by Steve Thompson and John O’Dowd With an Intro by Nicole Clements, the daughter of Christa Helm 2007
The late 1960s and early 70s were an exciting, if challenging, time for women of the day. Their moms were of the 1950’s—housekeepers and caretakers, mostly⎯who were often held against their will by the ‘right thing to do’. Divorces back then hadn’t much in the line of options, either.Then there was the incoming age of drugs, peace and rock and roll, and the newfound sexual freedom that no generation of women before them had the pleasure, and pain, of experiencing. My mother, Sandra Wohlfeil, was one of those women; finally finding her power in her sexuality, as opposed to the shame her adolescent experiences had taught her. Her beauty and charm were undeniable, and once she mastered the art of manipulation she found her way onto the path of her dreams. One day she decided that she was going to be a Movie Star…and she was going to make it happen any way she could.
A few years of modeling and “faking it” paid off when she moved to Hollywood and changed her name to Christa Helm. Living in a mansion, driving a new Jag, rich men falling all over her⎯wow, she had it made! Movie stars, sports figures, producers, politicians, and musicians…they were all hers for the taking, and so she took, and she worked, until she found herself on the Yellow Brick Road of fame. Guest starring in Wonder Woman and Starsky and Hutch, making B-grade movies, lathering in the Coppertone commercials of the day, and recording a disco album that would never see the light of day, all introduced her to the thrills and dangers of stardom. The lifestyles of many Hollywood starlets of the time were filled with sex, drugs, murder, and money. My mother gained it all, and then lost it all in a very short time.
Down to her last few dollars, waiting on a prime role and desperate to survive, she logged all of her escapades in a secret love journal. The journal is rumored to have been filled with the names of her many famous boyfriends, as well as the details of their more private moments. Her affairs, her beauty, and her strength enraged many who knew her, but those same attributes also brought her career growth and an array of people who truly loved and respected the beauty within her. In the end, those who loved and hated her would all be scrutinized under an investigation that remains open today⎯over 30 years later.
In the early morning hours of February 2, 1977, my mother was murdered. Stabbed over 30 times and bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, she bled to death under a parked car in an upscale Hollywood neighborhood. As of now, the case remains unsolved.
She was born Sandra Wohlfeil. She died Christa Helm. This is her story.
It was December of 1974 in Cincinnati when radio and TV commercials for a movie titled LET’S GO FOR BROKE seemed to be as omnipresent as department store Santas. The film itself had its heavily touted world premiere on Christmas Day at the 20th Century Theater, an old-time neighborhood cinema of the type being slowly replaced by suburban multiplexes. Leading up to the opening, the Cincinnati Post newspaper even ran a “Go For Broke” contest tying in to both the movie and the (then brand new) Ohio state lottery. The following Saturday, stars from the film came to town for a personal appearance at the theater. Its sexy blonde star Christa Helm, age 25, received a gift of expensive jewelry from the town’s mayor and posed happily for pictures with the event’s attendees (including future Sony executive Michael Schlesinger). Helm had grown up longing to be a movie star. After a single appearance in a low-budget horror film (1972’s excruciatingly bad LEGACY OF SATAN), LET’S GO FOR BROKE was her big break in show business…or rather, it should have been. After a brief run at the 20th Century, it was never seen nor heard of again. It’s never been released on tape or DVD⎯officially, or even on the so-called “collector’s market.” It isn’t listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) or any other film reference site. For all intents and purposes LET’S GO FOR BROKE seems to have never existed. Sadly, the same can almost be said of Christa Helm herself.
Who was Helm and how did she end up as a disco era Black Dahlia? On the surface, Christa was the ultimate party girl—a trophy blonde girlfriend and “Good Time Charlotte” who was widely known amongst the early seventies in-crowd for her big-name boyfriends and her boundless ambition to be a Lana Turner-style Hollywood star. She was described by one friend as “very beautiful, tall, about 5’9” with yellow-brown eyes—and smart. Perhaps too smart for her own good.”
