Dark City

31. UNSOLVED: A Tragic Murder and A Missing Diary - The Christa Helm Story with Jamey DuVall

• Dark City Productions • Season 1 • Episode 31

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Los Angeles, CA | What did Christa Helm know that got her killed? Or was she the victim of a jealous rage? On February 12, 1977, Christa was brutally stabbed to death in a quiet West Hollywood neighborhood. The night she was murdered, she carried a personal diary filled with high-profile names, secrets, and scandals—one that mysteriously vanished and has never been found. Decades later, her killer remains unknown. The eerie coincidences surrounding her death are just as numerous as the people who may have had a motive to silence her. Joining us to unravel the mystery is Jamey DuVall, Christa’s biographer and producer of the podcast Movie Geeks United.

You can submit a tip or stay updated on Jamey’s work and his upcoming book at www.whokilledchristahelm.com, or follow him on Instagram and Facebook @whokilledchristahelm.

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Speaker 1:

On February 12, 1977, aspiring actress Krista Helm was brutally stabbed to death in a quiet West Hollywood neighborhood. The night she was murdered, she was carrying with her personal diary filled with names, secrets and scandals, one that mysteriously vanished and has never been found. Decades later, her killer still remains unknown. Joining us today to talk about Krista Helm's life and the mystery that still surrounds her death is Jamie Duvall, who has spent years researching Krista's case. Jamie, before we go into Krista's life and also untimely death, can you introduce yourself and share how you became involved in her story?

Speaker 3:

you introduce yourself and share how you became involved in her story. Sure, and thank you for having me on the show today, thank you. I started podcasting in 2007. I did a movie podcast called Movie Geeks United and a few years into it I thought, hey, let me start a Hollywood true crime, and I wanted to do something that strayed from the usual Manson Dahlia kind of stuff even though I did that stuff too and so I went on a YouTube rabbit hole and I found an old 48 hours episode on Krista. This episode was from 2008, I think, and it was a story I hadn't heard before. And it was fascinating because, unlike most true crime stories, the resolution is either this or that.

Speaker 3:

Krista's case had like five different potential motives and suspects and all of them were valid. So I thought, man, this is an interesting concept to do a show about her. So I did the show. I brought in Krista's daughter, the original investigator, the two cold case investigators, some friends I found of Krista's, and I aired the show. But the story never left me. So for the past 10 years 10 years, my goodness I have continued to look into her case because it's a real labyrinth and she knew so many people and I've discovered a lot of new information that had previously been unfounded or unreleased. And years into that research I thought I've got all of this research on my computer. I should write a book because, gosh forbid, anything should happen to me. All this stuff will go with me. I wanted to start making it public. I've been working on a book for the past couple of years as I continue my research.

Speaker 2:

Jamie, let's start at the beginning. Who was Krista Helm and what drove her from small town life over to Hollywood?

Speaker 3:

Well, krista was born Sandra Woefile in 1949 in Milwaukee, wisconsin, and from an early age she loved the movies and she had stars in her eyes. She dreamt of kind of the old Hollywood glamour and being an actress. But she was in Milwaukee. You might as well be from another planet than make it in Hollywood, but she was very beautiful. Her parents divorced early and she and her two sisters stayed with their mother for a time. Their mother was an alcoholic and was in and out of a lot of abusive relationships apparently, and the children bore the brunt of some of the abuse as well. So I think Krista or Sandy back then kind of overcompensated in manufactured confidence and she was obviously already a very pretty girl. And then at the age of 16, she met a man named Gary Clements who was twice her age, and he ended up impregnating her. They married at the insistence of Krista's father. They married and he disappeared right after the honeymoon and she was told that he had died in a motorcycle accident. And so now she's a single mother and she still has this dream of making it.

Speaker 3:

She hatches a plan to go to New York City with a good friend of hers. Meanwhile she and this friend have their daughters stay with a friend of this friend's family because she's an older, experienced person. She's reared many children before and so they leave their daughters with this older woman in Vermont while they go to New York and try to make it. The other woman leaves pretty soon. Into that venture, krista stays. The plan is once her daughter turns 10, she'll live with her full time, but for now it's too much of a dangerous proposition in a place like New York City in the early 70s. But she and her daughter see each other quite often. They talk all the time on the phone and she comes to visit her in New York, krista goes to her in Vermont, they travel back home to Milwaukee together. So it wasn't like an abandonment, but it was still. You know it's a difficult reality.

Speaker 1:

So when I started researching this case and looking at pictures of Krista you're right, she's absolutely stunning Just before airbrushing or anything like that it's like I just woke up looking like this she's really, really beautiful. She definitely grabs you. I feel like even without ever getting to meet her really, because a lot of her work is a little bit more obscure, harder to find you can tell she has this magnetic appeal to her right away. She did. Sort of it quality.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean, having never met her, obviously, in person, I've been told by so many people that knew her that there was a magnetism, that there was something. So there was a generosity of spirit and I know that Krista had the reputation that she does have A lot of. It may be that she was mercenary about her career and backstabbing, but I have found from talking to people that actually knew her best that she was very protective of her career ambitions career ambitions and nothing was going to stop her. But she would give you the shirt off of her back. She was generous to a fault, to her friends and the people who were dear to her. There were many of them that just spoke absolutely glowingly of her. She did have a personality and a presence and aura that drew you in.

Speaker 1:

She had a very event-filled life and, you could say, lived in the fast lane a bit. And I think also too, jamie, when we were looking into this case and researching I saw in your blog the way you talked about her. It was like no, this is just a so much more complex case than just someone who is an aspiring actress. She dropped off her kid and lived in a way that was kind of frivolous. You can tell, even just listening to her daughter talk about her, that they're very deeply bonded. This is not a child that has been abandoned. This is someone who deeply loved her mother.

Speaker 3:

And her child has a lot of her mother in her, even though she was only nine when her mother was killed. The more she interviewed people in her later years you know, tell me about my mother the more she realized how much of her mother she has in her. There's a resilience, there's a generosity of spirit, there's a goodness of heart in Krista's daughter. I mean, krista's daughter has had a really hard life herself and it's miraculous that she turned out to be such a wonderful person and she is because I've communicated often with her and I met her in New York City and I was able to visit a lot of her mother's stomping grounds in New York and that was a very special experience for me.

