- A vicious murder...
- She had numerous wounds all over her body.
There were 23 wounds.
- A beautiful Hollywood starlet...
- She lived like a movie star
so people believed she was a movie star.
She was always surrounded
by a lot of really popular famous people.
- Mick Jagger, Joe Namath, Jack Nicholson.
- This was not the day of the internet
where you have people famous just for being famous,
but that's what she was trying to do.
- An enduring mystery. - It's been four decades
since Kristen was killed.
There's so many avenues of suspicion.
Every single one of them has reached a dead end.
- A tell-all diary... - I said if I were you
I would burn that right now.
- And secret audio tapes offer a glimpse
into a wild and dangerous life.
- Certainly possible that one of her high-powered dates
did find out about the tapes
and was not willing to let her keep them.
- While a daughter searches for answers...
- There was so much more to this.
I had a lot of questions.
I wanted to know what the hell happened.
- New evidence heats up this cold case.
- You take that stuff and test it and boy;
you've got your killer pretty quick.
Sex, drugs, famous Hollywood players,
as violent a murder as you could possibly imagine
and this beautiful actress; this story has everything.
- I'm Soledad O'Brien.
This is "Mysteries and Scandals:
Christa Helm, A Hollywood Murder."
Christa Helm was a gorgeous party girl
who pursued fame relentlessly, even recklessly.
At 27 she achieved that fame, but not in the way she intended.
Christa was found on a dark street
in Hollywood stabbed 23 times.
Investigators believed this was a passion kill
by someone who knew Christa.
Could a secret diary and hidden audio recordings
of Christa's sexual encounters provide a motive?
Will advances in forensic science
help identify her killer?
And how far will her daughter go to find justice?
Christa's life came to a tragic and violent end
on February 12, 1977.
Detectives take us through the events of that night.
- Christa had been at a party that evening
and left to go to her agent's house.
That was in West Hollywood.
- She drove to his house and she never made it inside his house.
- And she was attacked viciously,
bludgeoned to death, stabbed 20 plus times.
It was a very brutal killing.
- You can see the violence in the attack
and the violence in the amount of wounds.
That does not usually indicate a robbery.
That usually indicates passion.
Someone who was probably close to her, someone who knew her,
and someone who's very, very angry.
- But who wanted Christa dead? She was young, beautiful,
and on the verge of Hollywood stardom.
- Christa was an actress the day she was born.
I remember going to different shows and different parties
and just having, you know,
a glamorous time when I was with her.
- "Let's Go for Broke" was the film
that was supposed to make her a star.
It was described as a James Bond type movie.
A hot woman uses karate to save the day.
- You're learning, baby. - That was nasty.
- She did a really fun part in "Wonder Woman"
a little bit part in "Starsky and Hutch."
- She was on her way.
- My mom was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Her parents divorced when she was quite young.
From what I understand she was popular.
I understand there were a lot of boys with crushes on her.
She had a lot of charisma even in her younger years.
- In high school Christa and I both kept a diary.
We called them our rating books, you know, on a scale
of, like, to say 1 to 10.
If a girl had a boyfriend she would like to go
after that girl's boyfriend
to prove that she could get him.
She liked the thrill of the chase.
- My mom was 16 or 17 depending on who you ask
when she got pregnant with me.
She was working at a karate studio,
and the owner of the studio was my father.
MY grandfather insisted that they got married.
- Nicole was born and almost as soon as she was born
Gary took off.
He abandoned his new wife and child never to be seen again.
- She was definitely a single mom
in every sense of the word.
- Christa was very driven.
She knew that she wanted a better life for herself
and her daughter, the kind of life
that she probably could not find in the Midwest.
Her dreams involved the glitz and glamour of New York City,
Hollywood, movie stars and wealthy people.
- Christa's desire for fame forced her
to make a difficult decision.
- Right before my second birthday
my mom brought me to Vermont to live with a nanny
that was actually the mother of her roommate in Milwaukee.
She was approximately 19 at the time
that she headed to New York City to start her career.
