O'Mara worked on the Puente case while it was breaking, advising the police to get a forensic anthropologist to oversee the exhumations, issuing search warrants. After filing the first murder count against Puente, O'Mara then handed the case over to Deputy DA Tim Frawley, a tall, lean man whose every sinewy inch was testament to a serious running regimen. In private, Frawley had a soft-spoken manner, so that he sometimes startled defense attorneys with his commanding presence in the courtroom.
O'Mara felt confident that Frawley would do an excellent job in bringing this case to trial. From now on, he thought, the Puente case would demand only slightly more of his attention than the usual media-grabbing, multi-murder case.
He was wrong. The prosecution of Dorothea Montalvo Puente would demand far more than anyone anticipated, consuming time and energy in vast, unruly quantities, swelling and spreading like a feverish, misdiagnosed illness.
Despite a growing witness list, investigators were smacking up against a lot of dead ends. They questioned tenants and neighbors: Had they seen anything—struggles, suffocations? Had they heard any strange sounds at night? Screams for help? Had anyone seen Puente mixing drugs or chemicals into food or drinks? Or giving injections? Had anyone seen her carrying or dragging or burying anything suspicious? They’d come back virtually empty-handed.
With fading hopes of finding any eyewitnesses, they shifted their focus to the paper trail, subpoenaing financial accounts and accumulating dozens of canceled checks. They studied pill bottles, located prescriptions, called on pharmacists, and queried doctors. Meanwhile, the crime scene investigators prepared scores and scores of detailed diagrams, as if the very layout of the house and garden could somehow convince a jury that Dorothea Puente was guilty of murder.
Some feared that the Puente case wasn't being pursued with enough vigor or insight. But others thought, hell, they'd found seven bodies in that woman's yard—what else did they need to get a conviction?
The case continued to make headlines. The last two bodies at the morgue were identified: Leona Carpenter and Betty Palmer, both in their late seventies. Carpenter had been the first body discovered (the skeletonized leg bone, the dirty sneaker), and newspaper accounts reminded the reading public that Betty Palmer's identification had been complicated by the fact that she was missing her head, hands, and feet.
Who were these aged ladies? And why was Puente being charged with only one count of murder?
With allegations of octuple murders—seven bodies pulled from her yard and another found beside the river—the investigation had sprouted tentacles. That solitary murder charge was beginning to seem awfully lonely, yet weeks passed with little evident progress.
And the feds were getting hot about all the government checks Puente had allegedly forged, wanting to charge her with federal charges of fraud and forgery. But O'Mara argued that this case was complicated enough without dragging in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lesser charges. The jury was going to be overburdened as it was.
Since there was no statute of limitations on the federal charges, the feds agreed to back off; if Puente didn't go down for murder, they'd get her later. For now, the numerous, checks would be used to prove motive.
Despite growing pressure, the DA's office didn't want to rush to file charges yet. Frawley and O'Mara agreed that a case like this demanded caution, thoroughness—especially since there was now another suspicious death, a 1982 "suicide" that looked an awful lot like murder.
One afternoon in late 1981, Dorothea Montalvo Puente clicked her high heels into one of her favorite drinking establishments, a place with a rounded exterior topped with a neon cocktail glass called the Round Corner Tavern. Inside, she spied Harold Munroe and his new wife, Ruth. Nice couple. They invited her to join them, so she pulled up a chair and nudged the wheels of fate into motion.
Ruth Munroe had been out of work since leaving the pharmacy at Gemco, she said, and the plump, sixty-one-year-old grandmother was ready to try something new.
Why, it just so happened that the owner of the Round Corner was interested in leasing out the restaurant portion of the tavern, Dorothea told her. "I've been thinking, this kind of opportunity may not come around again," she said, looking at Ruth, "but I sure could use a partner."
By leasing the restaurant, she and Ruth could launch their own business with minimal start-up costs. They would make a terrific team, Dorothea said. And Ruth wouldn't even have to cook; Dorothea would handle the kitchen. Since Ruth was the one with a car, she could handle supplies and transportation.