Speaker 2:

She went to New York. How did she eventually make her way over to Hollywood?

Speaker 3:

It was a five-year journey with a lot of detours In writing this book. It's not so much about. 90% of the book is about her life and about 10% about her murder and what I could find out about it Because of the time in which she lived in New York City and LA. There's all this cultural explosion going on, political movements, the art world with Andy Warhol, excitement of movies and theater and music, and Krista was in the center of all of it. So a lot of this is just so fascinating for me to explore. But I guess the two most important things that happened to her in New York City is she met a guy named Stuart Duncan. Stuart Duncan, his family lineage. They were the founders of Worcestershire sauce, worcestershire, worcestershire. I'm so glad that you are the one who has to pronounce it. Producer. He produced Godspell. I think it premiered in 70.

Speaker 3:

Krista was an early investor in Godspell. Godspell, even today, is an incredibly popular musical and movie. It made them a lot of money by that time. Apparently, the Stuart Duncan guy he had started an affair with Krista. He for all intents and purposes, was her sugar daddy. Krista had a fancy sports car. She had a fancy townhouse in the center of New York City. She had a vacation home in the Hamptons. She was set.

Speaker 3:

This guy, stuart, was crazy about her and in 73, she convinced him to produce a feature film starring her, which was called let's Go for Broke. She plays an investigative reporter that goes undercover in this slave ring in Haiti. It was shot in Haiti, which was really, really interesting to be in that country in 1973. To be in that country in 73. And the movie played for two weeks in a Cincinnati theater and then it was never seen again. So it wasn't the career boost that she hoped for, but she starred in a movie.

Speaker 3:

The other important thing that happened in New York City is she met a guy named Lenny Barron who was a costume designer. He designed Wonder Woman's costumes. That was probably the most famous thing he did professionally. They became inseparable and he would introduce her to glamorous society and she would help him promote his fashions and all that kind of stuff. When she moved to LA in 1975, he moved with her. Lenny did, and so they took this whole journey together and Stuart financed a lot of that move to LA as well I mean Krista through investments. She apparently built an impressive bankroll of her own, I believe, separate from Stuart, but Stuart was definite presence and supporter in her life for quite some time before death.

Speaker 1:

I didn't realize that, I didn't realize that she had made those investments and each of newspaper coverage, a lot of media coverage in the New York Post.

Speaker 3:

She had got notices in the Times and syndicated worldwide in Earl Wilson's gossip column, and a lot of it too had to do with the famous people that she dated. Famous people that she dated. I mean she dated Joe Namath and Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty and apparently Polanski and maybe Burt Reynolds. I mean it goes on and on. Ryan O'Neill you think of a star at the time, mick Jagger. She was probably tied up with them in some way. So she got a lot of media coverage just based on her social life. But she in one of those interviews said that she had invested in several ventures and she was very successful in that realm.

Speaker 1:

So she was dating. She had a very busy personal life, social life, but she was also really hardworking. It sounds like just from what you've written in some of the research that I had done to help make it in Hollywood. There were a lot of different things that she was doing, so what sorts of things was she involved in like on a day-to-day basis?

Speaker 3:

Well, the most important thing is she was making all the connections and and Lenny had a modeling agency called oddities and so she'd get a lot of modeling work through that agency and through other avenues and she met a lot of people. Those connections she was counting on to get her to the next point in her career and in some measure they probably did advance her somewhat. But yes, she studied acting, she studied dance, I believe I think at one point she started taking singing lessons. She was already a singer. Her mother loved to hear her sing and she sang in a Golden Girls review in Milwaukee when she was a kid. So that was already in her blood Golden Girls, not the TV show. Apparently it was some musical review in Milwaukee back in the 50s and 60s.

Speaker 3:

But yeah, she studied hard and she cared about it. She was so singularly focused on advancing in this career and making a life for herself where she could support her daughter doing what she loved which was entertaining. She wanted to be a star which was entertaining, which she wanted to be a star. I can't say that she was like a serious actor, but she wanted to do whatever it took to to make it. And so when she got to that feature film. Talking to people that were part of that film shoot, they said she loved being in the role of the star and she showed up. She had an entourage, she had the plane full of luggage and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2:

She was playing out her fantasy detailed diaries of men and women that she dated, and even guess some videotapes.

Speaker 3:

Do we know what her intention was? Why did she always carry her diary with her? Yeah, this is probably the juiciest part of her story for people that follow true crime. In this case in particular. It was a practice that started when she was a kid. She and her best friend in childhood, Darlene Thorson. They kept kind of a boy list and they rated their boyfriends like from one to 10. It was like a silly little practice that a teenage girl would engage in. But as Krista became an adult and she moved to New York City and she started having all these exciting experiences with all these famous people, Darlene came to visit her and saw that she was continuing to keep a diary, but it had advanced to another level. So she looked through it and she recognized most of the names on it.

Speaker 1:

Quick question Just because, like her life was so event filled, was it all in one diary? Or I wonder, if she, did she ever get to a part two, a second book, or was it just this one that she was always carrying with her?

Speaker 3:

Well, you know, I wish I knew for sure. It wasn't my understanding she might've kept a diary, an official diary as well, which I hope she did. But the book that everyone talks about, it's a list of names with ratings attributed to each of them. So you could I mean, I don't think she could fill more than one book, because that's like thousands upon thousands of lines. I don't know how in depth she went with the diary necessarily.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I was just wondering if it was mixed in with detailed passages of her life and maybe a little bit more on the backstory of these people especially. I could see how people would get very bored.

Speaker 3:

That would be interesting. I haven't heard that there was more than just a name and a rating, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were more details, because I found this old interview with Burt Reynolds on Katie Couric. This was in the 2000s and he just mentions having a one-night stand with this beautiful blonde and after they had their encounter she pulled out a book and started writing in it and Burt Reynolds said what are you doing? And he said that the girl said I'm rating you and so that has to be Krista. I mean, he didn't know her by name, but I bet anything because this would have been in the mid 70s when Burt Reynolds was starting to be the hottest actor. He was the hottest number one actor for five years straight in the 70s, so the timing works. I think that was probably Krista.