The reason that she chose to have me not live with her
at that time was to keep me safe
to make sure that I wasn't exposed to things
that a child shouldn't be exposed to,
and that I had constant care.
- Christa was looking at the end result
like she wanted to make a better life for Nicole.
- New York City in the 1970s was edgy and dangerous with drugs
and crime on the rise,
but it was also a place where artists, musicians,
and actors could be discovered with the right connections.
- In New York City, Christa meets Lenny Baron
a costume designer.
Lenny was very connected to that glitzy,
free-wheeling kind of culture of the city at that time.
- She knew she had to live the lifestyle
and she had to give the image off,
and she lived like a movie star so people believed
she was a movie star even before she was.
- Christa wanted to be seen in all the right places,
at all the right parties and events,
and she made sure that she would put herself in those places.
- Christa submitted photos and stories to the gossip columns
so she could get some exposure.
- Christa boasted about hanging out
with many A-list celebrities.
- The stars that come to mind were Mick Jagger, Joe Namath,
Jack Nicholson.
- It seems as though Christa was a master of self-promotion.
- Whether it be as a model, an actress,
a singer she wanted to be famous.
She was not a celebrity.
This was not the day of the internet
where you have people famous just for being famous,
but yet that's what she was trying to do.
- Christa associated with all the right people.
- It's through Lenny Baron that Christa
first meets Stewart Duncan
who was a rather wealthy Broadway producer.
- Stewart Duncan was looking to produce his first film
and gave Christa her first break as a star
by casting her in the starring role of "Let's Go for Broke."
- Tell me something, Jackie, is it always like this?
- Only on the days when I have my karate lesson.
- Christa's efforts to create a name
for herself finally paid off.
- She plays an investigative journalist;
her name is Jackie Broke.
The film casts her as kind of a James Bond type.
It's an action movie. It's very ridiculous.
- Where do we begin, bye?
- We could start by oiling that wheelchair.
- In 1973 which Christa waited for her movie to be released
she moved from New York to Hollywood
where she was spotted in the company of some major players.
- I honestly don't know if she had
a dating relationship with them,
or just to be seen on the arm of them.
- I remember I woke up from a nap
and I went into her living room
and I was sitting on this big, white couch
and the guy that was sitting next to me was chatting
and I remember just staring at his lips
and I was absolutely fascinated.
He had the biggest lips I had ever seen,
and many years later I was watching TV
and Mick Jagger was on TV
and I'm like, "Those are the lips from the guy
that was on my mom's couch."
- I remember her sending me a card once
and she wrote on the back
"You wouldn't even know my life now,
but wow I can't wait to show it to you."
- One of the juiciest aspects of Christa's story
is the reported diary that she kept.
- It's my understanding that Christa took the diary
with her everywhere.
She was not trusting that she could leave it at any point.
- We had laughed because she said it's kind of like
when we were teenage girls,
you know, our rating system,
then she showed me her diary.
It was a step above a high school diary;
let's put it that way.
It was men that she had slept
with including some threesomes with women.
- She was with some very powerful people
and she made a point of documenting all of this
from people who probably did not like
to have this kind of thing documented.
- Christa made many of her friends aware of this practice,
and several of them told her to be careful.
- I did think she was playing with fire and I said
if I were you I would burn that right now.
- According to some reports she was planning on writing a book.
Other reports say she was keeping it
to blackmail various people
so I'm really not sure what the thinking was behind the diary,
but definitely a loaded book.
- While in Hollywood Christa landed a few small TV roles
and recorded a disco album,
but she also started running with a wild crowd.
- At this point in Christa's life she was not
just hanging out with the A-list people,
she was hanging out with the lower level,
seamier side of Hollywood
which quite often intermingled in those days.
- Christa said that she was in over her head
and that she got mixed up with the wrong people.
- I went to visit her
and we were just having such a great time.
I had just turned nine, and she started talking about
how she wanted to get out of the business,
and she had talked all those years about,
you know, you're gonna come live with me when you turn 10.
