Hollywood Secrets

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Speaker 4 She was my movie star mommy.

Speaker 4 Someone has been walking around for 30 years having committed this heinous crime on my mother.

Speaker 4 I want to know what happened to her.

Speaker 4 My mom was killed killed February 12th, 1977.

Speaker 4 I was nine.

Speaker 4 We found all kinds of things.

Speaker 4 Two huge boxes.

Speaker 4 All kinds of evidence, all kinds of interviews, all kinds of information that nobody had looked at before. They were just tucked away.

Speaker 5 The crime scene where Krista Helm was murdered in 1977, she had left a party in West Hollywood and she was attacked and stabbed numerous times.

Speaker 5 She was a very good-looking girl.

Speaker 7 How's my technique coming?

Speaker 8 Oh, you're doing fine.

Speaker 5 She was not against posing and seductive type photos.

Speaker 4 She was a young Hollywood starlet, party girl.

Speaker 4 She hung out with Joe Namath, Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty.

Speaker 5 Jack Nicholson, the Shah of Iran.

Speaker 6 We knew that she kept a diary.

Speaker 4 My mom was a very smart woman. I can definitely see her keeping track of things.

Speaker 6 We don't know if there may have been extortion.

Speaker 5 A lot of people have told us that there's a diary that's missing.

Speaker 4 They think that the diary was what was taken from her body when she died and that she was going to blackmail people with the diary.

Speaker 4 We don't know all the names in that book.

Speaker 6 We know that she did have some tapes of famous people sexually.

Speaker 10 I could send you into a sexual

Speaker 10 frenzy.

Speaker 4 She had intimate relations and intimate knowledge knowledge of a lot of famous people.

Speaker 4 I think it's going to be a huge surprise when people find out who committed this crime.

Speaker 12 She got in way overhead.

Speaker 13 She was playing with the big boys.

Speaker 13 Somebody killed her because of what she knew.

Speaker 6 The last take tonight's 48 Hours Mystery.

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Speaker 4 The dream was me standing in a room overlooking a parking lot.

Speaker 4 The wall is glass, and I see my mother walking through where I notice someone coming up behind her.

Speaker 4 They've got a knife in their hand, and I just am screaming and screaming and screaming for someone to help her.

Speaker 12 Krista Helm's daughter, Nicole, doesn't want us to mention her last name or reveal where she lives because her mother's killer has never been caught.

Speaker 4 There was a strength and a drive in me that I always felt from a very young age came from her. And I held on to that as my little piece of my mom.

Speaker 12 Where did you come from?

Speaker 4 She had a charisma that was just overwhelming. She had a warmth that just made people just be drawn to her on a regular basis.
She was powerful and strong and took no bull.

Speaker 4 She was a very complicated, beautiful human being.

Speaker 12 And says Nicole, her mother was born to be a star.

Speaker 4 From the time she was a little girl, she would dance and sing and tell everybody she was going to be a movie star when she grew up. And of course, in little Milwaukee, Wisconsin, no one believed her.

Speaker 12 Krista Helm had the kind of story that Hollywood legends are made from. Smart, sexy, and stunningly beautiful.
She was the classic small-town girl with a big Hollywood dream.

Speaker 12 Krista was determined to become a star, and she had the energy and unyielding ambition to make it happen.

Speaker 13 I remember her one time saying, well, Darlene, I'm not going to be a Midwestern housewife.

Speaker 12 Darlene Thorson was Krista's lifelong friend.

Speaker 13 We had a saying between the two of us,

Speaker 13 all's fair in love and war. And she lived by those words.
Nothing would really stop her from getting what she wanted.

Speaker 12 Not even a shotgun wedding when Krista was just 17 years old.

Speaker 4 She was a teenager. He owned a karate studio.
They were married in Chicago, and the morning after their wedding, she woke up in their honeymoon suite, and my father was gone.

Speaker 12 That was back in 1967. Nicole came along a few months later.
But within a couple of years, Nicole's young and ambitious mother grew restless and took off to follow her dream.

Speaker 12 The first stop, the bright lights of New York, where she found work as a model.

Speaker 12 Taking the city by storm would be impossible with a toddler in tow, so Nicole was left behind in the care of a good friend. But Krista promised mother and daughter would one day be together.

Speaker 4 I was supposed to be with her when I turned 10.

Speaker 12 Until then, Nicole was a visitor in her mother's life.

Speaker 4 When I was with her, she made me feel so important. The moments that I had with her really strengthened the belief that, you know, I wasn't.
She didn't just throw me away.

Speaker 4 She was really waiting until I was 10, till she felt safe.

Speaker 12 Her motto good looks and splashy personality made Krista unnatural for New York's party scene in the early 70s.

Speaker 16 If she walked in a room, If everyone in the room hadn't stopped to notice her walk in, then she would come back in again and get it right.

Speaker 12 Krista's sister, Marisa Rahm, was also a sometime actress. She was often at Krista's side.

Speaker 16 Very driven, very good. Very ambitious, really young.

Speaker 12 One of the first people Krista met in New York was a wealthy patron of the arts named Stuart Duncan. He took an interest in Krista's career, opening doors for her.

Speaker 16 She was throwing parties for big names, the Rolling Stones, for

Speaker 17 she

Speaker 16 actually got Bachelorette of the Month with Cosmopolitan. There were definitely big figures in her life.
The Shah of Iran, she dated, and he sent her jewels.

Speaker 12 Krista also picked up a fancy new best friend for life,

Speaker 12 a flamboyant New York clothing designer named Lenny Barron.

Speaker 16 She just had him around, sort of feeding her sense of stardom, like the entourage.

Speaker 18 And then in 1973,

Speaker 12 Krista got the break she'd been waiting for.

Speaker 12 Stuart Duncan gave her a starring role in a movie called, Let's Go for Broke.

Speaker 4 When they were filming it, hair and makeup and people just fussing over her all around, and she was in control of the whole scenario, and that was my mom.

Speaker 7 We forgot the customary bow.

Speaker 12 The movie opened up in Cincinnati in 1974 and promptly closed closed in just four days.

Speaker 12 Undeterred, a few months later, Krista headed straight for Hollywood. But there's only going to be one winner in this contest and you're looking at her.
She landed bit roles in Wonder Woman.

Speaker 7 I have personal things I'd like to go over with you. It won't take long.

Speaker 12 And Starsky and Hodge.

Speaker 7 How about an 8x10 glossy of my 6'2 ⁇ boyfriend?

Speaker 4 It was always a great adventure when I'd go to visit my mom.

Speaker 12 Nicole remembers visiting her mother at a Beverly Hills home.

Speaker 4 This was a spectacular mansion. It was absolutely enormous.
I'd never seen anything like it. It was the first place I'd ever seen that had maids' quarters.

Speaker 12 That mansion belonged to a famous financier, Bernie Kornfeld, who was once profiled by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.

Speaker 19 Bernie goes no place without companions, principally female, notably attractive, and inevitably more than one.

Speaker 4 Sitting on the couch, I was very, very young, and there was a big, huge party going on, and lots of smoke in the air. And I kept just staring at this fella's lips.

Speaker 4 They were the most fascinating thing I had ever seen. I just stared and stared and stared.
It was Mick Jagger.

Speaker 16 We were hanging out in clubs that Warren Beatty was at, Ryan O'Neill, Jack Nicholson. If you were a beautiful enough starlet,

Speaker 16 you know, you would get to go into the

Speaker 16 clubs, and so that's where we were usually hanging out.

Speaker 12 Krista was not only ambitious and adventurous, she also liked to keep score. Her friends say she kept a secret sex diary complete with a rating system.

Speaker 13 What she did was she gave

Speaker 13 these people a rating, like, you know,

Speaker 13 1 to 10, so to speak.

Speaker 12 While Krista partied in Hollywood, Nicole prepared for that much talked about mother-daughter reunion.

Speaker 12 But it would never happen.

Speaker 12 Krista Helm was stabbed to death.

Speaker 14 I can still remember it, and it was a,

Speaker 14 I couldn't tell if it was a screaming baby or a cat being killed. It was a horrendous, horrendous scream.
It was terrifying.

Speaker 12 Actor John Grise was 19 then. He was staying at his mother's house just down the street from where Krista was attacked.

Speaker 14 I remember I jumped out of bed and of course I, you know, my father had recently passed away and I had his pistol and I pulled his pistol up.