Speaker 3:

Probably a good chance, but that's another interesting point and I asked the detectives about this because she not only would mark her intimate encounters in a diary, she'd also audio tape them and some of them. And I asked the detectives about that and they said, yeah, the tapes that we were able to find and we could identify the actor or star that was in those tapes. We went to visit them and all of them said they were very much aware that they were being taped. She didn't have that technology. She was like, hang on, let me whip out this huge monster, because they're the technology. Back then, I mean, she had, I guess, a portable tape player or something. But all of them knew, apparently, that they were being taped yeah.

Speaker 1:

There's no discreet way to do that back then. It's not like you have an iPhone where you could just subtly put it aside.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, which I thought was interesting. So all this talk about what was she going to do with them? Interesting? So all this talk about what was she going to do with them? She was planning to write a book about her life and these experiences, and a lot of it would be drawn from the entries in her diary, which makes her pretty much ahead of her time, because eventually that happened. I mean, there were tell-all books of that same fashion later on in the 70s and 80s. I think you'll never eat lunch in this town again.

Speaker 3:

Her plans were to write a book, and she would hold the diary close to her chest. One of her friends said and said and she would say, this is going to make me a lot of money one day. But I'm surprised though. I'm surprised like she was so open with it. It's keeping like keeping it out there because I would be worried somebody would snatch it, or I guess also too, maybe it was less risky back then. It's kind of unsavory. But look, this was the 70s. This was an incredibly debauched period of time, and krista was open about these encounters that she was having to friends and probably strangers. There was a naivete about her. She wasn't the most worldly person. She was a girl from small town in Wisconsin and this was all new and exciting for her, so she probably wasn't as discreet as she should have been about a lot of things.

Speaker 2:

We kind of talked earlier about her magnetism and that kind of thing. But we know that she could also be kind of polarizing and I don't know maybe we touched on that a little bit earlier with how much she defended her career. Why do you think she was found to kind of be that way or why people thought she was that?

Speaker 3:

way. What I'm trying to do in researching her life and writing the book and trying to figure out who she was, is to be honest about every aspect of her personality that I can uncover, but not to be judgmental of it. We are all more than one thing. I mean. We each contain darkness and light and shades in between. So some people for instance, when she was on the set of her movie, one of the actresses felt like she was giving a great performance in the movie and Krista was jealous of it. Because Krista's attitude was this is my movie, you're not going to outshine me. And so the actress said so she felt that tension. But then another actress I just spoke to earlier this week, who's also in the movie and starred in it opposite her, said she was the sweetest, nicest thing and she'd sit with me and she talked to me about the movie and she was so helpful and open and welcoming. Essentially she was complicated, you know, like all of us are.

Speaker 1:

And not to say that she was never at fault, or maybe her interactions, there wasn't things she could have done differently, or maybe even just personality flaws. But I also imagine too she's probably incredibly intimidating. I'm thinking in the seventies. Someone who's that confident, that sexually confident, that beautiful, I could see how also people would be threatened by her, not necessarily that she was treating them poorly. So you always kind of wonder, in a very competitive industry how much of that sort of plays into it too, much of that sort of plays into it too.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and how women experience someone they perceive as sleeping their way to the top, which is one specific thing how men can be dismissive of women. They perceive that way as well. But I'm telling you almost to like 90 some odd percent people I talked to who knew Krista, who were friendly with her, absolutely loved her like, adored her, and they talk about how much they miss that sweet person.

Speaker 2:

Maybe she kind of had to fight for her own survival in whatever way she could, and so maybe that left her open to some interactions not always being pleasant, and maybe she was defensive. Or this is my movie and just out of like that self-preservation.

Speaker 3:

It's also, yeah, and a big part of that self-preservation, I think, as a child of abuse, how she felt. I mean, I can only speculate and go by what others have shared with me. Her identity or her perception of herself and her means of getting ahead was always tied into her sexuality at a young age, and I think it was especially triggered by the abuse she suffered. Because it it has to be personality altering, it has to kind of inform oh, this is value, this is how I'm viewed and I can turn it into something advantageous.

Speaker 1:

And that's why, especially when we were telling the story, I thought it would be great to come on the show to talk about it, because I didn't want her to be just dismissed as someone who slept her way to the top or was just frivolous, because there's just so much backstory too. She had a very tough childhood. She did have that trauma. She was left when she was 17 with a child Plus. Just being in the seventies, being a woman trying to make it on your own without family backup, is incredibly hard, and there's also so much evidence, too, that she was really she truly was hardworking and talented, and that shouldn't be dismissed either.

Speaker 3:

I think so too, and it isn't to ignore questionable things that she did in life. I've seen comment threads from other videos that people have done about Krista, and it's usually the guys. Usually the guys start with. I'm not saying she deserved it, no one deserves to die but she was asking for it and blah, blah, blah and she was terrible and they tune out, you know, a couple of minutes into her story because she didn't live a pristine life.

Speaker 1:

It's also, too, with some of the cases we've come across. Anytime there's a sex worker that's involved, they don't always get the same level. They usually don't get the same level of investigative support. They're treated like it's less than because of the nature of the way they live their life.

Speaker 3:

She was probably an escort. I'd say it's probably safe to say she was an escort, but I'm sure some of the times that meant just they call up the agency and they say I want to go to this party with this girl, for this girl to show up on my arm or whatever. And then you know, if it's a famous person, they probably had. They might've had an intimate encounter, whatever. She wasn't standing on a street corner.

Speaker 3:

She had an affair with a Shah of Iran in the early seventies when she was in New York city, probably arranged by an agency that she was with, probably Lenny's talent agency, but I don't know that for sure. But I do know that she made several trips to see the Shaw and that was probably a financial kind of thing. But she gets to go to a foreign country and she gets to have this extraordinary experience and she's showered with jewels and all this kind of stuff. I mean, and it's the 70s and it's an adventure and it's women's liberation is just taking hold in the culture and I think that Krista was incredibly liberated.

