When Sacramento Police were finally called, they pulled the file on Dorothea Puente Montalvo and saw what they were dealing with. On November 11, two detectives and Dorothea’s parole officer called at the house on F Street. By then the detectives had picked up all sorts of strange rumors in the dark world of alcoholic roomers and Social Security disability boarders. The house on F Street was a place you could get a good meal, but the lady that ran it was brutal. Disobedience was punished with heavy verbal abuse and even a slap and a push. And those who did not fit in were being buried in the garden.
The detectives took the yard story with a grain of salt. The yard was clearly visible from the sidewalk and exposed to the neighboring houses. Just the derelict ranting of aged alcoholics, the detectives thought. Nevertheless, they asked Dorothea if she would mind if they poked around a little in her yard. As long as they did not disturb the freshly planted flowers, Dorothea told them, she had no objections. “You won’t find anything,” she said.
It was not long before detectives dug up the remains of a corpse buried in a shallow grave near a flower bed. Police took Dorothea in for questioning, but as the corpse was clearly there much longer than the absence of the missing man everybody was searching for, she was released to go home that evening.
The next morning, as police descended on F Street to fully excavate the garden, Dorothea asked one of the detectives to escort her through the crowd so she could have a cup of coffee away from the chaotic scene. By the time the second body was uncovered and the detective had rushed back to take Dorothea into custody, she was in the cab on her way to Stockton. By the end of the weekend, she was hiding out in the Royal Viking Motel in Los Angeles, watching the television reports of the seven bodies uncovered in the yard at F Street.
Among the seven bodies, wrapped and taped in bedspreads and plastic like mummies, was the body of Bert Montoya, the missing mentally handicapped man the social workers were so adamant to find. Also unearthed were:
Dorothy Miller, an alcoholic 64-year-old Native American woman, was discovered with her arms duct-taped to her chest. She was last seen, by her social worker, sitting on Puente’s front porch smoking a cigarette;
Benjamin Fink, a 55-year-old man with a drinking problem, was last seen by a witness in April 1988 when Puente took him upstairs to “quiet him down” after he became argumentative. He was found buried in his stripped boxer shorts;
Betty Palmer, a 78-year-old victim who was found buried minus her head, hands, and feet, beneath a statue of St. Francis of Assisi just a few steps from the sidewalk;
James Gallop, a 62-year-old who had survived a heart attack and brain tumor surgery, but not the care that Dorothea accorded him at F Street;
Vera Faye Martin, 64, whose wristwatch was still ticking when she was unearthed and who investigators believed, judging by the patterns of the earth around her body, might have been buried alive and attempted to claw her way out of her shallow grave;
Leona Carpenter, 78, who had been discharged from a hospital into Puente’s care and subsequently vanished.183
Dorothea Puente was stealing approximately five thousand dollars a month from her victims. Shortly before police raided her home, she had cosmetic surgery. In her bedroom, police found expensive Giorgio perfume, stylish shoes and clothing, and stacks of paperback Westerns.
Endgame
After Charlie Willgues called about the Thanksgiving dinner she had offered to cook for him, Puente must have breathed a sigh of relief. If only she could somehow get into his apartment and kill him, she’d be safe. For the first time since police had descended on her house, Puente was feeling back in control. Soon she peacefully dozed off.
Until the LAPD began hammering on her motel room door an hour later, Puente had no way of knowing that when Charlie had called her, sitting next to him was a local Los Angeles TV reporter. A few hours after their barroom encounter, Charlie had realized where he had seen the woman before and he had called KCBS-TV. After they had interviewed him, they had decided it was best to call the police. Puente was arrested that night and transported the next day to Sacramento. She would never be free again.
Dorothea Puente Montalvo was charged with nine counts of murder—for the seven bodies found buried in her yard, for the murder of Everson Gillmouth once his remains found in the box by the river had been identified, and for the murder of Ruth Munroe back in April 1982, while Puente was standing trial for robbery and forgery.
