Puente had stayed poised a day earlier when Cabrera showed up with a fellow homicide detective and a federal probation agent. George Deukmejian and Bishop Francis Quinn decorated her home at 1426 F Street But setting aside such fleeting charity-event encounters, her stories hew closer to fable than fact. Within two weeks, Munroe fell ill, her body so weak she struggled to stand. Puente struck out on her own when she was 16. But in reality, he contends, she is the nation's most prolific female serial murderer ever . Some of them began to disappear. She would flee the city that morning. She reveals as much when, unbidden, she yanks down her shirt collar, baring a white patch the size of a silver dollar stuck to ghostly blue-veined flesh. In his sessions with her, Vicary had inched up to the subject of guilt, knowing that she would withdraw if he asked directly whether she had killed people. Puente offered a place where they could hang on. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution. 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. Dalmane, which is a drug used for insomnia, was found in all seven of the exhumed bodies. [1] Puente's total count reached nine murders; she was convicted of three and the jury hung on the other six. Forensic testing had failed to determine a definitive cause of death in any of the victims. Gawkers gather outside 1426 F St. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives), Domestic bliss and her maternal instinct failed to take root. They made a date to go shopping the next day, but Willgues returned to his apartment shadowed by an inkling that he somehow knew her face. Trial began in October 1992 and ended a year later. [citation needed]. The prosecution stated that Puente used sleeping pills to drug her tenants, suffocated them, and then hired convicts to bury them in the yard. Hes not a flirt.. A pen pal friendship developed, and when Puente was released in 1985 after serving three years of her five-year sentence, he met her outside the prison, driving a red 1980 Ford pickup. Puente was convicted in. Dorothea Puente had several children with McFaul but didnt raise them. And then theres the contradiction: beneath this house there are all these bodies. Florez agreed, and Puente assisted him. SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KTXL) Throughout the 1980s, as many as nine deaths in Sacramento were investigated as being connected to Dorothea Puente. The only time [the boarers] were in good health was when they stayed at my home, Puente insisted from prison. 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. A local Spanish-language newspaper that referred to Puente as la doctora (Courtesy of John Cabrera), The unlicensed venture thrived from the start. She was the sixth of seven children born to Trudy Mae Gates and Jesse James Gray, whose "lungs were damaged from a gas attack" while fighting in World War I. Dorothea Puente. Dorothea Helen Puente, rozen Grayov (9. ledna 1929 - 27. bezna 2011) byla americk sriov vraedkyn.V 80. letech 20. stolet provozovala penzion pro seniory v Sacramentu v Kalifornii, kde zabila nkolik starch i mentln postiench klient, aby zskala jejich finann prostedky.Na jejm kont je devt vrad; za ti byla odsouzena a porota trvala na . At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. 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. Isabel Vincent. "I was hooked when I saw that she had published a. A few wander over to a colorful mural of Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger and Piglet, who prance beneath a banner reading Family Is Love, Love Is Family. None of the kids acts bothered that mom or grandma or big sister is doing time. 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. I wonder what she wants when death does come. I stroll up the paved outdoor path that runs between the check-in station and the visitors hall, a walkway flanked with manicured rose bushes of the sort Puente once might have planted and pruned. Johansson divorced Dorothea in 1966. The first episode centers around one of the worst of all: Dorothea Puente, a Sacramento, California woman who has been dubbed Sacramento's most notorious murderer. For my benefit, she recites her prison medical history: a tumor removed from behind one knee last year; angioplasty in 2003; repair of a ruptured artery in 1998. As police exhumed corpse after corpse, TV crews jammed F Street while gawkers scaled trees to peer into the yard. As far as theyre concerned, Im dead.. 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. Intense news coverage led to Puentes trial moving to Monterey. Aug. 27, 1993 12 AM PT. But there were seven dead bodies in your yard. But to the end of her life, Dorothea Puente insisted that she was innocent and that she had been taking good care of the people under her charge. Sometimes she includes small handmade gifts. His head cocked to the side, he looks back at her, preparing to usher her past the crowd that looms outside the frame. Today she repeats a tale she first spun for me three months ago, showing remarkable fidelity to the specifics of the earlier version. On a later visit, she brags that she won $10,000 on a 1950s game show on NBC called Feather Your Nest; another time, that she played a few tournaments on the fledgling LPGA tour in the 50s. During this period, parole