Barring an unexpected transfer to another prison or a medical emergency, she will die inside this compound. I think they needed somebody and I was the easiest one around., Yet the most illuminating aspect of talking with Puente in prison arises from her silence about the dead. Dorothea Puente awaiting arraignment in Sacramento, California on November 17, 1988. The boarding house made infamous by Dorothea Puentes murders. The pensioner contacted local law enforcement who then quickly arrested Puente. The press dubbed Dorothea Puente the 'Death House Landlady.' The name sharply contrasted with her perception in the community. Moise alerted police, who went to the boarding house. Sharp also told police that Puente had hired prisoners on work furlough to dig and fill large holes in the backyard, and that some of the holes were covered with concrete. Though born in Redlands, Puente, who speaks passable Spanish, claimed Mexico as her birthplace, a ruse she perpetuated by alternately using the surnames of her last two ex-husbands, Roberto Puente and Pedro Montalvo. My oldest grandson is 15 and wanted to do this attraction. It had about $2,500, $3,000 in it. Cabrera shakes his head. She seems entirely harmless. A woman known as Dorothea Puente runs a boarding house for those less fortunate, but her seeming benevolence belies motives that are much darker. Dorothea Puente Home - Part 1: Directed by Star Price. [9], Puente continued to accept elderly boarders and was popular with local social workers because she accepted referrals of the "tough cases", including drug addicts and abusive tenants. As far as theyre concerned, Im dead.. As reported by Dailymail, seven year after Puente's death, a man named William Harder had claimed to be his grandson. She married Roberto Puente in 1968, but the relationship dissolved sixteen months later. Puente watched the images flicker across the TV screen in her Los Angeles motel room. Silver-haired, dressed in a long red coat and wearing large rounded glasses, the 59-year-old resembled just a regular grandmother - proving looks truly can be deceiving. If Im thinking about getting away, you think Im going to ask permission?, Police escort Puente after apprehending her in L.A.; Cabrera walks behind her. Cooking what I want. That didnt seem right, but Dorothea had conned our whole family into thinking she was a nurse.. Under the law, Puente received life without the possibility of parole. [4], Gray's first marriage at age sixteen, in 1945, was to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific theater of World War II. Her escape brought coast-to-coast ridicule of Police Chief John Kearns and his department while authorities chased dead-end leads from Las Vegas to Mexico. After their deaths she continued to draw their social security cheques. She got life for being with a guy when he killed another guy, Puente says. So we knew wed have an uphill battle in convincing the jurors that all of those were accidental deaths.. Twenty-one minutes laterhe remembers the time preciselyhe exhumed sufficient evidence: the remains of a second body buried about a foot deep in the earth. She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", a Muslim woman of Egyptian and Israeli descent. Con su simpata lograba escapar de la. Prosecutors said that Puente was one of the most cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen.. An officer dispatched to the house that morning interviewed Puente and one of her tenants, John Sharp. Everybodys heard of me. However, in 1978, she was convicted of illegally cashing state and federal assistance checks that belonged to her tenants. Her body shapeless under a long-sleeve T-shirt and dungarees, she has pulled back her snowy plume of hair with a pink scrunchie. The union lasted just two years. The grandmother would then sneak into the rooms of her incapacitated prey and smother them to death with a pillow. She gasped at sight of the remains, hands bracketing her cheeks. A year earlier, he had probed the case of Morris Solomon, a Sacramento handyman who would be convicted of murdering six women across the city. All three revolve around murder, a fact she notes without irony or self-consciousness. While Puente was charged with the murders of nine people, she was convicted of only three of them in 1993: A jury could not decide on the other six deaths. The erstwhile prostitute had turned a new trick. Get Sactown's top stories in your inbox by signing up for our weekly newsletter. Between 1982 and 1988, she killed nine people, all of whom were renting rooms at her boarding house. Police and forensics experts swarmed Puentes property the next morning. Benjamin Fink, 55. She was found guilty in three cases and one juror held out on the other four. She parlayed its success by pumping money into political campaigns and charitable causes, contributions that bought her the appearance of legitimacy and access to elite circles. Then, she asked if it would be ok if she went to buy a coffee. Her narrow lips, pinched and lined at the corners, curl slightly upward. 