The venture seemed just about perfect, and after hours of discussion, they were sparked with enthusiasm. Ruth Munroe withdrew the capital for her share of the investment and handed it over to her new partner. They were in business.
Soon, Dorothea was working there in the kitchen nearly every day. And she was busy cooking up more than just hamburgers. The restaurant business was faltering, she told Ruth. They needed more capital just to keep the business afloat, and Dorothea was forced to ask Ruth for more and more money, either for the business or for personal loans. The bills kept mounting, Dorothea kept complaining, and thousands of Munroe's dollars were drained into the enterprise.
Meanwhile, Ruth Munroe had other things weighing on her mind. Her husband wasn't a well man, and since marrying him the previous year, Ruth had unfortunately found herself taking him to the veterans hospital with increasing frequency. Early in 1982, Mr. Munroe's doctors diagnosed terminal cancer. Finally, they decided he ought to stay in the hospital, and Ruth returned home alone.
In Ruth's time of need, her new friend stepped forward with a generous offer. It just so happened that one of her boarders was moving out, Dorothea told her. "Why don't you just move in with me? We get along so well. Besides, it would be less expensive than staying in that place all by yourself. I just thought that, with your husband in the hospital and all, we could help each other."
At her age, Ruth Munroe didn't much like living alone, and Dorothea's unselfish offer seemed just what she needed. So, on Easter Sunday, April 11, she moved into 1426 F Street, sharing the upstairs with Dorothea. Her sons helped her move, hefting furniture up to the bedroom off the kitchen and helping her arrange it.
Munroe had no way of knowing that the very next day, April 12, Dorothea was scheduled in court for a preliminary hearing for having drugged and robbed Malcolm McKenzie back in January. As Dorothea was leaving the courtroom, she was arrested and temporarily held on a forgery warrant for having robbed another person, Dorothy Gosling, back in 1981.
But the key word here is temporarily. While her illegal activities were finally attracting some heat, Dorothea, slick character that she was, slid right back into action. Until now, she may have been just another petty crook, but she was about to move into the big leagues.
The quick theft and disappearing act wouldn't work with Ruth Munroe. This had become a long-term relationship, and something more was required. Perhaps the risk was worth it because Munroe offered not just loose change lifted from her pockets, but serious folding money.
Just two weeks after having moved into 1426 F Street, Ruth Munroe was abruptly stricken by a mysterious illness.
When her children came to visit, they were startled to find their ailing mother—who didn't drink—with a glass of creme de menthe in her hand. "Dorothea gave this to me to calm my nerves," she explained.
They were concerned that their mother looked so tired and pale, but Dorothea ushered them out, assuring them that she would take care of her new roommate. "After all," she reminded them, "I used to be a nurse."
With no idea what could be wrong with their mother, they put their faith in Dorothea and in their mother's healthy constitution.
But very early the morning of April 28, the phone rang. It was Dorothea, with staggering news: Their mother had suddenly died. They rushed to the house and found that it was true.
Grief-stricken, the family was at first too upset to analyze the circumstances surrounding Ruth Munroe's death. Bu
t later, when they received a copy of the coroner's report, they were shocked to see that their mother had died of an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen, and that her death had been judged a suicide!
Horror, then anger began to stain the edges of their grief. They began to reconsider how Dorothea, the former "nurse," had "taken care of" their mother. Their suspicions darkened when they found that Munroe's bank accounts had been cleaned out, and much of her jewelry was missing. Dorothea protested innocence, claiming that Ruth had owed her a lot of money.
Exactly three weeks to the day after Ruth Munroe's death, Dorothea Montalvo Puente was arrested. (Police found a ticket to Mexico in her purse.) She was charged with six felony counts, including robbery, forgery, grand theft, and administering stupefying drugs, and she was ordered held without bail. But murder was not among the charges, and Ruth Munroe's name was not listed among Puente's victims. Munroe's family didn't even know that Dorothea Puente had been arrested. In fact, it wasn't until reading in the paper that Puente had been sentenced that her children were compelled to contact law enforcement and request an investigation into the possibility that their mother had been murdered. But the investigation floundered, and no murder charge was filed.