Speaker 1:

Yes, she was. Yes, she was. Let's get to the disco album that she was working on before her death, because there's a lot of questions and controversies around that that could maybe unlock what happened and why. But what were some of what would you say were her key accomplishments up to this point in terms of making it as an actress?

Speaker 3:

Her ability to acclimate into this world. That was totally out of her realm and yet she kind of she, she took a kind of fake it till I make it approach, I think. So she, just from sheer fortitude and determination she became comfortable and became part of this society and so she did the feature and a lot of opportunities came from that. She did the feature film, she did a bit role in Stars beauty pageant episode that's competing against Linda Carter and she's great in it. Actually she is so winning in it. She auditioned for Charlie's Angels when Farrah Fawcett dropped out and they eventually went with Cheryl Blatt I think, but she auditioned for that part right before she died. I think. She auditioned for King Kong I heard that somewhere the 1976 version of that film.

Speaker 3:

So she was seizing as many opportunities as she could and the disco album was another such opportunity. She said look, this acting thing isn't happening. Maybe disco's all the rage, maybe if I make a disco album. And around that same time there were porn actors. I'm not comparing Krista to a porn actress because she didn't do any porn, but there was a pornographic actress named Andrea True and she had a number one disco hit at that time with a song called More, more. So there was precedence for a non-professional singer to really make it big in disco, and so she met this New York DJ who was in LA at the time. His name was Frankie Crocker. He was a big deal. He coined the phrase urban contemporary, I think and as a DJ there was no one more popular. And he agreed to produce a disco album for Krista, and so she assembled some musicians and an interesting group of people.

Speaker 1:

There was a lot of stuff, a lot of drama going on around the production of that and different characters involved. So can you describe what this was like and the details around it?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean, there's so many players so I'll try to keep it as simple as possible. I won't mention everyone in the band, but there are three members of the band that are of interest. There's Blair Aronson. He was the keyboardist on the project. There's Blair Aronson. He was the keyboardist on the project, Blair and some of his friends who are also members of the band. They were musicians. They had their own band named Silver Spoon. They did some of the cover songs for the TV movie Helter Skelter, so they had experience in the music industry. He was the keyboardist.

Speaker 3:

A woman named Debbie Danilo was one of the backup singers. Another woman named Patty Collins was another backup singer. The reason why I mentioned these three is because there was significant sexual drama between all of them during that recording session. Patti Collins was kind of obsessed with Krista. They even lived together for a time while they were making this album together. Now Krista, I think, was probably willing to go with either sex. It was like the freedom of the 70s, I guess. But Patti was a lot more obsessed with Krista than Krista had any interest in Patty. But people in the studio said, yeah, if we talked to Krista and we looked across the room, Patty would be giving us the stink eye because she was just very possessive.

Speaker 1:

Oh.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, debbie Danilo apparently had a thing for Blair Aronson and Blair Aronson had a thing for Krista. So Blair Aronson said that he and Krista were intimate together in his apartment one night and they looked out window and debbie danilo was standing outside the window staring at them oh no they didn't think much of it.

Speaker 3:

They kind of laughed that you know it's a kind of jealous, kooky thing to do but they didn't feel threatened. But it gained more resonance because the next night is when crystal was murdered. So I. So Blair Aronson will not talk to me and Debbie Danilo will not talk to me. They're among two of maybe five or six that won't talk to me, but they're the two most important voices that I'm not going to be able to include any personal anecdotes of theirs in the book because they refuse to provide them, but I think that's odd that they just will not talk about it.

Speaker 2:

Before Krista was murdered, she sent a message to a friend saying I'm in way over my head into something I can't get out of. Do we know what she meant by this?

Speaker 3:

That friend was Darlene, the girl that she grew up with, that they started the diary concept. We don't know exactly what it is. I can tell you that Darlene was a little puzzled by the postcard when she received it. Krista was always into something. There was always kind of drama in her life. After she kind of disappeared for a little while that she might've been in witness protection or something, because Krista always spoke kind of secretively, that there was stuff going on I can't tell you about and you know so. She had ideas like that, but I, you know, if I knew the true meaning of that postcard I'd know what happened to her. Probably it's another kind of mystical kind of question mark hanging out there.

Speaker 1:

Did Darlene think this was like out of pattern or odd, then? Or this was just more of like. Okay, this is Krista.

Speaker 3:

She held out hope Like she didn't know how. I mean I'm speaking for her, but she didn't quite know how to take the postcard. Other than what I just said, that Krista led a pretty dramatic life and she was very dramatic about certain things. That it can't be true. She has to be in witness protection or she disappeared. I mean, she even says in the postcard I might have to disappear for a while, until it got to the point where Darlene had to kind of accept for herself that she had been murdered.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, it's a big mystery. But what it tells you mostly is that Kristen knew she was into something, that there was danger around the corner. Right before this she had her last visit with her daughter and she told her daughter that she was going to leave LA and she said you and I will be together all the time, full time now. And she even asked her if she wanted a sibling and did you want a brother or a sister? And she even asked her if she wanted a sibling and did you want a brother or a sister. So she was getting ready to leave because some danger was around. I think it was more than just I haven't had any luck. I think it was some impending doom that she sensed.

Speaker 1:

That is so heartbreaking too, because this was about the time her daughter was 10. So that was the cutoff when they were supposed to be together. That's interesting that she said do you want a brother or sister? Was she pregnant by chance, or was that just-? I don't think so. I think she was serious about moving on to a different future. Well, let's talk about February 12th 1977.

Speaker 3:

So in the early morning hours Krista was brutally stabbed to death. Jimmy, can you talk about what happened exactly? She was kind of getting an allowance I don't know what you'd call it, but whether he was kind of fed up or he just couldn't do it anymore. Stuart Duncan was married this whole time. He ended up being married for something like 60 years to the same woman. So he cut her off and so she suffered. She moved out of her Bel Air home, all of her furniture went to her friend Lenny's house and she went from couch to couch a little bit. She ended up living with a woman named Stephanie in an apartment. They only knew each other for I don't know a month, two months, no more than three months, and they ended up living together. She and Stephanie went to a party in the hills Sometime during that party this is according to Stephanie.