Christa was born Sandra Lynn Wohlfeil on November 10, 1949 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the eldest of three girls. Her parents, Harry (who owned an asphalt company in Milwaukee) and Dolores (a housewife) were divorced three years after Sandy’s birth and Dolores became a born again Christian…as well as a very troubled woman plagued by alcoholism. While Harry Wohlfeil would remarry and have two more children, Dolores remained unmarried while entering into a series of violent relationships with several abusive boyfriends. “Many of these guys sexually molested my mother,” says Sandy’s daughter, Nicole Clements, “as well as her younger sisters Marisa and Candice (a.k.a. Debbie). It’s a shame but my grandmother was obviously a very tortured soul and for many years she wouldn’t admit that this sexual abuse even took place. My Mom idolized Harry, my grandfather, and he eventually saved her and her two sisters from the harrowing home life they had with Dolores.” At some point, all three girls moved out of Dolores’s home and stayed with their father and his new wife.
In addition to her dysfunctional upbringing, throughout her childhood and adolescence Sandy suffered from a chronic health condition that often required her to wear a bulky and uncomfortable back brace. According to Nicole, “Both my mother’s sisters told me that Dolores’s constant use of diet pills during her pregnancies caused all three girls to have skeletal problems.” Due to her dependence on the back brace and the countless episodes of sexual abuse she encountered as a child, Sandy struggled with a lack of self-esteem that by her mid-teens had morphed into some pretty wild behavior. She became rebellious and developed a brash and biting personality that nonetheless garnered her plenty of attention from the opposite sex.
At 16, Sandy fell in love with Gary Clements, a 26-year old man who was rumored to be involved in the mob in Milwaukee. Within weeks, she was pregnant and a shotgun wedding for the couple followed soon afterward, in Chicago. “Several months later, when Mom was 17, I was born,” says Nicole. “However, I never got to know my father. He kind of disappeared from our lives some time after my christening. I was told that Mom looked high and low for him and that she couldn’t find him. My father never did come back. A few months later Mom was told by someone that he had died in a motorcycle accident in Florida, but she was never sure if that was true. It seems so strange to say this, but it’s like he just vanished one day into thin air.”
Following Nicole’s birth Sandy began working as a waitress at Travato’s, an Italian restaurant on Milwaukee’s East Side that was reportedly run by the syndicate. She befriended another waitress, 23-year old Diane Mitchell, who remembers Sandy today with great fondness. “I liked her instantly,” says Diane. “She was down-to-earth and gregarious as well as very pretty. You wanted to be around Sandy, you know? She did what the rest of us only thought about doing! (laughs) We exchanged daughter and husband stories⎯I was in the middle of a divorce at the time and I had a little girl named Kellena who was approximately the same age as Nicole⎯and she told me that Gary had died in a motorcycle accident. Based on how she always talked about him, I believe he was the love of her life.”
During this time, Sandy met a college student named Rolf Siebolt (or Siefert), whom she began dating for a while, though not exclusively. Her ballsy and outrageous demeanor, coupled with her stunning, blonde looks, regularly attracted new suitors and Sandy was never at a loss for male companions.
Sandy and Diane eventually rented a two-bedroom apartment together near the restaurant. “It was a nice place,” says Diane. “I scraped together some furniture from my mother and Sandy found some also. At the time our mothers were caring for our daughters, but we had the girls over on weekends or whenever we could. Sandy and I would go out to eat almost every night after work. I remember her favorite meal was escargot. In fact, she ate it constantly! She spoke to everyone in the restaurant and would often invite people she barely knew over to our apartment for drinks. I was concerned and told her that it wasn’t safe to invite total strangers over to our place like that but she would just laugh at me. She said it was fine and that I worried too much. Lucky thing, most of the people she befriended were fine. There were a couple of strange guys, but you know, that was Sandy! She didn’t seem to be afraid of very much, if anything. In those days, Sandy didn’t drink heavily or do much more than smoke pot, when it was available. That was the full extent of her drug use back then.”
One day the girls boss invited them and two other waitresses from the restaurant to accompany him to a show at The Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The handsome, dark-haired actor and singer James Darren (of Gidget fame) was performing at the club and Sandy and Diane got to meet him afterwards. “He sat down with us at our table and we were thrilled,” recalls Diane. “James Darren was cute and wonderful and it was so exciting to hang out with him we both decided right then and there that we wanted to be Playboy bunnies! We thought we should try to get into the club in Chicago, though, as it was much larger than the one in Lake Geneva. My mother promised to watch my daughter and Sandy and I planned to commute by train to Milwaukee to see our daughters when we weren’t working. We went to The Playboy Club in Chicago and we were both hired on the spot. Several days later we very eagerly returned for our ‘bunny fittings’. They showed us the dorm where we would be living and then began training us in food and drink service. Sandy and I both went back to Milwaukee in preparation for the move and that’s when my mother threw a monkey wrench into the mix. For some reason she said she would not take care of Keleena for me, so after all that anticipation, I couldn’t take the job. I was devastated, as was Sandy. I told her to go to Chicago without me but she said she didn’t want to go alone, so neither of us ever became Playboy bunnies. I want to clear that up because at the time of her death, some of Sandy’s obituaries stated that she had once been a Playboy bunny and as you can see, that’s not accurate.”
In 1970, Sandy and Diane left their daughters with a friend’s mother, a Mrs. Gertrude Baker, in Burlington, Vermont, and moved to New York to become models. “Mrs. Baker was very nice,” says Diane, “and Sandy and I had no reservations about leaving the girls with her.” After they arrived in New York, Sandy and Diane got a room at the YWCA and began going on modeling interviews. “My God, it was ridiculous,” recalls Diane. “We had no portfolio, no experience and no money. Every newspaper ad for modeling was either for straight porno or lesbian-oriented photo shoots. It was all extremely seedy and we got very discouraged.”
The girls eventually got hired as waitresses at The Gaslight Club where Diane says, “Sandy dated singer Lesley Gore’s fiancé.” Soon afterwards she met, and moved in with, handsome Buffalo Bills football player Ray Abbruzzese. “At this point,” Diane says, “I got tired of living in N.Y., so I went back to Vermont, picked up my daughter at Mrs. Baker’s house and returned to Milwaukee. Sandy and I kept in touch and she told me she had begun taking singing and acting lessons at the Gene Frankel Workshop in Manhattan.”
By all accounts, Sandy’s status as Ray Abbruzzese’s live-in lover was brief and in 1971 she began seeing a wealthy Broadway producer named Stuart Duncan. He was later described as the primary heir to the Lea & Perrin Worcestershire Sauce fortune. During this same period of time, Sandy’s career as a New York fashion model took off and she was able to afford a luxury apartment in the city, as well as a new Corvette. When Duncan began working on his latest stage project, an original, religious musical that would later become the show Godspell, he reportedly helped Sandy make a financial investment (of an unknown amount) in the play. That investment wound up earning her a sizable profit when Godspell later became a huge hit on Broadway.
By late 1972 Sandy had acquired a second home outside the city in the gorgeous, celebrity-studded Hamptons section of Long Island. Stuart Duncan was said to have purchased the sprawling, beachfront house for Sandy, says Diane Mitchell, “…as a gift and a token of how much he loved her. Sandy invited me and another friend out to the house one time to spend the weekend with her. With one look around, it was very obvious to me that she was truly ‘living her dream’. When we arrived at the house, Sandy opened the door with her blouse undone and her breasts staring at us, and asked, “Well, how do you like them?’ I burst out laughing while our other friend gasped in shock. Sandy had gotten her breasts enlarged and she was obviously very proud of the results. Marisa, Sandy’s sister, was also there as well as a black female model who was a friend of Sandy’s. I did notice that she had become a bit jaded, but I guess it just went with the territory. I admit there were illegal drugs at the house that weekend…we all partied and had a good time. This is when Sandy told me that she had recently changed her name to ‘Christa Helm’. I asked why and she said, ‘An astrologer told me to do it!’ Sandy was always pretty outrageous.”
With her new identity as fledgling starlet Christa Helm firmly in place, the 23-year old went on to have several other cosmetic procedures performed to enhance her already stunning looks, and even paid for her daughter Nicole’s eyes to be fixed. “They had been crossed ever since birth,” says Diane.
One of the people Christa befriended during her time in NY in the early 70s was a young writer named Jeremiah Newton, now the Film, Television and Video Industry Liaison for New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan. In those years Newton was a relentless pub crawler and a frequent habitue of the Stonewall Inn, the legendary bar in Greenwich Village that became a landmark for the gay pride movement. Newton met Christa through his friends Candy Darling (the iconic transsexual friend of Andy Warhol’s who rock singer Lou Reed immortalized in his 1971 hit Walk on the Wild Side) and Lennie Barin, a flamboyant and well-known NYC costume designer. They were all part of a band of wild and freewheeling mavericks that tore through the town in the early 70s in search of notoriety, money and thrills.
In 2006, Jeremiah Newton contacted Nicole and remembered her mother in vivid detail: “Back then, Christa was close to both Lennie and Candy Darling, and while she and I weren’t what I would call best friends, she was definitely part of our group. At the time, Lennie Barin lived in a large, drafty loft on Bond Street just off the (then-unfashionable) Bowery. It was a large space with very high ceilings and over the years several young actors lived there with him, including David Dorman and Dennis Stewart, who was in the film Grease. Unfortunately, all of them (Lennie, David and Dennis) are now deceased, with at least two of them dying from AIDS.
“I thought Christa was beautiful and an extremely nice person. I recall she had gorgeous, creamy skin and great hair and she always seemed tan. I was told that she’d already had a lot of plastic surgery and I even heard that she had her legs made longer at some point, and that the surgery had been quite difficult. Christa was a straight-shooting, no-nonsense type of person (at least that’s how I perceived her to be). She was a fascinating girl.”
Jeremiah also recalled Christa’s luxurious apartment at the time. “She lived in a beautiful, seven-room duplex in the East 30s that she called ‘Merlin’s Magical Den’. I remember it had a stereo system that went on when you clapped your hands—very unusual back then. Her apartment was decorated with a lot of plush white furniture and I also recall an expensive display of crystal figures in the living room that was lit from underneath. I was told Christa was independently wealthy.” (More likely is that Christa’s income was subsidized in those years by several male benefactors.)
Christa and Lennie Barin seemed to enjoy an association that was both personal and professional, according to Jeremiah. “It was understood in our group that she was involved as a major investor in the play Godspell and that she had a lot of money. I believe she helped Lennie out financially. Thus, he gave Christa plenty of leeway in his life. Lennie designed a lot of her clothes and she actually wore one of the outfits he made for her when I got her a gig as a presenter at a local Emmy Awards show.”
Encouraged by the Broadway success of Godspell (though less so with its rather tepid screen adaptation in 1973) Stuart Duncan decided he wanted to try his hand at film producing. His first independent film, to be shot in the summer of 1973 in Haiti (to cut down on costs) would be titled LET’S GO FOR BROKE.
Described as both a “spy spoof” and a “high-spirited romp,” LET’S GO FOR BROKE was designed to serve as a star-making vehicle for the new film producer’s protégé, Christa Helm. Having dreamed of stardom from a very early age, Christa took with her all the trappings even though this was only her second movie. (Her bit role in 1972’s THE LEGACY OF SATAN, a Grade-Z horror film directed by DEEP THROAT director Gerard Damiano, was her first film, however it wasn’t released until 1976.) Christa’s entourage while in Haiti included designers, hair stylists, colorists and a makeup artist. Never averse to spending someone else’s money, Christa’s diva behavior undoubtedly played a role in the fact that the film’s $700,000 budget soon inflated to over one million dollars.
Filming in Haiti, especially in that era, was far from the easy tax dodge it might have initially appeared to be. Duncan had to be extremely creative to get around various government restrictions as well as the nasty bouts of Montezuma’s Revenge that regularly hit Christa and several others in the cast and crew.
