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. 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. Get Sactown's top stories in your inbox by signing up for our weekly newsletter. But while digging a second hole, Wilson heard a muted thud as his blade struck something hard three feet down. This is the disturbing story of Dorothea Puente, the Death House Landlady.. Ruth was not just Puente's friend but was also her business partner and had moved in with her just three weeks before the murder. 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. Puente offered a place where they could hang on. 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 I can die peacefully in my sleep without being sick or being a cripple. Working in my yard.. Dorothea Puente after her arrest in Los Angeles, en route back to Sacramento. I was on stage when the girl next to me broke her heel and bumped into me. Im certain they were just dying of natural causes, and she started burying them so she could keep the checks coming. The couple, Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams, renovated the . In a low, almost plaintive voice, she replies, Puente. We hold each others stare. At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. In 1993, facing nine counts of murder after prosecutors linked her to two other deaths, she stood trial without testifying. She does not once voice sadness over the deaths of her boarders, as if fearful that merely referring to them would imply her guilt. Her words return to me. Puentes mechanical response echoes what she has told me during prior meetings, and what I will hear on subsequent visits. She was notoriously known as the "Death House Land Lady" after committing nine murders. By 1948, McFaul asked for a divorce and Puente drifted south to California. Some play Scrabble, Sorry! Only after unearthing seven corpses at 1426 F Street in November 1988 would prosecutors charge Puente with killing Munroe. Con su simpata lograba escapar de la. I didnt drug anyone. In the landladys presence, he corroborated her story about Montoya. Over the next few years, she adapted by working as an in-home caregiver, affecting a matronly mien with her modest dress, oversized glasses and tremulous voice. In the 1970s, she opened her first boarding house in Sacramento. 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. Bogle Family Vineyards Ryan, Jody & Warren Bogle Thank goodness the potato crop failed. She married Roberto Puente in 1968, but the relationship dissolved sixteen months later. She resembles a wizened owl. Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929. Sometimes she includes small handmade gifts: Christmas ornaments constructed from cardboard and yarn, a greeting card stitched with fine thread. 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. Heres this grandmotherly figure in this beautiful, restored Victorian house with all these azaleas and other flowers, OMara says. On her way back, she insisted to reporters that she hadnt killed anyone, claiming: I used to be a very good person at one time.. Joy the last person to have seen her alive. If you lived anywhere else, theres still a good chance you recognize it, or at least the rough outline of her crimes. He returned to the house, grabbed a shovel and began to dig. The Victorian on F Street. She was the sixth of seven children but didn't grow up in a stable family environment. Her narrow lips, pinched and lined at the corners, curl slightly upward. Today the 59-year-old Cabrera works cold cases for the department as a retired sergeant. 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I dont give a shit what anyone else thinks., Did you like what you read here? 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. Finding nothing, they asked permission to dig up the yard. I scan the room out of empty impulse, certain I havent missed her. The next spring, with her husband hospitalized by terminal cancer, the 61-year-old Munroe moved in with Puente to save money. She attends services held at the prisons chapel, but avoids joining inmate worship groups. I could give her my answer now, but there are a few more questions to ask. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. She answers without pause. 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. She recalls the future president and his first wife, Jane Wyman, as her good friends. When I mention the Gippers second wife, Puente frowns. 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. 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. Officers rushed to the hotel to arrest Puente, but by then, she had bolted. The grandmother would then sneak into the rooms of her incapacitated prey and smother them to death with a pillow. 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. Her escape intensified interest in a lurid tale that for a time made Sacramento the center of the media universe. Their first series of holes dislodged only soft dirt and a vague sense of futility. When we discuss her health or the books she reads, when she makes a rare inquiry about my job or background, the conversation tracks as normal, even mundane. For a moment the prisons visitors hall feels bereft of other people and sounds. But Puente has lodged in his psyche as the rarest predator he confronted: in age, gender and disposition, she inhabits an extremely narrow strata of serial killers. With Bill Courage, John Cabrera, Bill Clausen, Judy Moises. [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]. Theyve never talked to me. On another occasion, she casts her circumstance in a biblical light. I wonder if she ever wishes she had received the death penalty. Hard living had stolen much of Dorotheas youthful beauty by the time she landed her third husband in 1968 and settled in Sacramento. I talk about the foggy drive to the prison, she recounts her trip to the visitors hall. (Clymo died in 2006.) 