Carol Ivy, a San Francisco TV reporter who had been up at dawn to make the long drive to Sacramento, surveyed the scene and declared, "Everyone wants this story."
But if Puente's defense attorneys had their way, the entire preliminary hearing would be a nonevent. Even before the courtroom doors opened, the startling news had spread that the defense had filed a last-minute motion to exclude the press and the public. A sham, reporters scoffed, with varying tones of conviction.
When the courtroom finally opened, some of the media crush was vented into the empty jury box, and the bailiff still had to turn away disappointed spectators. The noise level rose and fell in waves of anticipation.
Puente was finally brought in, flanked by her attorneys. She clasped Kevin Clymo's arm, lending her an air of frailty. Once she was seated, Peter Vlautin poured her water in the deferential way one might serve an aged aunt. Despite a light touch of make-up, she looked extraordinarily pale. Her skin was milky and smooth, her features fine and even, and her white skirt and sweater made her snowy hair seem even whiter.
Off to one side, Deputy District Attorney George Williamson watched the proceedings coolly. Even physically, he and Kevin Clymo seemed virtual opposites. Williamson was clean-shaven and had a full head of brown hair that he hadn't had time to have cut. Clymo's bald head gleamed, and he sported a large droopy mustache that earned him comparisons with the wrestler Hulk Hogan. In stature, George "the Bull Dog" Williamson was short and compact; Clymo's towering height was almost intimidating.
The bailiff intoned, "All rise," and Judge Gail D. Ohanesian, a petite woman with cropped dark hair and somber eyes, entered the court. With that, all the players were assembled.
The motion to exclude the press and public was the first order of business. In a bald attempt to catch the media flat-footed, this motion had been filed only the previous afternoon. Two attorneys representing various news media had scrambled to get here, and soon they were scrapping with the defense.
The prosecutor, who had witnesses waiting, listened impassively, his impatience scarcely breaking the surface.
The judge, meanwhile, seemed to be struggling to get a grasp on this unexpected turn of events. She quizzed both sides, yet appeared hesitant to give any response. The media began to buzz with consternation. Wasn't this odd? They'd expected the judge to promptly rule against the motion and get on with it. Maybe she was in over her head, they whispered.
Finally, Judge Ohanesian was persuaded that some of the arguments on this motion should be heard in camera, or in secret. The court was cleared and the doors shut.
Even Williamson was excluded. He came out in the hallway and told his witnesses—including an anxious Judy Moise—to go on home.
The whole of the next day, the attorneys argued behind closed doors. The defense called two expert witnesses who testified, using detailed graphs and charts, that the jury pool had already been polluted by protracted coverage, predicting dire problems with jury selection if coverage continued. (Ironically, these experts on the ill effects of media coverage were hit by the glare of TV cameras whenever they left the sanctity of the courtroom. Even when they went down the hall to the rest room, lights and video cameras followed.)
While arguing the motion to close the proceedings, the defense was fine-tuning an argument for a change of venue. Their exhibits detailing the extensive coverage to date included articles from Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and the AARP Journal, as well as 252 newspaper articles, 711 broadcasts, Blackburn's premature book, and even a Geraldo Rivera show called "The Murderer Next Door."
Meanwhile, the press was left to loiter in the halls and debate whether this unpredictable judge might close the proceedings after all. With no other options open to them, resourceful artists took turns peering through the narrow crack between the closed double doors, sketching amazingly accurate renderings that were then dabbed with color in time to make the five o'clock news.
By Friday afternoon, Judge Ohanesian had heard all the defense's arguments. She acknowledged that the "nature and extent of coverage in this case has been unique," and that it had been "the talk of the country," but she concluded that an open preliminary hearing would not compromise the defendant's right to a fair trial.
The flag was up.
As his first witness, Deputy DA George Williamson called Judy Moise. She entered looking poised, but in truth she had worried about this moment for weeks, reviewing her log and racking her brain about dates, times, and sequence. Her nervousness showed in a tendency to over-answer. Guided by Williamson's questions, she explained about her job, about Bert, about meeting Dorothea Puente, about how Bert had flourished while staying at her boardinghouse. She recalled Bert's disappearance, and how Dorothea had repeatedly assured her that Bert was in Mexico, promising his return. She explained about the strange phone calls from a man claiming to be Miguel Obregon, who'd slipped and called himself Don Anthony, and about the letter with the Reno, Nevada, postmark.
When Judy started off on a tangent, Williamson would cut in and put her back on track. He knew just where he wanted to go, and it was his style to focus on his point and move unswervingly toward it: the epitome of "direct examination."
The cross-examination wouldn't be quite so smooth. Clymo clearly wanted to discredit this witness. He attacked her credentials and slighted her job, since she wasn't a licensed social worker. He prodded her about her contract with the motion picture company that had signed up so many individuals associated with this case, implying that Judy Moise would profit from lying.
Judy hadn't expected this. She felt she was being alternately badgered and then cut off. Her testimony turned rocky.
At one point, Clymo stood just behind Puente and rested his big hands on her shoulders. Judy couldn't avoid making eye contact with the woman. Puente's stare was so unnerving, Judy shivered and looked away, vowing not to look at her again.
She was feeling uneasy and befuddled by the time Clymo got around to some provocative questions about Bert Montoya.
"Were you aware that he was a diabetic?"
Judy looked perplexed. "No."
"Are you aware that he took Micronase [an oral antidiabetic drug]?”
"No."
Clymo was making her seem uninformed. "You knew that he was schizophrenic?"
"Yes."
"Did you ever hear Bert talk to the spirits?"
"Yes," she replied, "he seemed as if he was admonishing them. He'd point to the sky."
"Didn't he tell you that the spirits told him to kill himself?"
Frowning, Judy said, "No." It was dawning on her, as on everyone else in the courtroom, exactly what strategy the defense would take.
It was no surprise that Clymo would argue that some of the victims unearthed at 1426 F Street—particularly oldsters like Palmer and Carpenter—had died of natural causes. But now it seemed that Puente's attorneys might make a case that even Bert Montoya, the youngest and arguably the healthiest of those discovered in Puente's yard, had been the victim of deadly disease, even suicide.
The argument began to crystallize: If Williamson couldn't establish the causes of these deaths, how could he prove murder?
By the time she stepped down from the stand on Tuesday, May 1, Judy was feeling wounded. (Clymo had given her such a hard time that he felt compelled to apologize, whispering as she left the stand, "I really don't have anything against you. It's just the way things are done.")
Williamson next called Donald Anthony to the stand.
A little guy in jeans and sneakers entered, and it hardly seemed possible that he could have caused Judy Moise any fearful, sleepless nights, or that his voice had once frightened her right out of her house. He was slight and wiry. Long brown hair spilled around a high forehead—which, his testimony would soon reveal, was no indication of elevated intelligence.
Anthony appeared nonthreatening, but he was no innocent. Williamson quickly established that he was a convicted felon seven times over: drug charges. And Anthony,
who professed a genuine fondness for Dorothea, admitted he was on the stand only because he was under subpoena.
In short, lazy sentences, he grudgingly described how he'd met Dorothea Puente: In the interim between prison and freedom, Anthony had been working at a halfway house. "She called work furlough and needed cheap labor, so they called me, 'cuz I needed work." As part of the work crew, he'd dug trenches in four spots around Puente's yard, and had even helped pour cement. The landlady had told him that the trenches were "for pipes," but he admitted under questioning that he never actually saw any pipes.
After leaving the halfway house, Anthony briefly stayed at Puente's boardinghouse. There he did odd jobs and favors for her, including making phone calls to Judy Moise using the name of Miguel Obregon. "I just thought I was doin' it for a good cause," he claimed, "so Bert could stay in Mexico."
To Clymo's consternation, Anthony's testimony did more than just validate Judy's. He revealed that Dorothea had taken him to Reno "to gamble and to mail a letter." She had also cautioned him to "have it wrapped in a paper towel so I didn't get fingerprints on it."
