While the finger pointing and hand wringing continued in Sacramento, Dorothea Puente was preparing to leave her motel room in Los Angeles, about seven hundred miles south. After her smooth escape on Saturday, she'd checked into the Royal Viking Motel, a cheap, nondescript place, registering under the name Dorothea Johanson (a version of a former husband's last name), paying seventy-four dollars cash up front.
For the next three days, Dorothea Puente clung to her privacy in room 31. She was a paragon of inactivity, slowing to a torpid pace, dwelling within her dull, cramped little motel room. She wouldn't let the maid in to clean, only sticking her head out to ask for towels.
Perhaps she thought all the fuss in the media would eventually blow over if she just kept her head down, and then she could assume a new identity and vanish into this huge metropolis. She went out only for meals, walking to a nearby restaurant, the T&G Express, where she ordered everything from pancakes to chop-suey, usually with beer, leaving generous tips.
But on Wednesday, Dorothea Puente became restless. That afternoon, she drew on her makeup, dabbed on perfume, and dressed to go out.
Once outside she hailed a cab and bluntly told the driver that she needed a drink. When he started to pull over at a beer tavern, she objected, "No, I have to have some hard liquor, not beer, because I couldn't sleep all night."
No problem. The taxi shortly pulled up in front of the Monte Carlo 1, a seedy neighborhood bar on Third Street, less than two miles from the motel.
She seated herself right in the middle of the bar, next to one of the regular patrons, Charles Willgues. The thin, balding man could hardly help noticing this well-dressed, unaccompanied woman next to him. With a blond rinse on her hair and fine clothes, she appeared out of place in this dive.
The lady ordered a screwdriver, then sighed and dejectedly regarded the purple pumps she'd been wearing since skipping out of Sacramento. The heels had worn off, she complained. Looking at him, she shrugged and remarked, "I've been walking a lot, looking for a place to live."
Chuck Willgues to the rescue. He knew a place just across the street. "If you're willing to slip your shoes off, I'll take 'em over and get 'em fixed for you."
It was too kind an offer to pass up. She pulled off her pumps and handed them over.
"Enjoy your drink," he told her, popping out of his seat. "I’ll be right back."
She sat dangling her stocking feet from her barstool while he carried her pumps to a nearby repair shop.
When Willgues returned with her shoes as good as new, Puente introduced herself as Donna Johanson, bought him a beer, and started concocting lies. She was recently widowed, she said with a sigh, and she'd just arrived from San Francisco two days ago.
Chuck Willgues, a widower himself, warmed to this good-looking, younger woman (she claimed she was fifty-five). She had style. And here she was a stranger, alone, in a town he knew well.
"Donna" took him into her confidence. She was trying to get over the death of her husband, so she'd decided to take a chance on L.A. Now she'd had all of her luggage stolen by an unscrupulous cabdriver, and she didn't know what to do. She had no choice but to stay in a cheap motel, and she was running short of cash.
Willgues wondered if there might be something he could do to help. "Why don't we move down to the end of the bar so we can talk privately?" she suggested.
Sipping another vodka and orange juice, the charming widow bought Chuck another beer. She seemed to be curious about each of the patrons, and Chuck knew them all.
Then "Donna" turned the conversation to her new gentleman friend. Flattered, the retired handyman shared a few details of his situation: no family nearby; a few medical problems; a quiet lifestyle on a fixed income. "Donna" seemed to take a genuine interest in the pensioner’s problems. She even suggested that she could help him increase his Social Security benefits, somehow seeming to know exactly how much disability he should receive for his back problems, tuberculosis, ulcer, and hernia. It made him momentarily uncomfortable.
But then she changed the subject. "I'm all alone too," she told him. No family. No friends. She was hoping for a fresh start in a new place and was looking for a job. If she could save enough, she thought she might eventually start a board-and-care business.
Willgues volunteered that he knew of a job at a nearby sandwich shop.
After ordering her third drink, "Donna" flashed him a smile and suggested, "Since you're alone and I'm alone, let's get together and I can cook Thanksgiving dinner."