Speaker 3:

Sometime during that party, krista encountered something that gave her the creeps. And Stephanie says this because when she saw Krista walk back up to her she had a really strange look on her face, like she was freaked out about something. Stephanie asked what was wrong and Krista wouldn't say she was like I'm fine, but it was clearly in her eyes. Something had happened at that party with Krista. So Stephanie had a guy at the party that she was going to spend the weekend with at the beach. Stephanie gave her car keys to Krista and said I'm going to go to the beach with this guy in his car. You can use my car until I get back. And so Krista left the party in her roommate's car. She ended up driving just a few miles away to the home of a man named Sandy Smith. He was a music agent but he claims, because I've interviewed him, the cold case police were never able to find him, to interview him, but I found him. So I went to his house and that's where she was murdered. This was about 1.30 in the morning. I don't know if she made it in the house and walked back out or just knocked on the door and turned around, but however it happened. When she turned around from the door she was attacked. Just a few feet from that door she was stabbed 22 times, bludgeoned several times about the face, nose, scalp, and she died there on the concrete right outside of that house.

Speaker 3:

1.30 in the morning there were earwitnesses. One heard two women and one man arguing before the screaming began. Another heard screams that sounded like a cat dying or fighting or something horrible. Screams like a cat dying or fighting or something horrible screams. And so he walked outside of his house and looked down, walked to the sidewalk and looked down the street. The screaming had stopped. He didn't see anything. If he would have walked out into the street he would have seen it happening, or at least the immediate aftermath. He would have seen her body and, coincidentally, the guy that was the ear witness that walked out, his name is John Grise. He's an actor. He was in Napoleon Dynamite. He was in the last season of the White Lotus. You'd recognize his face.

Speaker 1:

He sees a lot of stuff. Did he call the police when he heard the screaming?

Speaker 3:

Nobody called the police.

Speaker 1:

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 3:

Because it was the middle of the night. I guess Grice thought was I just dreaming or was it a cat Like? Am I going to call the police about it like a cat? It is odd. But there were several earwitnesses. One person looked out their blinds but the shrubbery was covering the scene of the murder. She didn't see anything. Oh my gosh. It reminds you of that famous case of Kitty Genovese or whatever her name was the witness in New York City where she was killed and all these 60 people heard it and saw it, but nobody called the police.

Speaker 3:

Her body was discovered by a limo driver. He was going to Sandy Smith's house. He pulled up to Sandy's house and saw the dead body in front there and he thought it was a hit and run and he said that when he approached the body she died, like she drew her last breath, and so he hopped back in the car and drove a mile to the sheriff's office and then brought them there to her body. She was on her stomach, kind of on her side, and her legs were partially tucked under the car in front of the house. And the car belonged to Sandy's girlfriend, even though apparently she wasn't in the house that night and Sandy's alibi was look, I had a party earlier in the night but I hadn't slept for 36 hours, so I cleared everybody out about 10 o'clock and I went to sleep, and I'm impossible to wake up once I'm asleep. So he claims not to have heard any of it.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. Did he think she was dragged under the car?

Speaker 3:

She had to have been either dragged even though that seems very awkward to drag somebody under a car or maybe she, with any strength that she had, maybe she pushed herself back partially under the car so she wouldn't get run over, because it's a very it's a one-lane street essentially. I mean, you know some of those streets lay, they're impossible for two cars to, and it's one of those kinds of streets right right and there were tire tracks running through the blood, so somebody drove through that.

Speaker 1:

The nature of what happened to her just screams rage. This is clearly a very targeted person. It's very, very angry. What's interesting, too, not to say that murders, crimes of passion, are always the most thoughtful, but that seems like the worst place that you would want to commit that crime, because they are one way streets. There are houses all around you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I totally agree. It wasn't a mugging, even though her purse was missing, her diary was missing, but it wasn't a mugging. But it wasn't a mugging. It was intimate, it was close up, it was brutal, it was overkill, it took time time because she fought back 22 stab wounds, maybe a separate weapon for the blunt force, trauma which says to me there might have been two killers with two different weapons, because it just seems odd to me that you'd bring a knife and say a hammer, and you'd say, okay, let me put the knife away. Now you use the hammer in the, in the fury of a of that murder.

Speaker 1:

It just seems odd. It feels like it's premeditated.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, but it also not because of the location, it feels like someone snapped. Yes, I think murdering her was premeditated. Where it was done was not. So maybe I'm following her from the party, maybe I'm the one that she saw at the party and she got freaked out and I'm following her from there and she stops at this house then this is where it's got to happen.

Speaker 1:

One thing also to it I noted in the research was that Krista was terrified of knives and she'd even told friends that she believed she would die that way old friends, that she believed she would die that way. And then in one of her films, the legacy of Satan, she was stabbed to death on screen. Yeah, is that all?

Speaker 3:

accurate, accurate. Yeah, it's just eerie. That's a bad movie, but but legacy of Satan. Last time I checked it was on Tubi and I got excited. I'm like, oh, I can finally see this movie. So I watched it and a lot of it was shot in Krista's New York City apartment. First of all because I looked at the wallpaper and said that wallpaper looks familiar and I realized, oh, that's her apartment. So I was able to get an inside view of what it looked like back then. But at the end of it she stabbed to death with a shard of glass.

Speaker 1:

And so to watch that movie now it's a horrible movie, but it takes on a deeper kind of resonance because of that. It kind of makes you wonder whoever?

Speaker 2:

did it? Were they replicating the movie? Did they know? Was it just?

Speaker 1:

I don't think so, but Do they know what knife it was?

Speaker 3:

The detective described it as a large buck knife, like a hunting knife, maybe Like something that you'd cut something open with. I don't know.