Despite the fact that seven of the bodies were dug up from beneath Dorothea’s bedroom window and that she was connected to every victim, it was not an easy case to prove. The advanced state of decomposition of the corpses made it difficult to precisely determine the cause of each death and it was difficult to separate the drug content in the corpses from drugs normally prescribed to the victims. The victims’ propensities for alcohol also made drug interaction with alcohol an issue. Were these natural deaths and did Puente conceal the bodies because she was worried her parole might be revoked for taking in boarders? The defense argued that, at most, Puente was guilty of concealing deaths.
In the end, Dorothea was convicted in three of the murder counts and sentenced to life imprisonment on December 10, 1993. Puente was almost 65 years old; she would surely die in prison. But just like some horror movie, Puente came back to life in 2004 at the age of 76 with a cookbook, Cooking With a Serial Killer, which featured fifty of her delicious recipes she was so famed for among her derelict victims, an interview with her, and samples of her art. There will be no stopping Dorothea Puente until she stops for good.
5
LOVING US TO DEATH
Serial Killer Moms, Angels of Death, and Other Murdering Caregivers
The first person we all meet on Earth is our mother. From then on, most of us—the lucky ones—perceive women automatically as sources of love, care, and nourishment. Our mothers’ care, we learn as we grow up, is supplemented by the professional care of babysitters, nurses, and teachers. Nurses, in particular, we see as professionals dedicated to healing and easing pain. Yet some women use these very identities to disguise their repeated, raging, homicidal acts.
Genene Jones—the Baby-Killing Nurse
You never know when or where you’ll meet your serial killer. United States Army Sergeant First Class Gabriel Garcia, a crew chief with 507th Medical Company, would later testify how he met his serial killer in the back of a UH-1 “Dustoff” Medevac Huey Bell helicopter cruising at 125 mph at 4,000 feet on a civilian air ambulance mission into San Antonio, Texas.
Garcia served in an army MAST unit—Military Assistance to Safety and Traffic, a highly specialized branch that supplied medical air evacuation services for both military personnel and civilian communities near their bases. On August 30, 1982, at 12:32 p.m., his unit got a call with a request to transport to San Antonio two gravely ill children from a hospital in the town of Kerrville, about sixty miles away. Garcia and his platoon leader, Sergeant David Maywhort, were highly trained and experienced elite emergency medics who had flown many similar missions together. Piloted by David Butler, the helicopter scrambled and landed at Kerrville about forty minutes later, a mile from the hospital. A waiting ambulance took Maywhort and Garcia into town to pick up the two patients.
MAST crews had a lot of discretion whether to accept civilian patients for an air transport. It would be their call whether they felt a patient was stable enough to endure the noisy and bumpy forty-minute helicopter flight back to San Antonio. Upon their arrival at the hospital in Kerrville, Maywhort and Garcia went in to see the two patients for themselves. They were met by Dr. Kathleen Holland, a recently graduated doctor who had just opened a pediatric clinic of her own a week ago in the town. She showed them the first patient, Christopher Parker, a 6-month-old baby boy whose mother had brought him in when his breathing became raspy. Dr. Holland had checked his air passages and found them constricted. She felt the infant should be transported to a San Antonio hospital for observation. The child was stable and calm
.
The second child was a 7-year-old boy, Jimmy Pearson, suffering from a host of chronic conditions. The child was severely retarded, unable to speak, and had skeletal deformities that twisted his tiny, twenty-two-pound body into a misshapen contortion. That morning, his family brought him into the hospital when Jimmy began to experience continuous, uncontrollable seizures. Kathleen stabilized his seizures with an injection of drugs through his intravenous line and then attached a breathing apparatus to the boy’s face, which blew a steady stream of oxygen into his lungs. Jimmy also appeared to be stable, calm, and sleeping.
Maywhort and Garcia accepted the patients for the flight. Dr. Holland introduced Garcia to her clinic nurse, Genene Jones, who would accompany the two patients on the flight to San Antonio. Jones was a chunky, big-boned, mousy-haired woman in her thirties with a determined jaw, a large, hooked nose, and a frown-set mouth with intensely clever hazel-colored eyes set in a doughy face—the smart, ugly, bossy girl in school, who at the end of the day never failed to remind the teacher that she forgot to assign homework. She exuded uncompromising competence.