Things were moving a bit fast for Chuck. He was even more surprised when she said she might even consider sharing an apartment with him. "Wait a minute," he said. "We’ll talk about that later." But he was captivated.
Still, there was something about her, something he couldn't put his finger on. She was familiar, somehow….
They talked on and on, and by the time their conversation came to an end, Chuck Willgues was quite smitten. Before putting her in a cab back to her motel, he made a date to pick her up and take her shopping the next morning.
But while he was walking home, the glow of their chat began to fade, replaced by "an ill feeling." Something just wasn't right.
Back at his apartment, he fixed himself dinner, but couldn't eat. He ran back through their conversation, trying to pinpoint the trouble, and suddenly realized he was pacing the floor. He chided himself out loud, "Chuck, what the hell's wrong with you?"
He decided to watch some TV, but as soon as he touched the television set, it hit him: "Damn, that's the woman I saw on TV this morning!"
Or was it?
Willgues again paced his tiny apartment. He could call the police, but what if he were wrong? "Donna" surely wouldn't want anything to do with him once he'd humiliated her with a visit from the boys in blue. But what if she really was Dorothea Puente? He could come right out and ask… But if he'd made a mistake, she'd be insulted. And if he was right, she damn sure wasn't going to tell him. Wasn't there some other way to find out?
At length, he decided to contact not the police, but the L.A. bureau of CBS news. He placed a call, which was routed through to the assignment editor, Gene Silver.
At first, it sounded to Silver like "a typical viewer call," with Willgues asking a few questions about the Puente case. Then he asked if the TV station had a picture of the woman. Silver found a Los Angeles Times photo, got back on the phone, and described the photo to Willgues.
Willgues wasn't sure. He thought that he'd met Puente, but he said he needed to see a picture to help him decide.
Having already spent about twenty minutes with this strange caller, Silver was thinking: If he's a kook, he'll go away. If not, this could be big. By then it was nearly 8:00 p.m., so he suggested that Willgues wait for the upcoming newscast, adding, "Do you mind staying on the phone?"
Willgues held on, and the two men, separated by miles, watched the broadcast together. Indeed, there was a long story about Dorothea Puente, with some video footage of Sacramento, but not a single frame of Puente herself.
By now Silver was thinking that this could be the biggest scoop of his career. "I’ll tell you what," he told Willgues, "I can bring the picture over and then you can decide for yourself whether this is really the woman you met." Silver jotted down the address and hung up.
When Silver pulled up in front of Willgues's dilapidated apartment building, some kids were doing crack in a doorway. Old Chuck was living in a pretty rough neighborhood, he thought.
Willgues was just hanging up the phone when Silver arrived. He and "Donna" had just firmed up arrangements to meet the next day, he said.
When Silver showed him the newspaper clipping, Willgues stared at Puente's photograph, transfixed, but said nothing. The newsman asked questions, prodding him, but Willgues wouldn't say whether or not this was the woman he'd met in the bar.
Clearly, Chuck Willgues, a lonely man who'd seen better days, didn't want to believe that the enchanting woman he'd met that afternoon was Dorothea Puente. Finally, he sai
d, “Well, you know, it looks a lot like her, but it's not the same dress…. I'd have to see a color picture."
Well, Silver suggested, how about watching the nine o'clock news? So the two men switched on the TV and settled down to watch, only to find that Lady Luck was being cagey: The newscast showed the same photograph—but in color.
Willgues leaned far forward and studied the image "like it was a test." When the screen flickered to other news, he sighed and dodged, "I just can't tell 'cause I can't see the rest of the dress."
Gene Silver could have strangled him. The guy had met the woman's twin in a bar, she'd told him some story about a taxi driver stealing her luggage, and then she'd asked about his disability checks! What difference did it make what dress she was wearing?
But Chuck Willgues was clearly reluctant to face the idea that he'd spent the afternoon with an accused murderess. Enraptured by the woman with "fire in her eyes," he didn't want to endanger this exciting new relationship. He tried explaining, "It's very important to realize that I'm going to pick her up tomorrow morning."
By now Silver was convinced that "Donna" was Dorothea. He continued quizzing Willgues, prodding and cajoling, assuring him that it would be handled very professionally by the police. If Chuck would give him the name of the place where she was staying, the police would simply go to her motel and ask for her ID. It would be painless.
The two lapsed into a long silence, Willgues thinking, Silver hoping. "Well, all right," Chuck said at last, "but just please don't go telling her that it was me who gave it to you."
A man with priorities, Gene Silver returned to his office and rallied a camera crew, then notified the police.
Detectives arrived shortly at Chuck Willgues's apartment. He told them what he knew, yet still seemed unable to believe that his charming, "very ladylike" friend could be as bad as they said. He even asked that they delay their arrest of Dorothea Puente for just one day. He'd made a date with her, after all, and he wanted to keep it.
But at 10:20 p.m., the police arrived at the Royal Viking Motel, knocked on the door of room 81, and waited.
Dorothea Puente had no hope of shimmying out a window. Slick as she'd been in the past, she just opened the door and walked straight into the arms of the law.
Seeing the officers and the camera crew, Puente stalled, identifying herself as Donna Johanson. But when the police asked for proper identification, a driver's license in her handbag revealed the name Dorothea Montalvo and her address, 1426 F Street. Bingo!
Wearing handcuffs and the same pink dress and red coat she'd worn in her flight from Sacramento, Puente was led out to the patrol car.
The waiting camera crew got it all.
CHAPTER 18
At about 3:30 Thursday morning, just before loading a tired and frail-looking Dorothea Montalvo Puente into the waiting plane at Hollywood-Burbank Airport, Sacramento Police Sergeant Jim Jorgensen turned to reporters and observed, "In twenty-three years of law enforcement, [I've found that] nothing is beyond the realm of believability when you're dealing with human beings."
After Jorgensen read Puente her Miranda rights, they stepped aboard neither a police aircraft nor a commercial plane, but a Lear jet. Sitting next to Detective John Cabrera, handcuffed, her arms chained to her waist, Puente was not only in police custody, she was confined in the company of a Channel 3 reporter, a cameraman, and a newspaper photographer.
Dorothea Puente was more than just a prisoner, she was a media event.
When word had reached Sacramento that Puente had been apprehended in Los Angeles, the local news media had scrambled to cover the story, but was frustrated to find that no commercial airline would be flying south from the city's airport for several hours. Outmaneuvering the competition, KCRA-TV, Sacramento's NBC affiliate, and The Sacramento Bee,the city's largest paper, had chartered the jet and then invited the police to come along.
During the flight, Puente sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup and submitted to a short interview. At one point, in response to a question by Channel 3 reporter Mike Boyd, Puente softly admitted, "I cashed checks, yes," but maintained, "I have not killed anyone." She also made the cryptic statement, "I used to be a very good person at one time." Then she clammed up.
A few hours later, Dorothea Puente was booked into the Sacramento County Jail. Police confiscated her purple leather purse containing a wallet, a California driver's license, a Seiko watch, a notepad, stamps, Tiffany cologne, miscellaneous cosmetics, two pairs of earrings, three rings with clear stones, a pack of Sweet 'n Low, and one sealed plastic envelope containing $3,042.55.
She traded her nice red coat, pink dress, and purple pumps for a regulation orange jumpsuit with "Sacramento County Jail" stenciled across the back.
Later that morning, looking tired, pale, and bewildered, Dorothea was brought into the jammed courtroom of Judge John V. Stroud. She looked especially small standing between Assistant Public Defenders Peter Vlautin and Kevin Clymo, more like a victim than a culprit.
She spoke just once during the seven-minute arraignment. When the judge addressed her as "Dorothea Puente Montalvo" she softly corrected him, "It's Dorothea Montalvo Puente," and all the reporters took note, as if this would tell any of us who she really was.
She nodded when the judge asked if she needed a public defender, but uttered nothing that might dispel the mystery of how so many bodies had come to rest in the yard of such a sweet-looking old woman. She listened solemnly as she was arraigned on one count of murder—that of Bert Montoya—and ordered held without bail.
