These entities fall through the cracks, said Kathleen Lammers, executive director of the California Law Center on Longterm Care, about boarding houses like Puentes. Dorothea Puente awaiting arraignment in Sacramento, California on November 17, 1988. My oldest grandson is 15 and wanted to do this attraction. Cabreras superiors approved her request, deciding they held insufficient evidence to detain her. John OMara, the prosecutor, called over 130 witnesses to the stand. Investigators opened the box and found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside. The comments below have not been moderated. She was tried for killing seven people by drugging them with Dalmane and alcohol. I have talked to her attorneys, to the cop who unmasked her, to the prosecutor who tried her for murder, to jurors who found her guilty. Dorothea Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California, on January 9, 1929. Some months earlier, another tenant, a longtime alcoholic on a bender, had vanished after Puente went to his room to make him feel better. The acrid stench of rotting flesh soon spread through the home and beyond, an odor she blamed on sewer problems and that drew complaints from neighbors. First off, I was getting the checks. Procedural wrangling moved the trial to Monterey, after a judge ruled that the intense media coverage of Puente in the Sacramento region would preclude her from receiving a fair trial here. EXCLUSIVE: 'I killed JonBent Ramsey! Convicted pedophile Rose West's son breaks silenceto tell how his killer mother Isabel Oakeshott receives 'menacing' message from Matt Hancock, Insane moment river of rocks falls onto Malibu Canyon in CA, Mom who lost both sons to fentanyl blasts laughing Biden, Pavement where disabled woman gestured at cyclist before fatal crash, Pro-Ukrainian drone lands on Russian spy planes exposing location, 'Buster is next!' She holed up in the Royal Viking Motel for the next three days, seldom leaving her room. Subscribe to Sactown Magazine . To give strength to other people. She lifts the paper towel to her eyes. Now 80, she speaks out in a series of rare interviews on her crimes, her "relationships" with the Kennedys and the Reagans and whyin the endthe person she really wanted to kill was herself Martin Kuz But in reality, he contends, she is the nation's most prolific female serial murderer ever . It is a flame of humanity that has burned inside Dorothea since she was young That is reason to give Dorothea Puente life without the possibility of parole. Montoya struggled with mental health issues and had been homeless for years. For Puente, the distortions of her past have congealed into a personal reality that grows ever more fanciful. I am waiting for one of the countrys most infamous female serial killers, an inmate whose notoriety leaves her without peer among women murderers in California history. In 1993, facing nine counts of murder after prosecutors linked her to two other deaths, she stood trial without testifying. Granddaughter of Dorothea Puente Victim Talks About Her Disappearance The granddaughter of one of Dorothea Puente's victims recalls finding out that Puente had run away from the police. ), Thanks to her ties to Reagan, Puente tells me, she met Vice President Spiro Agnew and U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, and in the mid-70s, she ate dinner with longtime Republican booster Clint Eastwood when he visited town. Six months after her release, she left Riverside. Grandson of Dorothea Puente, shared a 'real connection' with her - Daily Newshttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGIQ4XcqArGYqiw70QoKcvw?sub_confirmation=1Grand. cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen., serial killer known as the Angel of Death, Aileen Wuornos, historys most terrifying female serial killer. She would later kill them by poisoning or strangling them. Between 1982 and 1988, the elderly and disabled people living in Dorothea Puentes house had no idea that was she was poisoning and strangling some of her guests before burying them on her property and cashing their Social Security checks. Be Careful of the Quiet Ones 45m When college student Maribel Ramos goes missing, detectives turn their focus to her roommate, K.C. Finally, four days after she skipped town, authorities traced her to a tumbledown motel in Los Angeles. Me and Nancy, she says, shaking her head. Unchanged are his lean, square-shouldered build and animated manner, his eyebrows spiking and hands windmilling as he recounts the investigation. [citation needed]. However, Dorothea's outward demeanor was a smokescreen, concealing [] Scattered about the house were photos of her with the likes of California governors George Deukmejian and Jerry Brown, who once danced with her at a fundraising