I never set out to be an amateur sleuth. But that all changed when I came across Christa Helm’s story in early 2014.
I was preparing to produce and host a podcast series on infamous Hollywood crimes; an offshoot of a podcast I had founded in 2007 called Movie Geeks United.
It began, as so much research does nowadays, on YouTube. As I was searching for a Tinseltown crime that fell outside the purview of the usual Black Dahlia and Manson lore, I happened upon a blurry dupe of a 48 Hours episode from 2008. Titled The Last Take, the episode introduced me to Christa, her life of star-studded decadence, and the tragic end which befell her on February 12th of 1977.
On the surface, her story could be dismissed as a far too common retread of the “starlet sexpot who seeks stardom and pays the ultimate price for it”. But there were meaningful resonances that kept me fixated.
It started with the deeply affecting testimony of the daughter she left behind, a little girl who lost the world she was promised before the age of ten. Then there were the colorful characters who populated Christa’s life, a flamboyant parade of personalities who could have easily walked off a studio backlot (and actually had on occasion). Equally enticing was the flood of potential motives behind her murder – each seemingly as viable as the next – running the gamut from a scorned lesbian lover to a paranoid Hollywood big shot to the dregs of a thriving 70’s L.A. drug culture. Then there was Christa herself, a woman of great beauty, a profound drive, and an endearing yet ultimately tragic core of naivete.
Christa’s story also reflected a wider landscape that I had always found captivating. She entered the big city foray during a time of great turbulence and possibility. The upheavals of the day – including the continued bloodshed in Vietnam, the Stonewall Riots, the struggle to achieve female empowerment, and the ever-widening generational divide – informed each step in the march toward cultural rebellion. These seismic shifts were most apparent on the streets of New York City, the reservoir through which many of the country’s social ills and revolutions flowed.
In the words of Christa’s daughter Nicole, the era represented “the incoming age of drugs, peace and rock and roll, and the newfound sexual freedom that no generation of women before had the pleasure, and pain, of experiencing. My mother was one of these women, finally finding her power in her sexuality, as opposed to the shame her adolescent experiences had taught her.”
Christa Helm was an invention who was birthed in the thriving energy of the Big Apple. A port of sorts for outcasts from small towns across the United States, New York was a place where you could flirt with a fantasy image of yourself and be met with a higher level of acceptance and freedom that you’d ever known before. Christa found her place among the major cultural forces of the time – from sports heroes to iconoclasts of the modeling world to the behind-the-scenes trendsetters of the Broadway stage.
The New York and Los Angeles of the 1970s are major characters in Christa’s life and the story that follows here. Their nightscapes shimmered and threatened; you could party with the glam elite one minute, and find yourself wallowing in the vicinity of dopers, dealers and alley rats the next. Christa knew both worlds, and either could have played a significant role in her untimely downfall.
In the decade since I first produced my podcast on Christa, the true crime genre has rocketed into the stratosphere. In the interim, a general overview of Christa’s story has found its place among the hoopla, playing out in television exposés, short e-books, and many other podcasts. Though I am admittedly a frequent consumer of true crime media, I often find it a distasteful genre. Far too frequently, it’s a form of grisly pornography that relishes degradation over humanity. The trauma of real flesh and blood human beings is anesthetized into a form of senseless entertainment for the masses.
Christa’s story is almost tailor-made for this kind of vacant approach. The temptation to “slut shame” proves too irresistible in countless recounts that have been offered over the years.
“She played with fire and had it coming,” is one version of a common shaming response. It must be said that Christa lived on the edge, for sure, but she never murdered anyone. Being left to bleed out on a Hollywood street with over 20 stab wounds to her chest and back is far too harsh a price to pay for her comparatively meager indiscretions. Besides, most of us die as a result of the choices we make, but that doesn’t negate our worthiness for empathy. We’re all part of the human experiment; struggling to advance and cope with the limited tools we’ve inherited along the way.
In my estimation, Christa was bred from a faulty teacher. To a profound extent, Christa’s choices reflected her desire to overcome the emotional disabilities her mother instilled in her, and an overwhelming need to achieve her accepting embrace.