I couldn't wait to turn 10 and to be with her,
because I didn't want to be where I was.
It was really awful where I was
so I was pretty excited to turn 10.
- I want to say it was around Christmastime.
She sent me a letter saying that she was perhaps
going to disappear for a while.
So if I didn't hear from her not to be alarmed.
Then she told me that she was into something deep,
and she didn't tell me what it was.
Then she made the statement to me
that should something happen to her
that I was to take care of Nicole.
- Did Christa's Hollywood lifestyle
lead her down a dangerous path?
Was she being threatened?
If so who was threatening her? And why?
Before those questions could be answered Christa was dead
and the list of potential suspects included
some startling prospects.
Will secret audio recordings provide clues?
- 27-year-old starlet Christa
Helm
was found brutally murdered
on a trendy street west of Hollywood.
Did Christa's thirst for fame somehow lead to her death?
Did that scandalous secret diary scare
one of her famous suitors to the point of murder?
It was February 12, 1977.
- She went to a party with her roommate Stephanie Warshaw.
- Christa left to go to her agent's house,
that was in West Hollywood.
- The neighborhood was an older neighborhood
but somewhat exclusive.
The roads are quite narrow.
I think Christa might have known
that someone was following her or chasing her
because she obviously stopped fast.
The car that she drove up in was somewhat jammed into the curb
with the right front wheel hitting the curb.
- We don't know if that was intentional, or accidental,
or in a panic.
- And then she got out of the car.
People stated that they had heard some noises.
The one person stated that he heard two women
and a man talking loudly.
- Somewhere either en route to the house or walking back out
to her car she was attacked.
An ear witness heard these vicious screams
that sounded like a cat being skinned, and it scared him.
- She had numerous wounds all over her body.
I believe there were 23 wounds.
They were mostly in the front;
however she had some in the back also.
She had one on her neck and one on the side of her head.
- She had some on her hands;
those are classic defensive wounds.
- She was trained somewhat in martial arts.
She was not just gonna stand there
and let somebody attack her.
It was just a very violent encounter.
She was fighting. She wasn't giving up.
- I think part of it is seeing the police reports
with all the stabbings on her hands
and knowing how hard she must've fought.
That's probably the most painful part of it for me.
- The knife that was used in Christa's murder
was nowhere to be found.
- Based on the wounds we believe
it was probably like a buck knife.
It looked like a more heavy-duty blade
than would've been for a kitchen knife
and based on the amount of effort that went into this
and the amount of passion that went into it
I would believe that it would be one person.
- There was a very large blood stream running down the street.
- Whoever attacked Christa fled the scene
and left no evidence behind; Helm was clinging to life.
- A passerby approaches, finds her and he claims
that he was standing there
when Christa breathed her last breath.
- When Christa's body was found her purse was missing.
Supposedly she carried the diary with her
at all times in her purse.
- A typical street robbery you don't see
this level of violence.
They just want the goods and to get the heck out.
- And the reason we say passion is because
it's usually somebody that knows them
and that is involved with them,
and they're so angry
and they just keep going and they just can't stop.
The paramedics, when they arrived they pronounced
her dead at the scene.
As the coroner was removing the body underneath the body
were a set of keys.
They were able to take those keys
and match them to Stephanie's car
and so that's initially why they thought
the dead person might've been Stephanie.
- Those keys actually got them
into Stephanie Warshaw's apartment.
Obviously Stephanie told them no,
my roommate had my car last night,
and her name is Christa Helm.
What we know is that Christa never made it
wherever she was going,
which we believe was to Sandy Smith's house.
- According to detectives Christa's roommate Stephanie
told investigators that Sandy Smith was a friend
and that Christa called Sandy earlier in the night
to try to get him to join their party.
- Well Sandy Smith was a music producer.
He said that he was sound asleep, never heard anything.
The strange thing was, is there were other people coming
and going at his house that same night,
and the person that discovered her was going to Sandy's house.
