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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. 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. But in reality, he contends, she is the nation's most prolific female serial murderer ever . Vera Faye Martin, 64. She was known as the "step house lady" after filing nine homicides. Despite maintaining her innocence until the day she died, Puente has been immortalized as one of America's most notorious female serial killers. The home belonged to seemingly sweet Dorothea Puente, who was arrested in 1988 and later convicted as a serial murderer. James Gallop, 62, (continued left to right) Dorothy Miller, 64. He was a good-hearted man, very kind, she says. She is to be considered dangerous, and her living environment and/or employment should be closely monitored. The following year, without a license and in violation of her federal probation, she opened a boardinghouse at 1426 F Street, with enough space for as many as eight tenants. Unlike many who passed through Puentes boarding house, however, someone had their eye on Montoya. Others spoke of a calculating criminal who feigned altruism to mask her avariceand a homicidal bent. Betty Palmer, 78. In April 2020, the house and current owners were showcased in the Quibi series Murder House Flip. Released after three for good behavior, she returned to Sacramento, with her federal probation extended to 1990 due to the state conviction. A stream of people tour Dorothea Puente's former home on Sept. 15, 2013. (AP Photo/Walt Zeboski). In June 2020, the house was featured in a ten-minute documentary with 60 Second Docs about the purchase and renovation of the house by the current owners. Clausen checked on her in April 1982 and saw his pallid, suddenly enfeebled mother, who rarely drank alcohol, sipping crme de menthe. Puente was convicted of three of the murders, although the jury could not agree on the other six. Wood earlier sent Puente to prison for drugging and robbing the elderly. and other board games that the prison makes available to visitors. Gray would continue to use the surname Puente for more than twenty years. (A charity she declines to name sends her $15 a month, her sole source of money.) She'd later return to smother her incapacitated prey. It is a stifling backdrop in which to live out the years. The couple, Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams, renovated the . Dorothea Puente, born Dorothea Helen Gray was born on January 9, 1929 in San Bernardino County, California. 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. Waking at 5:30 a.m., I drove 135 miles south to Chowchilla, slowed by low-hanging fog as opaque as her reasons for ending years of public silence. Dorothea Puente, a notorious, grandmotherly boarding house operator convicted in the 1990s of killing her tenants, has died in prison aged 82. He called over Cabrera and Brown, and after he scooped away more soil, they saw what resembled a tree root. Puente was charged for seven murders, but her trial wouldn't begin for another four years. 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. But every time youd go to see her, Ballenger says, her cancer had moved from her brain to her breast to her liver. A few wander over to a colorful mural of Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger and Piglet, who prance beneath a banner reading Family Is Love, Love Is Family. None of the kids acts bothered that mom or grandma or big sister is doing time. 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. Puente's alleged grandson, William Harder (pictured), insists his grandmother wasn't all bad. Social workers in the 1970s looked upon Dorothea Puente and her boarding house with admiration. 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. (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.) Do not sell or share my personal information. They described a woman of contradictions. Now she watched from her second-story porch as the trio began to dig. She seems entirely harmless. Get Sactown's top stories in your inbox by signing up for our weekly newsletter. Witnesses, including her long-lost daughter, testified how Puente had helped them in their youth and guided them to successful careers. She was notoriously known as the "Death House Land Lady" after committing nine murders. She parlayed its success by pumping money into political campaigns and charitable causes, contributions that bought her the appearance of legitimacy and access to elite circles. The Victorian on F Street. The comments below have not been moderated. 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.. 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. Dorothea Puente's former boarding house is at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California, between 14th and 15th streets. Ringed by four chairs, each serves as the setting of a reunion between a prisoner and those she knows from the outside. The reality, in fact, was that across a period of 10 years, Puente had meticulously murdered at least seven tenants at the boarding lodge she ran in Sacramento, California. 