On November 7, 1988, Sacramento police went to 1426 F Street to ask about a missing man. Alvaro Montoya, known as Bert, was fifty-one and developmentally disabled, and he had not been seen since late August. His social worker, Judy Moise, who had reported him missing, had stopped believing the explanations she was getting. The landlady said he had gone to Mexico to visit relatives. A former tenant named John Sharp told the officer he had seen Montoya a couple of days before. Then he slipped the officer a note. It said: "She wants me to lie to you."
The landlady was Dorothea Puente, fifty-nine, a small gray-haired woman in old-fashioned dresses and large glasses who ran a boarding house for the old, the sick and the alcoholic in a Victorian house downtown. Social workers referred clients to her. On November 11 a detective came back and asked whether he could dig in the yard where the soil looked recently turned. She said he could. Within thirty minutes he found the first body.
Puente was not yet a suspect in anything but check fraud, and she was not held. That day she asked whether she could walk over to a nearby hotel for a cup of coffee, and she was allowed to go. She did not come back. Over the next days the police took seven bodies out of the property, buried under a gazebo, beneath a metal shed, under a slab of concrete by the rose bushes, and in a shallow hole in the front yard. An all-points bulletin went out on November 13.
She got as far as Los Angeles. On November 15, calling herself Donna Johansen, she met a retired man named Charles Willgues in a bar near her motel. The next morning he saw her face on a CBS newscast, called a CBS reporter, Gene Silver, and together they called the police. She was arrested that day, November 16, and flown back to Sacramento and booked into the county jail on the seventeenth, charged at first with Montoya's murder.
What the yard held, when the bodies were identified, was a list of the people she had been paid to look after. Leona Carpenter, seventy-eight, had overdosed on flurazepam, a sedative, in October 1986; Puente brought a notary to her hospital room to take power of attorney and was cashing her checks within ten days. Carpenter moved into F Street that December and disappeared in February 1987. Betty Palmer, seventy-eight, arrived in the fall of 1986. That October Puente got a California identification card with her own photograph and Palmer's name, and she went on to cash nearly seven thousand dollars of Palmer's benefit checks. The body in the front yard was Palmer's, and her head, hands and lower legs were never found.
James Gallop, sixty-two, moved in in February 1987. That July a doctor found a growth in his colon that might have been cancer, and he agreed to more tests. Puente called the doctor's office and said he had gone to Los Angeles indefinitely. He was under the gazebo. Vera Faye Martin came to the house in October 1987. Every year she called her daughter on her daughter's birthday; on October 19, 1987, she did not call. Puente was already forging her checks. Martin was under the shed.
Dorothy Miller, sixty-four, was placed in an upstairs room that same month and was gone within weeks. On November 20, 1987, Puente hired a carpet cleaner to remove what he described as a pile of foul-smelling slime from Miller's floor, and went on forging Miller's checks until they came to more than eleven thousand dollars. Benjamin Fink, fifty-five, arrived in March 1988. His brother visited every week for six weeks. By the end of April Fink was gone, and when another tenant complained about the smell from his room, Puente said the sewer had backed up. On April 29 twelve bags of cement were delivered. That June she had a hole dug by the door of the shed and filled with concrete. Montoya, the last, had been placed with her in February 1988. By March she was his payee.
Every body carried the same drug. Toxicology found flurazepam in all of them, alongside whatever each tenant had been prescribed and some things they had not. It was the drug that had put Carpenter in the hospital in 1986. The bodies had been wrapped in bedsheets and plastic, and in Fink's case in a knotted bedspread taped shut and lined with absorbent pads.