Speaker 22 I was frightened to death.

Speaker 14 It sounded like it was happening right here.

Speaker 12 Grise stood in his yard but didn't hear anything more or see anything and went back inside.

Speaker 14 The next day the sheriff came knocking on the door and they asked if any of us had heard anything unusual in the middle of the night. And then they told me that somebody had been murdered.

Speaker 14 And I remember the police officer saying, had I walked into the street and looked down, I would have seen her.

Speaker 14 But I only looked down the sidewalk.

Speaker 12 Turns out, Grise had his own connection with Krista.

Speaker 14 There were a lot of girls like Krista. I met her a couple of times, beautiful girls who just kind of seemed to work their way through the various corners of Hollywood.

Speaker 4 The reality hit me that I wasn't going to go have this beautiful life with my mommy that I'd been dreaming about for so long.

Speaker 4 And I fell to my knees outside of the school and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

Speaker 12 As the detectives started to investigate, they soon realized the case would be very difficult. With Krista's complicated life, there were plenty of people who might want to kill her.

Speaker 13 I I think that she was a little girl that made it big in Hollywood. A little girl that knew too much.

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Speaker 12 I'll come back with help.

Speaker 4 It's the only chance for all of us.

Speaker 12 At first, detectives thought Krista Helms' murder, that night back in 1977, might be connected to another sensational killing.

Speaker 12 The stabbing of actor Sal Minio, best known for co-starring with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

Speaker 12 The papers had a field day with the similarities. Krista had been stabbed and bludgeoned to death in front of her agent's house in West Hollywood.

Speaker 12 Minneo was murdered one year earlier on the very same day, February 12th, in the very same neighborhood. There were no known witnesses in either case.
But the Salmino lead fizzled.

Speaker 12 The suspect in his murder was believed to be in jail when Krista was killed.

Speaker 23 The 21-year-old murder suspect had to say in his jail cell when advised of his charges last night.

Speaker 12 So detectives started to look more closely at Krista's celebrity-studded love life

Speaker 12 and her infamous diary.

Speaker 12 Research, perhaps, for a tell-all book.

Speaker 13 She was someday going to write a book and she was going to expose all these people and it was going to be a bestseller.

Speaker 12 But Krista's scandalous diary had vanished. It may have been in her purse, which was missing from the crime scene.

Speaker 12 With that crucial piece of evidence gone, the investigators hit a string of dead ends.

Speaker 4 I think the initial investigation was a complete mess. I think that they didn't pay attention.
She was a young Hollywood starlet, party girl.

Speaker 12 Nicole mourned the loss of her mother and the life they were supposed to have together.

Speaker 12 She raised her own family in the Northeast, but a few years ago, she felt compelled to find out what really happened.

Speaker 4 I think that it's my job to make sure that people know who she was and what happened to her. She went through way too much in her life to have her death be so

Speaker 4 dismissed.

Speaker 12 After years of pressure from Nicole, a new generation of detectives took the case.

Speaker 12 Larry Brandenburg and Tom Harris are LA Sheriff's Department hotshots, homicide detectives with the Cold Case Unit.

Speaker 12 How do do you go about investigating a murder that occurred three decades ago?

Speaker 6 Well, actually, you try and go back in time yourself. I mean, you try and go back and look at it the way it looked that night.

Speaker 6 When we're talking about it in the middle to late 70s, I know back then it was a lot of the free love, a lot of the

Speaker 22 sex, sex, drugs,

Speaker 9 Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Speaker 12 Krista's written diary wasn't the only way she kept track of that long list of lovers. It turns out Krista was tape recording her sexcapades with all those celebrity boyfriends.

Speaker 10 I promise to cause you nothing but pleasure.

Speaker 6 She did have some tapes of famous people sexually.

Speaker 12 She's a well-known list of people. Can you tell us any of those names?

Speaker 12 I don't think it would be fair to those folks at this point to do that how significant do you consider those tapes they're a very significant part of this case nothing but pleasure

Speaker 12 because those sex tapes could have supplied a motive for someone to kill krista

Speaker 6 we don't know if there may have been extortion or a thought of extortion

Speaker 13 that scared me a lot

Speaker 12 Her friend Darlene warned her against making the tapes.

