Explaining the medical histories of these nine, O'Mara subtly emphasized that these were not just names, but living, breathing people. Divorced, widowed, or abandoned, most were alone. He'd managed to round up a photograph—a family picture, a doctor's photo, even a mug shot, if necessary—for all but one. Leona Carpenter's placard remained sadly faceless.
O'Mara admitted their foibles. They were, for the most part, perpetual alcoholics; some were heavy smokers; some were mentally ill; most were not very good at following doctors' orders. And for each one, O'Mara recited a litany of ailments, from arterial sclerosis to ulcers, noting that such diseases "can be troublesome, can be debilitating, or certainly can be fatal."
Spectators exchanged looks. Reporters frowned. Why was he putting so much emphasis on the abysmal medical histories of these people? True, the prosecution often defuses the defense's case by admitting its own weaknesses, but wasn't this overkill? O'Mara was making Clymo's case for him: These were sick, aging folks who just dropped over dead!
But then the prosecutor began sowing the seeds of suspicion: the toxicology reports showing Dalmane in the victims' systems; Puente's copious prescriptions for the drug; the empty gel capsules found in her drawer, in halves, with Dalmane residue still inside.
The defense attorneys hardly stirred. They expected all of this. Dalmane they were ready for.
But now O'Mara was uttering something new: "Asphyxiation,”he said, and he could almost feel the defense attorneys staring at his back. There are two types of asphyxiation, he told the jury, strangulation and suffocation. "Even these decomposed bodies probably would have provided evidence of strangulation; none was found. But what about suffocation?"
Had the defense anticipated this? They should have, O'Mara thought. Williamson hadn't pursued this at the preliminary hearing, but the notion had jumped out at him while staring at those gruesome photographs.
"A pillow placed over the face," he was saying, "even a garbage bag over the head of a drugged, weakened victim, would have left no detectable trace. Did Dorothea sneak in, after her victims had collapsed into unconsciousness, to quietly extinguish them?"
Letting no alarm show on their faces, Clymo and Vlautin listened, immobile. He couldn't prove this, they likely told themselves. He was fishing.
"We're going to see a pattern of behavior," O'Mara continued, "that shows how she tried to cover up her crimes. Time and again, you're going to hear that after they've disappeared, they've gone mysteriously somewhere," he said, gesturing in the empty air. O'Mara recounted Puente's lies: that Bert had gone with his brother-in-law to Shreveport, Utah, "a place that doesn't exist"; that Leona Carpenter had gone "to the hospital to die"; that Ben Fink had gone "up north, to Marysville"; that James Gallop had gone "back to L.A."; and that Everson Gillmouth had gone "back to Oregon."
Such were her euphemisms for death.
O'Mara turned toward the money trail, itemizing the checks that Dorothea had stolen from her tenants, totaling upward of $58,000. (He wondered just how high that figure might go; the rekindled investigation was still turning up evidence.)
Everyone had assumed—with the checks, the lying, the forgery—that the motive here was pure and simple greed. But now O'Mara threw another surprise punch: "You're going to see that she already had access to virtually all their money before they were dead. The motive is not getting their money," he declared. "There were a lot of forgeries while the decedents were still alive!"
O’Mara went on: "Well then, what is the motive for murder? Dorothea Puente ran a very nice board-and-care facility. She took in some people that are very difficult. These are not people that the average board-and-care operators want to take. For the most part, they're people that have mental problems, substance abuse problems. They act out. They're not reliable. You can't really depend on them."
The problem with these people, O'Mara said, was that their health deteriorated to the point that they required extraordinary care. Rather than merely providing "a place to stay and a couple of meals," Puente found herself running a skilled nursing facility. "You've got a lot of people that are very, very sick, that require a lot of attention."
What was he saying? That Dorothea killed them because they were too much trouble?
At the next break, Kevin Clymo puffed a cigarette, muttering, "For four years he's been telling the whole world that the motive was money, and now he says she did it because she's evil! I can't understand why he did that."
This threw a kink in their defense. As, of course, O'Mara hoped it would.