This time around, Ruth Munroe's children, named Clausen from her first marriage, weren't going to make the mistake of being too complacent.
They handed over everything they had about their mother's suspicious death in 1982, and the DA's office reopened a case that it had long considered closed.
On the surface, this murder charge looked awfully promising. It had just what this case needed: a solid autopsy, motive, and grieving children, all the elements that make a trial attorney's palms itch.
But underneath were some legal problems that Clymo would doubtless milk for every advantage. Deputy DA Frawley consulted with John O'Mara, and the two agreed this wasn't going to be pretty. They could almost hear the jurors arguing in the deliberation room: If the Munroe case looked so solid in 1989, why hadn't it been prosecuted back in 1982?
CHAPTER28
Trees that had been shedding their leaves at the time of Puente's capture were budding out with fresh spring foliage as the DA's office finally filed additional murder charges against her. On March 29, 1989, the DA's office fulfilled (perhaps even exceeded) public expectations when Tim Frawley, the prosecutor ostensibly in charge of the case, increased the number of murder charges from one to nine.
The counts against her included the murders of the seven individuals unearthed from her yard: Bert Montoya, Leona Carpenter, Betty Palmer, Dorothy Miller, Vera Faye Martin, James Gallop, and Benjamin Fink. Puente was also charged with two murders more remote in time: those of Everson Gillmouth, whose body had been found in a wooden box by the side of the river on New Year's Day, 1986; and Ruth Munroe, who had overdosed in Puente's home in April 1982.
Nine murder counts. Now Dorothea Puente had officially joined the unlikely fellowship of alleged serial killers—rare company for her age, rarer still for her gender. There was virtually no one else in her category. Across the country, FBI profilers and criminal psychologists raised their eyebrows, then penciled the little old lady's name on a very short list.
Those who believed they'd lost a friend or relative to murder now suffered the absolute futility of trying to will the legal apparatus into motion, waiting impotently by the phone, hoping first for some news of justice, then lowering expectations and hoping for news, any news, any movement. But the DA's office did not revolve around the Puente case, and news was slow in coming.
In fact, the DA's office was in the throes of change, and for now the pursuit of justice would have to take a backseat to office politics and career ambitions. When District Attorney John Dougherty unexpectedly resigned to go into private practice, he left the office in turmoil. The board of supervisors scrambled to find a replacement, and speculation over Dougherty's successor buzzed through the corridors. Many were disappointed when, rather than promoting from the more than a hundred attorneys working within the DA's office, the board settled on an outsider, Steve White, chief assistant with the attorney general's office.
As anyone who has ever worked in an office knows, realignments of power are disruptive. And new bosses, particularly those brought in from outside, are likely to be at least controversial, even unpopular.
The newly appointed DA, green to the workings of his new post, needed an insider to help him take charge, and shortly selected Timothy Frawley as chief deputy, his second-in-command. Frawley was a disciplined attorney with a solid track record, but in trying to juggle his new responsibilities, he soon realized that he would have to find someone else to help with his caseload, particularly that troublesome Puente case.
Meanwhile, the state's investigation, which had yet to match strides with the defense, continued to be plagued by mishaps.
Senior Document Examiner David Moore bent over his handheld magnifier and stared at the handwriting exemplars he'd been given. This was his job with the California DOJ Bureau of Forensic Services: to try to find truth in loops and slants, scrutinizing scrawls of pencil and ink, studying i dots and t crossings, comparing pressure, proportion, and "baseline habits." He sighed, wishing that the photocopies he'd been given were originals. These machine-made images rendered signatures two-dimensional, eliminating signs of pressure and making them harder to compare to the handwriting exemplars scribbled by Dorothea Puente back in December.
