In Mrs Puente’s second-storey apartment, the police found silk dresses and $110 bottles of Giorgio perfume. It was also noted that she had just had a facelift.
While drinking was strictly forbidden for residents, Mrs Puente kept a well-stocked liquor cabinet for herself upstairs. In the evenings, she would ply for trade around the seedy bars, buying drinks for lonely old men and enquiring about their financial situation. If they could afford her rents, she would ask them to become a tenant.
‘She asked me where I got my money from, where I was working,’ said 67-year-old John Terry, a regular at nearby Harry’s Bar. ‘About every time she would see me, she’d hit me up about it, wanting me to move in.’
He refused and lived to tell the tale.
With Puente on the run, the police and journalists tried to build up a picture of her. Sixty-four-year-old retired cook John Sharp, who had lived in Puente’s boarding house for eleven months, said that, although she could be a martinet, she had her kinder side. She took in stray cats and bought her boarders clothes and cigarettes. She even bought one disabled tenant a tricycle so they could get round more and, at Christmas, handed out tamales (a Mexican dish). The reporter from National Enquirer asked whether the meat in the tamales tasted funny.
Puente had befriended 54-year-old cab driver Patty Casey. He ran errands for her several times a week – buying cement, plants or fertiliser, or dropping her off at dive bars in downtown Sacramento. She had even told him about her recent facelift. She also admitted that she was really 71, not 59 as the records said, and that she had four failed marriages behind her.
‘I thought she was a nice person,’ Casey told the LA Times. ‘I really looked up to her and admired her. I felt I could learn a few things from her. I thought she was very savvy.’ When he visited the boarding house, he noticed the smell, but accepted her explanation about dead rats rotting under the floorboards.
The tenants were interviewed. They had noticed that, several times when a tenant had gone missing, Puente had said they were unwell and she was ‘taking them upstairs to make them feel better’. She had a variety of excuses for their absence. One tenant, she said, was becoming burdensome and ‘telling her how to run her house’. So she had packed his stuff into cardboard boxes in the middle of the night and thrown them on the street. Another left suddenly to live out of state with relatives.
Posing under the guise of a harmless old lady, Puente had been a lifelong criminal. The records, at least, say that she was born Dorothea Helen Gray on 9 January 1929. She claimed to have been the youngest of 18 children. Her birth certificate shows that she was her mother’s sixth child.
Her father died of tuberculosis when she was eight; her mother was killed in a motorcycle accident the following year. She had been sent to an orphanage until relatives in Fresno took her in. Later, she said she was one of three children, born and raised in Mexico.
According to relatives, the Gray children were farmed out to different homes. The census records that she lived in the city of Napa at the age of 13. School records show she was a student in Los Angeles when she turned 16. Soon after, she moved to Olympia, Washington, where she called herself ‘Sheri’ and worked in a milkshake parlour there in the summer of 1945. She and a friend were living in a motel room and turning tricks as prostitutes.
That autumn, she met 22-year-old Fred McFaul, a soldier who had just returned from the war in the Philippines. ‘She was a good-looking female,’ McFaul told the Bee. ‘She knew how to make a buck when she wanted to.’
They married in Reno a few months later. The 16-year-old Dorothea Gray called herself ‘Sherriale A Riscile’ on the marriage certificate and said she was 30.
Indeed, she was an inveterate liar. She claimed to have survived through the Bataan Death March, a three-month forced march of American and Filipino prisoners of war in the Second World War which occurred when she was 13, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. She was nowhere near Japan at the time. Her brother, she told people, was the US ambassador to Sweden, and she was a close friend of Rita Hayworth. To live up to the image, she loved to adorn her body with expensive clothes – silk stockings and provocative dresses.
She and McFaul set up home in Gardnerville, Nevada, where she had two daughters. Shortly after the birth of the second girl, she went to Los Angeles; she was pregnant several months later. She miscarried the baby, but McFaul left her anyway – she later claimed that he died of a heart attack in the early days of their marriage. One of their daughters was raised by his mother; the other was adopted.
