(She garnished her war story with accounts of surviving the 1942 Bataan Death March, a lie she repeated to The Sacramento Bee in a 1982 article on the march; in truth, she was 13 years old and living in California at the time.) Cooking what I want. Anyway, so she had six boarders! Marathon Man 63m Finally, four days after she skipped town, authorities traced her to a tumbledown motel in Los Angeles. 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. But every time youd go to see her, Ballenger says, her cancer had moved from her brain to her breast to her liver. Puente had stayed poised a day earlier when Cabrera showed up with a fellow homicide detective and a federal probation agent. Dorothea Puente. The couple, Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams, renovated the . Sometimes she includes small handmade gifts. An undercover cop posing as a trucker arrested her after she offered to perform fellatio on him; she served 90 days in county lockup. They know what shes done., Puente conveys a pride in her renown that, now and then, gives way to embarrassment, or perhaps weariness. In Olympia, Washington, she tried to make a living as a prostitute. Years later, her granddaughter visits the spot. The 9/ . All three revolve around murder, a fact she notes without irony or self-consciousness. Hayden spent months processing thousands of pieces of evidence related to the case, including a shovel used to dig up human remains. Season 1 Episode 2 - Videos 1:11 Preview Dorothea Puente Runs From Police The subject of personal health preoccupies Puente as much as the next octogenarian. As we talk on Valentines Day, I broach her long-ago brushes with the law, only to find myself stymied again. 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. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Bee/Genaro Molina). I started working her, Cabrera says, but all along, she was working me. Subscribe to Sactown Magazine . The infamous home Dorothea Puente lived in is along F Street in Sacramento. The psychologist morphed into a prophet with the discovery of seven bodies in Puentes backyard in November 1988. They first spoke with Dorothea Puente, who ran the clean, cozy home as a boardinghouse for low-income tenants. 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. 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. Montoya struggled with mental health issues and had been homeless for years. 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. Do not sell or share my personal information. While there, doctors diagnosed her as a pathological liar with an unstable personality. Ballenger began to suspect Puente of more nefarious behavior after learning that two elderly women in her care had suffered recurring spells of illness that baffled doctors. 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. 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. It was a human leg bone, he recalls. She was the sixth of seven children but didn't grow up in a stable family environment. The couple moved to Sacramento a short time later and lived in the city off and on for the next decade. MONTEREY . 31 of the Royal Viking. She will send me the list in a few daysthe bill will total $114.70but I already know I wont oblige. Be Careful of the Quiet Ones 45m When college student Maribel Ramos goes missing, detectives turn their focus to her roommate, K.C. In October 1988, discovering he no longer lived at the house, Moise began to hound Puente about his departure. I just did, she says. Their dismembered bodies were then placed in holes in the garden she'd paid ex-convicts to dig. After sixteen months, the couple separated, with Gray citing domestic abuse. A few days later I drive to Chowchilla for my final visit with her. She steams the tamales in plastic bags placed in a pan of water warmed with two electric immersion coils. 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. 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. It occurs to me that if I were unaware of her past and talking with her outside of prison, she could come across as the little old lady next door. Round-framed glasses too large for her face magnify a pair of pale blue eyes. It is a wistfulness that lays bare the depth of chaos that defined Puentes status quo long before they married in 1952. Its sick., Clausen knows Puentes appeals ran out last year. Puente died of natural causes at the Central . I made them change their clothes every day, take a bath every day and eat three meals a day. How many other boardinghouses have one person die? 