Speaker 13 I thought it was dangerous. I thought she was playing with fire.

Speaker 12 But here's a shocker. Just like Krista's diary, most of those tapes have also disappeared.

Speaker 12 The hunt for the missing tapes has led detectives to another new twist. It's an angle right out of the Sopranos.

Speaker 24 You're a maid guy now.

Speaker 24 It's your turn to make some real money, and I get to relax a little.

Speaker 12 Tony Surico is the actor best known as Pauli Walnuts of The Sopranos. But 30 years ago, Sirico was a Brooklyn tough guy trying to make it in Hollywood.
Here he is in a 1978 movie, Fingers.

Speaker 14 What's on your mind, pal?

Speaker 5 Brilliant.

Speaker 6 Back in 1977, Tony Sorico was an upcoming actor, and he knew some of the same people that Krista knew.

Speaker 6 We know that after Krista was killed, Tony Sorico was sent to her residence to check on the welfare and watch over her roommate for a few days and to make sure that she was okay.

Speaker 6 According to the roommate, Tony Sirico removed some tapes out of Krista's room,

Speaker 6 never to be seen again.

Speaker 12 Krista's roommate, who to this day is too frightened to talk publicly, also told detectives that Tony took some of Krista's furs and clothing. At the time, police never questioned Tony.

Speaker 6 That's Tony Sorico right there with the blood, but that's part of a film they were making.

Speaker 12 But in 2006, when the new detectives took over, they paid him a visit. Have you spoken to him?

Speaker 22 Yes,

Speaker 21 we have.

Speaker 12 Has he been cooperative?

Speaker 6 Not exactly.

Speaker 22 Mr. Sirico told us at first that he didn't even remember the victim.
He didn't really know Krista, and that he didn't even remember that she had been killed.

Speaker 22 And then his memory got a little bit better that, yeah, I think I had heard about her being killed, but I didn't really know her that well just met her in passing.

Speaker 12 According to detectives, Sirico denied going to Krista's apartment and denied he even knew the roommate.

Speaker 22 We started getting to the point of

Speaker 22 where he was on that day and asked him those type of questions and the interview was abruptly stopped by his attorney.

Speaker 22 And we explained to Mr. Sirico also that he was not, was not a suspect in this investigation.
He was considered a witness and someone that we were trying to glean information from.

Speaker 12 Years later, most of Krista's missing things did turn up at the home of Krista's closest friend, Lenny Barron, her designer and confidant.

Speaker 4 All of the furniture, all of the crystals, the Shah of Iran had given my mom a lot of crystals and jewels and beautiful things. She had fur coats, all of which were found in his home.

Speaker 12 Police now think it was Lenny who sent Tony Sirico to clean out Krista's apartment to protect her.

Speaker 6 We believe that he didn't want her reputation soiled, didn't want the information out there about her surreptitiously recording people or even her sexual activities.

Speaker 12 If he had so many of her things, her personal effects, is it possible that he may have been the one who had the audio tapes in the written diary?

Speaker 22 It's possible.

Speaker 12 Possible, but Lenny can't tell us. He died about 10 years ago.

Speaker 12 And Tony Sirico's manager says Tony didn't want to talk to us.

Speaker 12 But there's another new clue.

Speaker 12 This time from Krista's friend Darlene, who never spoke with police until now. Right before Krista died, she sent Darlene a postcard with a cryptic message.

Speaker 12 She said, darn,

Speaker 13 I am in way over my head here.

Speaker 13 I'm into something

Speaker 13 that I can't get out of.

Speaker 9 Because Rocky's the one that said that Krista's sitting on $300,000

Speaker 9 worth of dope and levels.

Speaker 22 If we could find her, it might be helpful. This is another gentleman we haven't been able to locate.
Can't talk to him because he's dead.

Speaker 12 Without Krista Helm's sex diary to guide them, detectives Tom Harris and Larry Brandenberg have had to dig deeper to find people who were involved with her.

Speaker 6 We've got to find Rocky.

Speaker 12 They've discovered that Krista may well have been in over her head.

Speaker 22 She had a lifestyle that was provocative.

Speaker 22 She had a lot of upscale friends that were famous, some of them. And then she also had a lot of friends that were on the seedy side of life, if you will, street people.