In the PG-rated LET’S GO FOR BROKE, Christa plays Jackie Broke, a crusading reporter who becomes involved in an international kidnapping conspiracy. Her character was described in a press release at the time as “a cross between Barbara Walters and Barbarella.” Christa told columnist Earl Wilson in September 1973 that she would not do any nude scenes in the film because her family was proud of her and “…they invited everyone in the neighborhood, including the pizza man, to the opening of LET’S GO FOR BROKE, and it isn’t even finished yet!” Thus, the film is toned down a notch or two from similar “sexploitation” movies of the early 1970s, such as GINGER and COFFY.
The film’s outlandish, Bond-style plot deals with a wheelchair bound madman who uses a synthetic dog food on his enemies which causes them to turn into (believe it or not) raw meat! Reporter Jackie Broke is interviewing a feminist who is then kidnapped and taken to Haiti. She herself is later kidnapped by the same villains and also taken to the island where voodoo and various tortures come into play until she escapes and tackles the bad guys with her feminine wiles and elaborate skills in martial arts. As if all that 1970’s action wasn’t enough, Christa even gets to sing the title song over the film’s credits!
Back in New York after filming LET’S GO FOR BROKE, Christa continued her reputation as a disco-dancing, party-loving playgirl and was briefly linked with, among others, NY Jets football great Joe Namath. Seemingly never at a loss for male companionship, by 1974 the willowy and wisecracking blonde was living in New York with an assistant director named Ron Walsh. That relationship, too, would be short-lived and the next time Christa was mentioned in Earl Wilson’s column she divulged that she had been living with adult film producer/director Joseph (AKA Jonas) Middleton, with whom she said she had written a film script titled ILLUSIONS OF A LADY. Although the film was later produced and released to theaters (premiering in Sweden on September 2, 1974), Christa’s name did not appear anywhere in the credits. Before the film hit theaters stateside, the couple reportedly split up when Middleton had insisted in shooting some hardcore scenes for the picture. “He said, ‘I’m shooting it hard’”, Christa told Earl Wilson, “so I got in my car in my bikini and I drove home. He just sat there and let me carry out my own bags! I was livid.” The released version of the triple X-rated ILLUSIONS OF A LADY starred future disco superstar Andrea True (“More, More, More”) and porn legend Jamie Gillis. From all accounts, the film was your typical grind house fare.
Like many other beautiful young women before her, Christa eventually headed for Hollywood to improve her chances of becoming a movie star. Due to her popularity in N.Y. she had many contacts in L.A. and she continued her party girl lifestyle with many famous musicians, actors, politicians…and drug dealers. Shortly after her arrival in town, Christa (with her younger sister Marisa in tow) moved in with internationally renowned financier Bernard (a.k.a. “Bernie”) Cornfeld, who reportedly managed a billion dollar empire in banking, insurance and mutual funds. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Bernie Cornfeld was a rabid womanizer who lived with a virtual harem of magazine centerfolds, film starlets and call girls in a 39-room house in Beverly Hills called Grayhall Mansion. Located at 1100 Carolinian Drive, the house had been built in the 1930s and was once the home of the legendary silent screen star, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. before being taken over in the early 70s by the tiny-stature Cornfeld and his coterie of concubines.
From the start, Christa seemed to fit in just fine with the like-minded hedonists at Bernie Cornfeld’s love nest. By all accounts, the gorgeous starlet loved men, loved sex and was clearly not above using her charms (as many other young hopefuls before her had done) to further her Hollywood ambitions. Christa was smart and fearless, but she allegedly set parameters on what she would, and wouldn’t, do. On September 19, 1973, columnist Earl Wilson wrote that Christa had revealed to him that there had been a time that she was given a chance to be a high-priced call girl but that she had thought about it and then turned the offer down. Even so, Christa’s lifestyle at the time was far from being sedate.