4. Her passivity subdues suspicion. EXCLUSIVE: 'I killed JonBent Ramsey! Convicted pedophile Rose West's son breaks silenceto tell how his killer mother Isabel Oakeshott receives 'menacing' message from Matt Hancock, Insane moment river of rocks falls onto Malibu Canyon in CA, Mom who lost both sons to fentanyl blasts laughing Biden, Pavement where disabled woman gestured at cyclist before fatal crash, Pro-Ukrainian drone lands on Russian spy planes exposing location, 'Buster is next!' Dorothea Puente was a convicted serial killer who ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California in the 1980s. Shes got everything she needs, her life is taken care of. But Puente has lodged in his psyche as the rarest predator he confronted: in age, gender and disposition, she inhabits an extremely narrow strata of serial killers. She filed a missing person report with police on Nov. 7. But looks can be ext Dorothea often took in the elderly and homeless and placed them as her tenants. She sat there so totally motionless and emotionless, says Honey Hewlett, one of 12 jurors seated for the trial, who stopped buying Giorgio perfume after learning Puente also wore the scent. I am led to believe if there is any reason for us to be living here on this Earth, it is to somehow enhance one another's humanity, to love, to touch each other with kindness, to know that you have made just one person breathe easier because you have lived. Nonetheless, with decades to mull what she might say about her case, she sounds as unpersuasive now as during her plane ride from Los Angeles. 'Executing Puente would be like executing your grandmother', one juror is reported to have said in response to the death sentence looming over the defendant at the time. Some praised the soft-hearted landlady who cooked big meals for her low-income tenants, handed out vegetables from her garden to neighbors and adopted stray cats. Some might interpret that as a kind of confession, I finally say. Her demeanor is, for the most part, politely docile, and I begin to perceive how so many could consider her trustworthy. For the rest of her life, she maintained her innocence, insisting that all of her boarders had died of "natural causes". The family suspected Puente of poisoning her. Now she watched from her second-story porch as the trio began to dig. In June 2020, the house was featured in a ten-minute documentary with 60 Second Docs about the purchase and renovation of the house by the current owners. It seems fitting that a published recipe collection by serial killer Dorothea Puente, aka the "Death House Landlady," includes how-to's for whipping up . Most of the lot has been paved over. Years later, her granddaughter visits the spot. In April of 1982, a 61-year-old woman named Ruth Monroe moved into Dorothea Puentes house. A lot of people get old in here really quickly cause they just kind of stop doing anything., Ruth Munroe, believed by authorities to be Puentes first victim (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives). John Cabrera sits at a long wooden conference table inside Sacramento Police headquarters on Freeport Boulevard. [6], Gray was arrested in 1960 for owning and operating a bookkeeping firm as a front for a brothel in Sacramento;[5] she was found guilty and was sentenced to ninety days in the Sacramento County Jail. She sits erect, legs crossed at the ankles and tucked beneath her chair. In turn, I know that when she receives my letter telling her as much, shell cut off contact. MONTEREY . Her father died of tuberculosis when Dorothea was 8; her mother, an alcoholic who alternated between abusing and deserting her children, lost custody of them in 1938. She also suffered a miscarriage. People viewed Puente as a sweet grandmother committed to giving back to society: she housed the old and homeless, attended political events, and donated money to charitable causes. Dorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. James Gallop, 62, (continued left to right) Dorothy Miller, 64. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. Its the same thing. The theory, while perhaps logical to anyone unfamiliar with Puente before her name hit the headlines, brought disparate reactions from those who already knew her. 22 ratings3 reviews. One of the bodies was missing its head, hands and feet, Body parts were also found scattered across the property. I dont know what to tell you, she said. Dorothea Helen Puente, rozen Grayov (9. ledna 1929 - 27. bezna 2011) byla americk sriov vraedkyn.V 80. letech 20. stolet provozovala penzion pro seniory v Sacramentu v Kalifornii, kde zabila nkolik starch i mentln postiench klient, aby zskala jejich finann prostedky.Na jejm kont je devt vrad; za ti byla odsouzena a porota trvala na . Puente claims she spent time in the 70s with California governors Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan. It wasn't until the first body was found in her backyard that authorities realized Dorothea was not the sweet old woman she first appeared to be. That is a human quality that deserves to be preserved. She parried, unwavering in her account of Montoyas departure, her voice calm as the detective pressed her. Clymo responded by evoking Dorothea the child and caregiver. Those cases were lies, she says, voice flat. William Vicary spoke with Puente for the first time about two months after her arrest. [citation needed], In November 1985, Puente hired a man named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her apartment. Thats just too much coincidence., Finally, on the 24th day of deliberations, the holdout juror acquiesced, voting guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and one second-degree count. She donated to Hispanic arts and education programs while providing cheap medical care to her boarders and other patients, falsely claiming she had worked as a nurse in World War II. Arrested for the scam in 1978, court records show, she received five years federal probation, the terms of which proscribed her from operating a boardinghouse. Dorothea Puente looked like a sweet grandmother but looks can be deceiving. One girl was placed in the care of relatives, the other put up for adoption. Finding nothing, they asked permission to dig up the yard. Court files indicate Johansson had his wife committed to a psychiatric ward in 1961, and doctors placed her on antipsychotics. The only time [the boarers] were in good health was when they stayed at my home, Puente insisted from prison. But every time youd go to see her, Ballenger says, her cancer had moved from her brain to her breast to her liver. Orphaned, Puente and her siblings splintered off in different directions, bouncing between foster care and relatives homes. Sacramento Co. By Remy Millisky / March 14, 2022 11:13 am EDT. It was too humiliating, too shameful for her to admit responsibility for these crimes. She was tough. She has sent me more than 15 letters and postcards in the months since I first wrote to her. She was a respected figure to the Mexican community, says Donald Dorfman, a longtime Sacramento criminal attorney who handled some of Puentes legal affairs before her 1988 arrest. So when I wrote to Puente last summer, nearly 20 years after the discovery of her victims, I had little expectation she would respond, let alone agree to talk. The two would continue to have a turbulent relationship, and Gray filed a restraining order in 1975. I dont feel like confessing my sins to anyone, she says sharply. 13 and watch the prisons visitors hall gradually fill, my doubts that she will appear grow with the rooms din. (Clymo died in 2006.) I started working her, Cabrera says, but all along, she was working me. But while digging a second hole, Wilson heard a muted thud as his blade struck something hard three feet down. Montoya struggled with mental health issues and had been homeless for years. On the other hand, when these people, as could be expected, would act upat that point, she snapped and decided to kill them.. But on the way to the storage facility, Puente abruptly asked Florez to pull over near a riverbank and just push the box into the water. She holed up in the Royal Viking Motel for the next three days, seldom leaving her room. At the time, she was serving two life sentences and a concurrent 15-year-to-life sentence. After the notorious female serial killer Dorothea Puente died in prison at the age of 82, the filmmaker Nick Coles stumbled upon her obituary. I dont know that she ever did anything good without a bad motive.. The first episode centers around one of the worst of all: Dorothea Puente, a Sacramento, California woman who has been dubbed Sacramento's most notorious murderer. As the minutes pass, I prepare to join the long list of people she has duped. Authorities alleged that, by poisoning her boarders, she wanted to collect their benefits checks without risk of them notifying social workers or police. An extensive five-day search for the elderly fugitive ended when a stranger she'd befriended in Los Angeles recognized her face from the news and turned her into police. Grandson of killer granny Dorothea Puente, who laced cakes with sleeping pills and then smothered them at her California boarding house, reveals how he shared a 'real connection' with her and. After I cleared the prisons background check, we arranged a date in mid-October; an early riser, she told me she preferred to meet in the morning. Drab and worn, the space, about the size of a single-car garage, has scuffed concrete flooring, dull fluorescent lighting and two windows; one faces a grassy prison courtyard, the other an interior