Disturbed Ground

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Disturbed Ground Page 9

by NORTON, CARLA


  Released after more than two hours of questioning, the landlady looked somber but unshaken. Having no comment for the hungry press, she moved through the crowd, reentered her house, and shut the door behind her.

  What a surprise.

  Though floodlights had been brought in, work outdoors ceased as the early November darkness fell. Still, some police work continued. An all-night watch was ordered, and police continued to question boarders.

  John Sharp, who had been taken to headquarters for about an hour of questioning, was returned to the house. A lone officer stood by and watched while he gathered up his belongings. When he came out a reporter called to him, "Are you moving out?"

  The reply was immediate: "You bet."

  It's impossible to say what Dorothea Puente might have done during those long, quiet hours of the night while she was left unattended in her home on F Street. She could have paced the floor, occasionally stopping to pull back her lace curtains and spy on the officer beneath her window. She could have sorted through papers, carried a neat pile to the kitchen sink, and burned them, washing ashes down the drain. She could have emptied the contents of vials, bottles, and jars into the toilet bowl, flushing them away. She could have poured herself several stiff drinks. She could have fumed and planned. Or, exhausted after such a trying day, she may have simply curled up in bed and fallen asleep.

  The next day dawned gray and drizzly, but any neighbors hoping to sleep in that Saturday found the morning stillness shattered by the hard growl of heavy equipment. Homicide detectives were back at 1428 F Street, along with a small crowd of coroner's deputies, crime scene investigators, and others.

  Forensic anthropologist Dr. Rodger Heglar presided over the recovery of the skeletal remains, which were slowly exposed as the hole was enlarged around them. Using shovels and then hand trowels, the diggers sunk a circle around the body to a depth of about three and a half feet, sifting the dirt for evidence. Final layers of soil were swept away with brushes, the body being photographed at every stage of exhumation.

  The remains, which were wrapped in a sheet of some sort, now rested on a pedestal of dirt. Eventually, a sheet of plywood would be slipped beneath the strange bundle, and the body, which weighed very little, would then be slipped into a zippered plastic body bag. An unmarked van waited to take the remains to the coroner's office, where they would be examined. For now, Dr. Heglar surmised that they'd uncovered "the entire skeletal remains of a gray-haired, rather petite, elderly female."

  Now the police were gearing up for some major excavations: if there were more bodies to be found, they were going to find them. They selected a site at the side of the house—a concrete slab of about six-by-eight feet—and moved the back-hoe into place. The pounding backhoe easily broke through the rectangular slab and moved it aside, ready to dig up the ground beneath.

  Shortly after 8:30 a.m., Dorothea Puente was poised to make her move.

  Grizzled old John McCauley, Puente's tenant and confidant, stepped out onto the porch and beckoned Detective Cabrera. Calling through a beard of gray bristles, McCauley said that Dorothea wanted to talk to him.

  Cabrera climbed the stairs and found Mrs. Puente wearing a smart pink dress and purple pumps—the very antithesis of understatement.

  "Mister Cabrera, am I under arrest?" she asked.

  He told her no, and the little landlady then asked if he would mind if she and her friend John McCauley went to the nearby Clarion Hotel to meet her nephew for a cup of coffee. She promised to be back soon.

  Dorothea Puente had been so cooperative, there was no reason not to let her go, was there? Cabrera quickly consulted with his superiors, who said they lacked enough evidence to arrest the woman. She was free to go.

  Cabrera returned with this news, and Mrs. Puente went to get her coat.

  Stepping back into the room in her red wool coat, she suddenly remembered, "Oh, my soup!" and spun off toward the kitchen, Cabrera at her heels. A big pot was simmering on her stove, and she took up a spoon to stir the bubbling liquid. Glancing shyly at Cabrera, she asked, "Would you mind very much, while I'm out, keeping an eye on my soup?"

  An amicable fellow, the detective agreed. Then, peering out the window at the gathering crowd, thinking that Puente might be intimidated by the press, Cabrera chivalrously volunteered to escort her out.