While staying at Bernie Cornfeld’s, Christa’s ever-changing dance card is said to have included actors Warren Beatty, Michael Sarrazin, Desi Arnaz, Jr. and George Hamilton, as well as singer Johnny Rivers. Other names with whom she was linked in the press in the mid 1970’s included recording stars Mick Jagger and Englebert Humperdinck and acclaimed movie director Roman Polanski (whose beautiful wife, Sharon Tate had been murdered a few years earlier by the so-called Manson “family”). Christa’s daughter Nicole recalls staying with her mother in L.A. for an extended period of time and attending a party with her in Beverly Hills in which Nicole says she experienced “a contact high” off the fumes of all the marijuana that was there. “I also remember meeting Mick Jagger at that party,” says Nicole. “I’ve since learned that he and my mother dated for a while.”
Nicole learned to swim in Englebert Humperdinck’s huge, heart-shaped swimming pool (which had once belonged to 1950s sex symbol Jayne Mansfield) and says she was heartbroken when she had a play date with a then six-year old Chastity Bono canceled at the last moment by her mother, Cher. “I know that Mom was acquainted with Cher, but I don’t think they were close friends. You have to understand, in the 70’s my mother knew a lot of people in Hollywood. Whenever any male celebrities in town needed an escort I was told they always thought of Mom first. She seemed to know everyone in town and was very popular as the girl everyone wanted to be seen with.” In those years, Christa even told friends that the Shah of Iran had flown her overseas to his palace for a week. “There was a rumor that the federal government here in the States often used models and starlets like my Mom to get information from him,” says Nicole. “They apparently approached my mother to help them and she began filtering information to them on his activities. The Shah was said to have given her many beautiful gifts, like jewelry and furs. I was told he was quite smitten with her but you know, he had lots of other girls like Mom in his harem.” Said one friend of Christa’s, “She lived as a free agent and frankly enjoyed sex.”
Diane Mitchell had not been in touch with Christa for over two years when the latter contacted her again sometime in 1975. “She called to tell me that she was getting some bit parts and she also told me she was dating actor Michael Sarrazin. It was a short conversation…no more than a few minutes. I got her telephone number and told her I would call her back. However, when I did call her back some time later, the phone had been disconnected. That was the last time I spoke with Sandy.”
In spite of her ambition and seemingly good connections, Christa’s acting career in Hollywood was nowhere near as successful as she had expected it would be. In fact, after two years in L.A., she had only managed to grab a Coppertone TV commercial and two small TV roles: a bit part as a roller skating waitress on a 1976 Starsky and Hutch episode and a much larger role later that year as a bitchy beauty pageant contestant on a memorable episode of Wonder Woman titled ‘Beauty on Parade’. (Other sexy, 1970’s TV starlets that appeared with her on the show included Lindsay Bloom, Paulette Breen and Jenifer Shaw.) Christa continued to pin her hopes for true stardom on the still in-limbo LET’S GO FOR BROKE. At one point, the film had been retitled LADY J. and Christa continually plugged its supposedly forthcoming release whenever she made the gossip columns. According to one posthumous report, Christa had shot some new and possibly more explicit scenes for the film in Hollywood the year before her death but the (now R-rated) drive-in epic still eluded distribution.
Following her Starsky and Hutch and Wonder Woman roles, and hot on the heels of her singing lessons back East, Christa decided she wanted to cut a disco record. Needless to say, with her many personal and professional connections in town, that was all that was needed to get the ball rolling. Neil Bogart’s Casablanca Records brought in expatriated New York DJ Frankie Crocker (the man credited with coining the radio term “urban contemporary”) to produce the record but he and Christa reportedly butted heads. Eventually, though, she would tell friends that she had Crocker “by the balls” and that he would do whatever she wanted.
Soon after starting the project, Christa, by now exploring her self-professed tendency toward bisexuality, hooked up with one of the album’s back-up singers, Patty Collins. The two reportedly became inseparable lovers with Patty said to be quite proprietary of Christa’s attentions. Debbie Danilow, a fellow traveler with various rock groups of the period, was another back-up singer brought onto the project and she immediately clicked with Christa. According to Debbie, “Christa was flirty, and came on to me immediately but with a sense of timeliness. She let me know she was interested in me (sexually) but wanted me to be comfortable with her first. I more or less ignored her advances, all the time keeping my eye on Patty who was keeping her eye on me! To be quite frank, I have never had an interest in having a relationship with another woman, especially sexual. I have been married five times⎯but always to men! But I accepted Christa as she was, and I appreciated her interest in me, even though it was not something we would act upon.”