Two more names went on the charge sheet from outside the yard. Ruth Munroe, sixty-one, had been in good health when she came to stay with Puente in the spring of 1982. On April 25 she told a friend: "I am so sick I feel like I am going to die." She died on April 28 of an enormous overdose of codeine, and the death was recorded at first as an undetermined overdose; it was later reclassified as a homicide. Everson Gillmouth, seventy-seven, was a retiree from Oregon who began writing to Puente while she was in prison. He was waiting at F Street with his truck and trailer when she was released in September 1985, and that October she wrote to his sister that they would be married on November 2. That November she hired a handyman, Ismael Florez, to put up wood paneling, and paid him with eight hundred dollars and Gillmouth's red 1980 Ford pickup, which she said belonged to a boyfriend who no longer needed it. She then had Florez build a wooden box about six feet long, telling him it was for books and other things; the published measurements vary. The box was nailed shut when Florez next saw it. On her instructions they drove it out along the Garden Highway in Sutter County and left it on the bank of the Sacramento River at a spot where people dumped household junk, which is what she told him it held. A fisherman found it on January 1, 1986, with a decomposed body inside, wrapped in plastic and a sheet, packed with mothballs and toilet deodorizer. Puente went on mailing Gillmouth's sister letters and cards in his name and cashing his checks until July. The body was not identified as his until December 1988.
She had been in prison in the first place for a pattern that, looked at afterward, was hard to miss. She was born Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California, on January 9, 1929, to two alcoholic parents; her father, who used to hold a gun to his head in front of the children, died of tuberculosis in 1937, and her mother lost custody the next year and was killed in a motorcycle accident. Dorothea went to an orphanage, where she was sexually abused. Married at sixteen, she sent one daughter to relatives and placed another for adoption. She was convicted of forgery in 1948, ran a brothel behind a bookkeeping front in Sacramento in 1960, and was diagnosed at a state hospital in 1961 as a pathological liar. Over the years she was Teya Singoalla Neyaarda, Sharon Johansson and, from a 1968 marriage, Mrs. Puente, and by the 1970s she was a figure in Sacramento's Hispanic community, running Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, funding scholarships and helping poor people sign up for Social Security.
In December 1978 she was convicted of illegally cashing thirty-four state and federal checks that belonged to her tenants. In January 1982 she met a seventy-four-year-old man named Malcolm McKenzie in a bar, went home with him, and, he said, slipped something into his drink and took his coin collection, his watches and his mother's diamond ring off his finger. On May 16, 1982, Dorothy Osborne, forty-nine, found her checks and credit cards gone eight hours after Puente had made her a drink. On August 18, 1982, Puente was convicted of three counts of grand theft and sentenced to five years. She served half. When she came out in September 1985, she went back to 1426 F Street and back to taking in tenants and their checks, although the terms of her parole barred her from working with the elderly or handling government checks, and the gaps in her supervision became a story of their own once the bodies were found. A former cellmate, Brenda Trujillo, had even written to the Social Security office in November 1987 to complain that Puente was stealing her checks.
The handyman who built Gillmouth's box was never tried. The charges against Florez over the Gillmouth box were dismissed in March 1989 because the statute of limitations had run, and he later testified against her with immunity. On March 31, 1989, prosecutors charged Puente with nine counts of murder with special circumstances, which made it a death penalty case. The preliminary hearing took seventy-one witnesses. The trial was moved to Monterey County, and it opened on February 9, 1993, before Judge Michael J. Virga and a jury of eight men and four women. By the end, 156 witnesses had testified and more than 3,100 exhibits had been entered. Puente's defense was that her tenants had died of natural causes and that she had buried them only because she was afraid of being sent back to prison.
The jury deliberated for weeks and told Virga on August 2 that it was deadlocked on all nine counts. He sent it back. On August 26, 1993, it convicted her of the first-degree murders of Dorothy Miller and Benjamin Fink, with the special circumstance of multiple murder, and of the second-degree murder of Leona Carpenter. It could not agree on the other six: Munroe, Gillmouth, Palmer, Gallop, Martin and Montoya, the man whose disappearance had brought the police to the house. The penalty phase deadlocked too, with the jurors reported split seven to five, and on October 13 she was spared the death penalty. On December 10, 1993, Virga sentenced her to two consecutive terms of life without parole, with fifteen years to life for Carpenter running alongside. An appeals court affirmed the convictions in 1997, and a judge rejected her claims of juror misconduct in 1998.
In prison at Chowchilla she corresponded with an artist named Shane Bugbee, and the result was a book of her recipes, Cooking with a Serial Killer, published in 2004. She insisted to the end that none of her tenants had been murdered. She died of natural causes at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, at eighty-two. The house on F Street still stands. In 2013 it was on the Sacramento Old City Association's home tour.