Dorothea McFaul returned to prostitution, supplementing her earnings with petty crime. In 1948, she stole cheques from an acquaintance to buy a hat, purse, shoes and stockings. She was convicted of forgery, served four years in jail, then skipped town while she was still on probation. Soon, she was pregnant by a man she barely knew and gave that child up for adoption, too.
In 1952, she married her second husband, Axel Johansson, a merchant seaman. When he returned from long absences, he would sometimes find his wife living with another man and neighbours complained of taxis dropping off strange men at all hours of the night. Nevertheless, their turbulent marriage lasted for 14 years.
In 1960, she was convicted of residing in a brothel in Sacramento. She told authorities she was just visiting a friend there, and did not know that the place was a whorehouse. She served 90 days in Sacramento County Jail, then another 90 for vagrancy. After she was released, she worked as a nurse’s aide, looking after elderly and disabled people in private homes. Then she started managing boarding houses.
During 1968, she opened a halfway house for alcoholics called ‘The Samaritans’. Divorced from Johansson, at 39, she married 21-year-old Robert José Puente. The couple argued constantly and the marriage ended a year later. By then, the halfway house was closed after running up $10,000 in debt.
Soon after, she took over the boarding house at 2100 F Street in Sacramento and, in 1976, she married one of the tenants, 52-year-old Pedro Angel Montalvo, a violent alcoholic. ‘She wanted new pantyhose every day,’ complained Montalvo. ‘She thought she was rich.’ The marriage only lasted a few months and she retained the name from her former marriage − Puente.
In 1978, she was convicted of forging 34 cheques she had stolen from her tenants. She served five years on probation and was ordered to undergo counselling. A psychiatrist who interviewed her diagnosed her as a schizophrenic and a ‘very disturbed woman’.
Then in 1981, she began renting an upstairs apartment in 1426 F Street. The following spring, 61-year-old Ruth Munroe moved in, bringing with her $6,000 in cash and all her earthly belongings. She was Puente’s friend and a business partner in a small lunchroom. Her husband was terminally ill in a Veterans Administration Hospital.
Munroe was optimistic about their business, which seemed to offer a way forward. But two weeks after moving in with Puente, she began to feel ill. She told a friend she met in a beauty parlour that she felt she was going die, although she did not know why. Three days later, Munroe died of an overdose of codeine and Tylenol. Puente told the police that she had been depressed because of her husband’s illness. The coroner ruled that her death was suicide.
Just a month later, Puente was arrested and charged with drugging four elderly people and stealing their valuables. One of the victims, 74-year-old pensioner Malcolm McKenzie, told the Sacramento Bee that Puente doped him, then looted his home as he watched in a stupor, unable to speak or move.
The judge sentenced Puente to five years in the California Institution for Women at Frontera. She was released after three years, in 1985, and ordered to not ‘handle government cheques of any kind issued to others’ and to stay away from the elderly.
She violated this parole condition before she had left prison when she began corresponding with a 77-year-old pen pal from Oregon named Everson Gillmouth, who told Puente he had a good pension and owned a trailer.
When Puente left jail after serving just three
years of her sentence, Gillmouth was waiting at the gates in a 1980 red Ford pickup. They moved back into the apartment at 1426 F Street, paying $600 a month rent. Gillmouth had told his sister he was going to marry Puente, and that they had opened a joint account.
In November 1985, Puente gave handyman Ismael Florez a 1980 red Ford pickup, saying that it belonged to her boyfriend in Los Angeles who no longer needed it. She then asked him to build her a box 6ft x 3ft x 2ft to store books. When it was filled and nailed shut, he was to help her take it to the storage depot. On the way, she changed her mind and they dumped it on the banks of the Sacramento River. Three months later, Puente sent a card to Everson’s sister saying ‘Thinking of You’. She later told his sister they were in the room-and-board business, but Everson had not contacted her because he was ill.
Gillmouth’s remains were found in their makeshift coffin by a fisherman in January 1986, but would lay unidentified for another three years in the city morgue. Meanwhile, Puente went on collecting Gillmouth’s pension.
When the owner of 1426 F Street moved out, Puente took over. She arranged to take in homeless clients, but she did not tell the social workers about her five felony convictions for drugging and robbing the elderly. And nobody at Social Services did their homework.
Puente accepted the hardest clients to place – drug addicts and alcoholics, and people who were violent or verbally abusive. One former social worker told the Bee she had put 19 senior citizens in Puente’s care between 1987–88, because ‘Dorothea was the best the system had to offer’.
But the Social Services were not the only ones at fault. Federal parole agents visited Puente 15 times in the two years leading up to the discovery in the backyard and never realised she was running a boarding house for the elderly – in direct violation of her parole.
An independent county agency published a reported called Sins of Omission. It criticised the Sacramento Police Department’s handling of the case as well as that of another ten public and private agencies that had dealings with the boarding house.
One of the Sacramento Police Department’s biggest failings was to allow Puente to walk out of 1426 F Street to get a cup of coffee at the Clarion Hotel two blocks away. While she drank her coffee, she called a cab, which took her to a bar on the other side of town. There she chugged down four vodkas and grapefruit, before catching another taxi to Stockton and boarding a bus for Los Angeles.
A few days later, 59-year-old retired carpenter Charles Willgues was nursing a mid-afternoon beer at the Monte Carlo tavern in downtown Los Angeles when a stranger in a bright red overcoat took the stool next to him. She seemed familiar.
She ordered a vodka and orange juice and introduced herself as Donna Johansson. She said she was from Sacramento and her husband had recently died. The grieving widow was hoping to begin a new life in LA, but things had got off to a bad start. The cabbie who had dropped her off at the $25-a-night Royal Viking Motel had driven off with her suitcases, and the heels of her only remaining pair of shoes were broken. Leaning back on her bar stool, she showed him the damaged purple shoe, along with a flash of ankle.
Feeling sorry for the woman, Willgues took her shoe to the cobbler across the street and had it repaired. His grateful companion then asked him how much money he got from Social Security a month. He told her − $576. She then said she was a good cook and suggested they move in together. After all, they were two lonely souls, so why not keep each other company?
‘I’ve got all I can handle right now,’ he said, somewhat taken aback. But he agreed to take her for a chicken dinner at a fast-food joint and arranged to go shopping with her the next day to replace the items the cabbie had stolen. Back in his apartment, Willgues switched on the television to see a picture of his companion, along with some footage of bodies being disinterred from her back garden. He called the local TV station, who in turn called the police.
‘I’m just very thankful that the relationship didn’t go any further,’ Willgues told the LA Times.
At 10.40pm, Los Angeles police surrounded the motel where Puente was staying, and she was arrested. During the flight back to Sacramento, she told one reporter, ‘I have not killed anyone. The cheques I cashed, yes … I used to be a very good person at one time.’
She was charged with nine counts of murder and pleaded not guilty at the Sacramento Municipal Court on 31 March 1989. It took another four years to sift the evidence. Her trial began in February 1993 and, because of the extensive pretrial publicity, the hearing was moved from Sacramento to Monterey. It took another three months to empanel (enrol) the jury of four women and eight men.
Prosecutor John O’Mara said that Puente murdered her lodgers to steal their government cheques – she had selected them deliberately. ‘She wanted people who had no relatives, no friends, no family … people who, when they’re gone, won’t have others coming around and asking questions,’ he said.
He told the jury that Puente had used sleeping pills to knock out her victims, then suffocated them, and hired convicts to dig the holes in her garden in which to bury them.
Her defence team maintained that the tenants died of natural causes. Puente did not call paramedics to retrieve the bodies because she was running the boarding house in violation of her parole and didn’t want to be sent back to prison. So she buried the bodies in her back garden.