Having called only two witnesses, Williamson had shown that Puente had gone to elaborate ends to deceive Judy Moise about Bert's whereabouts, even camouflaging her own involvement. And from a legal standpoint, fabricating evidence is an indication of guilt.
Williamson's next witness was one of Puente's former tenants, John Sharp. The hawk-eyed, retired cook looked as if his sixty-five years had not been easy, but his testimony was clear, concise, and articulate.
(Scheduled for bypass surgery the next day, Sharp was unperturbed by the prospect of testifying. "I may be dead in a few weeks," he had told Williamson. "This doesn't seem like such a big deal.")
Sharp related his strange tale of holes being dug in the yard, of disappearances, of foul odors. And he cast light on Puente's manipulations, including how she'd asked him to lie to the police when they came asking about Bert Montoya's whereabouts.
Anticipating that the defense would make a grand showing of Puente's kindness and generosity, Williamson tried to diffuse their argument by eliciting this testimony himself. Under questioning, Sharp confirmed that Puente had been an attentive caregiver, especially concerning Bert Montoya, who, Sharp said, had improved "a thousand percent" while under Puente's care.
Still, when Williamson asked, "Were you afraid of her?" Sharp admitted, "Leery of her, yes."
In cross-examination, Clymo succeeded in getting Sharp to describe Bert as "basically a derelict." And while Sharp maintained that he'd never seen Bert drink, Clymo got him to admit that he "could smell [alcohol] on him."
With the luxury of an abundance of evidence, testimony can be presented with both artistry and logic—the seeds of motivation, the climate of opportunity, the bedrock of hard fact—until the overall landscape of the crime appears. But Williamson lacked that luxury, and he privately admitted that presenting this care was like "pushing a tiny pebble up a large hill."
His evidence was circumstantial. No one had seen Puente strangling or poisoning tenants. No one had seen her dragging bodies into the yard or covering them with dirt. And there was not a shred of direct evidence—not a fingerprint, not a single strand of hair—linking her with the bodies unearthed from her yard.
So Williamson's approach would be "cumulative." If he had to, he would call a hundred witnesses—from cops to ex-cons, from bureaucrats to bartenders—to make his case against Dorothea Montalvo Puente.
CHAPTER 31
Asking questions rapid-fire and speaking so quickly that the judge had to call extra breaks so the court reporter could rest, Williamson called a string of experts, including David Moore, the senior document examiner at the Department of Justice. Moore, with the diligence of an entire army of ants, testified on hundreds of signatures (on pension, SSI, tax refund, and Social Security checks). In his expert opinion, they were virtually all signed by Dorothea Puente.
But, as the defense well knew, theft was one thing, murder was another.
Williamson also called deputy coroners, detectives, virtually everyone who'd been involved in the discovery and exhumation of the bodies. That included Detective John Cabrera, who testified about his role in apprehending Puente. (Afterward, he stopped to chat with reporters in the hall, confiding that complicated crimes of this nature "take a lot out of you." This same man who'd volunteered to escort Puente past police lines, who'd even agreed to stir her soup as she fled the scene, boasted—without the least hint of irony—about his investigative instincts. "I had a gut feeling about this case," he declared.)
Next, Williamson advanced on the core of the case: cause of death. Grisly details emerged during the testimonies of the two tall, pale forensic pathologists who'd performed the autopsies. While Williamson displayed gruesome photographs of the bodies, first Dr. Robert Anthony and then Dr. Gary Stuart recited a macabre litany of decomposition and skeletonization. With the utmost thoroughness, the doctors verbally lay bare each individual's bones and organs, citing medical histories.
This dark subject turned illuminating when Williamson focused on the infinitesimal traces of drugs found in the bodies. Starting with the first body unearthed, Leona Carpenter, the court was about to get a crash course in pharmacology.