agents visited Puente at least fifteen times; though she had been ordered to keep away from the elderly and refrain from handling government checks, no violations were ever noted. Farm Heroes Saga, the #4 Game on iTunes. Betty Palmer, 78. She answers with a look of mild reproach that pulls taut her soft fist of a face. Puentes mechanical response echoes what she has told me during prior meetings, and what I will hear on subsequent visits. Bogle Family Vineyards Ryan, Jody & Warren Bogle Thank goodness the potato crop failed. But volatility seemed to follow Puente wherever she went and the new couple argued frequently about Puentes drinking and gambling. The authorities left the cause of death as undetermined, since there was such an excessive amount of both these drugs, and she was bedridden at the time. Several were swaddled in bed sheets that matched linens found in the house. Shes been in for 12 years. He was good to me. (Johansson did not respond to interview requests.). Police found seven bodies. Why would I waste all my time to get these people cleaned up, make sure they have no diseases, get all their affairs in order if I was going to kill them?. The boarding house made infamous by Dorothea Puentes murders. Play it now! Given Montoyas history as a transient, his disappearance would have escaped notice without the persistence of Judy Moise. Soon after, Monroe died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. It was too humiliating, too shameful for her to admit responsibility for these crimes. On the other hand, when these people, as could be expected, would act upat that point, she snapped and decided to kill them.. In her telling, after showering and dressing, she prays, recites the rosary and reads a few pages of the Bible, favoring Proverbs and Romans. James Gallop, 62. The jury deliberated over a month and eventually found Puente guilty of three murders. (To the question of which verse most resonates with her, she shrugs and replies, All of em.) She then quietly gathers the clothing of her slumbering roomies to wash later in the morning, when prisoners are allowed out of their cells. A pair of Christmas ornaments made by Puente in prison. More than 130 witnesses were called to the stand by the prosecution, and eventually the devilish landlady was convicted for three of the murderers and ordered to serve back-to-back life sentences. Dorothea Helen Puente (ne Gray; January 9, 1929 March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. The three law officers had stopped by the house to try to learn the whereabouts of Alvaro Bert Montoya, who had gone missing three months earlier. She also suffered a miscarriage. Dorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. Cooking what I want. Working in my yard. Dismembering their corpses, she threw their remains into a mass grave in her garden, telling neighbors the foul smell emanating from the ground was sewage and dead rats, rather than dead residents. Gray would continue to use the surname Puente for more than twenty years. Some praised the soft-hearted landlady who cooked big meals for her low-income tenants, handed out vegetables from her garden to neighbors and adopted stray cats. Dorothea Puente - Dorothea Helen Puente (January 9, 1929 - March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. He stares at the photo and points at her purse. Tempers spiked as the impasse stretched to its third week. She moves toward the front of the room, where a guard seated behind a metal desk tells her my table number. Petitioner raises several claims and a request for a federal evidentiary hearing. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). She had seven. Genaro Molina/Sacramento Bee/MCT/Getty Images. When police arrived at 1426 F Street, Puente told the cops Montoya was on vacation, but they noticed some undisturbed soil among a vegetable patch in the garden. James Gallop, 62, (continued left to right) Dorothy Miller, 64. Benjamin Fink, 55. She answers without pause. Its about a mile from my building to here, she says. It is a wistfulness that lays bare the depth of chaos that defined Puentes status quo long before they married in 1952. A human leg and a badly discomposed foot were dug up separately in another part of the yard. Despite being convicted of murder in 1993 and sent to prison, Puente denied killing the victims until the day she died . I wondered if she maintained her innocence or felt bowed by remorse. I wondered whether, when thinking back to 1988, she saw her past as her own or that of a different Dorothea Puente, one who, over time, had faded into something of a stranger. These were peoplethe Salvation Army wouldnt take them. See that one? she asks, nodding toward a gaunt, gray-haired woman with stooped posture. 