The defence painted Puente as a benevolent soul who selflessly cared for ‘the dregs of society, people who had no place else to go’. The rent she received from her tenants barely covered the operating costs. She stole money to cover her expenses, but she was not a killer.
Throughout the five months, Puente maintained the demeanour of a sweet little granny, dressing in flowery frocks. But some found this unsettling. When the prosecution showed photos of Puente’s victims – first alive and smiling, then freshly disinterred from the garden – USA Today reported that she viewed them without flinching.
‘Dorothea Puente murdered nine people,’ O’Mara told jurors. ‘Don’t turn your back on reason.’
However, there were no eyewitnesses to the alleged murders. Apart from the case of Ruth Munroe, they could not ascertain the cause of death; the bodies were too decayed. Toxicological tests did reveal, though, that there were traces of Dalmane (flurazepam) – a prescription-strength sleeping pill – in all the remains.
Expert witnesses testified that Dalmane could be lethal, especially when taken with alcohol or other sedatives, and it was particularly potent in elderly people. At Puente’s preliminary hearing, a doctor testified that Puente had used Dorothy Miller’s ID card to try to get a prescription for Dalmane, but the doctor had refused her. But she had an abundant supply; Dalmane was given to her by her court-appointed psychiatrist and she got it from two other doctors as well.
Former tenant Carol Durning testified that James Gallop complained that Puente was giving him drugs that made him sleep all the time. She had also overheard Puente telling him he would have to leave unless he let her take charge of his money.
And Alvaro ‘Bert’ Montoya complained to William Johnson, an employee of a local detox centre where he lived before moving to 1426 F Street, that Puente was ‘giving him a medicine he didn’t like to take’. When Johnson confronted Puente, she flew into a rage and told him to take Montoya back to the detox centre if he was going to meddle in her business. But Johnson advised Montoya to stay at the boarding house where he would be better off.
‘I told him, “You’ll be safe there,”’ Johnson told the court. ‘I was wrong … I’ve got to live with this for the rest of my life.’
After Montoya was dead, Puente paid Donald Anthony, a local halfway house resident, to call Montoya’s social worker, posing as his brother-in-law, and say that Montoya had gone to live with his family out of state. But Anthony had mistakenly used his own name when he left the message on the social worker’s answering machine. It was this blunder that led Detective Cabrera to take an interest in Puente’s boarding house.
A ha
ndwriting expert confirmed that Puente had signed the names of seven dead tenants on sixty federal and state cheques that were sent to 1426 F Street. But Puente was not charged with forgery; the prosecution thought the additional charge would make the case too complex for jurors.
They also produced handyman Ismael Florez who testified about dumping Everson Gillmouth’s body by the Sacramento River. Again, Puente was not charged with Gillmouth’s murder as the statute of limitations had been exceeded.
Homer Myers, who had been a tenant for two years after she picked him up in a bar, said he unwittingly dug one of the victims’ graves. He said Puente had told him to dig a 4-ft hole to plant a small apricot tree. He had wondered why she had wanted it so deep. He then refused to sign docu-ments empowering her to cash his social security cheques. That saved his life.
The jurors were taken on a tour of Sacramento. They visited the seedy bars where she trawled for victims. They were taken to the house, then they walked about the back garden where Puente had planted flowers over the corpses. By that time, it was dark.
‘You can’t see much back there,’ said juror Joe Martin. ‘But you feel a lot. It’s weird.’
The trial had taken a year and the jury, after being out for a month, found Puente guilty on three counts of murder – Dorothy Miller, Benjamin Fink and Leona Carpenter. They were then asked to consider the sentence. O’Mara said that the jury must think of the victims – ‘These people were human beings, they had a right to live. They did not have a lot of possessions – no houses, no cars, only their social security cheques and their lives. She took it all … Death is the only appropriate penalty.’
Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home Page 9