It was Tuesday, April 11, and Moore had only just become involved in the Puente investigation. Using a stereoscopic binocular microscope, he looked again at the "questioned documents," mostly photocopied signatures on the backs of checks. He had hundreds of signatures to examine (and would ultimately spend over 125 hours on this case), but so far he'd concluded only that the writer had tried to disguise his or her handwriting while signing these checks. In his experience, signatures that were written vertically or left of vertically were usually fraudulent.
Moore regarded the handwriting exemplars spread across his desk with disdain. It was obvious to him that these were woefully insufficient. There weren't enough of them, for one thing. And there wasn't enough variation in writing styles, which indicated to Moore that all of these signatures had been collected from Puente during a single session, without much direction.
Switching to the video spectral comparator (VSC-1), which allowed him to see the inks under different lighting, Moore again sighed at the inadequacy of the exemplars. What he saw here was not a well-planned collection of writing samples, but the criminal wrapping her hand around the pen and signing various names in an unvarying fashion.
He pushed the exemplars away in exasperation. This was pointless, he decided. Puente hadn't been instructed to write vertically or slanted left, so the exemplars were too homogeneous to compare with the signatures on the backs of the checks. The handwriting exemplars, like the toxicology reports, would have to be redone.
It was already April. With a haphazard investigation and no one really at the helm, how likely was it that they'd be ready for Dorothea Puente's preliminary hearing, now scheduled for September?
The blistering month of July was just ending when George Williamson returned from prosecuting an organized crime case in Fresno and stepped back into the air-conditioned hubbub of the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office. Around the office, Deputy DA Williamson was regarded as a top prosecutor, even a troubleshooter. As one attorney put it, "If you see Williamson's name on a file, you know it's a problem case."
The People v. Dorothea Puente fell into that category. So it was no surprise when Tim Frawley, the new chief deputy, popped into Williamson's office and asked him to take over his caseload. Williamson accepted instantly, but once the paperwork was shifted into his office, he found the files in disarray, haphazardly stashed in boxes. Apparently, the Puente case had been sitting on the back burner.
It would take time to get this complex case cooking again, and Williamson had several cases to handle first. So, in a rout
ine procedure, Dorothea Puente's preliminary hearing was rescheduled for February 20, 1990. But finally, nearly nine months after Puente's arrest, it appeared that the DA's office had at last found its prosecutor.
George Williamson was a man in his prime. Despite his cigarette habit, he was fit, sturdy, and fast-paced. He sated his penchant for the outdoors with a winter ski cabin in Tahoe and all the equipment needed for an array of sports, including handball, tennis, golf, and waterskiing. He preferred standing to sitting. Even his words were rapid-fire, with a vocabulary displaying obvious erudition and intellect. When he wanted to, Williamson could play down his education, assuming the salty speech and low-key manner that put less sophisticated people at ease. In the courtroom, he was razor-sharp, thorough, and pugnacious. His tenacity as a prosecutor had even earned him a nickname around the police station: the Bull Dog.
With his background, Williamson could have easily ended up on the other side of the law. His mother died when he was fourteen, he couldn't tolerate his father, and he was on his own at sixteen. But instead of succumbing to baser temptations, Williamson put himself through college, then law school, and ended up in the Sacramento DA's office.
While most new attorneys could expect months or years of trying misdemeanors before graduating to felony prelims and then felony trials, Williamson was trying his first murder within eight months. Eventually, he became the youngest supervisor of any task force in the office, heading up what he casually referred to as "major dope." Some might call him a star prosecutor, but Williamson would demur, conceding only that he'd been "lucky in office progression."
Deft at deflecting praise, Williamson happily turned nearly any conversation to the achievements of his seventeen-year-old son, Tyler. The boy excelled in athletics, and after work Williamson, the canny attorney, became just another proud father in the bleachers, cheering when Tyler got a hit. Any hint of bitterness over an ill-fated teenage marriage was eclipsed by pride in his son. He boasted that Tyler, a talented golfer, had a handicap of only three, adding with a chuckle, "I've caddied for him more than once.”
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