Christa took her place behind the driver’s seat of her roomate Stephanie’s car and pulled out from the scene of a party. It is not known if she made any stops before she reached her final destination – 9022 Lloyd Place in West Hollywood, the address where Sandy Smith resided.
Sandy’s house was located at the back end of a duplex. Facing the street was 9020 Lloyd Place, the home of an elderly producer who rarely stepped foot outside. That’s where Christa parked her car. She made her way across the front of the duplex and around the adjacent street to the back, where she would have passed a small parking area on the side of the house that bridged both residences. It’s impossible to know if Christa made it to the door and knocked. But if she did, she would have been facing her attacker once she turned.
Around 1:30 that morning, Jon Gries awakened from a deep sleep to the not-so-distant sounds of screaming.
“It was the scariest noise I’ve ever heard in my life,” he recalled years later. “You know when you get goose bumps head to toe and cannot control them? At first, I thought it was a racoon and a cat having a fight, or a baby crying. It was this weird, horrible sound.”
A little over a month before, his father – the acclaimed Helter Skelter and Will Penny director Tom Gries – had passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 54 while playing tennis.
To help Jon and his three siblings heal in the wake of their loss, their mother Sally opened up a rental property to them which was located on Lloyd Place, a half a block from the site of Christa’s attack.
In the darkness of that night, startled by the nightmarish screams, Gries grabbed for the gun of his deceased father and bravely made his way out of the house. He stepped as far as the sidewalk, but the screams had ceased, and he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Was it all just a bad dream?
Within moments, Thurman Brooms, the 31-year-old owner of Bear’s Limo Service, neared Smith’s house, and slammed his car to an abrupt stop when he noticed a body lying on the street before him. He exited his car and stepped towards the figure. The bloodied female drew one last breath upon his approach.
It appeared to him as though she had been the victim of a hit and run. Panicked, he went to Sandy’s door and knocked furiously, but received no answer. He then returned to his car and drove a mile to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department West Hollywood division to alert them of his grisly find. Christa’s body lay unattended on the street before police units made their way back to her.
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By the time Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Larry Gandsey arrived on the scene, patrol cars had already barricaded the street.“What we observed at the start was a considerable amount of blood in the street that had some tire tracks running through it,” Gandsey recalled to me in 2014. “It was obvious it wasn’t a hit and run situation.”
What they had, as soon became apparent, was a rage killing. Christa was settled on her left side, armed tucked down the length of her torso and her hand gripped between her thighs. Her legs were partially obscured under the car, as if the attacker had attempted to pull her inward to avoid detection and then abandoned the effort.
A steady stream of blood cascaded down the length of the street from the body. Mixed in with the blood was a thick gelatinous matter which was soon identified as the contents of her breast implants. The police photographer captured the customary snaps only to discover later that they were using bad film. Fortunately, the sheriff’s photographer took his own photos. These continue to serve as the only visual depiction of the scene that night.
No purse, personal belongings or identification was found on Christa’s person. But when her body was turned over, investigators noticed a set of keys submerged in the underlying pool of her blood. Efforts were launched to comb the neighborhood and locate a match to the car key.
It didn’t take long to find the right fit – a Mercury Cougar registered to Stephanie Warshaw of 949 N. Larrabee Street, Apt. 2 in West Hollywood. At this stage, the police had every reason to believe that she was their mystery victim.
The car was parked awkwardly at the curb; in fact, the front passenger tire was blown, indicating that the driver was either inebriated or in a hurry to exit the vehicle. Perhaps the driver knew they were being followed.
Officers knocked on Sandy’s door repeatedly to no avail. If anyone was inside the residence, either they would not awaken or refused to come to the door. The detective left his card in the door frame.
Back at the station, the grilling of Thurman Brooms began. Known as “T’ by those closest to him, Brooms was an ambitious go-getter, with an unquenchable entrepreneurial spirit. As a younger man, he sent out five thousand fliers across the city promoting an ingenious idea for a start-up business – home grocery delivery. No one bit. Undeterred, he tried his hand at designing and selling denim shoulder bags. The enterprise took off for a time until a Boll Weevil infestation led to a severe shortage of materials, and the business could not acclimate. He then began to prosper with his own limousine service. He catered to an elite clientele, the most loyal of which were given a magic word. Once spoken, the client would find a tray of white powder awaiting them when they hopped on board.
Cocaine was everywhere in L.A., and it found unhidden residence in homes, clubs, parties, and meeting rooms across the city. The drug was considered by many a perfectly acceptable lubricant for daily living. “Hollywood was a cherry patch,” Gandsey claimed. “You could get dope anywhere.” Brooms had tinkered with the drug for many years. This was likely the foundation of his acquaintance with and reliance on Sandy Smith.