But was it enough? O'Mara still had to confront the defendant herself. He'd never had to prosecute a serial killer with such a sweet and vulnerable image.
"As you see her in court today," he said, gesturing toward Mrs. Puente, "the defendant looks somewhat delicate, an elderly woman." He smiled. "But in terms of personality, and in terms of her physical abilities, she is not an old woman. She's not Mary See at See's Candies." [A candy franchise with a white-haired grandma as its trademark.]
He cautioned them, "You're going to hear the defendant described as a very caring person, a person trying to help out unfortunates. And to some degree"—he shrugged—"that's true. But you're also going to hear a portrait of the defendant that's not nearly as flattering." He then described Dorothea Puente as extremely manipulative, a woman subject to very quick personality changes, who suffered "delusions of grandeur."
Curious jurors glanced over at this pale enigma.
Dorothea Puente listened impassively, her face a mask of a million tiny wrinkles, slight tucks in her cheeks (the apparent result of a 1988 face-lift).
Stepping up to a chart of the F Street house, O'Mara pointed to the upstairs and said quietly, "She describes that as a haunted room." All eyes went to the "haunted bedroom" off the kitchen.
Painting Dorothea Puente in sinister shades, he explained that "people died on her in there," that she was a deadly caregiver. "I'm going to take care of them," she would say, escorting some unsuspecting soul upstairs to that bedroom.
"Shortly thereafter," O'Mara intoned, "they would disappear. No one would see them again."
On this ominous note, O'Mara closed. He hoped it was enough, for even now he was playing catch-up. He'd found some flaws in his own case, and he'd tried to anticipate counter-arguments, but the defense had had four years to turn each small tear into a giant hole.
At times O'Mara had seemed awash in a sea of details, diagrams, and displays. Had the jurors resented this protracted stream of information? Had O'Mara dragged on so long that they begrudged him for it? Puente's attorneys certainly hoped so.
The next morning, defense attorney Kevin Clymo rose out of his seat to address the jury. "We are kind of at a disadvantage," Clymo began, playing the underdog. "You get used to that when you're a defense lawyer." He smiled at them. "You're not going to hear any of our arguments until mid-spring."
And after that, the prosecution would have a second chance to present evidence. "That's because the prosecution has the burden of proof," Clymo emphasized. The tall, dome-topped defense attorney had a much different style than the prosecutor: slower, more measured, with broad gestures. The jurors shifted gears and listened.
"Now, I'm going to tell you some things that the prosecution didn't tell you. I suppose one of our jobs under our adversary system is to make sure that you guys, the true judges of the case, get a balanced view of the facts."
Clymo knew that, without a strong opening, they risked months of damning evidence piling up against their client. His imperative was to show that the state's evidence was open to interpretation. Yet, for defense attorneys, opening statements are a walk on a tightrope. Up until now the prosecutor—and the public—could only guess at how they might defend their client. Now, with each word to the jury, he clued the prosecution.
Clymo wheeled over a detailed, three-dimensional model of Puente's house, which looked like the elaborate dollhouse of an extremely spoiled child. He lifted off the roof and the jurors
peered at the tiny furniture inside. "If, in fact, there was a 'haunted room,' you can see whether or not one of these rooms match that description," he said, his voice dripping sarcasm.
"I've got to tell you that I was a little bit surprised—for four years I've heard it suggested that Dorothea Puente killed people to steal their money. And what I heard yesterday was that Dorothea Puente killed people because she's a bad person. She's evil! And there is a haunted room in the haunted house! I went home and I scratched my head and I thought, my God, how little progress we've made since the Salem witch trials."
Popping in his own amateurish videotape, Clymo went through a leisurely tour of Puente's home. "This is a normal house," he said. "This is not a wicked witch's haunted house!" Indeed, with bookcases filled with paperbacks, a pantry full of food, lace curtains on the windows, pillows and big knitted comforters on the beds, it looked remarkably ordinary. "All the rooms had televisions," Clymo noted as the camera wandered through the first floor, then upstairs. "That's one of the things that Dorothea Puente did. That's where some of the money went. Televisions, beds, mattresses, linens, food—lots of food."