Debbie Danilow knew Christa only briefly but the latter made a big impression on her, perhaps even more so because she was to have met her on the night she was murdered. According to Debbie, though (and several other witnesses), she had left the party before Christa arrived. Today she describes the woman she knew as “…gifted and courageous, brilliant and creative, a rare shining light with no fear.”
The night that Christa met her destiny started out for her as many other nights had. She attended a party in Hollywood with her roommate, a woman named Stephanie Warshaw. They called a mutual friend, Sanford (a.k.a. “Sandy”) Smith, a Hollywood talent agent, who was also a frequent paramour of Christa’s, to join them, but he had refused. Undeterred, Christa decided to go to his house and try to talk him into going with the girls. She borrowed Stephanie’s car and drove to Smith’s house on Lloyd Place in West Hollywood. Smith later claims that he was sleeping when she got there and that he never saw nor heard her.
Either enroute to Sandy Smith’s house, or upon leaving (this part remains unclear), Christa was attacked from behind. Even though she was a certified Black Belt, the ambushed woman was unable to fight off her assailant. She was stabbed over 30 times (which tragically included numerous wounds to her neck and face) and then bludgeoned with a blunt object thought to be either the handle of a knife or a hammer. Christa’s badly ravaged body was found shortly after the attack by a young man crossing the street. Some contemporary reports say that he found her next to her car with her keys in her hand. “I was told that my mother was lying partially under a parked car,” says Nicole, “and that when he approached her, he heard her let out a long, deep breath⎯her last.”
Christa’s West Hollywood murder on February 2nd, 1977 received surprisingly little press coverage for someone so well known in the gossip columns and in Hollywood society itself. This led one writer to speculate in print that “who she knew and what she knew may be the reason her savage killing was barely reported.” According to witnesses who saw her earlier, Christa was carrying a handbag that night with the “Tommy Boy” logo on it but the purse was missing when the police arrived. It was never found and there has been strong speculation through the years that it may have contained her so-called ‘love diary’ and that’s why the killer (or killers) stole it.
Despite the horrific nature of Christa’s death, the story failed to make national headlines. The investigation into her murder proceeded apace for a time as police interviewed scores of people and searched fruitlessly for her diary which was said to be potentially explosive. When the case drifted into the background, a few crime writers tried to stir up interest, but to no avail. What remains in 2007 are two boxes of investigative notes and four notebooks filled with names and other pertinent information from the LAPD. Over 70 people have been interviewed in the past thirty years, and yet to date there has been no resolution to the case.
Christa’s daughter, Nicole, only nine years old when her mother died, grew up determined to see justice served. Toward that end, she has recently gotten the CBS-TV news magazines 48 HOURS and CELEBRITY JUSTICE to devote segments of their shows to the murder, and has herself put a number of cold case specialists on the scent. And yet, like Christa’s dreams of stardom, the case—and her killer⎯somehow continue to fall through the cracks.
Finally, with the rise of the Internet comes a growing “Christa Helm cult” based almost solely on her memorable TV appearance on Wonder Woman. Now, with a renewed interest in the long lost LET’S GO FOR BROKE (a movie that well could have made her a star), more and more people are suddenly hearing about the woman, the actress, and the horrifying way she died. As more and more people want to know what happened, the case will likely never grow completely cold.
Thirty years after she met her destiny at the cruel thrust of a killer’s blade, there is still a chance for justice⎯and even a type of fame, ironically⎯for the beautiful but ill-fated Christa Helm. And with it, perhaps, a sense of peace will come for one of Hollywood’s lost and forgotten beauties⎯a wild and free-spirited angel whose unfettered spirit did not justify the brutal way she left this earth.
Special thanks to Nicole Clements, Diane Mitchell and Darlene Thoresen for their help in the preparation of this article.