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. After what was then the longest deliberation in a murder case in state history24 daysthe jury convicted her of three killings. If Im thinking about getting away, you think Im going to ask permission?, Police escort Puente after apprehending her in L.A.; Cabrera walks behind her. Puente watched the images flicker across the TV screen in her Los Angeles motel room. Four days later, Munroe died at Puentes home. That is the question. But looks can be ext During her trial, the persecution said. Me and Nancy, she says, shaking her head. After Puente was released from her first spell in prison for three counts. Given Montoyas history as a transient, his disappearance would have escaped notice without the persistence of Judy Moise. During my meetings with Puente, a number of prisoners softly greet herHi, Miss Dorothea; How are you, Miss D?as they walk past. 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. After a number of legal hurdles, Puente's trial eventually went ahead four years later. Dorothea Puente is an American serial killer. Dorothea Puente, a notorious, grandmotherly boarding house operator convicted in the 1990s of killing her tenants, has died in prison aged 82. I wonder what she wants when death does come. This was a money-making scheme, but I do not believe she was a murderess.. Puentes mechanical response echoes what she has told me during prior meetings, and what I will hear on subsequent visits. 'Executing Puente would be like executing your grandmother', one juror is reported to have said in response to the death sentence looming over the defendant at the time. Even probation officers who stopped by accepted Puentes explanation that the people living at her house were guests or friends not boarders. Some were in an almost mummified state, wrapped tight with cloth, bed sheets and duct tape. [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. Puente cashed in the Social Security checks of the elderly and disabled boarders living in her house. Artifacts from the Dorothea Puente case splay out before him: a faded article published in a local Spanish newspaper with a black and white photo of a younger Puente; a pair of her mug shots, blue eyes dimmed and weary in both; a prescription label in her name for diazepam, a tranquilizer sold as Valium; the original wanted bulletin from Nov. 12, 1988, the day she went on the lam. [6], In 1968, Gray married Roberto Jose Puente. The four women and three men, ages 52 to 79, had boarded at the two-story, powder-blue Victorian. They had two daughters between 1946 and 1948; Gray sent one child to live with relatives in Sacramento, and placed the other for adoption. Going to church every day. Mental health experts testified of Puente's abusive upbringing and how it motivated her to help the less fortunate. Orphaned, Puente and her siblings splintered off in different directions, bouncing between foster care and relatives homes. On New Years Day, a fisherman spotted the box, noticed that it looked suspiciously like a coffin, and informed the police. 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. Today the 59-year-old Cabrera works cold cases for the department as a retired sergeant. His eyes popped wide. It was too humiliating, too shameful for her to admit responsibility for these crimes. In the 1970s, she opened her first boarding house in Sacramento. She had breached her federal probation by running a boardinghouse, yet admitted to the offense when asked. Jodi Picoult mentions Puente's crimes and cookbook in her novel House Rules. I wondered how the last two decades had changed her, how she had endured. After learning about the murders inside Dorothea Puentes house, read about the serial killer known as the Angel of Death. She professed her innocence until she died. 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. Puente watched the images flicker across the TV screen in her Los Angeles motel room. In the 70s, while running her first boardinghouse at 21st and F streets, Puente cultivated a strong rapport with social workers. Shes been in for 12 years. Gawkers gather outside 1426 F St. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives), Domestic bliss and her maternal instinct failed to take root. The Victorian on F Street. That didnt seem right, but Dorothea had conned our whole family into thinking she was a nurse.. Setting his feet, he grabbed hold of the object and, with a violent jerk, loosed it from the earths grip. Designers Joelle and Mikel visit the current owners to replace the home's negative energy with a new makeover. 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. Suspect left her residence for a walk but never returned.. 