.3 | It was kind of a typical dateline plot, but not. |
| 1:42.6 | Let me let you kind of describe what we're talking about. |
| 1:45.4 | It's just the craziest story. |
| 1:48.7 | I can never understand why nobody made it into a movie. |
... |
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