  Puente hastily grabbed her umbrella, then the threesome went outside and down the steps into the chill morning air. Cabrera lifted the yellow police tape, then shepherded his charges past the throngs of reporters and onlookers. After a couple of blocks, he stopped and watched as Dorothea Puente and John McCauley walked away.

  No one followed.

  Minutes later, back at the house, this error in judgment became painfully clear. Just fifteen inches underground, Cabrera's shovel uncovered a second body. And the sky, which had been threatening rain all morning, now wept upon the disturbed ground of Dorothea Puente's yard.

  CHAPTER 12

  Saturday, November 12, 1988, would not be a good day for Sacramento's police department. They'd discovered graves—plural—in the yard of a downtown Sacramento residence, they'd just let their primary suspect walk away, and TV vans with satellite dishes were sprouting like mushrooms around the crime scene. While microphones hungered for sound bites, the most natural spokesperson in such a serious situation, Police Chief John Kearns, was away at a convention in southern California—"golfing," as one cynic put it.

  With the body count hovering at two and Dorothea Puente nowhere to be found, the unsavory job of facing an indignant press fell to Lieutenant Joe Enloe. He composed himself, took a breath, and floated out the official explanations. He declared that there hadn't been enough evidence to arrest Dorothea Puente that morning, and that following Puente would have violated her rights.

  But as reporters badgered him for details, Enloe's excuses fell like blasted skeet. It could hardly have looked worse: Their primary suspect had been escorted past police lines in broad daylight, despite growing suspicions that her well-tended backyard was a well-planted graveyard, despite her criminal record, and despite the fact that she was in obvious violation of parole. Clearly, it was best to keep these encounters with the media brief.

  Officers meanwhile searched Sacramento's airport, bus and train stations, where they spotted many little old ladies… but not a single snowy-white hair of Dorothea Puente's head.

  She was elsewhere.

  At 9:45 that morning, Dorothea Puente called a cab, which took her and John McCauley to Tiny's, a bar in West Sacramento. While McCauley sipped a lone beer, Dorothea thirsted for more potent fortification: She downed three screwdrivers in a row.

  By 11:00, courage bolstered, she was ready. Correctly figuring that she was by now being sought at Sacramento's transportation centers, she called a cab and asked to be driven to the nearby town of Stockton. A fifty-mile drive, a sixty-dollar fare plus a generous ten-dollar tip, and she was clear of Sacramento's tightening net of law enforcement.

  The taxi driver deposited her at Stockton's Greyhound bus terminal, where she bought a ticket and boarded a bus. Sitting back and making herself comfortable for the long, anonymous ride to Los Angeles, she could breathe a little easier now. She'd escaped as cleanly as she had back at the age of nineteen….

  Dorothea stared out the window at the familiar streets of Stockton as the bus turned onto the freeway on-ramp and gathered speed, leaving behind a trail of exhaust and a cloud of confusion.

  Few people anywhere, in Sacramento, Stockton, or deeper in her past, could say they truly knew the white-haired passenger staring boozily out at the fleeting landscape. Johansson, Montalvo, Puente— they were all just temporary tags on a slippery identity. Enmeshed as she was in so much deception, Dorothea seemed to have lost herself somewhere along the way. The thread of truth had gotten tangled with lies long ago, before she'd become the landlady on F Street, even before her four failed marriages…. But this was no time to try to sort it all out.

  She knew from w
here Cabrera had been digging that at least two of the bodies had been found by now, and worried about whether they would find them all. Still, even if they missed one or two, it made no difference. No one was going to understand. No matter what the numbers, it added up to the same thing: She was running for her life.

  Dorothea must have secretly scolded herself for not having been smarter about this. Things had been going along pretty smoothly, but then she'd made some bad judgments, some mistakes, and that Judy Moise woman had gone and called the cops. She should have seen that coming. She'd had a feeling that Judy was going to be trouble, the way she was sniffing around all the time. Just like Mildred Ballenger back in 1982. Nosy, trouble-making social workers, both of 'em!

  In 1982, she hadn't acted fast enough. If she'd only been quicker, she could have used that ticket to Mexico. That time, she'd dawdled, and the cops had picked her up.

  But not this time.