- We kind of doubted that Sandy Smith was really asleep
at 1:00 on the morning; he was a party animal.
He had parties at his house all the time
and it just didn't fit Sandy's lifestyle.
- There was no physical evidence linking Smith to the crime,
and he denied any involvement.
- You develop your theories and you want your theory to be right
but at the same time you got to keep an open mind
because if you don't you're done.
- If detectives were going to solve this case
they needed to find a motive.
So they began looking into
Christa's personal and professional life.
- The recording sessions for Christa's disco album
were fraught with a great deal of tension and dysfunction,
and there are some very interesting characters
in that recording studio.
You have Blair Erinson, who was the keyboardist, Danalow,
who was a backup singer,
Patty Collins who was another backup singer.
- Detectives discovered the sessions were full
of personal drama and jealousy.
- Christa was a very sexual person.
Men, women, it didn't really matter.
- Patty Collins was having a relationship with Christa,
but Christa would not have considered herself a lesbian
and that upset Patty.
The investigators looked for Patty Collins
but they were never able to locate her.
- When two people are having a relationship
and they're in love or whatever and one ends up dying
and the other one disappears
I mean, that's a big red flag. I mean, why did they leave?
Are they afraid for their own safety?
I don't know, but she certainly disappeared.
- While investigators continued to search for Patty Collins
the other women in Christa's life
began to worry about their safety.
- Stephanie got threatening phone calls, or just hang-ups,
you know, people breathing. Just weird stuff.
- Stephanie had even received one phone call from a guy
that threatened that he was right down the street from her.
So she felt very frightened.
- I remember Stephanie left town because she thought
that she might be targeted next.
- Debbie Danalow also reported that she was scared.
After all perhaps the killer was in their circle.
- Debbie took a cab to the airport
and on the way she stopped
and bought some clothing, a wig, a disguise.
She said she thought maybe someone was after her
and they got the wrong person when they killed her
and she just wanted the heck out of LA
and didn't want nothing to do with LA anymore.
- After a few months the investigation
came to a standstill.
- What happens is when you work on a case for very long
and you're going down all these different roads,
and you have all these different motives
that you're looking at eventually what happens
is you run out of time
and that's what happened in this case.
- From what I know about the initial investigation
they didn't really dig into any direction very long.
They didn't pay a lot of attention to it.
- You look at the climate of today,
a story like this would make headlines every day.
There was none of that in 1977 when Christa was murdered.
It was curiously silent on the media front.
- Christa's only starring role "Let's Go for Broke,"
was never actually released.
It was just too bad because she wanted to be famous.
She deserved to be famous for something
other than being murdered.
- I think that I just kind of accepted the information
like a nine-year-old would
and didn't think anything beyond it.
Years later I had a lot of questions.
I realized that there was so much more to this.
I decided I wouldn't walk away from the pain anymore
because she was a real person and a whole person,
and I wanted to know what the hell happened.
- With little evidence and no leads Christa Helm
seemed destined to be a minor footnote in Hollywood,
but Christa's daughter vowed to learn the truth
about her mother's death.
How did she reignite this cold case?
Plus secret audio tapes of Christa's sexual encounters
never heard in public may provide some clues.
- Oh, this is strange.
- Would that be enough to murder somebody?
- Christa Helm was just
27 years old
when she was stabbed to death on a street in Hollywood.
Christa was an actress and a singer hoping for her big break.
She was also a single mom whose daughter was being raised
by a nanny in Vermont.
- I remember I was in the kitchen at my nanny's house
and the phone rang,
and she wasn't really nice to me most of the time
and she pulled out strawberry and chocolate wafer cookies--
I remember it very vividly--
and put them down on the table in front of me
and said, "I have something to tell you."
She said that my mom had been killed in a car accident.
I wasn't allowed to cry around my nanny.
Basically her response whenever I cried was, "Stop crying
or I'll give you something to cry about."
I was a little bit numb to it at that point
but the next day she sent me off to school.
The school knew that I had been told
she had been in a car accident,
but my best friend had found out
that my mom had been murdered and told me.
