A LOS ANGELES judge has sentenced two women to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing homeless men in a cold-blooded years-long scheme for $US2.8 million ($2.86 million) in life insurance.

Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, grabbed international headlines for their murders of two homeless men they lured off the street, housed and cared for two years, then ran over with a car for life insurance claims.

Prosecutors said the women were abusing a law that says insurers cannot contest life insurance policies after two years.

The women were each convicted in April on two counts of murder and conspiracy to murder for financial gain in the killings of Kenneth McDavid, 50, and Paul Vados, 73. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, a move experts said was because the elderly women would probably die in prison during the long appeals process.

The Superior Court judge David Wesley denied a motion for a new trial filed by Roger Diamond, Golay's lawyer, who alleged, among other things, misconduct by Rutterschmidt's lawyer, the deputy public defender Michael Sklar.

Mr Sklar blamed the murders on Golay, saying the evidence clearly showed she was the mastermind and kept Rutterschmidt in the dark about her intention to run over the men.

Mr Diamond also shifted his defence to point the finger at Rutterschmidt, leaving the two women accusing each other.

In 1999 Mr Vados, was found dead in a Hollywood alley in an apparent hit-and-run accident, after which the women collected about $600,000 in insurance claims. Authorities became suspicious when the women claimed the body and profited from the 2005 death of Mr McDavid, whose body showed the same upper-body injuries as Mr Vados's.

Authorities found Mr McDavid's DNA in the undercarriage of a 1999 Mercury Sable station wagon, which someone using Golay's auto club membership had towed on the night of Mr McDavid's death on the west side of Los Angeles.

Golay, a Texas native who owns real estate in Santa Monica, and Rutterschmidt, a Hungarian immigrant who once owned a coffee shop with her husband, were arrested in 2006 for insurance fraud while prosecutors investigated murder charges.

Prosecutors used as evidence a surreptitiously recorded conversation between the women on the day of their arrest, in which they discuss money and suing insurance companies but not murder.