ball. Vera Faye Martin, 64. She married Roberto Puente in 1968, but the relationship dissolved sixteen months later. I want to know what stopped her from killing herself. Still, prison has changed Puente in one profound aspect, reforming her into an obedient citizen. Coverage spanned from the national networks and Time, Newsweek and The New York Times to the National Enquirer, National Examiner and news outlets from as far away as England and France. A stream of people tour Dorothea Puente's former home on Sept. 15, 2013. Puente passed away in 2011 at the Central California Women's Facility at age 82 from natural causes. But the passage of months and years since the victims had died reduced the toxicology results to educated guesswork. Her eyes would fill with tears, but she would never admit it, he says. Tests revealed high levels of unprescribed drugs in their systems, and in time, the physicians fingered her as the culprit. Drugs Puente used to knock . Amanda Sedlak-Hevener. . She eventually met and married Pedro Angel Montalvo, though Montalvo abruptly left the relationship a week after their marriage. Puente has told me during previous meetings that her case still attracts worldwide attention, and that she recently spurned interview requests from a British newspaper and an Australian TV station. Removed from her violent crimes, it actually makes perfect sense to use Puente's image on a cookbook, as she has the perfect visage of a kind old lady who probably knows a secret recipe or two that her tenants all would . FacebookDorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. A pair of Christmas ornaments made by Puente in prison. And it was so counter to her strenuous effort all her life to be somebody who was respected, somebody important., Puente received a prison term of life without parole after the jury deadlocked on whether to give her the death penalty, an ending that deepened William Clausens bitterness. In November 1992, the same month jury selection started, she rejected a plea deal that would spare her the death penalty if she pleaded guilty to all nine murders. James Gallop, 62, (continued left to right) Dorothy Miller, 64. The infamous home Dorothea Puente lived in is along F Street in Sacramento. The business supplied her with steady revenuesteady and, apparently, inadequate. Her father died of tuberculosis when Dorothea was 8; her mother, an alcoholic who alternated between abusing and deserting her children, lost custody of them in 1938. On a subsequent visit, her vanity recedes when a guard, apparently new to working the visitors hall, asks her name. Puente watched the images flicker across the TV screen in her Los Angeles motel room. The initial jolt of uncovering a dead body on Nov. 11 ebbed as Cabrera weighed three factors. Some of the remains were in a mummified state - bound in bed sheets, cloth and duct tape (above), Puente would lure her victims to their deaths by baking them cake laced with sleeping pills. She answers without pause. Some touch her shoulder. I didnt need to kill anyone. A few days later I drive to Chowchilla for my final visit with her. Puente was acquitted in the poisoning death of his mother, Ruth Munroe, and Clausen, who testified at trial, regards the convicted killers every living day as a denigration of his mothers memory. In the 1980s, she ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered various elderly and mentally disabled boarders before cashing their Social Security checks. Her narrow lips, pinched and lined at the corners, curl slightly upward. Dorothea Montalvo Puente might seem like "a grandmotherly figure," says prosecutor John O'Mara. I leave through a different door and make my way out of the prison, stepping into the cool afternoon air. The case rested on the shifting sands of circumstantial evidence. But before the cop left, Sharp managed to slip him a hand-written note that read, Shes making me lie for her. He later divulged unsettling details about life at the house. Now she watched from her second-story porch as the trio began to dig. He also knows what will happen if by some unimaginable spasm of fate she should ever walk free. Federal law shields inmate medical records from the public, leaving open the question of whether she has had three surgeries since entering prison. As it happened, her shovel was used to dig the hole that yielded a human leg bone, a decomposed foot inside a dark dress shoe and what looked like pieces of tattered fabric that in fact were rotting flesh. McFaul left her in late 1948.