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. For her and the others, one factor in particular undercut Puentes claim of innocence. Next, Dorothea Puente went to San Francisco, where she married her second husband, Axel Bren Johansson, in 1952. She moves toward the front of the room, where a guard seated behind a metal desk tells her my table number. Despite the guilty verdict of her . One decomposed leg was found on one side of the garden, and a foot was found on the other (Pictured: Investigators compile miscellaneous body parts found in the ground, 1988). (Puente tells me she also had twin daughters who as young adults committed suicide one week apart. Dorothea Puente at the Central California Womens Facility, February 21, 2009 (Courtesy of Central California Womens Facility). A 22-year-old soldier who had returned to the U.S. from the Pacific after World War II, he married Dorothea in 1945, and they moved to Gardnerville, Nevada to start a family. However Harder insists that's where he draws the line. Prosecutors said that Puente was one of the most cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen.. It had about $2,500, $3,000 in it. Cabrera shakes his head. Dorothea Puente's reign of terror began in 1982 when her friend, Ruth Monroe, was found dead in a boarding house Puente was running at that time. The comments below have not been moderated. After their deaths she continued to draw their social security cheques. Despite lacking formal dance training, she says, I went out there and they hired me. She eventually met and married Pedro Angel Montalvo, though Montalvo abruptly left the relationship a week after their marriage. (One woman later discovered checks and jewelry missing from her home; her case played a part in Puentes 1982 arrest on theft charges.) [6], Gray and Johansson divorced in 1966, although she continued to use Johansson's name for some time following their separation. I ask why the cops targeted her. Soon after, Monroe died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. She took it all Death is the only appropriate penalty. On Nov. 11, 1988, acting on the concerns of a social worker looking for a client who had disappeared, homicide detectives dropped by the mans last known address: a boardinghouse for derelicts and the mentally ill that Puente operated at 1426 F Street, within a mile of the Hall of Justice and the Capitol. (A charity she declines to name sends her $15 a month, her sole source of money.) 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 contents might be what you'd never expected. Shes making me lie for her.. She is a California native, born in Redlands, Calif. 2. She was tough. Forensic testing had failed to determine a definitive cause of death in any of the victims. As far as theyre concerned, Im dead.. She gave birth to a daughter in 1946 followed by a second less than a year later, but public documents suggest she inherited her mothers aversion to childrearing. Dorothea Helen Puente (ne Gray; January 9, 1929 March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. Her eyes would fill with tears, but she would never admit it, he says. She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", a Muslim woman of Egyptian and Israeli descent. Sacramento Bee Two more murders She'd. I have listened to the lingering grief and anger of a man whose mother died mysteriously while in her care. In any case, after more than 20 years behind bars, and despite the withering of her features, she retains a physical vitality and a fondness for cosmetic excess. [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. They prized her willingness to accept alcoholics, drug addicts and other difficult clients into her home, a sprawling, three-story Victorian that could sleep more than two dozen tenants. A T-shirt designed to cash in on Puente mania (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives). As the others begin to stir, she tidies up the space, a boardinghouse landlady to the last. Would you want that to happen to your children? 3.23. She pled guilty to two counts of forgery, serving four months in jail and three years' probation. We both fell into the orchestra pit and I broke my leg. The other dancer? She resembles a wizened owl. Instead, Puente opened up her second boarding house. [19] It was then the subject of the 2015 documentary short The House Is Innocent and was again opened to tours for one day in conjunction with a local film festival's showing of the film.[20]. 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. I could give her my answer now, but there are a few more questions to ask. An Asian woman in her mid-thirties, with sharp cheekbones framed by long glossy black hair, wears standard-issue prisoner garb: white T-shirt with long navy blue sleeves, dungarees and blue sneakers. When attempts to extract it with a shovel failed, Cabrera climbed into the hole. Her bedroom was on the second floor. She had a traumatic childhood after being raised by alcoholic parents. Gillmouth's body remained unidentified for three years. Beneath the rooms ashen lighting stand neat rows of small round tables, some 50 in all. Shes got everything she needs, her life is taken care of. 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. If you lived in Sacramento in the late 80s, you recognize her name. An alarmed Ballenger urged fellow counselors to steer clear of Puente. At the time, she was serving two life sentences and a concurrent 15-year-to-life sentence. Authorities alleged that, by poisoning her boarders, she wanted to collect their benefits checks without risk of them notifying social workers or police. But on the way to the storage facility, Puente abruptly asked Florez to pull over near a riverbank and just push the box into the water. She claims he has sent her Christmas cards in prison, and as she talks about that small act of kindness, her eyes mist over. On her release from prison, she began killing her victims. For the rest of her life, she maintained her innocence, insisting that all of her boarders had died of "natural causes". In November 1985, Dorothea Puente hired a handyman named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her home. She got in serious trouble for the first time in her life after bouncing a check in San Bernadino and spent four months in jail. She was found guilty in three cases and one juror held out on the other four. Dorothea Puente's House Has Been Bought. After the notorious female serial killer Dorothea Puente died in prison at the age of 82, the filmmaker Nick Coles stumbled upon her obituary. Puente passed away in 2011 at the Central California Women's Facility at age 82 from natural causes. Moise alerted police, who went to the boarding house. 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. (Clymo died in 2006.) The visitors hall at the Central California Womens Facility in Chowchilla brings to mind a church social as hosted for state convicts. The grandmother would then sneak into the rooms of her incapacitated prey and smother them to death with a pillow. In her absence, investigators dug up the whole yard and discovered the body of 78-year-old Leona Carpenter. Another tenant, John Sharp, backed her up. [citation needed]. A search of the home showed nothing amiss. (Obituaries for Ingemar Johansson, who died earlier this year, list his sole surviving brother as Rolf.). Dorothea Montalvo Puente (hereinafter "Petitioner") petitions for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C 2254 challenging her 1993 conviction following a trial by jury. Serial killer Dorothea Puente poisoned seven people in her boarding house and buried them in the backyard. She also mentions undergoing major cancer surgery in 1961 to remove her reproductive organs and part of her intestines and stomach. The jokes on me. FacebookDorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. Retired social worker Mildred Ballenger first met Puente in the late 1970s. [11], Puente has been featured on numerous true crime television shows, including Crime Stories,[12] Deadly Women,[13] A Stranger in My Home,[14] World's Most Evil Killers,[15] and Worst Roommate Ever.[16]. But the passage of months and years since the victims had died reduced the toxicology results to educated guesswork. 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. The Boarding House Killer: Directed by Steve Allen. The Montoya file landed on Cabreras desk within a day. I didnt drug anyone. 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! & Brucato, Gary, Ph.D., The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books), pp. 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. Time has deepened the creases between her potato-like nose and dumpling cheeks, and her blanched skin has slackened at the neck. SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KTXL) Throughout the 1980s, as many as nine deaths in Sacramento were investigated as being connected to Dorothea Puente. But 26 years after her conviction - and seven years after her death - a man who claims to Puente's grandson, William Harder, has stepped forward to reaffirm his grandmother's claim that she wasn't always bad. Given Dorothea Puente's image, this meant the controversial artist, Shane Bugbee, would collaborate with her on a cookbook. Finding nothing, they asked permission to dig up the yard. The conversation soon veers toward why I want to interview her, and before I finish explaining, she interrupts. They were met by Dorothea Puente, an elderly woman with big glasses, who repeated her story that Montoya was simply on vacation. The only time [the boarers] were in good health was when they stayed at my home, Puente insisted from prison. With Jeff Rechner, Joelle Uzyel, Mikel Welch. Dorothea Helen Puente (nascido Gray; 9 de janeiro de 1929 - 27 de maro de 2011) foi uma assassina em srie americana.Na dcada de 1980, Puente mandava numa hospedaria em Sacramento, Califrnia, e assassinou vrios idosos e pensionistas com deficincia mental antes de descontar seus cheques de seguridade social. [2], Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California, to Trudy Mae (ne Yates) and Jesse James Gray. 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. 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. [6], In 1978, Gray was charged and convicted of illegally cashing thirty-four state and federal checks that belonged to her tenants. She was released just three years later, although a state psychologist diagnosed her as a schizophrenic with no remorse or regret who should be closely monitored.. I know her only through the words of others. Now, as I sit at table No. In her telling, after showering and dressing, she prays, recites the rosary and reads a few pages of the Bible, favoring Proverbs and Romans. She wound up serving four months in jail and shortly afterward fled Riverside County, flouting the terms of her probation. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and . Puente died in prison at Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, from natural causes; she was 82. She filed a missing person report with police on Nov. 7. See how its bulging? 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. In summer 1982, Clausen and his siblings spotted a story in the Bee about Puentes conviction on theft and forgery charges related to her drugging four elderly people. I rise as she approaches and shake a hand that feels skeletal and small. 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. 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. 13, as designated by the plastic placard atop its faux-wood surface. 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. In 1993, facing nine counts of murder after prosecutors linked her to two other deaths, she stood trial without testifying. Still, prison has changed Puente in one profound aspect, reforming her into an obedient citizen. I dont feel like confessing my sins to anyone, she says sharply. It is a stifling backdrop in which to live out the years. A woman known as Dorothea Puente runs a boarding house for those less fortunate, but her seeming benevolence belies motives that are much darker. John Cabrera and Terry Brown, homicide detectives with the Sacramento Police Department, and Jim Wilson, a federal probation agent, had arrived at the house late on the morning of Nov. 11, 1988. Beneath a black and white mug shot of Puente wearing a polka dot dress and round glasses, the bulletin reads, The above suspect wanted for murder after several bodys (sic) found buried in her backyard. Dorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. Alcoholics dont stay in one place for long. Several were referred there by social workers who viewed the home as a last-resort refuge for their ailing or most erratic clients. Not yet considering the sweet lady to be a suspect, the officers obliged at the 59-year-old's request to go down the street to buy a cup of coffee - but she had no intention of returning. And then theres the contradiction: beneath this house there are all these bodies. Her body shapeless under a long-sleeve T-shirt and dungarees, she has pulled back her snowy plume of hair with a pink scrunchie. In the spring of 1948, Gray was arrested for purchasing women's accessories using forged checks in Riverside. Despite being convicted of murder in 1993 and sent to prison, Puente. If she had been held accountable for murdering my mother, Clausen says, then maybe there wouldnt have been any other victims.. She gasped at sight of the remains, hands bracketing her cheeks. For a moment the prisons visitors hall feels bereft of other people and sounds. Some play Scrabble, Sorry! Its the same thing. The police returned and searched the house. Despite this, their marriage lasted until 1966. That is a human quality that deserves to be preserved. Our visit winds down. Sometimes she includes small handmade gifts: Christmas ornaments constructed from cardboard and yarn, a greeting card stitched with fine thread. To my surprise, an envelope stamped with the words Central California Womens Facility State Prison arrived a few weeks later. I now see them as tokens of loneliness, trifles to mark the time. We spent 2 hours in here looking and reading most of the items. People were always coming and going. During the 1992 proceeding, investigators revealed that Puente - who was then 63 - had been killing the tenants for money, making $4,000 a month from cashing their social security checks. I dont know what to tell you, she said. Rene C. Byer Sacramento Bee file. She consented again, even lending a shovel to the men, who had brought only two. In 16 years at the facility, she has accrued only two rules violations, the last occurring in 2004. The business supplied her with steady revenuesteady and, apparently, inadequate. The discovery prompted Cabrera to summon Puente to the backyard. I wonder if she ever wishes she had received the death penalty. 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. I leave through a different door and make my way out of the prison, stepping into the cool afternoon air. Im certain they were just dying of natural causes, and she started burying them so she could keep the checks coming. Their first series of holes dislodged only soft dirt and a vague sense of futility. 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. She parried, unwavering in her account of Montoyas departure, her voice calm as the detective pressed her. She this Dorothea Puente, was an elderly lady (think a widow at that) that housed boarders, a care home, or is it care house? 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. The impending anniversary, if tracked only by media types and those who sell serial-killer novelties online, had stirred my curiosity.