  While the police were struggling with their investigation, the press was busy with its own, and by the next morning those who love the Sunday papers were being treated to hefty doses of this sensational case. Big, colorful, front-page photos of the scene on F Street grabbed attention, and Dorothea Montalvo Puente, the primary suspect, was given a liberal share of the paper's column inches.

  Many in the Mexican-American community practically spat out their coffee when they read that la doctora was suspected of murder! And those who had known Dorothea Puente as a kindly, seventy-year-old grandmother were shocked that she was really a fifty-nine-year-old ex-con, a woman with a nefarious past and an elusive identity. She had glided through aliases like a fun seeker at Mardi Gras, her personal history shifting with each turn of her identity, details blurring and contradicting each other.

  The hard facts of Dorothea's history could be found, mostly, in court documents. Criminal charges, dates of arrest, terms of parole—these sorts of things made up the loose weave of her past. Highlights from her criminal record were there in black and white: Toward the end of 1978 she'd been caught and convicted of illegally cashing thirty-four federal checks, filching benefit checks intended for her tenants. But apparently these thefts hadn't impressed the judge as especially serious—her sentence had been light: five years' probation.

  She emerged as a woman with a weakness for grand lies. She'd lied about being a survivor of the Bataan Death March in 1942, about having cancer, about making movies with Rita Hayworth, about being the ex-lover of this or that star. And she'd lied about being a doctor, or nurse, or health care worker—whatever she could get away with.

  One of her past victims, Malcolm McKenzie, described Dorothea Puente as a slick con artist. "She was a sharp dresser, sharp in her ways," he recalled. "She knew what she was doing. She could have fooled you or anybody."

  One afternoon in January 1982, she'd walked into a midtown bar called the Zebra Club, shed her coat, and slid into conversation with a group of oldsters who were meeting over drinks. In particular, she'd befriended the seventy-four-year-old McKenzie, a retiree and a regular at the bar.

  McKenzie recalled for the press how he'd become ill after just a couple of drinks. Dorothea had offered to escort the old gent home, then had rifled through his belongings. Stricken by some sort of temporary paralysis, he'd watched helplessly as she stole checks, cash, even a ring which she brazenly slipped off his limp finger. "She could have killed me," he reflected.

  When McKenzie recovered, it seemed obvious to him that Dorothea had slipped a Mickey into his drink, and that's just what he told the police later on. A detective looked into the matter, and even interviewed "Miss Montalvo," but she apparently worked her charm, denying everything, claiming that McKenzie was just a drunken old fool.

  Even back in 1982, it took Sacramento police a while to put two and two together. Not until April, when Dorothea Montalvo was in court for a preliminary hearing for having drugged and robbed Malcolm McKenzie in January, was she arrested on a forgery warrant for having robbed someone back in 1981.

  Frail and ailing, seventy-nine-year-old Esther Busby had needed a live-in health care attendant. An energetic and caring woman named Dorothea Montalvo had seemed perfect for the job. But soon after hiring her, Busby had become repeatedly and mysteriously ill.

  At the hospital, Dorothea had dazzled all onlookers with her solicitous ways. She was so kind and attentive that even nurses had been impressed. But eventually, Busby's doctor got suspicious. He guessed that Dorothea Montalvo was over-medicating, perhaps even poisoning his elderly patient. And he told her social worker, Mildred Ballenger, that he suspected Montalvo was "ripping Mrs. Busby off."

  Alarmed, Ballenger had checked and discovered that Busby's latest Social Security check had indeed been cashed, the signature forged.

  Ballenger had itched to hand Dorothea Montalvo over to police. But luckily for Dorothea, Esther Busby simply wasn't up to pressing criminal charges; instead, she'd merely fired her.

  Like Busby, eighty-three-year-old Dorothy Gosling was also old and ill. And like Busby, Gosling hired Dorothea Montalvo as a night nurse, then ended up at Sutter General Hospital suffering repeated bouts of inexplicable illness. But Gosling had a healthy skepticism and plenty of fight left in her. When her case attracted the attention of Mildred Ballenger, she acted on the social worker's recommendations. She checked her belongings, then reported to police that Dorothea Montalvo had stolen her jewelry, a rare gold coin, and some blank checks (later forged and made payable to—no surprise—Dorothea Montalvo).