[5][6]. Dorothea Puente - Dorothea Helen Puente (January 9, 1929 - March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. She was a respected figure to the Mexican community, says Donald Dorfman, a longtime Sacramento criminal attorney who handled some of Puentes legal affairs before her 1988 arrest. Dorothea Puente is an American chronic executioner. She wound up serving four months in jail and shortly afterward fled Riverside County, flouting the terms of her probation. Going to church every day. When we later part, Puente disappears through the gray metal door at the back of the hall. Her father died of tuberculosis when Puente was eight while her mother, an alcoholic, routinely abused her children and died in a motorcycle accident a year later. Mental health experts testified of Puente's abusive upbringing and how it motivated her to help the less fortunate. Eleven jurors were convinced of Puentes guilt in killing the seven boarders found in her yard; one juror disagreed. She tells me they appreciate the advice she provides them, whether informal legal counsel on their cases or how to traverse the social services network after their release. I made them change their clothes every day, take a bath every day and eat three meals a day. I was bewildered as to what in the world was going on with all these people in her yard.. A man identifying himself as a talent scout for the Radio City Rockettes, the famed New York City dance troupe, sized her up and, on the spot, invited her to fly east for an audition. He was good to me. (Johansson did not respond to interview requests.). Satisfied, the authorities ruled Monroes death a suicide and moved on. Today she repeats a tale she first spun for me three months ago, showing remarkable fidelity to the specifics of the earlier version. [6], Following her divorce, Gray focused on running a boarding house located at 21st and F streets in Sacramento. At the same time, they agreed she had an evil side brought on by the stress of caring for her down-and-out tenants. 104-107. A woman known as Dorothea Puente runs a boarding house for those less fortunate, but her seeming benevolence belies motives that are much darker. Gray would continue to use the surname Puente for more than twenty years. A nonfiction book, "The Bone Garden" (1994), is the definitive account of serial killer Dorothea Puente, who was the subject of a nationwide hunt after nine bodies were dug up from her Sacramento, California yard. Trial began in October 1992 and ended a year later. Vlautin spoke gently about Puente's childhood touching on the traumatic aspects that shaped her life and urged the jurors to see the world through her eyes. The prosecutor, John O'Mara, was the homicide supervisor in the Sacramento County District Attorney's office. Bodies were found buried in what is now the yard at left. Dorothea was convicted of three out of nine murder counts and sentenced to life in prison in August of 1993. I made them change their clothes every day, take a bath every day and eat three meals a day When they came to me, they were so sick, they werent expected to live.. Investigators soon found the decomposing body of an elderly man inside. She had breached her federal probation by running a boardinghouse, yet admitted to the offense when asked. Scant evidence exists to suggest she socialized with Reaganwhen he divorced Wyman, Puente was 20 years old and living in the Bay Areaany more than she danced with the Rockettes. The only time [the boarers] were in good health was when they stayed at my home, Puente insisted from prison. Ruth was not just Puente's friend but was also her business partner and had moved in with her just three weeks before the murder. Seven bodies were eventually found buried on the property.[10]. Thats just too much coincidence., Finally, on the 24th day of deliberations, the holdout juror acquiesced, voting guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and one second-degree count. George Deukmejian (second from left) in this undated photo. Despite maintaining her innocence until the day she died, Puente has been immortalized as one of America's most notorious female serial killers. Puente and McCauley had caught a cab from the Clarion Hotel to a West Sacramento bar. [citation needed], O'Mara called over 130 witnesses; he argued to the jury that Puente had used sleeping pills to put her tenants to sleep, then suffocated them, and hired convicts to dig the holes in her yard. Theyve never talked to me. On another occasion, she casts her circumstance in a biblical light. . For a moment the prisons visitors hall feels bereft of other people and sounds. Dorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. 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Their theory hardened into subjective truth when they discovered that, following the funeral, the nurse had drained thousands of dollars belonging to Munroe from a joint business bank account. Dorothea Puente, also known as the Death House Landlady, was a little-old-lady serial killer who preyed on the elderly and drug-addicted men and women of Sacramento, CA in the 1980s. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and . But there were seven dead bodies in your yard. Puente claims she spent time in the 70s with California governors Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan. Puente was convicted in. La historia de Dorothea Puente: la dulce abuela que mataba jubilados y los enterraba en el jardn La anciana era duea de una casa para adultos mayores. This was a money-making scheme, but I do not believe she was a murderess.. Puente sah aus wie die Gromutter aus der Nachbarschaft, aber in Wirklichkeit war sie eine kaltbltige Mrderin. Her past crimes belied her pose of pure benevolence, yet she had submitted to the house and yard searches without protest. The two then separated, with McCauley returning downtown and Puente taking another cab to Stockton, where she hopped a bus to Los Angeles. Puente cashed in the Social Security checks of the elderly and disabled boarders living in her house. Dorothea Puente is one of the criminals whose crimes are detailed in 'Worst Roommate Ever.' Puente was known in her neighborhood for housing individuals who were homeless, elderly, or otherwise unable to care for themselves. Puente surrendered quietly. Once, when I asked if she ever hears from her surviving siblings or two daughters, she shook her head. The lone drug present in all of them was Dalmane, a sedative for which Puente had obtained more than three dozen prescriptions of 30 pills each between October 1985 and November 1988, according to court records. The penalty phase of the prosecution was highlighted by her prior convictions introduced by O'Mara. Unbeknownst to Puente, the pensioner recognized her as the woman he saw on television news reports. Dorothea Puente Dorothea Puente, born Dorothea Helen Gray was born on January 9, 1929 in San Bernardino County, California. All three revolve around murder, a fact she notes without irony or self-consciousness. I wait for her to speak. But she has shown too much interest in my visits for me to believe her. Moise alerted police, who went to the boarding house. My question about the incident draws an explanation akin to the one Puente gave a county judge nearly a half century earlier: I was there visiting a friend when the cops came. She refuses to elaborate. On New Years Day, a fisherman spotted the box, noticed that it looked suspiciously like a coffin, and informed the police. She established herself as a genuine resource to the community to aid alcoholics, homeless people, and mentally ill people by holding Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and assisting individuals to sign up to receive Social Security benefits. The subject of personal health preoccupies Puente as much as the next octogenarian. After her mother passing Dorothea and her 18 siblings . Her escape brought coast-to-coast ridicule of Police Chief John Kearns and his department while authorities chased dead-end leads from Las Vegas to Mexico. Vera Martin, 64. (Obituaries for Ingemar Johansson, who died earlier this year, list his sole surviving brother as Rolf.). Puente and her siblings were subsequently sent to an orphanage, where she was sexually abused. At 39, she was 16 years older than Roberto Puente, a Mexican migr whose interest in his heavyset bride concerned money and American citizenship, as chronicled in Disturbed Ground, a 1994 book about the Puente murder case. He was going with another movie star, she says. Driven by routine, Puente rises by 4:30 a.m. most days, long before her seven cellmates. Hes not a flirt.. Puente had already been convicted and executed in the media, and the attorneys understood the long odds of winning in court. She resembles a wizened owl. In 1961, Johansson had Gray briefly committed to DeWitt State Hospital after a binge of drinking, lying, criminal behavior, and suicide attempts. Dorothea Helen Puente (ne Gray; January 9, 1929 - March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer.In the 1980s, she ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered various elderly and mentally disabled boarders before cashing their Social Security checks. The wanted bulletin for Dorothea Puente. She also suffered a miscarriage. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). Jodi Picoult mentions Puente's crimes and cookbook in her novel House Rules. Cooking what I want. Serial killer Dorothea Puente poisoned seven people in her boarding house and buried them in the backyard. Genaro Molina/Sacramento Bee/MCT/Getty Images. Peter Vlautin addressed the jurors in confidential tones, contrasting with O'Mara's shouting: We are here today to determine one thing: What is the value of Dorothea Puente's life? But volatility seemed to follow Puente wherever she went and the new couple argued frequently about Puentes drinking and gambling. At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. Here are 5 things you may not know about Dorothea Puente: 1. She collected tenants' monthly mail before they saw it and paid them stipends, pocketing the rest for "expenses". The 1991 film Evil Spirits, starring Karen Black and Arte Johnson, is loosely based on the Puente murders. She declines to disclose the fathers name, when and where they were born and died or the circumstances of their deaths.). In another twist to the case, Sacramento police escorted her back to the city on a plane chartered by KCRA for its news crew. As the search expanded, cabin fever seized Puente. (One woman later discovered checks and jewelry missing from her home; her case played a part in Puentes 1982 arrest on theft charges.) We lapse into a short silence, and in that span, the incredible feats of a younger Dorothea diminish in the distance. Despite this, their marriage lasted until 1966. The noise inside the prisons visitors hall amplifies on Valentines Day. I stare at the brick and wrought-iron front gate through which Dorothea Puente walked for the last time on Nov. 12, 1988. [6], Gray and Johansson divorced in 1966, although she continued to use Johansson's name for some time following their separation. A person like her, the retired sergeant says, theres no forgetting. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). Federal probation officers visited her numerous times in the next two years without suspecting she ran a business, lulled by her kindly facade and clean home as much as by her lies that those staying at the house were friends or guests. Dorothea - Dorothea (also spelled Dorothe, Dorotea or other variants) is a female given name from Greek (Drotha) meaning "God's Gift". They know what shes done., Puente conveys a pride in her renown that, now and then, gives way to embarrassment, or perhaps weariness. ), Puente relates that, as a Rockette, she met John Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, and his wife, Jackie, and befriended actress Rita Hayworth. A year later her mother died in a motorcycle accident. In 1993, after several days of deliberations and a deadlocked jury (due in part to her grandmotherly disposition), Dorothea Puente was ultimately convicted of three murders and received back-to-back life sentences. April 27, 2019 1:12pm. Hed been referred to Dorothea Puentes house because of her sterling reputation welcoming people like him. Trapped by tan cinderblock walls that climax in a Tsteepled ceiling, chatter and laughter create a kinetic mood amid the dense scent of microwaved pizza, burgers and fried chicken strips. She does not once voice sadness over the deaths of her boarders, as if fearful that merely referring to them would imply her guilt. Nonetheless, with decades to mull what she might say about her case, she sounds as unpersuasive now as during her plane ride from Los Angeles. Drab and worn, the space, about the size of a single-car garage, has scuffed concrete flooring, dull fluorescent lighting and two windows; one faces a grassy prison courtyard, the other an interior hallway. But in the 1980s, their residence was a boarding house owned by Dorothea Puente, who killed her elderly and disabled tenants to steal their Social Security checks. Once free of the throng, Cabrera stopped and watched the pair until they entered the hotel. She turns to look at me. She parlayed its success by pumping money into political campaigns and charitable causes, contributions that bought her the appearance of legitimacy and access to elite circles. He claims to have had a regular relationship with her, The Founder of MurderAuction, a website that sells serial killer memorabilia, Harder says he sees his grandmother as human, despite her crimes (pictured: Harder with cult leader Charles Manson). Soon after, Monroe died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. "They immediately died," says Warren's grandson, Warren W. Bogle, who today serves as President and Vineyard Director. Puente was convicted of three of the murders, although the jury could not agree on the other six. Clausen checked on her in April 1982 and saw his pallid, suddenly enfeebled mother, who rarely drank alcohol, sipping crme de menthe. By 1952, she had wed Johansson, whom she met in San Francisco. 3 min read. The seven tenants who had lived at 1426 F Street died with a variety of drugs in their bodies: anticonvulsants, antidepressants, antipsychotics, painkillers, tranquilizers. After their deaths, Puente collected . Johansson divorced Dorothea in 1966. Dorothea Helen Gray met the world on Jan. 9, 1929, in Redlands, Calif., the sixth of seven children born to Jesse James Gray and Trudie Gray.