Speaker 12 So Job One has been tracking down all those people Krista socialized with in her two years in Hollywood.

Speaker 6 If someone is violently murdered, you're never going to forget that.

Speaker 12 So far, though, few of them remember much or are saying much.

Speaker 6 It's very interesting to go back and talk to these people because people can't remember what their lies were. They can remember what the truth is.

Speaker 24 The neighborhood that we responded to in 1977 was a pretty upscale neighborhood. I was the lead detective on the case.
I think we came in from this direction. We drove in this way.

Speaker 12 Brandenburg and Harris returned to the crime scene with the one witness who is happy to cooperate.

Speaker 24 She was probably

Speaker 24 about like this.

Speaker 11 Okay.

Speaker 12 83-year-old retired Los Angeles detective Larry Ganzi.

Speaker 24 Earrings. She had earrings on, I know that.

Speaker 12 They're hoping to jog the memory of the original investigator.

Speaker 24 She had no identification. We don't know who is it.

Speaker 12 About the night Krista died.

Speaker 24 We found out that she was a party girl. She had come from a party with a girlfriend.
She was headed over to see her agent, Sandy Smith.

Speaker 5 The house looks the same now as it did then, didn't it?

Speaker 11 Exactly.

Speaker 24 This is me right here.

Speaker 12 They also opened the box of evidence Gansi started 31 years ago.

Speaker 22 Bringing back some memories.

Speaker 24 Well, yeah, yeah, she was bleeding quite profusely there. You could see that she had numerous stab wounds in the chest.

Speaker 24 Our thoughts then we had a rage killing, that somebody was really upset with this girl.

Speaker 12 What strikes you as odd? or unusual or interesting about this case?

Speaker 22 Well, the way she was attacked really sticks out. It was violent, a lot of passion involved.
She was stabbed 22 times.

Speaker 12 22 times. Yes.
Bludgeoned.

Speaker 6 And bludgeoned also.

Speaker 12 This doesn't strike you as a random act of violence.

Speaker 11 No.

Speaker 6 It would be more of

Speaker 6 somebody was very mad at her.

Speaker 12 There was a side to Krista that seemed to provoke people.

Speaker 7 You sound almost charming.

Speaker 12 Because while many thought she was a barely passable actress on camera

Speaker 16 off camera she was an infamous drama queen Krista was the role of her lifetime she loved the daily drama one of her recurring dramas starred her beautiful and younger sister Marisa who learned the hard way the lengths Krista would go to we'd party together and we'd go to this party and that party I was excited that I was meeting this actor and dating that actor and they were calling me and she knew that and was really upset that it was me.

Speaker 16 When she started to see that I was attracting more attention than her, that started to wear on her.

Speaker 12 In an apparent jealous rage, Krista cut her sister off and threw her out of the apartment.

Speaker 16 She basically said, okay, now you're out on your own. She didn't care if I didn't have any money or a place to live.

Speaker 12 That sounds like there was a very cold side to her.

Speaker 16 Oh, just a definite cold.

Speaker 16 Cut it off and get back in her own world and push you aside.

Speaker 12 Would she step over bodies to get what she wanted? Would she use people?

Speaker 16 Yes, I would say so.

Speaker 12 Is that possible that that has played into what happened to her?

Speaker 16 I've always presumed that that was a part of what happened to her.

Speaker 12 Harrison Brandenburg think so too. Wonder if Krista might finally have crossed the wrong man.
As they dig deeper into the case, they find a startling confession of sorts.

Speaker 22 So this guy bragged about doing the killing.

Speaker 12 His name? Rudy Mazzella. And he was known for his anything goes parties where Christo was a frequent guest.

Speaker 6 He was very flamboyant, very strange. He would do certain things like wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and a gun belt with a six gun on it.
And that's the way he walked around the house.

Speaker 12 But Mazzela was also a known drug dealer.

Speaker 22 He was a thug.

Speaker 12 With a bad reputation.

Speaker 22 He's a violent kind of guy. He's known to carry guns and knives.
We spoke to his ex-wife, deathly afraid of him, said that he would threaten her.

Speaker 12 What was Krista doing with him?

Speaker 22 He was in that other circle of friends, what we call the dark side of her life, the street people, the drug dealers that would come to these parties.