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Later that year, Dorothea moved to San Bernardino and picked up her first criminal conviction after trying to float a check under a false name. She established her reputation as a caregiver, providing young women with a sanctuary from poverty and abuse without charge. They described a woman of contradictions. She inflated her age by 10 to 15 years to further disarm her elderly clients, whom she set about exploiting under the guise of ministering to them. [citation needed], In November 1985, Puente hired a man named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her apartment. But, behind the scenes, Puente had embarked on a path that would lead her to murder. Her upstanding reputation concealed a habit of forging the signatures of tenants on their benefits checks before signing them over to herself. When Puente offered to perform a sex act on an undercover cop at a house of ill-repute, her husband sent her to a psychiatric ward. Instead, Puente found a husband. She had breached her federal probation by running a boardinghouse, yet admitted to the offense when asked. The psychologist morphed into a prophet with the discovery of seven bodies in Puentes backyard in November 1988. Dorothea Puente, born Dorothea Helen Gray was born on January 9, 1929 in San Bernardino County, California. She tends to wear thick violet eye shadow and pink lipstick, both of a hue common to Toulouse-Lautrec paintings, and her body lotion of choice, Victorias Secret Love Spell, gives her the subtle bouquet of cherry blossoms. That didnt seem right, but Dorothea had conned our whole family into thinking she was a nurse.. With age and health concerns relieving her of work duty, she considers her self-assigned morning chores, attending chapel and other diversions a means of survival. Dick Schmidt/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesDorothea Puente after her arrest in Los Angeles, en route back to Sacramento. 4. Chief later dismantled a garage in the backyard and installed a fresh concrete slab there as well. 'I saw her as a human - despite her crimes.'. At the time of her 1988 arrest on murder charges, photos of Puente with Jerry Brown, former California Gov. Genaro Molina/Sacramento Bee/MCT/Getty ImagesThe boarding house made infamous by Dorothea Puentes murders. (A charity she declines to name sends her $15 a month, her sole source of money.) Thats between me and my God., Until 2006, Puente rotated through assorted prison jobs, cleaning cells, giving haircuts, toiling on a landscaping crew. ', Puente died in 2011 aged 82 in her prison cell at the Central California Facility, in Chowchilla. We spent 2 hours in here looking and reading most of the items. Puente was supposed to stick around to serve out her probation, but in a sign of things to come she skipped town instead. Barring an unexpected transfer to another prison or a medical emergency, she will die inside this compound. Marathon Man 63m [4], Gray's first marriage at age sixteen, in 1945, was to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific theater of World War II. I wait for her to speak. Puente cashed in the Social Security checks of the elderly and disabled boarders living in her house. The boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento was included in the 2013 home tour held by the Sacramento Old City Association. Investigators soon found the decomposing body of an elderly man inside. Puente and McCauley had caught a cab from the Clarion Hotel to a West Sacramento bar. He neither explained his motive for capitulating nor discussed why he agreed to convict her of only three killings. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. The press dubbed Dorothea Puente the 'Death House Landlady.' The name sharply contrasted with her perception in the community. The candy proves popular with youngsters, whose sporadic laughter pierces the rooms hum. She eventually met and married Pedro Angel Montalvo, though Montalvo abruptly left the relationship a week after their marriage. But God always puts obstacles in peoples way. During my meetings with Puente, a number of prisoners softly greet herHi, Miss Dorothea; How are you, Miss D?as they walk past. I could see the joint., A vial of flurazepam found in Puentes home (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives). Once, when I asked if she ever hears from her surviving siblings or two daughters, she shook her head. Police later accused Puente of lacing food or drinks she served her victims with a lethal mix of prescription drugs, poisoning them to collect their Social Security checks, a scheme that netted more than $5,000 a month. I talk about the foggy drive to the prison, she recounts her trip to the visitors hall. Most disregarded the warning in the face of a paucity of housing options for alcoholics, drug addicts and the mentally ill, and even after her release from prison in 1985, social workers and homeless advocates, ignoring or unaware that she was an ex-con running a boardinghouse without a license, sent their clients to her. I watch the scenes unfold from table No. She sent one child to live with relatives while another was put up for adoption. I ask why shes here. As most serial killers, Dorothea had a rough childhood. One girl was placed in the care of relatives, the other put up for adoption. Police and forensics experts swarmed Puentes property the next morning. . I was struck by how pleasant and socially intact and intelligent she was, says Vicary, who works in Los Angeles. Axel Johansson rates as Puentes favorite of her four ex-husbands, a presumably unwanted distinction. I wonder if the tenants know about the homes notorious history. 