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 . (Obituaries for Ingemar Johansson, who died earlier this year, list his sole surviving brother as Rolf.). She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", a Muslim woman of Egyptian and Israeli descent. Puente told them that they were welcome to do so, and even provided an extra shovel. Cabreras superiors approved her request, deciding they held insufficient evidence to detain her. Despite maintaining her innocence until the day she died, Puente has been immortalized as one of America's most notorious female serial killers. However, in 1978, she was convicted of illegally cashing state and federal assistance checks that belonged to her tenants. The Bogle Family's winemaking story begins in 1968 when Warren V. Bogle wanted to try a new crop and planted potatoes on their farm just south of Clarksburg. 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. The higher volume results from the presence of more children, most of whom exhibit the happy symptoms of a sugar buzz. She would flee the city that morning. When attempts to extract it with a shovel failed, Cabrera climbed into the hole. That same year, the Victorian bungalow Puente used to commit her crimes was sold to a Sacramento couple at a public auction for $215,000. After several days of deliberations, the jury was deadlocked 75; Judge Michael J. Virga declared a mistrial when the jury said further deliberations would not change their minds. She had a terrible adolescence after being . She has sent more than 15 letters and postcards in the months since I first wrote to her. And it was so counter to her strenuous effort all her life to be somebody who was respected, somebody important., Puente received a prison term of life without parole after the jury deadlocked on whether to give her the death penalty, an ending that deepened William Clausens bitterness. 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. 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. One of the bodies was missing its head, hands and feet, Body parts were also found scattered across the property. 'The contents might be what you'd never expected. To vary her diet, Puente sometimes cooks in her room, making tamales with tortillas, canned chili, cheese and other ingredients bought in the prisons canteen or mail-ordered through a food-delivery service. These people were human beings, they had a right to live-they did not have a lot of possessions-no houses-no cars-only their social security checks and their lives. & Brucato, Gary, Ph.D., The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books), pp. Play it now! Puente was acquitted in the poisoning death of his mother, Ruth Munroe, and Clausen, who testified at trial, regards the convicted killers every living day as a denigration of his mothers memory. 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. Both have died, and police cleared them early in the investigation. He says he's often inundated with requests from crazed fans and fellow murder enthusiasts who ask to buy his grandmother's ashes. Several were referred there by social workers who viewed the home as a last-resort refuge for their ailing or most erratic clients. In another twist to the case, Sacramento police escorted her back to the city on a plane chartered by KCRA for its news crew. The police returned and searched the house. I wondered if she maintained her innocence or felt bowed by remorse. I didnt need to kill anyone. Others spoke of a calculating criminal who feigned altruism to mask her avariceand a homicidal bent. Four days later, Munroe died at Puentes home. Designers Joelle and Mikel visit the current owners to replace the home's negative energy with a new makeover. (One woman later discovered checks and jewelry missing from her home; her case played a part in Puentes 1982 arrest on theft charges.) After spending part of Valentines Day with Miss Dorothea, as other inmates call her, I returned later in February and stopped by for a final chat in April. Puente drugged three women with tranquilizers to steal checks, money and valuables from their homes in the early 80s, as recounted in court records. (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. Her evasive answersfirst claiming he had traveled to Mexico, then that he had returned and moved to Utahtripped Moises suspicion. It is a stifling backdrop in which to live out the years. But their marriage was brief only three years and hinted at trouble beneath the surface. Puente and her siblings were subsequently sent to an orphanage, where she was sexually abused. She never intended to show, I realize. Frequent quarrels and separations marred the marriage, with much of the discord brought on by Dorotheas appetites for drinking, gambling and other men. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution. Inmates eat breakfast and dinner in a dining hall separate from their building units; after breakfast, they receive a cold boxed lunch that they take back to their cells. Aug. 27, 1993 12 AM PT. However, it would be three more years before authorities could identify the body as one of the tenants in Dorothea Puentes house. 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. An extensive five-day search for the elderly fugitive ended when a stranger she'd befriended in Los Angeles recognized her face from the news and turned her into police. See how its bulging? She declines to disclose the fathers name, when and where they were born and died or the circumstances of their deaths.). Ill be waiting for her.. She asked Florez to build a 6-by-3-by-2-foot box to store "books and other items". Procedural wrangling moved the trial to Monterey, after a judge ruled that the intense media coverage of Puente in the Sacramento region would preclude her from receiving a fair trial here. 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). I leave through a different door and make my way out of the prison, stepping into the cool afternoon air. The house at 1426 F Street, now painted a shade of gingerbread, appears occupied on the first floor and empty on the second, where she used to sleep. 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. The seven tenants who had lived at 1426 F Street died with a variety of drugs in their bodies: anticonvulsants, antidepressants, antipsychotics, painkillers, tranquilizers. Now 80, she speaks out in a series of rare interviews on her crimes, her "relationships" with the Kennedys and the Reagans and whyin the endthe person she really wanted to kill was herself Martin Kuz She was known as the "step house lady" after filing nine homicides. That is mitigating. But no one noticed. A lot of people get old in here really quickly cause they just kind of stop doing anything., Ruth Munroe, believed by authorities to be Puentes first victim (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives). Familiar in name, she remained an enigma. Things happen for a reason., Nov. 12, 1988: Homicide detective John Cabrera (right) ushers Puente out of her home to a nearby hotel. All three revolve around murder, a fact she notes without irony or self-consciousness. Puente surrendered quietly. 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. Shes not hurting there in prison, he says. Maybe I would have been better off. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and . Puente passed away in 2011 from natural causes at the Central California Facility in Chowchilla, aged 82. I think she truly wanted to rehabilitate [her tenants] as she could not the people in her own family, Vicary says. Instead, after buying the coffee, she fled immediately to Los Angeles, where she befriended an elderly male pensioner whom she had met in a bar. The 59-year-old looked like an ordinary grandmother when she was arrested after a five day hunt across California. She was the sixth of seven children but didnt grow up in a stable family environment. 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. 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. She wound up serving four months in jail and shortly afterward fled Riverside County, flouting the terms of her probation. Drugs Puente used to knock . Our visit winds down. The theory, while perhaps logical to anyone unfamiliar with Puente before her name hit the headlines, brought disparate reactions from those who already knew her. ', Puente died in 2011 aged 82 in her prison cell at the Central California Facility, in Chowchilla. 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. Intense news coverage led to Puentes trial moving to Monterey. Clausen checked on her in April 1982 and saw his pallid, suddenly enfeebled mother, who rarely drank alcohol, sipping crme de menthe. EXCLUSIVE: 'I killed JonBent Ramsey! Convicted pedophile Rose West's son breaks silenceto tell how his killer mother Isabel Oakeshott receives 'menacing' message from Matt Hancock, Insane moment river of rocks falls onto Malibu Canyon in CA, Mom who lost both sons to fentanyl blasts laughing Biden, Pavement where disabled woman gestured at cyclist before fatal crash, Pro-Ukrainian drone lands on Russian spy planes exposing location, 'Buster is next!' They were met by Dorothea Puente, an elderly woman with big glasses, who repeated her story that Montoya was simply on vacation. In turn, I know that when she receives my letter telling her as much, shell cut off contact. 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. In addition to the usual fare sold in the halls chow line, there are heart-shaped boxes of chocolates for $7. Farm Heroes Saga, the #4 Game on iTunes. A couple who braved the stigma of the house's curse purchased the home, fully aware of the history. Axel Johansson rates as Puentes favorite of her four ex-husbands, a presumably unwanted distinction. Puentes vanishing ignited a manhunt that stretched to Mexico. It is a wistfulness that lays bare the depth of chaos that defined Puentes status quo long before they married in 1952. Her father died of tuberculosis in 1937; her mother, who worked as a sex worker, lost custody of her children in 1938 and died in a motorcycle accident by the end of the year. Dorothea Puente was arrested in 1988 after the dismembered bodies of seven residents were found in the garden of her home in Sacramento, California Being escorted to a police car after her. Prosecutors charged Puente with killing nine people. Given Dorothea Puente's image, this meant the controversial artist, Shane Bugbee, would collaborate with her on a cookbook. Investigators opened the box and found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside. Nannie Doss admitted to killing 11 people between 1920 and 1954. I know her only through the words of others. They know what shes done., Puente conveys a pride in her renown that, now and then, gives way to embarrassment, or perhaps weariness. She got life for being with a guy when he killed another guy, Puente says. Setting his feet, he grabbed hold of the object and, with a violent jerk, loosed it from the earths grip. Some lauded the tireless advocate whose charitable work benefited the Hispanic community. Among them were four of her five husbands, two children, her two sisters, her mother, a grandson and a mother-in-law. Eventually, the "Death House Landlady" would then drug her tenants to the point of rendering them incapacitated. 