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Dorothea Puente, Convicted of Killing Three Tenants of Her Sacramento Boarding House, Dies in Prison at 82

She was serving life without parole. Police dug up seven bodies at her home in 1988; a jury convicted her of three murders and deadlocked on six others.

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Dorothea Puente in later life, with white hair, in a prison photograph

Dorothea Puente ran a Sacramento boarding house where police dug up the bodies of seven tenants in 1988. She died in a California prison on March 27, 2011, at 82.

Puente died of natural causes at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, said Paul Verke, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. She was serving life without parole for two first-degree murder convictions and a concurrent 15-years-to-life term for a second-degree murder conviction. Her 1993 trial, moved to Monterey County because of media coverage, ended with guilty verdicts for the murders of Benjamin Fink, Leona Carpenter and Dorothy Miller, and jurors deadlocked on six other murder charges.

The investigation began in 1988 after a social worker looking into the disappearance of a mentally disabled man became suspicious of her unlicensed boarding home. After police questioned and released her that November, Puente fled to Los Angeles, where she was arrested days later after a man she met in a bar recognized her and turned her in. Prosecutors said she preyed on the elderly, alcoholics and the disabled and collected their money and Social Security checks. She had been on parole at the time for an earlier conviction involving robbing elderly victims. Puente denied killing anyone, saying her tenants had died of natural causes.

The Los Angeles Times wrote that the body of a man found in a box in the Sacramento River was discovered after the seven at her home, while the Center for Sacramento History says those remains were found in January 1986 and identified in 1989.

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