  On November 18, 1981, Sacramento police dutifully recorded Gosling’s complaint. But it wasn't until 1982, after Malcolm McKenzie's charges, that Dorothea's illegal activities finally attracted some heat.

  Still, she wasn't jailed, and Teflon criminal that she was, Dorothea slid right back into action. She pulled off two robberies in quick succession.

  Just a month after the McKenzie preliminary hearing, Dorothea slipped into a secured apartment complex and knocked at the door of eighty-two-year-old Irene Gregory. Introducing herself as Betty Peterson of the Sacramento Medical Association, Dorothea talked her way into Gregory's apartment, saying she'd been sent to check on the elderly woman's medications. Gregory obediently showed the "nurse" to her medicine cabinet, then was handed two pills and instructed to lie down and close her eyes.

  The "nurse" said she was going to take Gregory's blood pressure, but when Gregory awakened, she found that the "nurse" had instead taken two valuable rings and a bottle of sleeping pills. Only after she received a bill for $730 would she discover that a credit card was missing too.

  Even then, Dorothea had time to escape. But apparently she needed just a little more money.

  So, late one morning, Dorothea unexpectedly dropped in on a neighbor, eighty-three-year-old Dorothy Osborne. She came bearing gifts—a bottle of brandy and a bottle of vodka—and prepared a concoction for her friend. Osborne hardly sipped the foul-tasting drink, but didn't awaken until about eight that evening. Only later did she realize that some keys, her Visa card, a checkbook, an unemployment check, an ID card, and some rolled coins had been stolen.

  Two days later, Dorothea Montalvo Puente was arrested, charged with assorted crimes, and ordered held without bail. Police confiscated the ticket to Mexico in her purse.

  By the time readers had finished the back page of Sunday's paper, many were wondering how police could have let this disreputable woman slip through their fingers.

  Part III: THE SPECTACLE

  You always have questions about whether a placement is the best…. But we have to put them somewhere. We have to take what society provides us, and it's not always the best.

  —Peggy Nickerson

  The focus in this tragedy has been on the spectacle of mass murder. I work constantly, however, with people who live in the continuing jeopardy of homelessness, poverty, and mental illness. I think we should all focus even more intently on these people whose daily lives are a tragic exercise in futility and abandonment. We have a national tragedy ongoing t
hat we must deal with.

  — Judy Moise

  CHAPTER 13

  At about the same time Dorothea Puente was catching her taxi to Stockton, a forensic anthropologist was applying his craft in the back corner of her yard. With a practiced eye, Dr. Heglar had identified areas where slight changes in the color and texture of the soil indicated recent digging. Plants had been uprooted, and here and there topsoil had been removed. There had been a momentary stir over some suspicious discoveries, but they turned out to be only trash.

  Now he was scooping dirt away from a dubious patch of fabric. Crouched at the base of a newly planted tree, he next used a metal probe, testing the surrounding area for resistance. Then, with meticulous care, he began flicking soil away with his brush.

  Heglar enlisted the help of a coroner's investigator and others, and this spot became the focus of a controlled commotion. Shovels scooped a broad ring of earth away from the bundle, then small hand trowels were employed. It became obvious that this was yet another body. Dr. Heglar and the coroner's investigator stood knee-deep in the hole, whisking away dirt from the encircled form, watching as the cloth took on human dimensions. Like the others, it had been wrapped in layers of material before burial.

  The body would not be tampered with here at the site. In accordance with protocol, it was tagged, photographed, sealed in a white plastic body bag, and removed to the morgue to await the necessary indignities of autopsy. For now, it would be known only by the impersonal designation, coroner's case #88-8381.

  Police found it hard to imagine little old Dorothea Puente maneuvering dead bodies into the ground by herself. "We're making the assumption that it would be pretty hard for a woman of her small size to carry those bodies," Lieutenant Enloe disclosed to the press. So, with Puente off to parts unknown, finding an accomplice became a top priority.

 

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