She never intended to show, I realize. Witnesses, including her long-lost daughter, testified how Puente had helped them in their youth and guided them to successful careers. The jokes on me. See how its bulging? Working in my yard. Clymo concluded his closing argument by showing a picture commonly used in psychology that can be viewed in different ways and saying "Keep in mind things are not always as they seem." 104-107. The Monstrous Crimes Of The Dorothea Puente, The Death House Landlady. 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I know her only through the words of others. She turns to look at me. In late 1981, his mother, Ruth Munroe, went into business with Puente, leasing and running the restaurant side of the Round Corner Tavern in midtown. 13, as designated by the plastic placard atop its faux-wood surface. They appealed to authorities to reexamine their mothers death, a probe that ended with investigators upholding the suicide ruling. As the story goes, while shopping at a department store called The Emporium in San Francisco in 1948, a 19-year-old Puente felt a tap on her shoulder. After what was then the longest deliberation in a murder case in state history24 daysthe jury convicted her of three killings. Puente surrendered quietly. Her narrow lips, pinched and lined at the corners, curl slightly upward. As we talk on Valentines Day, I broach her long-ago brushes with the law, only to find myself stymied again. A pair of Christmas ornaments made by Puente in prison. Somehow a neighbor got suspicious, when the police officers investigated the house, the back yard, at least five bodies were buried in her back yard! Axel Johansson rates as Puentes favorite of her four ex-husbands, a presumably unwanted distinction. The seven tenants who had lived at 1426 F Street died with a variety of drugs in their bodies: anticonvulsants, antidepressants, antipsychotics, painkillers, tranquilizers. A state psychologist who evaluated Puente before her release from prison in 1985 diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Between 1982 and 1989, Puente would take in the vulnerable and homeless people. For the rest of her life, she maintained her innocence, insisting that all of her boarders had died of "natural causes". 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. Throughout the trial, Dorothea Puente was portrayed as either a sweet grandma-like type or a manipulative criminal who preyed on the weak. The grandmother would then sneak into the rooms of her incapacitated prey and smother them to death with a pillow. 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. When police arrived at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, they noticed some disturbed soil in a vegetable patch, but not thinking Puente to be a suspect they allowed the grandmother to flee the scene, In her absence, the officers dug-up the entire garden (left) where they discovered seven bodies. On the other hand, when these people, as could be expected, would act upat that point, she snapped and decided to kill them., The Puente trial dragged on for five months, with more than 150 witnesses, thousands of pieces of evidence and unrelenting media scrutiny. By 1952, she had wed Johansson, whom she met in San Francisco. If you lived in Sacramento in the late 80s, you recognize her name. Puente's deceptive appearance would later go on to confuse the jury presiding over her trial. Kara Goldfarb is a writer living in New York City. Puente had welcomed him into her home that February. The two would continue to have a turbulent relationship, and Gray filed a restraining order in 1975. She does not once voice sadness over the deaths of her boarders, as if fearful that merely referring to them would imply her guilt. They had a turbulent marriage; Gray took advantage of Johansson's frequent trips to sea by inviting men to their home and gambling away his money. So we knew wed have an uphill battle in convincing the jurors that all of those were accidental deaths.. George Deukmejian (second from left) in this undated photo. At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. Disguised as a kind-hearted boarding house owner, Dorothea Puente allegedly murdered tenants who lived on her property, and buried them in her backyard, according to the Los Angeles Times. We lapse into a short silence, and in that span, the incredible feats of a younger Dorothea diminish in the distance. That was my tomcat. I dont feel like confessing my sins to anyone, she says sharply. Ill be waiting for her.. The silence here feels powerful enough to swallow space. In the end, Cabrera erred on the side of skepticism. Hed been referred to Dorothea Puentes house because of her sterling reputation welcoming people like him. The forensic psychiatrist, assigned to evaluate the alleged serial killer as her case proceeded toward trial, would spend 12 hours talking with her over the next four years. Puente died of natural causes at the Central . (Clymo died in 2006.) I dont know what to tell you, she said. I leave through a different door and make my way out of the prison, stepping into the cool afternoon air. She will send me the list in a few daysthe bill will total $114.70but I already know I wont oblige. 