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Slight and demure, with her ivory-white hair and solicitous demeanor, the landlady resembled any other elderly woman with a kitchen full of pots and pans and a cat calendar hanging next to the stove. And, she says, They like my tamales.. A lot of people saw your running away as a sign of guilt. Despite this, their marriage lasted until 1966. Now she watched from her second-story porch as the trio began to dig. She this Dorothea Puente, was an elderly lady (think a widow at that) that housed boarders, a care home, or is it care house? [citation needed], Suspicion was first aroused when neighbors noticed the odd activities of a homeless alcoholic known only as "Chief", whom Puente stated she had "adopted" and hired as her handyman. Satisfied, the authorities ruled Monroes death a suicide and moved on. Authorities unearth a corpse buried in the lawn of 59-year-old Dorothea Puente's home in Sacramento, California.Puente operated a residential home for elderly people, and an investigation led to . An undercover cop posing as a trucker arrested her after she offered to perform fellatio on him; she served 90 days in county lockup. Six more corpses would follow, but Puente was still on the run. Throughout the trial, Dorothea Puente was portrayed as either a sweet grandma-like type or a manipulative criminal who preyed on the weak. I dont feel like confessing my sins to anyone, she says sharply. She turns to look at me. 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. But police tracked her down in Los Angeles after a man in a bar recognized her from TV. He says he's often inundated with requests from crazed fans and fellow murder enthusiasts who ask to buy his grandmother's ashes. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. [citation needed], Granting a change of venue motion filed by Puente's lawyers, Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin III, a judge transferred the trial to Monterey County. Her shovel was used to dig the hole that yielded a human leg bone, a decomposed foot inside a dress shoe and what looked like pieces of tattered fabric that in fact were rotting flesh. During the initial investigation, Puente was not immediately a suspect, and she was allowed to leave the property, ostensibly to buy a cup of coffee at a nearby hotel. Speaking softly, she asked, Am I under arrest? When the detective told her no, she explained that the police presence and the growing mob of onlookers had her on edge. A dark thought arrived. At the time, she was serving two life sentences and a concurrent 15-year-to-life sentence. A year later her mother died in a motorcycle accident. Prosecutors charged Puente with killing nine people. That is a human quality that deserves to be preserved. Get Sactown's top stories in your inbox by signing up for our weekly newsletter. Others wave and smile. She parried, unwavering in her account of Montoyas departure, her voice calm as the detective pressed her. But a bit of digging in the backyarda tenant had reported seeing large holes excavated and filled behind the houseunearthed a human leg bone and a decomposed foot. [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. He was a good-hearted man, very kind, she says. After learning about the murders inside Dorothea Puentes house, read about the serial killer known as the Angel of Death. So when I wrote to Puente last summer, nearly 20 years after the discovery of her victims, I had little expectation she would respond, let alone agree to talk. For the first time, her gaze squarely meets mine. Prosecutors said that Puente was one of the most cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen.. The infamous home Dorothea Puente lived in is along F Street in Sacramento. The Monstrous Crimes Of The Dorothea Puente, The Death House Landlady. The case rested on the shifting sands of circumstantial evidence. Her passivity subdues suspicion. Its like she was watching a movie she wasnt particularly interested in., Jury deliberations commenced in July 1993 and soon stalled. Dorothea Puente Home - Part 1: Directed by Star Price. She was the sixth of seven children, all of whom struggled in a less-than-stable family environment, with little income and love to speak of in the Gray house. That is mitigating. & Brucato, Gary, Ph.D., The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books), pp. Montoya struggled with mental health issues and had been homeless for years. 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. Theres a waiting list of people who want to be in my room. (This is true in the broadest sense: The prisons population hovers around 4,000 from month to month, roughly double its capacity. [9], Puente continued to accept elderly boarders and was popular with local social workers because she accepted referrals of the "tough cases", including drug addicts and abusive tenants. [6], Following her divorce, Gray focused on running a boarding house located at 21st and F streets in Sacramento. [7] On August 18, 1982, Puente was convicted of three theft charges and sentenced to five years in prison; there, she began corresponding with Everson Gillmouth, a 77-year-old retiree from Oregon. Acres of almond trees and farmland border the prison, a vast archipelago of dun-colored, low-slung buildings moored inside electrified fences topped with razor coil. . After her mother passing Dorothea and her 18 siblings . Dorothea Puente's former boarding house is at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California, between 14th and 15th streets.