Keith Morrison leans into LA’s Black Widow murders in new Dateline NBC podcast

Keith Morrison, longtime broadcast journalist and award-winning “Dateline” correspondent, has reported thousands of stories in his career, and he doesn’t play favorites with them.

“Every story is my favorite story while I’m working on it,” Morrison said during a recent phone interview from his Laguna Beach home. “I remember a lot of them intimately, and only a few do I sort of forget.”

But there are some he wanted more time and space to explore.

They’re the stories that warrant more attention and explanation and can’t be wrapped up in a one- or even two-hour television segment. That’s why Morrison said he’s thrilled to have the opportunity to host Dateline NBC podcasts, which allow him to go more in-depth with his reporting and further introduce listeners to key players in these standout cases.

His new six-episode podcast “The Thing about Helen & Olga” — which comes on the heels of the successful six-episode “The Thing About Pam” podcast in 2019 — will be available starting Tuesday, Nov. 16 on most platforms.

This is one of those stories Morrison just couldn’t stop thinking about.

On the surface, Olga Rutterschmidt and Helen Golay, both of Los Angeles, were saints. In the late ’90s and early ’00s, the two women, who were both in their 70s, helped homeless men, providing them with food and shelter. However, by 2008, they were convicted for the murders of two men, Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid, that they had supposedly been helping. The women were also found guilty of nine counts of fraud: They’d taken out multiple life insurance policies on both men. As the story unfolded, these killings became known as The Black Widow Murders.

“I won’t say the characters are inspiring in a good way, but they are certainly fascinating,” Morison said. “The nature of what they did is binge-worthy, and I found myself fascinated by the way they behave. There’s a spot later on in the podcast where we’ll get to hear a frank conversation between the two, which happens to be recorded, about who did what to whom and what the repercussions ought to be.”

While this case has been covered on shows like “Dateline,” “Deadly Women,” “Wicked Attraction” as well as being loosely worked into the storyline of a 2009 “CSI:NY” episode starring Kim Kardashian and Vanessa Lachey, Morrison said that there are things in the podcast that haven’t been shared before.

For instance, Morrison dives into how investigator Ed Webster followed the money, a move that ultimately helped uncover a motive for the murders. There’s also Jimmy Covington, a homeless man that Morrison describes as having “movie star looks,” who ultimately declined the women’s offer for free food and rent, although that didn’t stop them from taking out a life insurance policy on him as well.

“Jimmy smelled a rat, I guess, but he was one of those people who understood that it’s wise to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Morrison said. “He figured there had to be something in exchange for what they’d offered. What this story also shows is that we have a big problem with homelessness, a very big problem. It’s terrible blight on what is the richest country on the planet.”

Morrison said in his many years of working in the realm of true crime, he’s learned that not all villains “are like in the cartoons, scurrying around, twirling his mustache with an evil grin, plotting what he could to take advantage of in the situation.” The two women in this case were “kindly old ladies” for whom fraud and murder was “easy as pie,” he says.

“Then they added to their profitability by trying to do a bunch of other things that were clearly against the law,” he said. “So in the end, how much did they get away with that we still don’t know all about?”

The current fascination with true crime is nothing new. Morrison attributes its recent uptick in popularity to the rise of social media as well as the proliferation of internet sleuths sharing information online in real-time. There was also a bit of a surge during the pandemic as shows like “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” and “Why Did You Kill Me” were popular on Netflix and true crime podcasts continued to thrive in the months of lockdown.

Morrison began his career at local TV stations in his native Canada before moving to Los Angeles to join Southern California’s KNBC in 1986. He joined NBC News two years later and in 1995 was hired as a correspondent on “Dateline.” Now, at 74, Morrison is treated like a rock star at things like CrimeCon, an annual convention for true crime enthusiasts, authors, podcasts and more. He said the reception still surprises him since “people rise in their seats like it’s the Rolling Stones or something … it’s weird.”

But Morrison understands the interest in the topic.

“Human beings have always been interested, almost from an evolutionary standpoint, about ‘What goes bump in the night around me?’” he said. “It’s more of an ‘I think I better understand what that might be and what kind of behaviors I have to watch out for,’ especially when so much of the bad stuff that happens to us occurs at the hands of people who we thought were our intimates.”

Morrison is also known for his soothing voice and ability to describe in great and almost poetic detail the most gruesome of crime scenes. It’s a delicate dance to be accurate and descriptive but to always remember that he’s dealing with actual human beings.

“That’s at the heart of everything we do,” he said. “I understand completely. We’re telling stories because people are interested in true crime and they watch it as entertainment in a way. I talked to the families. I talked to the people who have gone through this worst moment anybody could ever imagine in their lives, and I sit in front of them for a few hours and you feel their pain and you don’t want to mess with those people. The fact that they have come forward, they’re talking with us and they want the story of their loved one to be put out there, we do it respectfully.”

Despite the nature of his work, Morrison said he has a very happy family life with his longtime spouse, journalist and former press secretary of the Canadian Prime Minister, Suzanne Perry, their six children (including Morrison’s stepson, “Friends” star Matthew Perry) and several grandchildren. To allow his brain an escape, he said he’s read every Agatha Christie novel three or four times over and has enjoyed the works of Georges Simenon and his Jules Maigret detective character.

Though he is serious while on the job, Morrison also has a sense of humor. He got a kick out of being parodied by actor Bill Hader on “Saturday Night Live” and he’s now more thoughtful about where and how he supports himself while cameras are rolling since a “Keith Leans on Things” Instagram account with over 23,000 followers popped up on social media.

“It’s a strange thing, but it’s a great compliment and I take it as one, too,” Morrison said of Hader’s impression. “It’s odd. I mean, the last act is parody, right?”

And about the leaning?

“Now I try not to overdo it because, yes, I know people are watching,” he said with a laugh.