- The last time Nicole saw her mom Christa
promised they'd be living together soon.
- And I remember being outside of the school
lined up to go back into the school
and it hit me that I was almost 10
and it wasn't gonna happen, and I wasn't gonna go with her,
and I had that reality
that I was six months from being with her and she was gone,
and that was really the moment and I remember
I just fell down to the ground and just started sobbing.
I was never gonna see her again
and I was gonna literally spend the rest of my life in the hell
that I was living in there.
- The mystery of who killed her mother haunted Nicole
into adulthood
until one day she decided she had to know the truth.
- And right about 2006 that's when the questions
started to emerge was looking at my children,
something triggered in me
and that's when I started making the phone calls
to the LAPD and trying to get more information.
- And a lot of times that is what it takes.
That phone call sometimes is important, you know?
The squeaky wheel and sometimes it really helps
get things going again.
- At that point our captain asked Larry and I
if we would pull the case out and take a look at it,
and that's what we've been doing.
- In 2006, nearly 30 years after the murder
of Christa Helm Los Angeles cold case
detectives began investigating the case.
- The first thing we do is we start going through it
and see what's been done and what hasn't been done.
Well obviously one of the things
that had never been done in this case was any DNA.
- They found the DNA samples, the nail clippings,
and they found the bodysuit
she was wearing which was covered in blood.
- It's going to take a long time
before that DNA can get analyzed
and we can actually get some sort of a profile on it.
It isn't something that happens within a week or a month even.
- As detectives waited for the DNA samples to be analyzed
they attempted to re-interview people from Christa's past.
- Christa was killed outside a gentleman's house
by the name of Sandy Smith.
When we first got this case we decided okay,
we need to talk to him.
We need to verify some of the things
that he said in his initial report,
and we have a lot of unanswered questions.
- We spent a lot of years trying to find Sandy.
I don't know that anybody ever even found him.
- We are still actively looking for him
and would like to speak with him.
There's a lot of things about taking a case
that's 20 or 30 years old.
Things were done a lot differently back then.
Reports were written differently.
They didn't indicate the same amount of details
about an individual, even a witness.
So we've had an awful lot of trouble in cases
this old finding witnesses, finding people
because you don't have a lot of background information on them.
- Unable to find Smith, detectives turn their attention
to Christa's former roommate Stephanie Warshaw.
- Well my partner and I went and spoke
with Stephanie in person at her home.
- She was extremely cooperative.
She didn't seem like she had anything to hide
or anything that she was ashamed of.
- I definitely get a sense that Stephanie knows something,
not necessarily about who killed her,
but about some of the stuff that Christa had been involved in
during that period that could have led to it.
Not only did Christa keep her infamous diary,
but she also recorded audio tapes of certain encounters.
- These excerpts from audio recordings
obtained by detectives
have never been heard by the public until now.
- Oh this is strange, I feel like now
I'm getting a rush of feeling like a teenager in high school.
This is the first time I've made love
to somebody over the telephone before
I've done it to them in person.
But it did feel good.
Who lives in your beach house, just you?
Do you need a roommate?
- The original investigator talked to Stephanie Warshaw
and some other people that had heard of--you know,
these tapes existed.
According to Stephanie there were a lot more.
A lot more.
- It's certainly possible that one of her high-powered dates
did find out about the tapes,
and the diary,
and simply was not willing to let her keep them.
And she was not willing to give them up.
- Would that be enough for a celebrity, or a political guy,
or a high-profile person to murder somebody?
It's happened.
- Did the missing audio tapes provide a motive for murder?
Detectives focused on this new theory.
- Stephanie stated that Tony Sirico, another actor
who was fairly new to Hollywood at the time
came over to her house to check on her welfare.
- He was in LA because he was trying to make a career
for himself as an actor,
and eventually he got there.
And he got a very prominent role on "The Sopranos"
as the character of Pauly Walnuts,
who's really one of the most beloved parts of that show.
