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 filed a missing person report with police on Nov. 7. Several were referred there by social workers who viewed the home as a last-resort refuge for their ailing or most erratic clients. The noise inside the prisons visitors hall amplifies on Valentines Day. I ask why the cops targeted her. We hold each others stare. Dorothea Puente at the Central California Womens Facility, February 21, 2009 (Courtesy of Central California Womens Facility). We lapse into a short silence, and in that span, the incredible feats of a younger Dorothea diminish in the distance. Play it now! I now see them as tokens of loneliness, trifles to mark the time. The home belonged to seemingly sweet Dorothea Puente, who was arrested in 1988 and later convicted as a serial murderer. The subject of personal health preoccupies Puente as much as the next octogenarian. Shes been in for 12 years. Dorothea Helen Gray, ms conocida como Dorothea Puente, naci el 9 de enero de 1929 en Redlands (California, Estados Unidos), en el seno de una familia trabajadora. 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. 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. Puentes vanishing ignited a manhunt that stretched to Mexico. I am not here to take part in a reunion; I have never so much as glimpsed the woman I am waiting to meet. I wonder what its like to be known as a murderer. Puentes neighbors and acquaintances murmured disbelief that the white-haired landlady who handed out homemade tamales and fussed over her rose beds and vegetable garden could be a mass murderer. 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"Someone. Subscribe to Sactown Magazine . She had a terrible adolescence after being . 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. [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. Get Sactown's top stories in your inbox by signing up for our weekly newsletter. 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. 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. After her mother passing Dorothea and her 18 siblings . The next spring, with her husband hospitalized by terminal cancer, the 61-year-old Munroe moved in with Puente to save money. 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! I now see them as tokens of loneliness, trifles to mark the time. 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. Instead, Puente found a husband. When they finished without noticing anything suspicious, Cabrera asked if they could dig in her yard. The 59-year-old looked like an ordinary grandmother when she was arrested after a five day hunt across California. People were always coming and going. & Brucato, Gary, Ph.D., The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books), pp. One girl was placed in the care of relatives, the other put up for adoption. I didnt know if anyone was going to look after him.. First off, I was getting the checks. An alarmed Ballenger urged fellow counselors to steer clear of Puente. Maybe I would have been better off. 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. The police dug up 78-year-old Leono Carpenter and then six more bodies. Isabel Vincent. Amanda Sedlak-Hevener. After the notorious female serial killer Dorothea Puente died in prison at the age of 82, the filmmaker Nick Coles stumbled upon her obituary. Four days later, Munroe died at Puentes home. Someone reached across the table at one point and almost got into a fistfight with him, says Hewlett, who now lives in Oregon. Her eyes fix on the mural of Winnie the Pooh. The Monstrous Crimes Of The Dorothea Puente, The Death House Landlady. Nannie Doss admitted to killing 11 people between 1920 and 1954. I dont give a shit what anyone else thinks., Did you like what you read here? She collected tenants' monthly mail before they saw it and paid them stipends, pocketing the rest for "expenses". Most of the luminaries are connected to her years in Sacramento, where she moved in the mid-50s with her second husband, Axel Johansson, who now lives in Orangevale. Im certain they were just dying of natural causes, and she started burying them so she could keep the checks coming. Throughout the trial, Dorothea Puente was portrayed as either a sweet grandma-like type or a manipulative criminal who preyed on the weak. 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). Julio Santana dropped to his left knee and propped his right elbow on his . 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. The psychologist morphed into a prophet with the discovery of seven bodies in Puentes backyard in November 1988. After noticing disturbed soil on the property, they uncovered the body of tenant Leona Carpenter, 78. Then aged 63 (above), 103 witnesses were called to testify against her in the trial, Suspicion arose in 1988 when Alberto Montoya, a mentally disabled and schizophrenic tenant, was reported missing by a social worker, Puente's victims: (left to right)Everson Gillmouth, 77. 3.23. 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.. Authorities alleged that, by poisoning her boarders, she wanted to collect their benefits checks without risk of them notifying social workers or police. Given Dorothea Puente's image, this meant the controversial artist, Shane Bugbee, would collaborate with her on a cookbook. MONTEREY . Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group, '2023 will be our year of victory! Both have died, and police cleared them early in the investigation. Puente occupies a lower bunk owing to her age and tenure at the prison, sleeping on the same kind of thin, lumpy mattress as other inmates. Many of them found dead and buried in the boarding house's yard. She was the sixth of seven children but didn't grow up in a stable family environment. Inmates enter one at a time at irregular intervals through a gray metal door along the rear wall. 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. Six more corpses would follow, but Puente was still on the run. How did I know where they were? Absolving herself, Puente fingers McCauley and another former tenant as the possible murder suspects. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives), Dorfman drew up Puentes will years agoI dont know if its any good anymore; shes probably given away stuff she doesnt [even] ownand still receives Christmas cards from her. 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. It wasnt until 1988 that suspicions first arose about Puente, after one of her tenants, 52-year old Alvaro Montoya, went missing. She watched from her porch, and before Cabrera put spade to soil, she requested a moment of his time. McFaul split from his young wife in 1948. 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. Unbeknownst to Puente, the pensioner recognized her as the woman he saw on television news reports. For his labor and $800, Puente gave him the red Ford pickup, which she stated belonged to her boyfriend in Los Angeles, who no longer needed it. For someone who insists she worried over the well-being of her tenants, Puente tells me that, after her arrest, she fretted about Sam. After Florez finished the job, Puente had one more request: to build her a six-foot-long box so she could fill it with books and a few other assorted items before the pair of them would bring the box to a storage facility. The four women and three men, ages 52 to 79, had boarded at the two-story, powder-blue Victorian. She also suffered a miscarriage. When they returned to his apartment, he watched in a stupor as Puente helped herself to his checks and cash; before leaving, she slipped a diamond ring off his pinky. Some of them began to disappear. (AP Photo/Walt Zeboski). [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. Sacramento Bee Two more murders She'd. 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. Hard living had stolen much of Dorotheas youthful beauty by the time she landed her third husband in 1968 and settled in Sacramento. She met and married Fred McFaul in 1945. Her body shapeless under a long-sleeve T-shirt and dungarees, she has pulled back her snowy plume of hair with a pink scrunchie. 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). They all know who I am, she says. Arrested for the scam in 1978, court records show, she received five years federal probation, the terms of which proscribed her from operating a boardinghouse. In 16 years at the facility, she has accrued only two rules violations, the last occurring in 2004. The unreliable narrator breaks the hush. Two decades after he yanked the leg bone from the ground behind the boardinghouse, his dark hair has shaded silver and he has shaved off his boomerang-curved mustache. She balanced her dance career with a second job as a cook at a San Francisco seafood restaurant, she tells me, shuttling between coasts until her dance career came to a sudden end in 1957. Aug. 27, 1993 12 AM PT. Shes dying of cancer. 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. Within two weeks, Munroe fell ill, her body so weak she struggled to stand. It doesnt fit., At least three peopledefense attorneys Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin and their clientharbored scarce empathy for the prosecutor. Dorothea Puente, ne Dorothea Helen Gray, was born on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California. Cooking what I want. 31 of the Royal Viking. I wait for her to speak. Twenty-one minutes laterhe remembers the time preciselyhe exhumed sufficient evidence: the remains of a second body buried about a foot deep in the earth. A person like her, he says, theres no forgetting.. However, it would be three more years before authorities could identify the body as one of the tenants in Dorothea Puentes house. Hayden spent months processing thousands of pieces of evidence related to the case, including a shovel used to dig up human remains. Dorothea Puente after her arrest in Los Angeles, en route back to Sacramento. The infamous home Dorothea Puente lived in is along F Street in Sacramento. Wood earlier sent Puente to prison for drugging and robbing the elderly. As most serial killers, Dorothea had a rough childhood. 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. Gawkers gather outside 1426 F St. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives), Domestic bliss and her maternal instinct failed to take root. The prosecutor, John O'Mara, was the homicide supervisor in the Sacramento County District Attorney's office. 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[2], Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California, to Trudy Mae (ne Yates) and Jesse James Gray. He was a good-hearted man, very kind, she says. They dont have all the facts, she tells me one morning, dismissing those who judge her a murderer. . Puente was convicted of three of the murders, although the jury could not agree on the other six. In 1993, facing nine counts of murder after prosecutors linked her to two other deaths, she stood trial without testifying. I wonder if she ever wishes she had received the death penalty. 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 . [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. If you lived anywhere else, theres still a good chance you recognize it, or at least the rough outline of her crimes. Between 1982 and 1989, Puente would take in the vulnerable and homeless people. "You have heard of the despair which was the foundation of her life, the anger and resentmentIf anyone in the jury room tells you it was not that bad, ask them would you want that to happen to yourself? [3] Her parents were both alcoholics and her father repeatedly threatened to commit suicide in front of his children. I wonder if the tenants know about the homes notorious history. (A charity she declines to name sends her $15 a month, her sole source of money.) Granddaughter Of Dorothea Puente Victim Visits Boarding House Exclusive Granddaughter Of Dorothea Puente Victim Visits Boarding House Dorothy Miller was eventually found buried in the yard of Dorothea Puente's boarding house. During discussions that typically lasted two to three hours, she proved by turns defiant and self-pitying, disavowing she killed anyone while reserving words of sorrow for herself. After their deaths she continued to draw their social security cheques. [6], In April 1982, 53-year-old Ruth Munroe began living with Puente in her upstairs apartment, but soon died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. She was notoriously known as the "Death House Land Lady" after committing nine murders. A dark thought arrived. Pathologists testified that they hadnt been able to fix the cause of death for any of the corpses. Puentes next two marriages would be short-lived. Puente surrendered quietly. 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. On her lap bounces a pony-tailed girl in a red-buttoned vest who giggles Mama! Two tables over, a stout, fortyish black woman with a toothy smile banters with her parents and younger brother, to judge from the physical semblance. At the time, she owned a solid reputation among Sacramentos social workers, who referred clients to her that other boardinghouses turned away: the mentally ill, recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, those with chronic physical maladies who had no one to care for them.
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