But resisting the urge to psychologize (something I’m not qualified to do), I think it’s important to acknowledge that the motivating factors behind a person’s principal drives can rarely be distilled into one neat package. I once asked a biographer of famous Hollywood star Burt Lancaster if she ever felt she truly understood her subject. She spent many years conducting hundreds of interviews and browsing through research materials spread far and wide. She knew the building blocks and timelines of his life and career chapter and verse. But, as she admitted, what she was left with were her own perceptions of Lancaster which were derived from the resources at her disposal. There will always be aspects to any human being that remain stubbornly enigmatic. Can we ever truly know a person’s inner being and the private thoughts that inform it? Many people don’t even fully understand their own complexities.
In the quest to uncover some modicum of a deeper truth, a biographer’s greatest allies are informed interview sources. In that respect, I’ve been incredibly fortunate in the development of this book. They’ve ensured that the profile that follows is as instructive and accurate as their individual memories and perspectives allow.
These sources include, first and foremost, Christa’s daughter Nicole, who kept the channels of communication open with me through what must have felt like an ordeal. She met me in New York City, revisited painful memories, and never wavered in her kind support of this project. I hope I did justice to her mom’s story because it’s her story too.
Then there are the sleuths who came before me. In the mid-2000s, Steven Thompson and John O’Dowd authored a lengthy piece on Christa that appeared online. For many years, that article constituted the only substantial material you could find on Christa’s story.
Steven and his wife Rene have shown me a generosity and encouragement I could never have expected. They’ve been unwavering cheerleaders throughout this process, and I’ve aspired to live up to their belief in the project. I’m especially grateful to Steven for sharing his prior research with me, and consistently communicating via Facebook and telephone to review my findings and help me speculate on what it all meant. Meanwhile, John did an interview with me for my podcast and, crucially, put me in touch with Christa’s last roommate Stephanie, whose insights into the final months of her life have proven essential.
Now retired, both cold case investigators – Sargent Thomas Harris and Detective Larry Brandenburg – were also very helpful. Brandenburg, in particular, went out of his way to procure answers he could not immediately access by memory, but as you’ll read in the coming pages, those efforts proved futile.
Dozens of figures in Christa’s life were gracious and forthcoming in sharing their remembrances with me, especially her close friends and companions Darlene Thoresen, Kevin McKeon, Joseph Middleton, Richard Banister, and Denise Steinle. Others who were completely unaffiliated with the story showed tremendous interest and went the extra mile to assist me, including librarians, county clerk employees and members of the Los Angeles Police Department and Savannah Police Department Records Division.
Then there were those subjects who refused participation.
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department – the law enforcement agency that has overseen this case from day one –has shown no interest in advancing their long dormant efforts to find resolution.
In spite of repeated attempts to reach them through social media, email, phone calls, texts and written requests delivered through snail mail, key figures in Christa’s life wouldn’t budge in their refusal of my overtures. In some cases, their denials (or outright avoidance in offering any response whatsoever) were infuriatingly obstinate. They could have provided crucial details regarding Christa and her final days. Sadly, they failed to follow through on the weight of that responsibility. Perhaps tellingly, most of the subjects who preferred to keep mum inhabited the L.A. portion of her life.
But some, I’m sure, had their valid reasons for declining my requests. After all, the 70s were a time of great debauchery. Today, those same rabble-rousers are parents and grandparents, and perhaps not eager to relive a period of time from which they harbor deep regrets. It’s not easy to promote the depravity in your life, particularly in the service of a book that will be available to the public and to a writer for whom you have little earned trust.
Still others might have been unable to transcend the sting that Christa’s death inflicted upon them all those years ago. Some likely questioned what right I had to delve into someone else’s tragedy. This posed a quandary for me as well.
The writing of this book consisted of long stretches of nothingness where no one would talk to me, and no new revelations were being uncovered. These stretches were punctuated by fleeting bursts of exhilarating discovery. But whether I was experiencing frustration or elation, I never lost sight of those who entrusted me with their travails and sorrows, and I remained steadfast in my determination to do right by them. Their recollections – and the narrative of Christa’s life and murder – became sacred to me. In the end, any sense of imposter syndrome faded away, and I felt secure in the belief that you either go all the way in, or you don’t go in at all.
Tracking Christa’s journey became my journey. Thank you for your interest in taking that journey with me.