hallway. & Brucato, Gary, Ph.D., The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books), pp. If she had been held accountable for murdering my mother, Clausen says, then maybe there wouldnt have been any other victims.. She purchased the refills through a pair of doctors who, presumably oblivious to her past drugging of clients, trusted her stories that she simply wanted to help boarders sleep. The inmates know who she is, the official says. But as the police prepared to leave, Sharp slipped them a message. The jury was deadlocked eleven to one for conviction on all counts, and the lone holdout finally agreed to a conviction of two first-degree murder counts, including special circumstances, and one second-degree murder count. Puente passed away in 2011 from natural causes at the Central California Facility in Chowchilla, aged 82. As it happened, her shovel was used to dig the hole that yielded a human leg bone, a decomposed foot inside a dark dress shoe and what looked like pieces of tattered fabric that in fact were rotting flesh. Ringed by four chairs, each serves as the setting of a reunion between a prisoner and those she knows from the outside. In 1961, Johansson had Gray briefly committed to DeWitt State Hospital after a binge of drinking, lying, criminal behavior, and suicide attempts. Shed give advice to all these young Mexican women who came to her when they were trying to get divorced., Puente poses next to California Gov. She had a traumatic childhood after being raised by alcoholic parents. Working in my yard. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution. The noise inside the prisons visitors hall amplifies on Valentines Day. A person like her, the retired sergeant says, theres no forgetting. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). Word reached Cabrera. He neither explained his motive for capitulating nor discussed why he agreed to convict her of only three killings. As jury foreman Mike Esplin recalls, the man simply said, Thats all Im going to give. Puentes composure cracked after the last verdict was read. George Deukmejian and Bishop Francis Quinn decorated her home at 1426 F Street But setting aside such fleeting charity-event encounters, her stories hew closer to fable than fact. Their theory hardened into subjective truth when they discovered that, following the funeral, the nurse had drained thousands of dollars belonging to Munroe from a joint business bank account. Florez agreed, and Puente assisted him. On Nov. 11, 1988, acting on the concerns of a social worker looking for a client who had disappeared, homicide detectives dropped by the mans last known address: a boardinghouse for derelicts and the mentally ill that Puente operated at 1426 F Street, within a mile of the Hall of Justice and the Capitol. Puente died in prison at Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, from natural causes; she was 82. Im certain they were just dying of natural causes, and she started burying them so she could keep the checks coming. She falls silent for a moment. However, Dorothea's outward demeanor was a smokescreen, concealing [] Despite this, their marriage lasted until 1966. (AP Photo/Walt Zeboski). Sitting knee to knee, they stare without speaking, eyes wet. With a smile, I ask whether she and the actor shared a romantic attraction. The conversation soon veers toward why I want to interview her, and before I finish explaining, she interrupts. We next met days before Thanksgiving, when the recent election of Barack Obama had boosted her hopes for the countrys future, and again in mid-December. In summer 1982, Clausen and his siblings spotted a story in the Bee about Puentes conviction on theft and forgery charges related to her drugging four elderly people. A few days later I drive to Chowchilla for my final visit with her. She was just pure evil, Ballenger says. ', Puente died in 2011 aged 82 in her prison cell at the Central California Facility, in Chowchilla. By 1982, Puente was sent to prison for her thefts. She trails Cabrera, his police badge clipped to the front of a dark blue jacket and his jeans tucked into knee-high black boots that he had donned for the days dig. To my surprise, an envelope stamped with the words Central California Womens Facility State Prison arrived a few weeks later. Their dismembered bodies were then placed in holes in the garden she'd paid ex-convicts to dig. They were men and women who had skidded toward lifes edges. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Dorothea Puente believed herself to be an able caretaker. Cooking what I want. [citation needed], The defense called several witnesses, who showed Puente had a generous and caring side to her. Joy the last person to have seen her alive. But God always puts obstacles in peoples way. She professed her innocence until she died. [8], Puente told Florez to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter County and dump the box of "junk" on the riverbank at an unofficial household junk dumping site. Tempers spiked as the impasse stretched to its third week. Ill be waiting for her.. Retired social worker Mildred Ballenger first met Puente in the late 1970s. She is a California native, born in Redlands, Calif. 