When Garcia began to brief Genene on helicopter ambulance procedure, he did not get very far. He later testified:
I didn’t go into a lot of detail, because my impression was that she was an experienced nurse—in every way she presented herself as a highly competent, flight-practiced RN [registered nurse]…I also told her exactly what we’d expect from her if there was some kind of emergency, be it aircraft failure or medical problems. I reminded her about how the headset worked once connected, and about how she shouldn’t interrupt the pilots unless absolutely necessary. It was just a quick briefing. She gave me the impression that she knew all about it already.184
Sergeant Garcia saw that Jones had a paper bag with her. Wanting to know what other supplies would be available to him in case of an emergency, he asked if he could have a look at what she had in it. In the bag he found a laryngoscope—an instrument inserted through a patient’s mouth and used to examine a person’s air passage, usually prior to inserting breathing tubes—some sterile breathing tubes, a bagging mask for ventilating a patient’s air passage, and a preloaded 3-cc syringe, which Genene told him contained Neo-Synephrine, a vascular constrictor, and a container of lidocaine, a local anesthetic used to combat irregular heartbeat.
Garcia recalled that Genene smiled at him gravely and said, “I think we may have some trouble with the Pearson boy. I think he may go sour.”
Satisfied that the two boys were secured into berths fixed perpendicularly inside the helicopter’s cabin, the 6-month-old baby Christopher Parker on the bottom and the handicapped boy Jimmy Pearson on top, the pilot began to prepare for takeoff. Nurse Jones and Sergeant Garcia strapped into a bench seat facing the patients, inches away from their knees, and put on their communication headsets. Sergeant Maywhort got in on the other side of the stretchers into the gunner’s port, from where he would assist in keeping his eye on the patients and on air traffic to the sides of the helicopter.
As the helicopter took off and attained a cruising speed at a 4,000-foot altitude, Maywhort looked back into the cabin to ensure the patients were still calm and stable. The infant, who was hooked up to a heart-monitoring system built into the helicopter, appeared to be sleeping calmly. Maywhort decided to switch the system over to Jimmy Pearson instead, and asked Garcia to do it. Garcia deftly hooked up the boy to the heart monitor, probably without Nurse Jones realizing it. He checked the readout on the screen—Pearson’s heartbeat was normal and stable.
Approximately five minutes later, Maywhort threw a glance back into the cabin and saw that Genene was leaning over the Pearson boy, listening intently to his heart through her stethoscope. While Maywhort could observe her from the gun port, Garcia—on the other side of the stretchers—could only see the nurse with her back turned to him. Maywhort signaled Garcia to lean forward and find out what was wrong.
Garcia unstrapped, got up next to Genene, and observed her with the stethoscope pressed against the boy’s chest. He asked her what was she doing. He was taken a little aback when she only threw him a contemptuous look of exasperation—like “Mind your own business, I know what I’m doing.”
As Garcia looked at her listening intently with her stethoscope, a wave of apprehension swept over him. He recalled, “I was sort of stunned, really. I looked at her trying to use her stethoscope on this poor kid, and it was just absurd.”
It was absurd because the patients lie on berths directly connected to the helicopter’s airframe and the powerful engine transferred noise and vibration right through the stretcher into a patient’s body. Through a stethoscope one would hear nothing but the gut-heaving, heavy thump-thump-thump-thump of the helicopter rotors and engine noise, racket and vibration.
Garcia said, “You can’t do that.”
Genene, thinking he was challenging her authority, barked back, “Of course I can.”
Garcia explained, “But you can’t hear anything through that.”
Genene replied, “I can hear fine,” and then began to gesture dramatically and yelled, “He’s going bad. He’s in trouble. He’s having another seizure. Look at him, he’s turning black. He’s going to arrest just like I said he would.”
Maywhort later stated that Jones looked agitated. “Not upset or anything, just agitated. Kind of excited, like something important or, well, exciting was going on.”
Garcia and Maywhort looked at the heart-monitor screen—Pearson’s heart rate appeared to be normal. The boy appeared calm and stable, breathing normally. Genene was still up over the patient, appearing to listen intently through her stethoscope. Maywhort and Garcia exchanged glances—this woman was crazy! As Maywhort looked back into the cabin, he saw Genene bring up a syringe and tap the air out of it.