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. She filed a missing person report with police on Nov. 7. Some were in an almost mummified state, wrapped tight with cloth, bed sheets and duct tape. As reported by Dailymail, seven year after Puente's death, a man named William Harder had claimed to be his grandson. O'Mara's closing argument focused on Puente's acts of murder: Does anyone become responsible for their conduct in this world? 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. 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. They first spoke with Dorothea Puente, who ran the clean, cozy home as a boardinghouse for low-income tenants. Its about a mile from my building to here, she says. An alarmed Ballenger urged fellow counselors to steer clear of 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. Police found seven bodies. 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. The initial jolt of uncovering a dead body on Nov. 11 ebbed as Cabrera weighed three factors. Dorothea Puente is one of the criminals whose crimes are detailed in 'Worst Roommate Ever.' Puente was known in her neighborhood for housing individuals who were homeless, elderly, or otherwise unable to care for themselves. Hayden spent months processing thousands of pieces of evidence related to the case, including a shovel used to dig up human remains. All three revolve around murder, a fact she notes without irony or self-consciousness. 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. Its like she was watching a movie she wasnt particularly interested in., Jury deliberations commenced in July 1993 and soon stalled. 13 and watch the prisons visitors hall gradually fill, my doubts that she will appear grow with the rooms din. I wonder what its like to be known as a murderer. Explaining away the corpses in her yard, she says, Not one person who worked for me saw me doing anything wrong. To reduce chest pain, she wears a nitroglycerin skin patch. April 27, 2019 1:12pm. Dorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. The two talked through the afternoon, with Willgues both attracted to and wary of the well-dressed stranger who sipped screwdrivers. For the rest of her life, she maintained her innocence, insisting that all of her boarders had died of "natural causes". 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. The family suspected Puente of poisoning her. Tempers spiked as the impasse stretched to its third week. Coverage spanned from the national networks and Time, Newsweek and The New York Times to the National Enquirer, National Examiner and news outlets from as far away as England and France. 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. She came on a little hard, what with her questions about his Social Security benefits and abrupt suggestion that they consider living together. (Details of reports on such incidents are not public record.) She parried, unwavering in her account of Montoyas departure, her voice calm as the detective pressed her. Dorothea Puente's former boarding house is at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California, between 14th and 15th streets. I realize today will be our last conversation when Puente sits down at my table and makes a request. On her release from prison, she began killing her victims. The business supplied her with steady revenuesteady and, apparently, inadequate. He remains convinced of her innocence, arguing that her crimes were limited to filching the benefits checks of her tenants. Though born in Redlands, Puente, who speaks passable Spanish, claimed Mexico as her birthplace, a ruse she perpetuated by alternately using the surnames of her last two ex-husbands, Roberto Puente and Pedro Montalvo. However Harder insists that's where he draws the line. She settled her nerves not with coffee but a few vodkas with orange juice while he drank beer. Forensic testing had failed to determine a definitive cause of death in any of the victims. The jury deliberated over a month and eventually found Puente guilty of three murders. They were men and women who had skidded toward lifes edges. In the spring of 1948, Gray was arrested for purchasing women's accessories using forged checks in Riverside. I now see them as tokens of loneliness, trifles to mark the time. 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. They all know who I am, she says. During her trial, the persecution said. Peter Vlautin addressed the jurors in confidential tones, contrasting with O'Mara's shouting: We are here today to determine one thing: What is the value of Dorothea Puente's life? Again and again, it is not her. (A charity she declines to name sends her $15 a month, her sole source of money.) He pieced the puzzle together a couple of hours after they parted, and later that night, police converged on room No. I watch the scenes unfold from table No. Clymo responded by evoking Dorothea the child and caregiver. The next day, under suspicion but not yet under arrest, Puente, then 59 and ostensibly the essence of grandmotherly virtue, fled the city.
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