The California Supreme Court did two things to this case in December 2018, and they pull in opposite directions. It affirmed the convictions, holding that the evidence she had killed her three children was sufficient. And it reversed her death sentence, because the trial judge had excused prospective jurors over their views on capital punishment on the strength of their questionnaire answers alone, without questioning them. The decision, written by Justice Leondra Kruger, was unanimous. She has been awaiting a new penalty trial ever since.
Dora Buenrostro married Alejandro Buenrostro, known as Alex, in 1982. They lived in Los Angeles with Susana, Vicente and Deidra. He worked as an auto refinisher and painter; she spent seven years as a file clerk and interpreter at a law firm. They separated, and in 1990 she moved with the children to San Jacinto in Riverside County.
What the court record documents in the last week of October 1994 is a sequence of sightings, and the gaps between them are the case.
She drove to Los Angeles and was found standing in a doorway holding a knife. Police arrived twenty minutes after Alex called them, at a quarter past one in the morning, and she dropped it when told to. She said she had come to collect her youngest child, who she said Alex had taken to buy shoes and not brought back. Officers saw no children at the house and none in her car, a dark four-door Oldsmobile with no child seat in it. They told her to go back to San Jacinto.
At about half past ten on the morning of Wednesday, October 26, she walked into the San Jacinto police station and told Officer Blane Dillon that her estranged husband had taken her youngest child two days earlier and had not returned her. Dillon explained that the police could do nothing unless Alex was breaching a court order. She left.
At about two that afternoon her sister, Angela Montenegro, saw her at a gas station in San Jacinto. She was alone in the black Oldsmobile. The car had been washed, and water was still dripping from the back bumper. Deidra was not in it and neither was a child's seat.
At about three, the next-door neighbor, Velia Cabanila, saw Susana and Vicente stop briefly at her apartment to play on their way home from school. They were nine and eight years old and they were alive.
On the morning of October 27 she burst into the Riverside County sheriff's substation in San Jacinto, screaming that her former husband was at her apartment and was going to hurt the children. Deputies went to the apartment and found Susana, nine, and Vicente, eight, dead, their throats cut, their arms marked with defensive wounds, Susana on a loveseat and Vicente on a couch, both under a blood-soaked blanket. Deidra was not there. Her body was found separately, at an abandoned building. Deputies noticed how little emotion their mother showed, and how evasive she was when asked where her youngest might be.
Alex Buenrostro was taken into custody and told there that two of his children were dead and the third missing. Detectives checked with his employer and his friends, found an alibi that held, and saw a man destroyed by the news. Her own account changed each time she gave it. She was arrested on October 29.
One jury was empaneled to decide whether she was fit to be tried, and found that she was. A psychologist who interviewed her a second time in July 1995 found no thought disorder; her fixation on the smell of gas in her cell, she explained, came from news reports of deaths in Riverside caused by gas fumes. A second jury heard the evidence. It convicted her of three counts of first degree murder, found true three multiple-murder special circumstances and a finding that she had personally used a knife in each killing, and after a penalty phase returned a verdict of death. The trial judge refused a new trial and refused to modify the verdict, and Judge Patrick Magers sentenced her on October 2, 1998. She was thirty-eight.
She blamed Alex from the first day and was still blaming him when she testified, against her lawyers' advice, at both the guilt and the penalty phases. Her own lawyers did not. In closing argument the defense conceded that Alex had an alibi and could not have killed the children, and argued instead that the state had not proved she did it willfully, with premeditation and deliberation. That is an unusual position for a defense to be left holding, and it is the shape of the trial. The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Michael Soccio, told the jury she had killed the children in a rage after a fight with Alex, planning it to hurt him and then trying to put it on him. After the verdict she lashed out at the San Jacinto police, at the prosecutors and at her own attorneys, and when the death recommendation was read and whispered to her in Spanish she stared ahead, then sobbed. One juror, Tia D'Errico, said that if she had said she did it, was sorry and had loved her children, voting for life would have been easier.
On appeal the court affirmed the guilt judgment and then took the sentence apart. Two of the three multiple-murder special circumstances were vacated, because three killings support one multiple-murder finding, not three, and the death sentence was reversed on the juror question and sent back for a new penalty determination.
So the convictions stand and the death sentence does not. California has executed nobody since 2006, has had a moratorium since 2019, and closed the condemned unit at San Quentin in 2024. No new penalty trial in Riverside County has been reported. Her appellate lawyers wrote in 2011 that why Susana, Vicente and Deidra were killed had never been answered, at either phase of the trial.