Dorothea Helen Gray was born in Redlands, California, on January 9, 1929, one of seven children, orphaned by nine and raised in institutions and with relatives. She married four times, gave two children away, and built a long adult life on forged documents and invented histories: she variously claimed to be a doctor, a nurse, a survivor of Dachau and a relative of a Mexican ambassador.
By the 1970s she was running boarding houses in Sacramento. She was convicted of forging cheques in 1978, and in 1982 of drugging and robbing elderly people she picked up in bars, for which she served three years. Her parole conditions forbade her from handling other people's government cheques and from taking in tenants. She was back at 1426 F Street doing both within weeks of release, and her parole officer, told repeatedly that she was running a boarding house, took her word that she was not.
She was a good landlady by most accounts, in a city short of anywhere for elderly alcoholics and people with mental illness to live. Social workers referred tenants to her. She fed them well, kept a beautiful garden, and forged their signatures on their disability and Social Security payments. When one of them threatened to complain, or simply became too much trouble, she gave them a lethal dose of the sedative flurazepam, and had the handyman dig.
The nine named in the record are Ruth Munroe, sixty-one; Everson Gillmouth, seventy-seven; Alvaro Montoya, known as Bert, fifty-one; Dorothy Miller, sixty-four; Benjamin Fink, fifty-five; Betty Palmer, seventy-eight; Leona Carpenter, seventy-eight; James Gallop, sixty-two; and Vera Faye Martin, sixty-four.
The end came over a missing man. Alvaro Montoya, a developmentally disabled tenant known as Bert, stopped appearing at his day programme, and his social worker would not accept Puente's explanations. Police came to the house on November 11, 1988, and were given permission to dig. They found the first body that day. Puente asked an officer whether she might walk to the hotel across the road for a cup of coffee. He let her go. She took a bus to Los Angeles, where an elderly man she had approached in a bar recognised her from television and called police, and she was arrested on November 16. Seven bodies came out of the garden.
She was charged with nine murders. The trial was moved to Monterey and ran through 1993. On August 26 the jury convicted her of first degree murder in the deaths of Dorothy Miller, Benjamin Fink and Leona Carpenter, and deadlocked on the rest, and the same deadlock at the penalty phase meant she was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life without parole rather than death. She maintained to the end that all of them had died of natural causes and that she had only concealed the bodies to avoid trouble with her parole. She died on March 27, 2011, aged eighty-two, at the Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla.