Dorothea Helen Puente (born January 9, 1929) is a
convicted American
serial killer.
In the
1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in
Sacramento,
California
, and cashed the Social Security checks of her
elderly and mentally disabled boarders. Those who complained
were killed and buried in her yard.
Background
Puente was
born as Dorothea Helen Gray in San Bernardino
County, California
. Her parents – Trudy Mae Yates and Jesse
James Gray – were an impoverished
alcoholic couple who both worked as
cotton pickers. Puente's father died when she
was four years old, and her mother died when she was six years old.
She was
sent to an orphanage until relatives from
Fresno,
California
took her in. In later life, she lied about her
childhood, saying that she was one of three children who all were
born and raised in Mexico
.
In 1945, she was married for the first time at the age of 16 to a
soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific.
Dorothea had two daughters between 1946 and 1948, but she sent one
to relatives in Sacramento, and gave the other up for adoption.
Dorothea became pregnant again in 1948, but eventually
miscarried. In late 1948, McFaul became fed up
and left her. Humiliated at being abandoned, Dorothea would lie
about this marriage and claim that her husband died of a
heart attack within days of their
union. In an attempt to gain an income, she tried to forge checks,
but she was eventually caught and sentenced to a year in jail; she
was
paroled after six months. Soon after her
release, she was impregnated by a man she barely knew and gave
birth to a daughter, whom she gave up for
adoption. In 1952, she married a Swede named Axel
Johanson, and had a turbulent 14-year marriage.
In 1960, she was arrested for owning and managing a
brothel and was sentenced to 90 days in the
Sacramento County Jail. After her
release, she was arrested again, this time for
vagrancy, and sentenced to another 90 days in jail.
Following that, she began a criminal career that over time became
more serious. She found work as a nurse's aid, caring for disabled
and elderly people in private homes. In a short time, she started
to manage
boarding houses.
She
divorced Johansen in 1966 and married Roberto Puente, a man 19
years her junior, in Mexico
City
. The marriage only lasted two years.
Shortly
after it ended, Dorothea Puente took over a three-story, 16-bedroom
care home at 2100 F Street in Sacramento, California. There, she ostensibly provided care and
comfort to the homeless and destitute of the area.
Puente got married for the fourth time in 1976 to Pedro Montalvo,
who was a violent alcoholic. The marriage only lasted a few months,
and Puente started to spend time in local bars looking for older
men who were receiving benefits. She forged their signatures to
steal their money, but she eventually was caught and charged with
34 counts of treasury fraud. While on
probation, she continued to commit the same
fraud.
According to California Court of Appeal records, in 1981 Puente
began renting an upstairs apartment at 1426 F Street in downtown
Sacramento. The nine murders with which she was charged in 1988
(she was convicted in 1993 of three) were associated with this
upstairs apartment and not her previous 16-room boarding
house.
Murders
Dorothea's reputation in the boarding house was mixed. Some tenants
resented her stinginess and complained that she refused to give
them their mail or money; others praised her for small acts of
kindness or for her generous meals. Puente's motives for killing
tenants was financially motivated, with police estimates of her
ill-gotten income totaling more than $5000/month. When apprehended,
Dorothea was in possession of expensive perfume and silk
dresses.
The murders appear to have begun shortly after Puente began renting
out space in the home at 1426 F Street. In April 1982, 61-year-old
friend and business partner Ruth Monroe began living with Puente in
her upstairs apartment, but soon died from an overdose of
Codeine and
Tylenol. Puente
told police that the woman was very
depressed because her husband was
terminally ill. They believed her
and judged the incident a
suicide.
A few weeks later, the police were back after a 74-year-old
pensioner named Malcolm McKenzie (one of four elderly people Puente
was accused of drugging) accused Puente of drugging and stealing
from him. She was convicted of three charges of theft on August 18,
1982, and sentenced to five years in jail.
While in jail, she
started to correspond with a 77-year-old retiree living in Oregon
, named
Everson Gillmouth. A pen-pal friendship developed, and when
Puente was released in 1985 after serving just three years of her
sentence, he was waiting for her in a red 1980 Ford
pickup. Their relationship developed quickly,
and the couple was soon making wedding plans. They opened a joint
bank account and paid $600-a-month rent for the upstairs apartment
at 1426 F Street in Sacramento.
In November 1985, Puente hired handyman Ismael Florez to install
some wood paneling in her apartment.
For his labor and an
additional $800, Puente gave him a red 1980 Ford pickup in good
condition, which she stated belonged to her boyfriend in Los
Angeles
who no longer needed it. Dorothea Puente
then asked Florez to do one more thing: build a box 6 feet by 3
feet by 2 feet to store "books and other items." She then asked
Florez to transport the filled and nailed-shut box to a storage
depot. Florez agreed, and Puente joined him.
On the way, however,
she told him to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter
County
and dump the box on the river bank in an unofficial
household dumping site. Puente told him that the contents of
the box were just junk.
On January 1, 1986, a fisherman spotted the box sitting about three
feet from the bank of the river and informed police. Investigators
found a badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man
inside. Meanwhile, Puente continued to collect Everson Gillmouth's
pension and wrote letters to his family, explaining that the reason
he had not contacted them was because he was ill. She also
maintained a "room and board" business, taking in 40 new tenants
(most of whom were alcoholics and drug addicts). Although she was
making a good profit doing this, she wanted more money and
therefore started to frequent bars looking for new customers.
Gillmouth's body remained unidentified for three years.
Puente continued to accept elderly tenants, and was popular with
local social workers because she accepted "tough cases," including
drug addicts and abusive tenants. Puente collected tenants' monthly
mail before they saw it and paid them stipends, pocketing the rest
for "expenses."
During this period, parole agents visited Puente, who had been
ordered to stay away from the elderly and refrain from handling
government checks, a minimum of fifteen times at the residence. No
violations were ever noted.
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 made her
personal handyman. Puente had Chief dig in the basement and cart
soil and rubbish away in a wheelbarrow. At the time, the basement
floor was covered with a
concrete slab.
Chief later took down a garage in the backyard and installed a
fresh concrete slab there as well. Soon afterward, Chief
disappeared.
Arrest and imprisonment
On November 11, 1988, police inquiring after the disappearance of
tenant Alvaro Montoya, a mentally retarded schizophrenic whose
social worker had reported missing. After noticing disturbed soil
on the property, they uncovered the body of tenant Leona Carpenter,
78. Seven bodies were eventually found, and Puente was charged with
a total of nine murders, convicted of three, and is now serving two
life sentences.
During the initial investigation, Puente was not immediately
suspect, and was allowed to leave the property, ostensibly to buy a
cup of coffee at a nearby hotel. Instead, she fled to Las Vegas,
where she immediately befriended an elderly pensioner, who
recognized her from police reports and called the authorities- but
not before paying some of her expenses and entertaining her
suggestion of cohabitation.
Puente is
currently incarcerated at Central
California Women's Facility
(CCWF) in Madera County, California
. She maintains her innocence and insists all
of the tenants died of natural causes.
Trivia
In 1998, Dorothea began corresponding with
Shane Bugbee, who conducted an extensive
interview with her over the course of several years. She began
sending him various recipes, and in 2004 the book "Cooking With A
Serial Killer" was released. It included a lengthy interview,
almost 50 recipes, and various pieces of prison art sent to Bugbee
by the convicted murderer.
Media
Dorothea Puente appeared in the criminal
documentary Crime Stories on
Discovery Channel,
Biography Channel and
History Television.
In Popular Culture
Although never mentioned by name, Puente's crimes were alluded to
in the novel and film of the same name,
No Country for Old Men. The
character, sheriff "Ed Tom Bell" reads an account of them from a
newspaper to one of his deputies to illustrate how difficult it is
to get anyone in a community to care about crimes being committed
right next door. Some of the details he reads, though, are
inconsistent with Puente's crimes. "'Neighbors were alerted to a
man seen running from the premises wearing nothing but a dog
collar.' But that's what it took to get someone's attention.
Digging graves in the backyard didn't bring any."
Footnotes
- Ancestry of Dorothea Puente
- Cooking with a Serial Killer: Recipes From Dorothea
Puente at Amazon.com, accessed May 11 2007.
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