Dr. Anthony explained that found in Carpenter's brain tissues were traces of three drugs: Dalmane, Valium, and codeine. Of the benzodiazepine class of drugs, Valium (or diazepam) and Dalmane (or flurazepam) were both "sedative hypnotics," or sleeping pills, he said, and codeine was an opiate, a narcotic painkiller. A potent combination. And, the doctor noted, these drugs were "very liquid soluble."
"So they can be put in liquid rather easily—in water or alcohol?" Williamson asked.
"Yes, sir."
Visions of toxic cocktails floated through the courtroom.
"Could a large amount cause death?"
"Yes." The doctor explained that each of these drugs caused "sedative, muscle relaxant, hypnotic effect[s],” and that “in large quantities, [they caused] stupor, coma, difficulties in operating."
Further, the "synergistic effect" made them even more powerful in combination, particularly for elderly people. And, he added, when added to alcohol, they could become "highly toxic."
Moving to a deeper level of complexity, Dr. Anthony explained that the sedative known as Dalmane, or the "parent" drug flurazepam, was quickly broken down by the body into metabolites, traces of which might linger in the body for two weeks or more. Since the metabolites were found in the tissues along with the parent drug, the body hadn't had time—probably less than twenty-four hours—to metabolize the drug prior to death.
For example, Leona Carpenter's tissues carried .04 milligrams per kilogram of flurazepam, the parent drug, and .84 and .18 milligrams of two metabolites.*
[*See Appendix I.]
As the testimony progressed, it became clear that all seven of the bodies unearthed from the yard had traces of both the parent drug and its metabolites. Damning as all this sounded, Williamson knew that his argument was flawed. He couldn't actually prove that any of these people had been killed with cocktails laced with drugs. Usually, when someone dies from a drug overdose, the autopsy is conducted promptly, and the cause of death is determined by a blood or urine analysis. Sometimes, other bodily fluids, such as bile or fluid from the eye can be tested. Unfortunately, the bodies in this case were so decimated that no bodily fluids remained, so decomposed tissue samples had been tested.
"The numbers can't be told with any degree of accuracy," Dr. Anthony was saying, because no one knows "when fluids leave the body whether drug levels go up or down."
Were the drugs retained in the tissues, thus elevating the numbers? Or were the drugs mostly excreted from the body with other fluids, thus lowering the numbers? And how many milligrams of flurazepam in extremely decomposed remains would indicate a fatal dose?
No one could say. Though these drugs could be identified and measured, no one could authoritatively state wh
ether they were at toxic levels. No scientific tests could provide a scale.
Clymo was ready for this. In cross-examination, he got Dr. Anthony to admit that "because we're dealing with a dehydrated brain, the number is essentially meaningless."
What more could the defense want?
Further, Dr. Anthony said, "No studies have been performed to see where the drugs go when the body decomposes." (In a wry aside that delighted observers, he added, "It's very difficult to get a live patient to give up part of their brain.")
Clymo asked, "If I took five hundred capsules within two hours, my system would shut down?"
"Odds are," the doctor replied, "you would stop breathing, go into cardiac arrest, and die."
"The metabolism stops?"
"Yes, sir."
"So no more of the drug is turned into metabolites?"
"Yes, sir."
"So, if that happened, there would be a very high amount of the parent drug and a very low amount of the metabolites?"
"Yes," the doctor answered. "What you'll see in acute overdose, generally, is a large amount of parent drug and a small amount of metabolites."
More points for the defense. Since these toxicology reports showed the reverse, Clymo had heaped doubt on the theory that Puente's tenants had died of drug overdoses. Underscoring this inconsistency, he went on to establish that someone with liver disease (such as many of these victims had) would metabolize the drug even more slowly.
Clymo pressed on, asking how many thirty-milligram capsules of Dalmane it would take to kill.
"That has not been established," Dr. Anthony admitted.
"Do you have an opinion as to whether or not it would take thousands of capsules?"
"I believe it would take a significant number of capsules to successfully lead to an overdose."
"Hundreds?"
Disturbed Ground Page 19