Speaker 7 Rudy is a pretty big guy, pretty powerful and scary guy.

Speaker 12 In this interview in July of 1977, a woman who frequented Mozella's house told police what she had heard about him.

Speaker 7 My boyfriend told me Rudy had told him that he had murdered Krista.

Speaker 7 He didn't give a reason, but he said that he had murdered Krista.

Speaker 12 And was that followed up on back then?

Speaker 22 They did question Rudy, yes. They questioned him.
He denied any involvement in it.

Speaker 22 Rudy was the kind of guy that would brag about things that maybe he didn't do just to get some notoriety and to boost his standing with people.

Speaker 12 With no other evidence tying was hello to the crime. The original investigators left it at that.

Speaker 22 Was he serious? We don't know because the person he bragged to is deceased and so is Rudy, so we can't talk to either one of them anymore.

Speaker 12 And now, three decades later, the Cold Case squad can only wonder, is there any other lead?

Speaker 6 I don't know that we can actually eliminate anybody at this point.

Speaker 12 It does seem like something or someone had Chris despooked.

Speaker 4 My last visit with her, she had actually said that she was leaving Hollywood.

Speaker 12 Nicole now believes her mother realized she was in some kind of danger.

Speaker 4 I think that the fight just got to be a little too difficult for her.

Speaker 4 It got ugly. There were a lot of dark people and dark lifestyles that she didn't really want to be part of.

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Speaker 12 31 years into the Krista Helm case, detectives Larry Brandenburg and Tom Harris have uncovered a long string of boyfriends and girlfriends that Krista left in her wake.

Speaker 12 They now suspect jealousy may have been a motive in her murder.

Speaker 6 We've identified people that she was involved with who

Speaker 6 had other girlfriends, and those girlfriends found out about Krista.

Speaker 6 There were a couple other females that we believe that she was involved with sexually that were upset because she would be with men.

Speaker 12 So she had relationships with both men and women. Yes.
And felt no compunction or loyalty to be with any one person. Yeah.
And no one person was off limits to her.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I mean, that was her lifestyle.

Speaker 12 The detectives are now focusing on Krista's final stab at fame, a recording session she set up in the winter of 1977.

Speaker 18 Go on and dance, dance, dance, child.

Speaker 12 They've gotten a first-hand account of the session from backup singer Debbie Danilo. She and Krista became good friends.

Speaker 18 Dance in the face of fear.

Speaker 20 Once in a while you meet someone and it's like you've known them forever. Soulmates, maybe.
And when I met Krista, it was like she was an instant soul sister.

Speaker 12 The detectives now believe that the session exploded in a storm of jealousy and betrayal. It began when Krista apparently got involved with the records producer.

Speaker 23 The top 10 to top 25.

Speaker 12 Well-known DJ Frankie Crocker.

Speaker 19 The fast Frankie in the city.

Speaker 16 And I think that she was probably a boyfriend or sleeping with him. And so he had a beautiful Beverly Hills mansion and part of the music scene, part of the party crowd.

Speaker 12 And what was he like?

Speaker 11 Oh,

Speaker 16 very full of himself, rich.

Speaker 16 I'm somebody in Hollywood. You're not.

Speaker 20 Debbie says Krista flaunted the relationship I remember that day telling Krista I said I don't think that it's gonna work out with Frankie because I don't think he likes the way I'm handling the the songs and she said don't worry about Frankie I've got him by the balls

Speaker 12 Debbie also claims Krista was having an affair with the other backup singer. Her name was Patty Collins, and Patty didn't like to share.
Patty was very, very jealous of

Speaker 20 anyone being around Krista. Very jealous, very, you know, just watch your step kind of thing.

Speaker 12 As if things weren't complicated enough, the session's keyboard player, Blair Aronson, has told detectives that he was casually involved with Debbie.

Speaker 6 We were told originally that they were boyfriend, girlfriend. Some come back and say maybe casual dating.

Speaker 5 Some come back and say, well, that, you know, they were a pretty heavy item.

Speaker 6 I believe that Debbie had a more serious commitment to Blair than Blair did to Debbie.

Speaker 12 Then Blair dropped a bombshell. He told detectives that he slept with Krista the night before she died and that Debbie caught him.