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. Jodi Picoult mentions Puente's crimes and cookbook in her novel House Rules. She answers without pause. Investigators opened the box and found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside. Dorothea Puente. Puentes next two marriages would be short-lived. For years, the disappearances of these so-called shadow people who lived at the margins of society went unnoticed. With Bill Courage, John Cabrera, Bill Clausen, Judy Moises. Our visit winds down. She was the sixth of seven children, all of whom struggled in a less-than-stable family environment, with little income and love to speak of in the Gray house. Her body shapeless under a long-sleeve T-shirt and dungarees, she has pulled back her snowy plume of hair with a pink scrunchie. She moves toward the front of the room, where a guard seated behind a metal desk tells her my table number. Even probation officers who stopped by accepted Puentes explanation that the people living at her house were guests or friends not boarders. But the passage of months and years since the victims had died reduced the toxicology results to educated guesswork. I am not here to take part in a reunion; I have never so much as glimpsed the woman I am waiting to meet. Me and Nancy, she says, shaking her head. Dorothea Puente was a convicted serial killer who ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California in the 1980s. Court files indicate Johansson had his wife committed to a psychiatric ward in 1961, and doctors placed her on antipsychotics. At the same time, they agreed she had an evil side brought on by the stress of caring for her down-and-out tenants. Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house for down and outs. 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. We break the ice. She had a terrible adolescence after being . 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. I wonder what its like to be known as a murderer. Judy Moise, an outreach counselor with Volunteers of America, became suspicious when Montoya vanished. But as the police prepared to leave, Sharp slipped them a message. Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929. 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. I know her only through the words of others. The detective had yet to realize that, in the 59-year-old Puente, he had another serial killer on his hands. She recalls the future president and his first wife, Jane Wyman, as her good friends. When I mention the Gippers second wife, she frowns. After their deaths she continued to draw their social security cheques. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. The two talked through the afternoon, with Willgues both attracted to and wary of the well-dressed stranger who sipped screwdrivers. 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 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. [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]. Tom Williams and Barbara Holmes are the new landlords of the "haunted" house. 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. First off, I was getting the checks. A gentle bear of a man, the 52-year-old Montoya suffered from untreated psychosis, a condition that for years had consigned him to the streets and homeless shelters. She answers with a look of mild reproach that pulls taut her soft fist of a face. As the others begin to stir, she tidies up the space, a boardinghouse landlady to the last. Her warmth for him appears unrequitedshe hasnt heard from him for awhile nowand reflects rose-tinted nostalgia for a marriage that, despite near constant turmoil, lasted longer than her other three combined. SPECIAL TO THE TIMES. Puente watched the images flicker across the TV screen in her Los Angeles motel room. Unchanged are his lean, square-shouldered build and animated manner, his eyebrows spiking and hands windmilling as he recounts the investigation. It wasn't until the first body was found in her backyard that authorities realized Dorothea was not the sweet old woman she first appeared to be. 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. In 2004, she released a cookbook titled Cooking with a . A person like her, he says, theres no forgetting.. The subject of personal health preoccupies Puente as much as the next octogenarian. 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. Suspect left her residence for a walk but never returned.. 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'. Rene C. Byer Sacramento Bee file. At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. 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. Others disparaged the closet alcoholic who on occasion punctuated roof-raising, cuss-filled tirades with a piece of furniture heaved down the stairs. In 16 years at the facility, she has accrued only two rules violations, the last occurring in 2004. 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. Dorothea Puente after her arrest in Los Angeles, en route back to Sacramento. The jury deliberated over a month and eventually found Puente guilty of three murders. She never blinked, never broke a sweat. After the interview, he allowed her to return to the house, where a patrolman stood sentinel outside through the night. Dorothea Puente died in prison of natural causes on March 27, 2011, at age 82. The two would continue to have a turbulent relationship, and Gray filed a restraining order in 1975. The unreliable narrator breaks the hush. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Dorothea Puente believed herself to be an able caretaker. By 1952, she had wed Johansson, whom she met in San Francisco. Dismembering their corpses, she threw their remains into a mass grave in her garden, telling neighbors the foul smell emanating from the ground was sewage and dead rats, rather than dead residents. 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. 