This was a glimpse at their counterargument. Feeding a houseful of people over a period of three years would not be cheap. Was $58,000 an unreasonable sum? The defense didn't think so.
Their roles had reversed: While Clymo talked, O'Mara sat with pen in hand, plotting every turn of logic.
"We heard that the people at the house were ‘shadow people.' They were people that, for the most part, were down and out. They were derelict They were disabled. They were drunkards, the dregs of society, so to speak. They were people that didn't fit."
Emphasizing the services that Dorothea Puente had provided, and the stresses placed upon her, he continued, "Drinkers are the most belligerent. They are the most self-neglecting. They are people that don't take care of business, and they are the most difficult to place."
But Dorothea Puente would take people in, Clymo said, "when they didn't have anyplace else, when nobody would take them."
None of this Mother Teresa bit struck O'Mara as surprising.
Clymo moved to a more delicate area. "Someone said that Dorothea Puente has a touch of larceny in her heart. It may be true. I'm not going to stand here and tell you that she's a thief. But I'm not going to jump up and down and protest a whole lot about evidence that may suggest she had a touch of larceny in her heart. It doesn't make her a killer," he said, raising his eyebrows and adding in a mocking tone, "it doesn't make her an evilserial killer."
Now Clymo was saying, "She went to prison," and O'Mara listened closely. How much of Puente's record would Clymo reveal?
"I'm not going to hide that from you," Clymo went on. "I’ll tell you from the get-go, she went to prison in 1982 after being convicted upon her plea of guilty to theft charges, writing and forging checks." Phrasing this carefully, he added, "She was also accused of administering a stupefying drug to an individual and liberating that individual of his property."
Clymo was giving this to him—and O'Mara would take it, he'd work it in whenever he could—but it was no error. It was a legal paradox in this tangled case that the prosecution would use it to establish guilt, while Clymo introduced it to fight for her innocence.
Clymo cast derision on circumstantial evidence, declaring, "Of nearly two hundred witnesses, not a single one will testify to having seen Dorothea Puente kill anyone! And not a single one will testify to having seen her bury anyone!"
O'Mara had expected this "failure of proof" defense.
But now Clymo made a surprising, if vague, concession: "After all you hear about this case, you will infer that Dorothea Montalvo Puente was connected with, somehow associated with, maybe even responsible for causing people to be buried in her yard. That's seven people in the yard. I'm sure you've already had that thought."
The jurors regarded him quizzically as he paused to remind them again of the presumption of innocence.
Then he held up a photo of the religious figurine standing over Betty Palmer's grave in front of the house. "Dorothea Montalvo Puente was the person who not only took care of these people, but remembered them in her own way. She took care of them when they were alive"—he glanced at the photo—"it looks like she took care of them after they were dead, too."
The reporters were loving it. This was something they could use! Spooky stuff! It made good copy.
But what did it say about Puente's defense? This was a strange way to argue for death by natural causes.
Moving on, Clymo's suggested that it was the oppressive onslaught of the media, the crush of onlookers, and the constant noise of the news vans that had compelled Puente to "rabbit" for Los Angeles. After all, she wasn't under arrest, so she hadn't really ‘escaped.’ "The only way to be unmolested by the media was to get the hell out of there. And she did," he said simply. "She did."
He pointed out that she had had over three thousand dollars in her purse and spoke Spanish. "She had the ability to duck into Mexico"—he opened his palms and shrugged—"she didn't do it."
And, just as the prosecution had humanized the victims, the defense humanized the accused. Clymo showed photographs of a younger Dorothea Puente holding a small child in her lap, standing in her immaculate house, and cradling her cat in her arms. The picture of innocence.
With those images in the jurors' minds, Clymo reminded them again that with no cause of death, there was "no criminal agency." In other words, "If you can’t say how they died, then you can never establish unlawful killing."