2. The prosecution stated that Puente used sleeping pills to drug her tenants, suffocated them, and then hired convicts to bury them in the yard. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). Peter Vlautin addressed the jurors in confidential tones, contrasting with O'Mara's shouting: We are here today to determine one thing: What is the value of Dorothea Puente's life? I dont think anyone would pick this kind of life, she says, drying tears with a piece of coarse brown paper towel. Between 1982 and 1988, the elderly and disabled people living in Dorothea Puentes house had no idea that was she was poisoning and strangling some of her guests before burying them on her property and cashing their Social Security checks. Puente died of natural causes at the Central . A T-shirt designed to cash in on Puente mania (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives). They were met by Dorothea Puente, an elderly woman with big glasses, who repeated her story that Montoya was simply on vacation. Now, as I sit at table No. The Victorian on F Street. A local Spanish-language newspaper that referred to Puente as la doctora (Courtesy of John Cabrera), The unlicensed venture thrived from the start. Inmates eat breakfast and dinner in a dining hall separate from their building units; after breakfast, they receive a cold boxed lunch that they take back to their cells. A lot of people saw your running away as a sign of guilt. Her evasive answersfirst claiming he had traveled to Mexico, then that he had returned and moved to Utahtripped Moises suspicion. At age 16, she drifted off on her own to Olympia, Wash. Comely and flaxen-haired, with soft blue eyes and a beguiling smile, she worked as a prostitute to earn money and caught the attention of Fred McFaul. Six months after her release, she left Riverside. [citation needed]. They wanted to question her about Bert Montoya, her onetime tenant who had been reported missing. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives), Dorfman drew up Puentes will years agoI dont know if its any good anymore; shes probably given away stuff she doesnt [even] ownand still receives Christmas cards from her. The home belonged to seemingly sweet Dorothea Puente, who was arrested in 1988 and later convicted as a serial murderer. It is late March and after midnight, the hour when shepossibly with the help of an unsuspecting Montoya or another accomplice, a mystery police never solvedburied bodies in the yard. One was missing its head, hands and feet. But a bit of digging in the backyarda tenant had reported seeing large holes excavated and filled behind the houseunearthed a human leg bone and a decomposed foot. John OMara, the prosecutor, called over 130 witnesses to the stand. Many of them found dead and buried in the boarding house's yard. Her cancer story, on the other hand, sounds consistent with her peculiar, decades-long charade of claiming to suffer from the disease in a ploy to gain sympathy. Its like she was watching a movie she wasnt particularly interested in., Jury deliberations commenced in July 1993 and soon stalled. Driven by routine, Puente rises by 4:30 a.m. most days, long before her seven cellmates. According to Dailymail, seven years after the death of Puente, a man named William Harder had claimed to be her grandson. It occurs to me that if I were unaware of her past and talking with her outside of prison, she could come across as the little old lady next door. She took it all Death is the only appropriate penalty. Familiar in name, she remained an enigma. I leave through a different door and make my way out of the prison, stepping into the cool afternoon air. Scant evidence exists to suggest she socialized with Reaganwhen he divorced Wyman, Puente was 20 years old and living in the Bay Areaany more than she danced with the Rockettes. The wanted bulletin for, I think she truly wanted to rehabilitate [her tenants] as she could not the people in her own family, psychiatrist William Vicary says. She also established herself as a respected member in Sacramento's Hispanic community, funding charities, scholarships, and radio programs. In his sessions with her, Vicary had inched up to the subject of guilt, knowing that she would withdraw if he asked directly whether she had killed people. An alarmed Ballenger urged fellow counselors to steer clear of Puente. As police exhumed corpse after corpse, TV crews jammed F Street while gawkers scaled trees to peer into the yard. On her fourth day as a fugitive, she dropped by a dive bar near the motel, introducing herself as Donna Johansson to a retired carpenter named Charles Willgues.