Speaker 2:

Debbie fled town in disguise just days after Krista was killed. Do we know why she fled? What was she running from?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, having not spoken to her personally, but I did read a letter that she wrote to other researchers who approached her 15, almost 20 years ago, and she explained her thinking in that letter. She said I was freaked out. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I didn't know if this was something in our circle, because it happened during this time when we were all in the album together in this tight knit kind of group. She said uh, there was also. I had a stalker at the time, uh, and some people theorized that krista was mistaken for another blonde at the party, so she got a disguise and she flew out of there and she went to texas and that's where she's been since oh, interesting, interesting, don't blame her.

Speaker 1:

Do you think it's possible that they were not after Krista? Then again, her diary and her purse disappeared.

Speaker 3:

I really don't think that's a possibility, but it's just another theory to throw onto the fire. I will say that George Hamilton, which was one of the actors that was intimate with Krista, dated her for a time, months before her death. He said that he met Krista at a party hosted by Gray Fredrickson. And I read that and I thought, oh, I know Gray Fredrickson. He was the producer of the Godfather and a bunch of other movies. I had interviewed him years ago, so I sent him an email. He's since passed away. Sent him an email, he's since passed away. But uh, I said, hey, you remember krista helmed. You remember dating her? And he said, yeah, I think we went out once or twice. He said, uh, you know, I had heard that she was mistaken for another woman and that's why she was killed walking out of that house that night. But you know the person must. If that was the case, this person probably didn't know what the hell Debbie Danilu looked like, because he was facing Krista for a long time as he was trying to kill her.

Speaker 3:

I don't know what the lighting was like in 1977 on that road. I visited that road since, so I would imagine, like any residential street, it probably had some lighting.

Speaker 2:

And didn't you see balloons on the front, the back of her?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it was 10 on the front, 12 on the back, or vice versa.

Speaker 1:

I would just think to be that up close and to do that much damage you would at one point getting to 22 stabs, you'd probably realize that's not the right person, yeah.

Speaker 3:

I mean this was up close. He or she, or two of them, they were clearly at a certain point. They were out to defile her because of the trauma to her face and her head and to kind of decimate that chiseled beauty. Because I tracked down the original medical examiner who did the autopsy and the most surprising thing he said after he reviewed his files, he said after she was, she has a two stab wounds on her back. That that are the trajectory of them appear to me as though she was already on the ground and the killer stabbed from above on one side of the back and then walked to the other side of her and stabbed on the other side of the back. I mean that's overkill.

Speaker 3:

So he said that whoever did this was clearly pissed off. But the reason why I think there's a possibility of two attackers beyond the two weapons is why did she stand her ground, Even though she knew karate? Why didn't she just run away? One explanation of that could be that there were two attackers. She was cornered. There was nowhere to go. Why didn't you run to a different house down the road and knock on the door, scream your head off or whatever?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, depending on how they got hurt, where the first stab wound was and how painful it was, maybe she couldn't run or not run that fast.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but she had a chance to fight back. Because she fought back, she was physical against this person, right? So before the fatal wounds there was obviously time because she physically attacked this person in return.

Speaker 1:

Well, initially investigators thought her murder was connected to another Hollywood killing, the stabbing of actor Sal Mineo.

Speaker 3:

Sal Mineo yeah.

Speaker 1:

Sal Mineo. Both were murdered on the same day in the same neighborhood, which is a very eerie coincidence.

Speaker 3:

So just a year apart. One year apart, yeah, one year apart. Anything to that. I think the original investigator focused on this coincidence so long that it kind of put the other potential motives by the wayside, which is a shame, because Minio's murder was completely different. He was surprised during a home burglary. He came home and found this guy and the guy ran off and in a haste stabbed Mineo once in the heart near the parking garage where he just got out of his car and then ran off.

Speaker 2:

That doesn't sound anything like yeah, it doesn't, yeah, it's too different.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it was the date. It was the coincidence of one date later, right, one year later, which is crazy to me on its own. What is this guy going to say? All right, february 12th next year, I got to figure out who else I'm going to murder. It just seems weird.

Speaker 1:

Without a connection.

Speaker 2:

There was also another beheading that was nearby. Was this just kind of an eerie coincidence as well?

Speaker 3:

This one. I don't. I mean my. My gut says that there's more to this than mere coincidence. And in the the day after Krista's body was found, la Times started report on the murder and other papers in the area did too. Two and they connected these two murders because they happened less than a day apart from each other, within five miles of each other, and they were both extremely brutal. Sheila Green the paper said that she was 22 years old. She was actually 18 when she was killed. She was killed like five minutes away, up in the Hollywood Hills, in a park in the middle of the night, the Hollywood Hills, in a park in the middle of the night. So the park was abandoned. There's no houses nearby, so there are no ear witnesses to this one. She was stabbed repeatedly, she was gutted and eventually her head was cut off. And then less than 24 hours later you know, five minutes, less than five minutes, five minutes down the road there is when Krista was killed.

Speaker 3:

Now police tried to connect the two themselves because Sheila's murder was handled by the LAPD. I contacted them years ago and had them look and they actually looked in the cold case files for me. I found someone who answered the phone and she said oh, I'll pull that cold case file I'll see, cause I was interested in Krista's name in there. And she said Krista's names all over Sheila's file. Apparently they were trying to make the connection themselves but were unable to. She said but I have a list of a few potential suspects in Sheila's file here. I said, oh, let me give you a couple of names, see if any of them match. So I gave them a couple of names that were potential witnesses and Krista's or perpetrators, and none of them matched. Unfortunately, it wasn't until after that phone call with LAPD that I discovered a potential connection between Sheila and Krista was an escort, a male madam named David Marcus. I was like, okay, maybe David Marcus's name is in Sheila's file, but I can't get anybody on the phone that will help me look in that box again. So I don't know if David Marcus's name is in the list of suspects or not and that would definitively prove a connection between the two.

Speaker 3:

The argument against the same killer doing both killings was that Sheila was so much more brutal. But my point is Krista was stabbed 22 times, hit multiple times with a blunt object and left to bleed out in the middle of a residential street. Sheila was in the middle of nowhere where no one could hear her scream. Now, if Krista were in the middle of nowhere, could you imagine how much worse that murder would have been, if this guy is willing to stab her 22 times in public? Essentially, if Sheila and Krista knew one another, if they both saw something they shouldn't have seen and they're both gotten rid of within a day of each other, that's a possibility and the cold case detectives have never looked into it and it's hard to find that connection myself, even though I was able to find a relative of Sheila Green a few months ago after searching for years and it ended up being Sheila's daughter.

Speaker 3:

Sheila had a four-year-old child when she was killed at the age of 18. And the daughter kind of freaked out when I contacted her and said I've been, and I said I've been looking into your mother's murder and I think it's connected to another murder, a woman named Krista Helm and the daughter said that she heard very little about her mother and she didn't ask about her mother for the longest time, until she turned 18 or something. And then she asked her grandmother what happened to my mother. Grandmother didn't give any details about the gruesomeness of the crime. But the grandmother did say the police told us the person who killed your mother was the same person who killed this white woman on the same day. So her, her family, told her there was a connection between her mother's murder and krista's murder, because the family said that the police had told them that yeah what a quick.

Speaker 3:

I just can't prove it yeah, yeah. But they were both escorts. They were both escorts. If they were both escorts for David Marcus, then there is no doubt there's a connection.

Speaker 1:

Tony Sirico, best known later as Polly Wommets on the Sopranos, was sent to clean out Krista's apartment after her murder. So he did take a few things. What was the story around that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, tony Sirico used to be kind of associate of the Colombo crime family in New York City and he spent time in prison, a lot of time in prison. He had a big rap sheet when he got out he wanted to make it in Hollywood. So he moved to LA and apparently he was really close friends with Krista's best friend, the gay costume designer named Lenny Baron, which is an odd pairing Like this tough mobster. Tony Sirico and Lenny Baron are best pals. It was kind of strange bedfellows but apparently they got on famously.

Speaker 1:

He designed the Superwoman, the Wonder Woman, yeah.

Speaker 3:

So apparently, as Stephanie, krista's last roommate, told detectives, after Krista's murder it might have been that night, it might have been the next night Lenny and Tony went to the apartment her apartment and they took a lot of Krista's things. She knew that they took furs and jewelry and just a lot of belongings. They probably took the tapes the audio tapes too, because apparently there was a library of those audio tapes and the detectives only found a few of them. Now, was the diary at the apartment? Did they take that too? Or was the diary kept in Krista's purse that was stolen from her body? I don't know, nobody knows. But Tony Sirico went to that house with Lenny and they took a lot of Krista's things. Nothing nefarious, I mean, it has to go somewhere. It would go to her best friend. I'm not making any accusations. So anyway, the cold case.

Speaker 3:

Detectives find out about this Tony Sirico connection and they call him in to interview him and he, he denies knowing Krista. At first he says, well, no, I don't know what you're talking about. And then he kind of breaks down a little bit and says oh yeah, I knew her a little bit, but I don't have any idea about her murder, or I might've heard something. But and then when they asked him, where were you the night that she was killed, he called his attorney in and the attorney ended the whole thing. Tony Sirico would never speak again about it Not to the cops and not to me certainly when I talked to Krista's sister Krista's sister also lived in LA at the time.

Speaker 3:

She got home that Saturday from a beach excursion and got a phone call from Lenny. Lenny said I'm sending a car for you to bring you back to my house. So a car brought Marissa, krista's sister, to Lenny's house and Lenny told her Krista's been stabbed to death. That's how she got the news of her sister's death and then she had to go identify the body. The only other person in Lenny's house when she was told about her sister's murder was Tony Sirico. He was sitting on the couch looking at her the whole time. So, tony, he knew the sister, he knew Lenny. He had to have known Krista and he was there when her sister was told that Krista was murdered. So he's lying. He was lying. He's dead now. I can't do anything to drag it out of him.

Speaker 2:

In 2006, so nearly 30 years later, Krista's daughter was pushing for the case to be reopened. Why did it take so long for them to be willing to take a second look at all that?

Speaker 3:

Why did it take so long for them to be willing to take a second look at all? That Actually Steve Hodel shed some light on this, because Steve Hodel was the investigator on Sheila Green's murder, which I didn't know until I got her autopsy. So I contacted Steve Hodel. I said, hey, you remember Sheila Green, this case? And he said no, I have no memory, because even though it was a beheading, you'd think that somebody would remember that. But he said we investigated things for two months and then we stored it away. When Chris's daughter became a certain age and started to have her own children, there grew kind of a fire in her to learn more about her mom, and so she made the necessary contacts at the LA Sheriff's Department and just ringing that bell led to them reopening the case and looking into it again in the 2000s.

Speaker 3:

And their investigation really started with this new technology called DNA, because the medical examiner had taken samples of tissue from under Krista's nail and saved it for evidence. He didn't know what DNA was either, but I guess that was just a practice. If they found blood or something, they saved it, and so they had that tested, and it was a massively long and costly process. They had to apply for grants to finance it. It took three years to get the test results back. They came back as a female DNA sample. So they said, oh man, we're looking for a female killer. So they tested all the females that they interviewed and everybody came out negative. But I don't even know if it was a female killer. It was tissue. She was driving her roommate's car. She had been with her roommate that night which, by the way, her roommate Stephanie, was one person they haven't done DNA testing on. She could have been intimate with a woman that night. It doesn't necessarily speak with the person who killed her there was no blood in the sample.

Speaker 1:

What about the two women in the band? It was Debbie and Patty Collins Patty. The one that was Debbie and Patty Collins Patty.

Speaker 3:

The one that was incredibly jealous of Krista. Krista kicked Patty out of the band right before she was murdered. Patty apparently thinks she was interviewed by the original investigator and she didn't admit to having a relationship with Krista. When the Cole case picked up the case they couldn't find Patty. No one's been able to find Patty. It's too common of a name. I mean. I've continued to work on it. I texted about three dozen Patricia Collins throughout the country who are in that age group and I said hey, did you know Krista Helm? So I'm continuing to reach out to Patty Collins but nobody can find this person, if she's even still alive. But she's a main suspect. She's the major suspect Because it was either somebody listed in her book, in her diary, listed in her book, in her diary, it was a drug deal gone bad somehow, because there's another man named Rudy Mazzella.

Speaker 3:

That's in Krista's life, a real low life. And Rudy had admitted to a friend that he killed her and then when the police interviewed him he said I just like to brag about doing bad shit, I would never hurt Krista. And I interviewed Rudy's widow and his widow said I can't see that he would ever kill Krista.

Speaker 1:

I wouldn't even brag about that, just sometimes the choices people make.

Speaker 3:

He's the second main suspect and Patty Collins, I would say, is the big one.

Speaker 2:

My next question for you. So, beyond DNA, what supports those theories for them as the two strongest?

Speaker 3:

The diary is just juicy. Was somebody worried about being outed? I think that's all window dressing. Did Krista see something she shouldn't have because she was pretty loose-lipped about things? There were a lot of drugs back then, a lot of famous people, a lot of debauchery. Did she see someone influential, something really incriminating with someone influential, and they had her killed? I don't know. Was it mob-related, Was it drug-related? Was it a jealous lover? Was it the wife of someone she had an affair with? And then you throw in the Shah and the political stuff about that and her outing being with the Shah. It's honestly endless and it's a very difficult case to crack because all these people, they're not going to come forward. So your only hope is can I catch their best friend If they passed on? Can I get their best friend? Maybe they told their best friend or relative something before they died. That's really what you're hanging your hopes on.

Speaker 1:

It just seems very personal and it seems very rage oriented.

Speaker 3:

When you investigate a story like this, there are months and months and months and months of nothing happening, and then, oh my gosh, an avalanche of new stuff I'm finding and it's exhilarating. And then you go back to a year or more months of nothing happening, like there was. There was a time when I found out the true identity and true fate of Nicole's father and I was able to tell Nicole what happened to her birth father and it came out. You know, I was looking into it for years and then one night everything came to be. I found one piece of the puzzle and then I I looked at it and all the information was there, like it poured out, like his whole life story.

Speaker 3:

He outlived Krista. He didn't die in a motorcycle accident, he outlived her. But as it turns out, he was a con man. He would go to different states, he would marry people, he'd usually take all their money, and then he'd disappear. He would go to different states, he would marry people, he'd usually take all their money, and then he'd disappear. And then the widow would receive a call saying your husband's died in a motorcycle accident. So that birth father actually was married to two other women at the same time. He married Krista and he outlived her by about a year and a half and he finally he killed himself in a Days Inn in Savannah, georgia. I drove to the Days Inn, I drove to the police station and read the police reports.

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and this was all news to Nicole.

Speaker 1:

How's her daughter now?

Speaker 3:

Oh, she's great. She's great. I mean, it wasn't pleasant to hear that information and yet it was some degree of closure, I would imagine. But yeah, no, she's a great person and has a beautiful life that she's made for herself and her kids.

Speaker 1:

As far as physical evidence really, then the only thing that you have right now would be the DNA under the fingernails, or is there anything else that can be tested?

Speaker 3:

I think that's it. If they still have the jumpsuit that she was wearing that night, that's covered in her own blood, so I don't know how they differentiate where a sample from someone else might be on that jumpsuit, especially after so many years. I'm keen not to trust the DNA. Actually, I don't know that the DNA is definitive or if the DNA was processed correctly, because it took a long time. It was kind of bumbling the whole process of getting that done.

Speaker 2:

Leaves you more open for errors. I think in that process, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and it might just be circumstantial. It might not point to a killer, even if it is legitimate from what was on her nails.

Speaker 2:

So with any modern forensic technology, do you think there's ever a way for this to be solved?

Speaker 3:

They could do I don't know the exact term for it, but the genetic DNA, I guess, if they still have the reading or have another sample, I guess if they still have the reading or have another sample, and so they could find out the contributor of that DNA through genealogy. But that's cost prohibitive and no one's going to pay for it, and maybe not definitive.

Speaker 1:

That's how Joseph D'Angelo the Golden State Killer. That's ultimately how they found him through family DNA.

Speaker 3:

The same the cold case cop on Krista's case. He solved a murder using the family DNA. It was the wife of Bill Medley, the guy that sang that dirty dancing song. I've had the time in my life. They solved that through family DNA. Oh interesting, but it's too expensive and the LASD isn't going to do anything about this case. I think they're done with it. That's why I need to see those files. They're collecting dust, nothing's happening with it and nothing will ever happen with it. So why don't you give her family closure? Right, let them know what was found. So anyone from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department that might be listening to your show tonight or today, hey, get in touch with me. I'd love to get some inside track into seeing those files.

Speaker 1:

Jamie, as far as your book, when do you anticipate it would come out, or is that still TBD?

Speaker 3:

I'm about 70, 70, 75% through it, but the book will be done. When I it doesn't, I don't have to solve the crime to put out the book. That's not what I'm waiting on. I'm just waiting on being the most informed I possibly can to fill the book with information, correct information. So whenever that happens and hopefully it'll be soon I'll send it to, I'll shop around for an agent and a publisher and I'll get the thing out there.

Speaker 2:

Where can listeners follow your work and stay updated on this case, and even when your book does come out?

Speaker 3:

The best way to do that is to visit my website, whokilledchristahelmcom. There's a recap of her life story and murder investigation on those pages, some of what I've uncovered. I don't reveal everything on there, or else why would I write a book and I upkeep a blog there with updates when I find new photos or new documents. Oftentimes I'll put it there on the blog or I'll put it on the Facebook page I have. Who Killed Krista Helm on Facebook. Through the website or Facebook page, you can also submit a tip If you knew her, if you have some information, if a relative or friend used to know her and said something about her to you. However you receive the information, I'll be happy to receive it from you. However, you're willing to give it.

Speaker 1:

And what we'll do is we'll link all of that information in the show notes to your website and your social media so people can find you. Thank you Well, jamie. Thank you so much for coming on the show and wish you luck in hopefully finding some sort of resolution to the case.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, I'll keep you guys updated.

Speaker 2:

Definitely Love it, thank you.