The evidence would show, he said, that tissues from Everson Gillmouth's body were saved and tested. Yet the toxicology exams showed nothing—no trace of Dalmane, or of any other drug. "The pathologist wasn't able to determine a cause of death, but it certainly wasn't due to a drug overdose."
That put a knot in the pattern.
Next, Clymo moved to that troublesome Ruth Munroe count. Of the nine, Munroe was the only one for whom there had been an immediate autopsy. Clearly, she had died from an overdose of codeine and Tylenol. Munroe's children had insisted that their mother wouldn't commit suicide, and that she was allergic to codeine. Now, with huge blowups of medical records, Clymo pointed out that Ruth Munroe, who was actually allergic to penicillin, was prescribed codeine by her own doctor!
In sympathetic tones, Clymo conceded that Munroe's children had been understandably confused and upset when their mother died. "They didn't want to believe she'd committed suicide." He paused. "But she wasn't murdered."
Looking into the jurors' faces, he asked softly, "That case wasn't prosecutable in 1982. Why now?"
This had to leave them wondering.
Further, Clymo went on, Dorothea Puente was the person who had called police when Ruth Munroe died. Yet she hadn't notified police when Everson Gillmouth died. Why not? What was different?
Some jurors leaned forward.
In 1982, Dorothea wasn't on parole. From 1985 on, she was. And as a condition of her parole, she was instructed "not to seek employment with elderly or mentally disabled people," or to handle government checks. If she lied about this, she could go back to prison. So, rather than alert the authorities when seventy-seven-year-old Everson Gillmouth died of old age, rather than risk questions, risk going back to prison, she'd quietly disposed of his body. And seven bodies after that.
Very tidy. But O'Mara's thoughts snagged on this neat little web of logic. There was a glaring inconsistency…. But would it be admissible?
The defense had prepared pie charts and graphs showing a kinder, gentler interpretation of the money trail. But since O'Mara had preempted this argument, Clymo kept it short. Given the daily costs of running a standard nursing facility, he asserted, Dorothea Puente didn't clear much profit in providing for her needy boarders.
Before turning the podium over to his co-counsel, Clymo laced together the fingers of his big hands and summed up their case: "We expect the evidence to show that eight of the nine died of natural causes, the
ninth of suicide. And Dorothea Montalvo Puente is not guilty of these charges."
The jury was starting to fidget, but when Peter Vlautin began with a few humorous remarks, they chuckled. They were with him, their minds still open.
Vlautin hurried through a few important points of pharmacology. He explained that Dalmane was of the class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, developed in the seventies as a safer alternative to highly addictive barbiturates, such as Valium. "It's almost unheard of to have an overdose of Dalmane."
Flourishing a red marker, Vlautin highlighted data on large blowups of the victims' medical records: histories of drug and alcohol abuse, and Dalmane prescriptions, which would explain the Dalmane in their systems.
With chart after chart, he showed these people to have been on the brink of death.
O'Mara had expected the defense to bring out "specters"—vague people who once threatened the life of this or that person—but he would have to fight something even more ephemeral: the general ill-health of these people.
Vlautin was being careful. He didn't want to alert the prosecutor to too much of their case. But now he declared, "I think the evidence suggests that alcohol and Dalmane played a role in the death of Bert Montoya."
But hadn't it been established at the prelim that Bert, the youngest and healthiest of the nine, was not a drinker? O'Mara scribbled notes on his legal pad.
Vlautin made a few parting shots at the testimonies of some of the ex-cons he expected to testify, and then, suddenly, he was done.
Judge Virga excused the jurors, who quickly spilled past reporters and out into the parking lot.
The paths of their normal lives had just taken a detour. For the next many months, this trial would roll forward, lurching along in fits and starts, carrying them on a life-and-death ride. They would bear witness to the passing of nine strangers who'd slipped away with scarcely a breath of notice.
But was it really possible to sit in a courtroom in 1993 and discern what had happened to nine people so many years ago? Wasn't this just the absurd hubris of our justice system? How close could even the most astute juror come to the truth? And how far could their hearts possibly travel from that sucking black hole of "reasonable doubt"?
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