Speaker 6 We interviewed Blair Aronson and he explained to us that he and Krista had spent the night together, were in bed, and they got up, were sitting on the edge of the bed and happened to look over and saw Debbie looking through the window waving at them.

Speaker 22 Blair and Krista were startled, obviously, by seeing her outside the window, but they laughed about it, and she ran away.

Speaker 12 Debbie adamantly denies any involvement with Blair or that she saw him in bed with Krista. And Blair declined to speak to 48 Hours.

Speaker 12 But detectives find the entire recording session suspicious, especially since Debbie and Patty were both abruptly pushed out. It seems Patty took the news especially hard.

Speaker 6 And apparently she was very upset about it at that time. We don't know if she was removed by Frankie Crocker or by Krista herself.

Speaker 12 When Debbie talked to the original investigators about Krista, she pointed the finger squarely at Patty.

Speaker 20 I told them that she had a

Speaker 20 A female lover that seemed that she was extremely jealous. That was my first thought, that maybe her her female lover killed her.

Speaker 13 Because

Speaker 20 every time that I was around her, she seemed so threatened and so dark.

Speaker 12 Just days after Krista's murder, Debbie packed up her entire LA life, disguised herself in a wig, and then made a mad dash out of town.

Speaker 20 I didn't want anybody to know who I was.

Speaker 20 I was afraid that somebody had killed her because she knew something she wasn't supposed to know. I thought, well, what if they think she told me? You know,

Speaker 20 I had never been around anybody that had been murdered

Speaker 20 and I just wanted to be away from it.

Speaker 12 Frankie Crocker is now dead. Still, the Colkade squad is left to wonder, could Krista's killer have been a woman? It just seems like a pretty violent, really vicious attack for a woman.

Speaker 6 I don't think I would characterize it as that. I think when somebody is in a violent rage, I think their gender doesn't matter.

Speaker 12 Then investigators get a break. One of Krista's fingernails, preserved for three decades, yields DNA.

Speaker 6 It's obvious to us that she put up quite a fight.

Speaker 6 And a lot of times in that situation, you're going to find skin cells or blood or something from the other person under the fingernails.

Speaker 12 Even more intriguing, that DNA is from another woman. Did you try to match the DNA to a specific person?

Speaker 6 Well, we are requesting from people that we interview. At times, we're requesting oral swabs.

Speaker 12 One of those people is Debbie Danilo. Do you consider Debbie Danilow a suspect?

Speaker 22 Everyone's still a suspect.

Speaker 11 I've been searching my heart to remember

Speaker 8 songs I've left behind.

Speaker 18 For nine long months, I questioned why my God would forsake me.

Speaker 12 Debbie Danilo put Hollywood and Krista Helm behind her many years ago, but she never really got over the murder that struck so close to home.

Speaker 20 Changed me. It changed the way I looked at everybody in the group.
You know, you start looking around going, who did it? Who did this? Who could have done this? You know?

Speaker 12 And it's scary.

Speaker 12 And then recently, out of the blue, she got a letter from Krista's daughter, Nicole.

Speaker 20 And it said, hi, my name is Nicole.

Speaker 20 I think you knew my mother as Krista Helm.

Speaker 20 And I am trying to find out information about her because I didn't know her.

Speaker 12 Shortly afterwards, Debbie heard from the cold case squad.

Speaker 20 Of course, they had gotten my name from Nicole. And they said, can we talk to you? I said, sure.

Speaker 12 But detectives Harris and Brandenburg didn't just want Debbie's memories, they wanted her DNA.

Speaker 12 And what they really wanted to know was if it matched the scrapings they had found under Krista's fingernails.

Speaker 6 We did collect DNA from Debbie Danilo, and it was not her DNA that was under the fingernails.

Speaker 18 So now I'm letting go go once.

Speaker 12 There is no other evidence tying Debbie to the murder either, and she has told police she had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 22 Tom and I are in agreement. Debbie Danlow is

Speaker 22 much farther down on the scale as a person of interest in this case now.

Speaker 12 With the help of an anonymous tip, The Colke squad finally tracked down the woman they believe was Krista's girlfriend, Patty Collins.

Speaker 22 Patty and Krista had a relationship, according to more than one person. They had a close sexual relationship and a professional relationship.

Speaker 22 At some point, they had a falling out with one another, it looks like, according to these people. And was it serious enough for a murder? We don't know that, but we'd like to talk to Patty about that.

Speaker 5 Hopefully, she's home. Hopefully, we can get an interview and maybe collect a sample of her DNA.

Speaker 12 Patty was happy to talk to the detectives and willingly gave them a DNA sample. But they were stunned by what she had to say.

Speaker 8 I do not know Christie Helm. I have no idea who she is.
They showed me a photograph they thought was me and it's not me.

Speaker 12 We're trying to bring closer. Not only that, Patty claimed she was never in Southern California.

Speaker 6 She was in Southern California, we know that.

Speaker 5 But for some reason, she's denying ever being there in her life.

Speaker 22 I got a feeling we'll be back to talk to her again.

Speaker 22 I really do.

Speaker 12 But not until they get the DNA results and confirm her identity. Meanwhile, they'll go after other leads.

Speaker 6 It's an ongoing process.

Speaker 9 We still have a lot of work to do.

Speaker 24 She was probably

Speaker 24 about like this.

Speaker 12 The Colke squad's best lead might turn out to be the oldest lead of all. And it comes from the man who first worked the Krista Helm case, 83-year-old Larry Ganzi.

Speaker 24 Sal Minio's killer is the same killer that killed Krista Helm.

Speaker 24 In my own mind, I'm so sure of that, I'd bet the deed to my house that he is A1 number one suspect.

Speaker 12 Remember, Sal Minio was murdered a year before Krista on the same day and in the same way, a stabbing and in the same neighborhood.

Speaker 24 Method of operation, the area of operation, was so similar to Sal Minio's killing. It's almost identical.

Speaker 12 The man ultimately convicted of Minneo's killing was 21-year-old Lionel Williams, and he was thought to be in jail at the time of Krista's murder.

Speaker 12 But the Colkade squad recently learned that Williams wasn't arrested until after Krista's death. Even more surprising, he was never questioned about Krista's death.

Speaker 24 I don't even know what he looked like. They never saw him.
Never got the chance

Speaker 24 to talk to him.

Speaker 12 Shortly afterwards, Ganzi and his partner were reassigned. And then Gansi left the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department for good.
That's when the Krista Helm case went cold.

Speaker 24 I think this case has affected me personally more than any I worked. And you're not supposed to get involved.

Speaker 24 You're supposed to put everything behind and you're you're neutral. You're just doing a job

Speaker 24 But

Speaker 24 with me anyway,

Speaker 24 I Couldn't put this one to bed

Speaker 12 Meanwhile Lionel Williams served 12 years for the murder of Salmino in 1990.

Speaker 6 He was released from prison He has been in and out of jail since this occurred. He's been arrested for other crimes.
We believe we have an idea where he is living.

Speaker 6 We believe that he's not that far away, and we're going to go talk to him.

Speaker 12 So, after sifting through all the drama of Krista Helm's life, the myriad lovers, the diary and the sex tapes, the tales of jealousy and betrayal, Could it really be that detectives will discover that Krista was simply the victim of a random, late-night street robbery at the hands of a career criminal?

Speaker 4 She was so young. She had so much time left.

Speaker 12 Krista's daughter Nicole, now 40, hopes that discovering the truth about the murder will finally bring solace.

Speaker 4 She was 13 years younger than I am right now when she died.

Speaker 12 All Nicole has to remember her mother by are a scrapbook,

Speaker 12 a couple of B movies,

Speaker 12 and the stuff nightmares are made of.

Speaker 4 In the end of one of her films, The Legacy of Satan, she's stabbed to death at the end of the film.

Speaker 4 And that was a little eerie as well.

Speaker 4 All I know is that she had told several people that she was terrified of Nys, and she believed that was the way she was going to die. That's kind of

Speaker 20 freaky. Yeah.

Speaker 12 But Nicole still has a child's hope that justice will somehow be served, even after all this time.

Speaker 4 I believe that the person is still out there, and I I believe that we're going to find closure one day for my mom, and we're going to find justice.

Speaker 4 And I believe that this person is, they know that they did it,

Speaker 4 and we're ready.

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