The Last Take

Did A Hollywood Actress' Secret Love Diary Lead To Her Murder?

(CBS)  Then Blair dropped a bombshell, telling detectives that he slept with Christa the night before she died, and that Debbie caught him.

Debbie adamantly denies any involvement with Blair, or that she saw him in bed with Christa. And Blair declined to speak to 48 Hours. But detectives find the entire recording session suspicious, especially since Debbie and Patti were both abruptly pushed out. It seems Patti took the news especially hard.

"Apparently, she was very upset about it at that time," Harris says. "We don't know if she was removed by Frankie Crocker or by Christa herself."

When Debbie talked to the original investigators about Christa, she pointed the finger squarely at Patti.

"I told him that she had a female lover that was extremely jealous. That was my first thought, that maybe her female lover killed her because every time that I was around her she seemed so threatened and so dark," Debbie says.

Just days after Christa’s murder, Debbie packed up her entire L.A. life, disguised herself in a wig, and made a mad dash out of town. "I didn't want anybody to know who I was. I was afraid somebody killed her because she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. What if they thought she told me? I had never been around anybody that had been murdered. And I just wanted to be away from it," she says.

Frankie Crocker is now dead. Still, the cold case squad is left to wonder: could Christa's killer have been a woman?

Investigators got a break when one of Christa’s fingernails, preserved for three decades, yielded DNA. "It's obvious to us that she put up quite a fight. And a lot of times, in that situation, you're gonna find skin cells or blood or something from the other person under the fingernails," Brandenburg says.

Even more intriguing, that DNA is from another woman.

"Did you try to match the DNA to a specific person?" Maher asks.

"Well, we are requesting from people that we interview at times, we're requesting oral swabs," he says.

One of those people is Debbie Danilow. Asked if he considers Debbie a suspect, Harris says, "Everyone's still a suspect."

Debbie put Hollywood and Christa Helm behind her many years ago, but she never really got over the murder that struck so close to home. "It changed me. It changed the way I looked at everybody in the group. You start looking around going, 'Who did it? Who did this? Who could have done this?' And it’s scary," she says.

And then recently, out of the blue, she got a letter from Christa's daughter, Nicole. "And it said, 'Hi. My name is Nicole. I think you knew my mother as Christa Helm. And I am trying to find out information about her, because I didn't know her,'" Debbie recalls.

Shortly afterwards, Debbie heard from the cold case squad. "Of course they had gotten my name from Nicole. And they said, 'Can we talk to you?'" she says.

But detectives Harris and Brandenburg didn't just want Debbie's memories, they wanted her DNA, and what they really wanted to know was if it matched the scrapings they had found under Christa's fingernails. "We did collect DNA from Debbie Danilow. And it was not her DNA that was under the fingernails," Brandenberg explains.

There is no other evidence tying Debbie to the murder, either. And she has told police she had nothing to do with it. "Tom and I are in agreement that Debbie Danilow is much farther down on the scale as a person of interest in this case, now, than she was," Brandenburg says.

With the help of an anonymous tip, the cold case squad finally tracked down the woman they believe was Christa's girlfriend, Patti Collins. "Patti and Christa had a relationship, according to more than one person. They had a close sexual relationship and a professional relationship. At some point, they had a falling out with one another, it looks like, according to these people. Was it serious enough for a murder? We don't know that, but we'd like to talk to Patti about that," Brandenburg says.