Signed in Blood, St. Martin's True Crime Library

They came from different backgrounds, but when Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt met in the 1980s, they became fast friends. For decades, they made a game of engaging in petty crime—bad deals, insurance fraud, robbing wallets. But after years of dabbling in theft, they came up with a way of making their pocketbooks even fatter. They found a way to make murder pay…

It was a plan out of Arsenic and Old Lace: Befriend a homeless man, place life insurance policies in his name—and then have him killed. Their scheme worked once…but then police started to notice a pattern. Helen and Olga were discovered, and in front of a court of law, their coldhearted pact to kill and cash in would finally be exposed.