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. With Jeff Rechner, Joelle Uzyel, Mikel Welch. I think she truly wanted to rehabilitate [her tenants] as she could not the people in her own family, Vicary says. She has sent more than 15 letters and postcards in the months since I first wrote to her. Vera Martin, 64. She falls silent for a moment. However, in 1978, she was convicted of illegally cashing state and federal assistance checks that belonged to her tenants. Puente's heinous crimes were eventually discovered in 1988, when Alberto Montoya, a mentally disabled and schizophrenic tenant, was reported missing by a social worker. Her evasive answersfirst claiming he had traveled to Mexico, then that he had returned and moved to Utahtripped Moises suspicion. Puente had stayed poised a day earlier when Cabrera showed up with a fellow homicide detective and a federal probation agent. Their first series of holes dislodged only soft dirt and a vague sense of futility. It is a wistfulness that lays bare the depth of chaos that defined Puentes status quo long before they married in 1952. Then there was the riddle of Puente. As most serial killers, Dorothea had a rough childhood. We next met days before Thanksgiving, when the recent election of Barack Obama had boosted her hopes for the countrys future, and again in mid-December. 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. He was a good-hearted man, very kind, she says. Play it now! Puentes mechanical response echoes what she has told me during prior meetings, and what I will hear on subsequent visits. Dalmane, which is a drug used for insomnia, was found in all seven of the exhumed bodies. The unreliable narrator breaks the hush. When they came to me, they were so sick, they werent expected to live.. But volatility seemed to follow Puente wherever she went and the new couple argued frequently about Puentes drinking and gambling. She was just pure evil, Ballenger says. I am led to believe if there is any reason for us to be living here on this Earth, it is to somehow enhance one another's humanity, to love, to touch each other with kindness, to know that you have made just one person breathe easier because you have lived. She purchased the refills through a pair of doctors who, presumably oblivious to her past drugging of clients, trusted her stories that she simply wanted to help boarders sleep. Then working as an in-home caregiver, Puente displayed an odd obsession with her own health, lamenting to clients and caseworkers alike that she suffered from cancer. Despite this, their marriage lasted until 1966. 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. Puente had Chief dig in the basement and cart soil and rubbish away in a wheelbarrow. 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The psychologist morphed into a prophet with the discovery of seven bodies in Puentes backyard in November 1988. Her cancer story, on the other hand, sounds consistent with her peculiar, decades-long charade of claiming to suffer from the disease in a ploy to gain sympathy. Drugs Puente used to knock . Retired social worker Mildred Ballenger first met Puente in the late 1970s. When we later part, Puente disappears through the gray metal door at the back of the hall. In the narrative of her life that unfurled at her murder trial and in news reports and books about the case, she grew up poor, deprived in equal measure of material comforts and parental nurturing. The detective had yet to realize that, in the 59-year-old Puente, he had another serial killer on his hands. In her telling, after showering and dressing, she prays, recites the rosary and reads a few pages of the Bible, favoring Proverbs and Romans. This was a money-making scheme, but I do not believe she was a murderess.. 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. It doesnt fit., At least three peopledefense attorneys Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin and their clientharbored scarce empathy for the prosecutor. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution. Shane Bugbee. She came on a little hard, what with her questions about his Social Security benefits and abrupt suggestion that they consider living together. The next day, under suspicion but not yet under arrest, Puente, then 59 and ostensibly the essence of grandmotherly virtue, fled the city. It was always moving. 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. Genaro Molina/Sacramento Bee/MCT/Getty Images. [17] The result was Cooking with a Serial Killer (2004),[18] which included a lengthy interview, almost fifty recipes, and various pieces of prison art sent to Bugbee by the convicted murderer. Suspect left her residence for a walk but never returned.. [6], In 1968, Gray married Roberto Jose Puente. Puente's crimes were featured on the Netflix show . Our visit winds down. 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. To my surprise, an envelope stamped with the words Central California Womens Facility State Prison arrived a few weeks later. The Boarding House Killer: Directed by Steve Allen. Wearing purple pumps and a long red coat over a pink dress, Puente carries a large maroon purse and pink umbrella, her eyes cast downward to watch her step. Next, Dorothea Puente went to San Francisco, where she married her second husband, Axel Bren Johansson, in 1952. Dorothea Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California, on January 9, 1929. She'd later return to smother her incapacitated prey. Despite being convicted of murder in 1993 and sent to prison, Puente denied killing the victims until the day she died . Going to church every day. Wood earlier sent Puente to prison for drugging and robbing the elderly. 