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. Things happen for a reason., Nov. 12, 1988: Homicide detective John Cabrera (right) ushers Puente out of her home to a nearby hotel. I wonder what she wants when death does come. If she had been held accountable for murdering my mother, Clausen says, then maybe there wouldnt have been any other victims.. To give strength to other people. She lifts the paper towel to her eyes. [citation needed], In November 1985, Puente hired a man named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her apartment. Orphaned, Puente and her siblings splintered off in different directions, bouncing between foster care and relatives homes. Dorothea Puente Dorothea Puente, born Dorothea Helen Gray was born on January 9, 1929 in San Bernardino County, California. 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. Her evasive answersfirst claiming he had traveled to Mexico, then that he had returned and moved to Utahtripped Moises suspicion. Theyve never talked to me. On another occasion, she casts her circumstance in a biblical light. 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. Puente died of natural causes at the Central . Im here until I die.. Most of the lot has been paved over. When she was eight her father died of tuberculosis. If you lived in Sacramento in the late 80s, you recognize her name. Despite lacking formal dance training, she says, I went out there and they hired me. We spent 2 hours in here looking and reading most of the items. Murdaugh is heckled as he leaves court, Ken Bruce finishes his 30-year tenure as host of BBC Radio 2, Ukrainian soldier takes out five tanks with Javelin missiles, Family of a 10-month-old baby filmed vaping open up, Missing hiker buried under snow forces arm out to wave to helicopter, Hershey's Canada releases HER for SHE bars featuring a trans activist, Moment teenager crashes into back of lorry after 100mph police race, This Guy Collects Artwork From Serial Killers - VICE. Beyond that lurked the vexing conundrum of the accused herself. I get pushed in a wheelchair. She speaks in clipped sentences, her voice, so rarely shared with journalists, scratchy but strong. 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). One was missing its head, hands and feet. The initial jolt of uncovering a dead body on Nov. 11 ebbed as Cabrera weighed three factors. Dick Schmidt/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesDorothea Puente after her arrest in Los Angeles, en route back to Sacramento. After their deaths, Puente collected . In the 70s, while running her first boardinghouse at 21st and F streets, Puente cultivated a strong rapport with social workers. In another twist to the case, Sacramento police escorted her back to the city on a plane chartered by KCRA for its news crew. We both fell into the orchestra pit and I broke my leg. The other dancer? Still, prison has changed Puente in one profound aspect, reforming her into an obedient citizen. As the search expanded, cabin fever seized Puente. They had two daughters between 1946 and 1948; Gray sent one child to live with relatives in Sacramento, and placed the other for adoption. I dont know that she ever did anything good without a bad motive.. Police soon figured out why, uncovering the remains of six more bodies. Sacramento landlady Dorothea Montalvo Puente was found guilty Thursday of murdering three of her tenants for their government benefit . Sometimes she includes small handmade gifts: Christmas ornaments constructed from cardboard and yarn, a greeting card stitched with fine thread. She then asked Florez to transport the filled, sealed box to a storage depot. She sat there so totally motionless and emotionless, says Honey Hewlett, one of 12 jurors seated for the trial, who stopped buying Giorgio perfume after learning Puente also wore the scent. 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. For someone who insists she worried over the well-being of her tenants, Puente tells me that, after her arrest, she fretted about Sam. Soon after, Monroe died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. Eventually, the "Death House Landlady" would then drug her tenants to the point of rendering them incapacitated. In addition to the usual fare sold in the halls chow line, there are heart-shaped boxes of chocolates for $7. Puente passed away in 2011 from natural causes at the Central California Facility in Chowchilla, aged 82. It wasnt until 1988 that suspicions first arose about Puente, after one of her tenants, 52-year old Alvaro Montoya, went missing. Some touch her shoulder. (Obituaries for Ingemar Johansson, who died earlier this year, list his sole surviving brother as Rolf.). I wondered how the last two decades had changed her, how she had endured. Bogle Family Vineyards Ryan, Jody & Warren Bogle Thank goodness the potato crop failed. She was the sixth of seven children but didnt grow up in a stable family environment. Despite being convicted of murder in 1993 and sent to prison, Puente denied killing the victims until the day she died . Puente watched the images flicker across the TV screen in her Los Angeles motel room. The visitors hall at the Central California Womens Facility in Chowchilla brings to mind a church social as hosted for state convicts. To reduce chest pain, she wears a nitroglycerin skin patch. The business supplied her with steady revenuesteady and, apparently, inadequate. An undercover cop posing as a trucker arrested her after she offered to perform fellatio on him; she served 90 days in county lockup. For her and the others, one factor in particular undercut Puentes claim of innocence. He also knows what will happen if by some unimaginable spasm of fate she should ever walk free. But the jury had a difficult time believe the matronly grandmother was capable of carrying out such menacing crimes. Shane Bugbee. 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. 13 and watch the prisons visitors hall gradually fill, my doubts that she will appear grow with the rooms din.