As soon as these somber proceedings concluded, an international assemblage of reporters elbowed in close to Puente's attorneys, hoping for quotes, and the public defenders were happy to oblige. It was highly improper to confine a suspect with the press at close quarters for a long period, they declared. Puente's legal right to remain silent had been compromised. "It's unheard of to have a suspect transported with a reporter and cameras on the plane before she even has a chance to talk to an attorney," Peter Vlautin fumed. He accused the police of "enlisting the aid of the media to create a circus atmosphere in this trial," adding, "I'm surprised she wasn't on Geraldo! this morning."
(Geraldo would get his chance later.)
A deeply chagrined Police Chief Kearns meanwhile responded that he'd only just learned of the unorthodox travel arrangements, declining to comment further until he had more information.
While the cops squirmed about having committed yet another embarrassing blunder, the media seemed nothing short of delighted with its news coup. "Our job is to aggressively cover the news and to run after things when they happen. And frankly, I'm quite proud of what we did," crowed Bob Jordan, KCRA's news director. "We literally offered the police a ride. They accepted."
In a sense, Dorothea Puente had been apprehended by the media. She'd become a cause célèbre. The movie moguls were already making plans. Television or big screen? Mini-series or movie of the week? Whatever they would ultimately decide, the public-interest barometer clearly indicated it was time to prepare some contracts.
Of course, Chuck Willgues had his photo splashed from coast to coast. In front-page headlines, the Los Angeles Times dubbed him the "Tipster" who had "Led Police to Death House Suspect.” In one interview, Willgues summed up, "Everything happened so fast. The next thing I knew, I'd seen her on TV."
(His sudden rise from obscurity had a happy footnote: Willgues was reunited with his three children, whom he hadn’t seen in thirty years.)
Under the scrutiny of observers, Patty Casey's eyes teared up as she watched the noontime news and heard how her onetime friend had tried to con Chuck Willgues. The cabdriver who had been so taken in by Puente's guise said, "Bless her heart…. It's ironic that she went back to the same environment, the same hustle."
Casey wasn't the only one who wept for Dorothea Puente.
"Sometimes she would have a heart of gold, sometimes she was the demon. She had many personalities," said one who should know, Dorothea's fou
rth husband, Pedro Montalvo, who still resided in Stockton. Remembering his brief but passionate marriage to Dorothea, the old man's eyes spilled with tears. "Poor woman. The poor woman stole from innocents and gave to other people." Montalvo sat very still, obviously affected by the woman he once loved. "One minute she is in this world, the next minute she is in another world. It is like a nightmare," he said.
But Montalvo didn't believe that the police had yet solved the case. "I don't doubt that she committed crimes. What I doubt is the manner in which she could drag them out and bury them. That is what I doubt. Some bandido must have helped her. Or two of them, or more bandidos."
Now that Dorothea Puente had been apprehended, law enforcement fell strangely silent about possible accomplices. Was it logical to believe she'd acted alone? Or was it possible, even with such suspicious circumstances, that she was actually innocent?
With Puente locked up, Judy Moise felt safe enough to move back home, but she was still fearful that Puente's accomplices might be freely roaming the city. It seemed pretty darned unlikely to her that Puente had gone solo.
She'd given the police the inept letter written by "Michel Miguel Obregon," or someone named Don Anthony, yet they hadn't made any new arrests.
Meanwhile, Judy stubbornly clung to the hope that Bert might still be alive somewhere. Asleep or awake, she had visions of Bert smiling, laughing, walking toward her. Always inclined to look for a spiritual interpretation of dreams, she searched this recurring image for meaning, but conclusions eluded her.
She commiserated with Bill Johnson about the disappearance of their friend. They gingerly explored "should haves" and "if onlys," then gloomily discussed how these very public events had touched their private lives. "I told my five-year-old daughter that maybe Bert has died," Johnson said sadly. "She cried."
Judy's everyday life took on a surreal quality. Whenever she chanced by 1426 F Street, the house seemed shrouded in a sepulchral darkness, as if its once cheery blue paint had been tainted by the black events of the past days. And her job, long a source of pride and inspiration, now seemed sapped of meaning. She was only going through the motions, sleepwalking through the working day, tossing sleeplessly through the night.
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