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 . While Puente was charged with the murders of nine people, she was convicted of only three of them in 1993: A jury could not decide on the other six deaths. Questions about her criminal record will elicit short answers trailed by awkward silence, during which she will stare at the table or the far wall, in the direction of Winnie and friends. When they finished without noticing anything suspicious, Cabrera asked if they could dig in her yard. Dorothea Montalvo Puente might seem like "a grandmotherly figure," says prosecutor John O'Mara. Some of the bodies were mummified in cloth, bed sheets and duct tape. I watch as she pushes away the empty plastic container of fried chicken strips and french fries that she finished eating earlier. Dorothea Puente was a convicted serial killer who ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California in the 1980s. A person like her, the retired sergeant says, theres no forgetting. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). Barring an unexpected transfer to another prison or a medical emergency, she will die inside this compound. Court files indicate Johansson had his wife committed to a psychiatric ward in 1961, and doctors placed her on antipsychotics. 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. The case rested on the shifting sands of circumstantial evidence. Benjamin Fink, 55. Didnt know that at the time., The detective walked about halfway to the Clarion with Puente and her boarder, John McCauley. Shes not hurting there in prison, he says. [8], Puente told Florez to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter County and dump the box of "junk" on the riverbank at an unofficial household junk dumping site. People were always coming and going. I pass through the check-in station, a process that requires visitors to pull pants pockets inside-out, remove their shoes and lift their stocking feet for inspection by guards. But there were seven dead bodies in your 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. William Vicary spoke with Puente for the first time about two months after her arrest. [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. Marathon Man 63m and other board games that the prison makes available to visitors. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. 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Police and forensics experts swarmed Puentes property the next morning. In 1993, facing nine counts of murder after prosecutors linked her to two other deaths, she stood trial without testifying. They first spoke with Dorothea Puente, who ran the clean, cozy home as a boardinghouse for low-income tenants. The jury was deadlocked eleven to one for conviction on all counts, and the lone holdout finally agreed to a conviction of two first-degree murder counts, including special circumstances, and one second-degree murder count. Im not that kind of person. I prod for more, to no avail. Betty Palmer, 78. Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house for down and outs. She was paralyzed. (The Rockettes alumni association has no record of someone named either Sharon Neyaarda or Dorothea McFaul performing with the company, nor of two dancers tumbling into an orchestra pit. Gray assumed the identity of "Sharon Johansson", hiding her delinquent behavior by portraying herself as a devout Christian woman. Puente was convicted of three of the murders, although the jury could not agree on the other six. The hospitalization occurred a year after Sacramento police busted Dorothea in a raid on a residential house of ill fame on Fulton Avenue that had fronted as a bookkeeping service, according to court records. [citation needed], On November 11, 1988, police inquired after the disappearance of tenant Alvaro "Bert" Montoya, a developmentally disabled man with schizophrenia, who had been reported missing by his social worker. Shed give advice to all these young Mexican women who came to her when they were trying to get divorced., Puente poses next to California Gov. 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 trails Cabrera, his police badge clipped to the front of a dark blue jacket and his jeans tucked into knee-high black boots that he had donned for the days dig. A local Spanish-language newspaper that referred to Puente as la doctora (Courtesy of John Cabrera), The unlicensed venture thrived from the start. Once free of the throng, Cabrera stopped and watched the pair until they entered the hotel. Puente cashed in the Social Security checks of the elderly and disabled boarders living in her house. "They immediately died," says Warren's grandson, Warren W. Bogle, who today serves as President and Vineyard Director. 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. MONTEREY . There are so many sad stories in here. Look at Job, John, Paul, Moses. Silver-haired, dressed in a long red coat and wearing large rounded glasses, the 59-year-old resembled just a regular grandmother - proving looks truly can be deceiving. She donated to Hispanic arts and education programs while providing cheap medical care to her boarders and other patients, falsely claiming she had worked as a nurse in World War II. An alarmed Ballenger urged fellow counselors to steer clear of Puente. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. The jury deliberated over a month and eventually found Puente guilty of three murders. A woman known as Dorothea Puente runs a boarding house for those less fortunate, but her seeming benevolence belies motives that are much darker. Being escorted to a police car after her capture in 1988, serial killer Dorothea Puente told gathering reporters 'I used to be a very good person, at one time'. [citation needed], The defense called several witnesses, who showed Puente had a generous and caring side to her. Owen Brewer/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesDorothea Puente awaiting arraignment in Sacramento, California on November 17, 1988. [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. Know Her Death House Now She did not strike me as a person who had a major mental illness. Cabrera, lead detective on the Puente case, stands with the shovel that she lent to law officers to dig in her backyard on Nov. 11, 1988. No one else would want that name., Prison protocol bans inmates from talking to each other in the hall apart from brief exchanges. Old bones sometimes turned up in downtown and midtown yards, vestiges of the early 20th century, when families unable to afford a cemetery plot interred loved ones on their property. Authorities alleged that, by poisoning her boarders, she wanted to collect their benefits checks without risk of them notifying social workers or police. 'We had a real connection,' Harder told VICE. The inmates know who she is, the official says. She filed a missing person report with police on Nov. 7. 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. Dorothea Puente, ne Dorothea Helen Gray, was born on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California. Common sense says that if youve got [seven] people who have died in your house, somethings gone wrong, says Vlautin, who retired from the Sacramento Public Defenders Office in 2005. Not everybody running them is being nefarious, but nefarious activity can crop up.. By 1982, Puente was sent to prison for her thefts. Eleven jurors were convinced of Puentes guilt in killing the seven boarders found in her yard; one juror disagreed. Instead, Puente found a husband. Before leaving, I decide to return to the subject of Los Angeles, to the despair that descended as she watched the news in her motel room. Their dismembered bodies were then placed in holes in the garden she'd paid ex-convicts to dig. In theory, the blend of narcotics detected in the victims could have proven lethal, or weakened them to the point of defenselessness against suffocation with a pillow or blanketa nearly untraceable cause of death. There, she quickly got back to her old tricks. Tempers spiked as the impasse stretched to its third week. 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. She declines to disclose the fathers name, when and where they were born and died or the circumstances of their deaths.). What he did know was that her public image as a shepherd of the dispossessed veiled the past of an ex-con who preyed on the weak. Then, she asked if it would be ok if she went to buy a coffee. Published: 17:09 EST, 21 January 2019 | Updated: 17:42 EST, 21 January 2019, Dorothea Puente was arrested in 1988 after the dismembered bodies of seven residents were found in the garden of her home in Sacramento, California. 'Never judge a book by its cover,' said retired police officer John Cabrera in 2018, the lead investigator on the case. 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. Sometimes she includes small handmade gifts: Christmas ornaments constructed from cardboard and yarn, a greeting card stitched with fine thread. 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. It was too humiliating, too shameful for her to admit responsibility for these crimes. The Victorian on F Street. 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. A person like her, he says, theres no forgetting.. When she was eight her father died of tuberculosis. It wasnt until 1988 that suspicions first arose about Puente, after one of her tenants, 52-year old Alvaro Montoya, went missing. An outreach counselor with Volunteers of America, she had visited Puente before placing him in her care. 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. Dorothea Puente spent much of the 1980's providing shelter for the elderly and infirm in her Sacramento boardinghouse. Cops hauling away body bags. She had seven. She then asked Florez to transport the filled, sealed box to a storage depot. Its the same thing. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Dorothea Puente believed herself to be an able caretaker. The noise inside the prisons visitors hall amplifies on Valentines Day. She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", a Muslim woman of Egyptian and Israeli descent. He neither explained his motive for capitulating nor discussed why he agreed to convict her of only three killings. So after that, I was out in New York on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then Id come back to California the rest of the week. Known at the time as Dorothea McFaul, the last name of her first husband, whom she had recently divorced, she performed on stage as Sharon Neyaarda. She attends services held at the prisons chapel, but avoids joining inmate worship groups. Nor could anyone rule out that the four women and three men had taken the drugs on their own, considering their assorted substance addictions, physical maladies and mental illnesses. Serial killer Dorothea Puente poisoned seven people in her boarding house and buried them in the backyard.
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