- Tony Sirico was a colorful character who moved to LA
from the East Coast.
According to an interview Sirico gave to the "LA Times,"
he had a long history of arrests,
but Tony denied going to Stephanie's house
following the murder.
- Stephanie believed that he had taken the tapes
out of Christa's room.
When we went to go to talk to Tony Sirico
he agreed to meet with us.
- Sirico claimed that he was an acquaintance of Christa's.
He knew her but not well. He met her a couple times.
It was very, "I don't really know her.
I know who she is, that's all and I heard
about her death on TV or somewhere."
- He was very nice throughout the whole interview.
When we got to the point of asking him,
about dates and times, locations
of where he may have been, his attorney called time-out.
They went outside and talked; his attorney came in
and said he wouldn't answer any more questions,
and that was the end of the interview.
We told the attorney he's not a suspect.
It's very frustrating.
- According to detectives Tony Sirico denied
taking the tapes from Christa's home,
but when that door closed another one opened,
and a new potential suspect emerged.
A suspect who couldn't keep his mouth shut.
- Rudy Mizella is another interesting player in this case.
He was a drug dealer,
very violent, volatile, a nasty guy.
He was roommates with Blair Erinson
who was the keyboardist in those recording sessions.
So he knew Christa. He was in that circle.
- Rudy was more of a thug if you will.
Drug dealer, enforcer type thug kind of guy.
There was rumors that Christa was storing
a large quantity of cocaine for Rudy.
- I believe it was a half a million dollars
worth of cocaine.
- And that she skimmed some of the drugs off of there
and that's why she was killed.
- According to detectives
there was another reason to suspect Rudy.
- We received information from the original investigators
that Rudy Mizella
was bragging about committing the murder of Christa.
- I think Rudy was very capable of killing Christa Helm
the way she was killed.
- After 30 years did investigators
finally have a solid suspect?
Was the mystery of Christa Helm's murder
about to be solved?
And what other revelations
would Christa's infamous audio tapes disclose?
- Nearly three decades after
the murder of Christa Helm
cold case detectives learn that an acquaintance,
a known drug dealer, boasted about killing her.
- When police started interviewing people they came up
with Rudy Mizella's name as a connection with my mom.
Blair Erinson and my mom were really good friends.
He and my mom were in the band together.
He was also Rudy Mizella's roommate at that time.
Rudy had actually bragged about having murdered my mom.
- When the original investigators went
and talked to Rudy
he changed that story very quickly.
You know, he said he had nothing to do with anything,
that he wouldn't do that, he wouldn't kill Christa.
- Of course very few of them are gonna tell you
they did something like this, you know?
- Still, cold case detectives wanted to speak
with Rudy Mizella.
Maybe he did know something about Christa's death.
Unfortunately the search for Mizella ended in disappointment.
- He was dead before we got the case.
- I was so excited that the police
were gonna go try to talk to him and get some witness testimony
and to find out that he had died was heart-wrenching for me.
Being able to finally put that piece of my mom's death away
would've been beautiful.
- We learned that Rudy had said that he was with his roommate,
and that he had not left the house.
We did talk to Blair Erinson. He verified Rudy's story.
- And they really haven't found any evidence
to support that theory that it was Rudy
even though so many of us believe
that the potential that he murdered my mom is very strong.
- Detectives couldn't say definitively
that Rudy killed Christa,
and the possibility that her killer
was still out there remained.
So the investigators took another look
at some of Christa's friends
including her former backup singer Patty Collins.
- The detectives let me know they had a lead on Patty Collins
and I was asked them questions about her
and I'd never heard her name before.
It was also the first time that I learned
that my mom had female lovers
which wasn't horribly shocking or anything.
It was just new news.
Kind of like wow, I had no idea but, you know, not surprising.
It was the '70s.
- According to detectives after Christa's murder
one of the audio tapes
that was found featured a sexual encounter
between Christa, Patty Collins,
and a man investigators said was a well-known movie star.
- Some tapes that were old, so we got them digitized,
listened to them and they were pretty much
what people were saying they were.