Reacting instantly, Maywhort shouted to Garcia, “Stop her!”
But it was too late. Genene injected the contents of the syringe into the boy’s IV line. Knowing something was wrong, Maywhort alerted the pilot, “Mark time,” letting him know something significant had happened in the cabin and that he should note the time. Genene yelled to Maywhort that it was “no big deal” and that she had just injected him with something to dry his mucus and help him breath easier. She threw the used syringe into her paper bag.
Maywhort and Garcia did not know what to think. The Pearson boy was clearly not convulsing or having problems breathing. He had appeared so far quite calm and stable. He did not need any additional medication. But what freaked the two veteran medics out the most was that the nurse was clearly pretending to hear the boy’s heartbeat through her stethoscope. They knew that was impossible. What the hell was going on?
Several minutes passed in anxious silence when Garcia began noticing a change in the boy. His chest movement became erratic and his skin began to mottle and turn blue as his respiration grew shallow and increased in pace. Genene flew out of her seat shouting, “He’s having a seizure!”
Observing the monitor, Garcia saw that in fact the boy was having a heart attack. He ordered a “Mayday”—an immediate landing of the helicopter so that they had the freedom of movement inside the cabin to assist the arresting child. As they went down toward a farm pasture for an emergency landing, Garcia punched a button on the heart-monitoring system, which printed out a record of the scope’s readings. By now Jimmy Pearson had stopped breathing and the monitor registered a fading heartbeat.
Genene Jones pushed Garcia aside and attempted to place a resuscitation mask on Jimmy’s face, but because of his deformities she could not get a tight fit. Maywhort stood up on his seat in the gunner’s port and leaned over the boy’s stretcher. He began to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as the helicopter dropped to the ground.
Once they landed, the medics whisked Pearson out of the berth and laid him down on the cabin floor. Genene pulled out the endotracheal breathing tube from her paper bag and attempted to pass it into the boy’s breathing passage. She was clumsy and could not do
it, so Garcia had to take the tube from her hand and properly insert it, attaching it to an air pump with which he would ventilate the boy’s lungs.
With Maywhort and Garcia in the cabin both working on the boy, the helicopter lifted off. Garcia ordered the pilot to fly to the nearest hospital in San Antonio as he gave Jimmy cardiac compression while Maywhort concentrated on the ABC—airway, breathing, and circulation. As the helicopter cruised toward the hospital, Garcia testified to observing that Genene seemed to be in a state of excitation:
She seemed a little pale and appeared to be going through some kind of hyperventilation syndrome. It looked like she was, well, it’s hard to describe. Sure, it was a frightening experience, and anybody might pant, but she looked more, well, you know, excited.
Jimmy’s mother, who was already in San Antonio, had arrived at the hospital before the helicopter landed. She saw her child rushed into Emergency by the medics. Genene Jones walked over to her when she saw her.
The mother would testify:
What I remember most vividly is her appearance. She was trembling. She was pale. She had an unusual—I can’t explain the look she had in her eyes. It was something I’ve never seen before. She was “up.”
The mother said Genene told her Jimmy was fine and that she had given him some Valium for his seizures. She also said that later in the flight he had stopped breathing; they had had to go down in a cow pasture to revive him. She continued:
Then I remember she made a sort of joke about the cows not producing milk for the next twenty years because of Jimmy and the helicopter. And then—I’ll never forget—she looked at me and said, “It was one of the most exciting afternoons of my life.”
None of the events of the trip ended up being reported. Garcia remembers the printout from the heart monitor being put into the paper bag that Genene had, but cannot recall who had the bag—it was never seen again. Dr. Holland never got a followup report on the flight emergency because Jimmy Pearson was not her regular patient. Jimmy would die seven weeks later, shortly after his eighth birthday, from an infection and complications caused by his previous illnesses. But throughout the eight years of his grave medical history, he suffered a respiratory or cardiac arrest only once—on the day he flew with nurse Genene Jones. Jimmy Pearson did not live long after his encounter with Genene, but he survived her at least. Investigators would later suspect that as many as forty-seven other sick children were not that lucky.
Female Serial Killers Page 28