Professionally, Smith was employed with WorldWide Artists, a talent agency he co-owned with entertainment veteran Henry Lazarus. Smith handled musical clients while Lazarus led the theatrical division. Smith also popped up on television occasionally. He did a favor for an industry friend by appearing in two episodes of Starsky & Hutch, the second of which titled Starsky’s Lady enjoyed its network premiere on – of all evenings –Saturday, February 12, 1977, the same date Christa was murdered beside his home.
Smith also dealt drugs from his home. It was a known party house, playing host to an endless parade of thrill seekers in a series of all-night, drug-fueled shindigs. On the night of Christa’s murder, it is not clear if Brooms was heading to Smith’s house for a friendly visit, or a possible score, when he happened upon Christa’s body.
After a lengthy period of questioning, Brooms left the station and returned to Smith’s home. Upon knocking, Sandy actually answered this time. Brooms proceeded to fill Sandy in on the details of the previous hours. Looking upon the business card the detective had left in his door, he called the sheriff’s office and awaited Gandsey’s arrival.
Gandsey found Smith’s alibi more than a little unconvincing: he claimed he went to bed early that Friday night. “He said he was hard to wake up when you knocked on his door,” Gandsey recalled in 2014 when reflecting on his first interview with Smith.
The detective knew of Smith’s reputation as a late-night party hound and drug dealer. The calls Smith received during this informal interrogation all but confirmed it. “During our conversation, the phone would ring a couple of times and his first statement on the call was “Could you imagine? The police are here with me!,” Gandsey recalled of Smith’s exaggerated reaction. “And the phone conversations would end.”
The car under which Christa’s body was found belonged to Sandy’s live-in girlfriend at the time – a woman named Nancy (last name unknown) - who was suspiciously absent from the house that night.
Smith first met Christa through their mutual friend - her roommate Stephanie Warshaw. Smith admitted to Gandsey that he wasn’t particularly close to Christa, but that they had shared two intimate encounters.
At the conclusion of Gandsey’s first interview with him, Smith followed the investigators back to the station to identify Christa’s body. The detectives were likely studying Smith’s reactions upon seeing her lifeless corpse.
The detectives returned to Smith’s home several times over the ensuing months, but they could establish no meaningful connection to her murder beyond the vicinity of her body.
Officers knocked on other doors throughout the neighborhood that day, including the one belonging to Jon Gries and his brothers. Gries recited his recollections from hours earlier – the horrific screams, grabbing the gun, stepping outside to the sidewalk and seeing nothing unusual. Officers told him that if he had ventured away from the sidewalk and further out onto the street, he would have witnessed the immediate aftermath of the attack. “Literally, I was three steps away from discovering her,” he would later say.
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Christa’s body was delivered to the coroner’s office at 4:15 that morning. At 10:00 am, her five-foot eight inch, 142-pound frame was wheeled in for autopsy. Thirty-six-year-old Dr. Robert Zedelis was assigned to perform the examination. His findings were meticulously collected and annotated, and his resulting report identified the central cause of death as exsanguinating hemorrhage exacerbated by multiple stab wounds involving the neck, chest, and abdomen. The report detailed 22 separate wounds from head to ankles, likely inflicted by a large buck knife.
Angles and trajectories indicated that two of these wounds were incurred after she was already face down on the street. The killer, stabbing from above, plunged the blade down on one side of her back, made their way to the other side of her body and plunged again. The report noted a number of defensive cuts and bruises across the front and back of her hands, shins, and ankles, indicating that she put up quite a struggle as she punched, kicked, and attempted to shield herself.
The toxicology report returned no traces of alcohol or barbiturates. Based on these findings, it seems unlikely that Christa was in any way impaired when she parked her car haphazardly at Sandy’s house.
Zedelis’ report provides valuable answers regarding the character of Christa’s wounds, and the temperament and mindset of the figure who inflicted them. But many resolutions involving the murder act remain elusive even to this day.
It was clear that this was not a smash and grab mugging turned brutal. The interaction was too intimate, prolonged and rageful. Because of this, detectives felt from the beginning that this was someone who knew Christa and enacted a personal vendetta against her. The sheer number of stab wounds indicated that the attacker might have been caught off guard by the ferocity of Christa’s defensive postures and flailed with the blade repeatedly just to subdue the onslaught of her counterattacks. But the dozens of wounds also pointed to overkill. Then there were the blows to her face and skull, thought to be the result of a hammer. If they were inflicted after she fell, they may have demonstrated the killer’s urge to further defile the chiseled beauty that had long served as her calling card.
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News of Christa Helm’s demise would soon spread throughout the states and internationally. But it had already infected the psyche of her sizeable social circle in the hours that followed the discovery of her body on February 12, 1977.
The corpse on Dr. Zedelis’ table harbored an ocean of secrets, and a community of characters – from the dregs of the drug scene to the starriest inhabitants of celebrity culture - would soon find themselves trapped in the chaos of its currents.