I can tell you that Patty and Christa were on the tape.
I don't think it would be fair to the third party
to state who that was
'cause he's a pretty high-profile person.
- I don't know if it would threaten their career.
It may threaten relationships.
- They were all three engaged in
a very intense sexual encounter,
and they all three seemed to be enjoying themselves quite well.
- Oh, I'm so hot.
Feel me, and grab me, and touch me,
and taste me, and bite me.
Oh, God, anything your passion dictates.
- The celebrity was interviewed and he claimed
that he sensed this jealousy,
this animosity between the two of them during that encounter.
- I believe he said that Patty Collins
was not happy with Christa.
That there was tension in the room.
She didn't want Christa to be with men.
- Patty Collins was known to have a great affection
for Christa.
A very jealous, volatile affection for her,
but investigators were never able to track
down Patty Collins.
- She's a person that we still want to talk to.
We've been looking for her
and we have not been able to locate her.
- Detectives couldn't find Patty Collins, or Sandy Smith.
Rudy Mizella was dead,
so they reached out to Christa's keyboardist
Blair Erinson.
Blair told detectives
that he and Debbie Danalow had once dated,
however Debbie denies that they were ever together.
- Blair and my mom were in the band together with Debbi Danalow
and several other people
and he and my mom
the night before her death had been intimate
and he told me
that he had seen Debbie Danalow actually in the window
watching them being intimate.
- Debbie vehemently denied that this encounter ever took place,
but the story prompted Nicole to reach out.
- I wrote to Debbie Danalow.
I just said "I know you knew my mom.
"I'm really just trying to just get to know
people that knew her."
And she did write me back a very lengthy letter
and kind of went back and forth between,
"Your mom was beautiful and charismatic and wonderful
and loving, " to, " Your mom was selfish
and harsh and walked on people."
The whole letter just kept going back and forth,
and back and forth. It was really confusing.
- Cold case detectives wanted to speak with Christa's backup
singer Debbie Danalow,
but that wasn't their only angle.
How would a scientific breakthrough change
the course of the investigation?
- This was the break in the case
that people had been looking for for 30 years.
- Cold case investigators
continued to run down leads
in the murder of Christa Helm.
Detectives were hoping Christa's backup singer
Debbie Danalow could shed some light on the investigation.
- When we met Debbie she was a very interesting person.
She didn't have anything bad to say about Christa.
- when we interviewed Blair Erinson he told us
that the night before that him and Christa
had just finished having sex
and they looked out the bedroom window
and there was Debbie Danalow peering in,
looking at them and she kind of waved at them.
They thought it was weird.
- Debbie denied catching Christa and Blair in bed.
She said it never did happen.
- Well, what Debbie Danalow told us definitely
was in conflict with what Blair told us.
- Debbie denied any involvement in Christa's murder
and cooperated fully with detectives,
but they were still missing pieces of the puzzle.
- Like a lot of family members of murder victims,
we're kept in the dark about a lot of things.
The lack of communication
has been extremely frustrating for me.
- I'm sure she's not happy with how this investigation has went.
It's just a very difficult case.
When you get a new lead you don't automatically
pick the phone up and call the family
because you're gonna put them through this constantly?
You'll drive them crazy.
- Detectives didn't have any new suspects,
but they did have the DNA sample from Christa's fingernails.
- So the DNA finally came back. It took several years.
- We've solved a lot of crimes from the '70s.
Now with the DNA is as good as it is you take that stuff
and test it and boy, you got your killer pretty quick.
- So my understanding of the DNA results
from the fingernail clippings from Ms. Helm told to me
by the detectives in this case
is that there was concluded it originated from a female.
- Remember Christa had high-profile
male and female lovers.
- Now that female DNA could come from the struggle;
it could also be from another encounter.
Maybe a sexual encounter.
- Even casual contact will result in DNA being deposited
and detected under someone's nails.
Something as simple as this very light
is really sufficient to deposit
detectible DNA under one's fingernails.
- That doesn't necessarily mean it's our suspect's DNA,
but it's another place to look.
- It certainly is a tool that the detective can use
to try to ascertain
as to the truthfulness
or deception of the answers that he or she is getting.
- When I found out that they had DNA I was hopeful
that this would be the end of it
and that the case would be solved.
I thought they had gotten the person.
- This was the break in the case
that people had been looking for for 30 years.
The test simply didn't exist at the time of the murder,
but modern science being what it is
they were able to check it now.
- That was the first concrete physical evidence that we had,
and that was super exciting.
- That person that left their DNA,
or their DNA got under her fingernails
would have a lot of explaining as to how that got there,
how that happened.
- The DNA databank is a combined DNA index system,
but everybody calls it CODIS.
You can search an unknown profile against that databank
to see if a previously convicted individual
might also be the perpetrator in your case.
- The DNA from Christa Helm's fingernails was entered
into CODIS and no hit.
So now it's up to us to find the person
that will match that DNA under her nails.
- After discovering the presence of female DNA
under Christa's fingernails detectives sought out the women
in Christa's past to test their DNA.
One of those women was Debbie Danalow.
- We did recover DNA from Debbie Danalow.
She was excluded as the donor of the DNA.
- What's amazing about this case is
there are so many suspects.
So many avenues of suspicion. So many possibilities.
Pretty much every single one of them has reached a dead end.
- Nobody in this has actually been cleared as a suspect
until we solve the case.
- There was still one more person
detectives wanted to speak with,
but they had no idea where to find her.
- We actually got a tip on the blog
that I maintain about Christa Helm
that I passed onto the cold case department.
Someone was describing Christa's backup singer
and girlfriend Patty Collins.
So we passed it on to the detectives.
- Patty Collins in this particular case,
one of the reasons we want to find her
is she never has been interviewed.
- There was a woman living in Montana
that had been down in Southern California
at that time period,
and her name was Patricia Collins.
- Could this possibly be the break detectives
needed to solve the mystery?
- Decades after the brutal
stabbing death of 27-year-old
actress Christa Helm cold case detectives were hopeful.
They thought they'd finally tracked down
a key person of interest,
Christa's other backup singer Patty Collins,
who'd been missing since the murder.
- When I heard that the detectives found Patty Collins I
was actually really hopeful and excited
that maybe this would be the break we needed
given that we had DNA and we may be able to connect her.
- So we contacted that person and we went up to Montana
and interviewed that person.
- It was not the right Patty Collins.
The person was very nice, and very cordial,
but unfortunately it wasn't the right person.
- I was a little bit heartbroken thinking oh, gosh,
we have to start from scratch again.
- So the status trying to find her now I would say
there's some people that need to be interviewed
that may lead us to her.
- We will find them.
That's the one thing about cold cases is they don't go away.
There's no statute of limitation on murders.
- Many people had very strong feelings one way or another
about Christa Helm.
There were potentially a lot of reasons
that somebody might want to kill Christa.
Could be she was blackmailing them,
could be somebody was blackmailing her.
Could be drugs, could be jealousy because of her success,
could be jealous because of somebody she was with.
There are any number of things that Agatha Christie
would look at and say,
"Ah, this makes a perfectly good theory."
And yet most of them seem to not go anywhere.
- In my lifetime I would like to see
this case solved.
- I'll never give up. I won't.
Till the day I die I will keep trying until we get our answers.
- Somebody out there knows.
I would hope that whoever that person or persons may be
that they would say okay, it's time to come forward.
- It's so important for my family,
and for me, and for my mom's legacy.
- Christa Helm pursued fame with a passion,
but that quest may have been her undoing.
Or was there something else entirely that led to her murder?
And what about Christa's infamous diary?
It's never been found.
Does that diary hold the clue to her killer?
Whatever the motive Christa's daughter continues to believe
that someone will step forward
and finally put to rest this enduring Hollywood mystery.
For more on "Mysteries & Scandals" go to oxygen.com