[2], Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California, to Trudy Mae (ne Yates) and Jesse James Gray. Owen Brewer/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesDorothea Puente awaiting arraignment in Sacramento, California on November 17, 1988. In the 1970s, she opened her first boarding house in Sacramento. Drugs Puente used to knock . He says he's often inundated with requests from crazed fans and fellow murder enthusiasts who ask to buy his grandmother's ashes. Puentes neighbors and acquaintances murmured disbelief that the white-haired landlady who handed out homemade tamales and fussed over her rose beds and vegetable garden could be a mass murderer. MONTEREY . Puente died of natural causes at the Central . Infamous serial murderer . For my benefit, she recites her prison medical history: a tumor removed from behind one knee last year; angioplasty in 2003; repair of a ruptured artery in 1998. But there were seven dead bodies in your yard. Hayden spent months processing thousands of pieces of evidence related to the case, including a shovel used to dig up human remains. When they finished without noticing anything suspicious, Cabrera asked if they could dig in her yard. Puente was found guilty of the murders of 64-year-old Dorothy Miller, 55-year-old Benjamin Fink, and 78-year-old Leona Carpenter. By 1982, Puente was sent to prison for her thefts. Many of them found dead and buried in the boarding house's yard. Working in my yard. Clymo responded by evoking Dorothea the child and caregiver. I was struck by how pleasant and socially intact and intelligent she was, says Vicary, who works in Los Angeles. Despite being convicted of murder in 1993 and sent to prison, Puente. George Deukmejian and Bishop Francis Quinn decorated her home at 1426 F Street But setting aside such fleeting charity-event encounters, her stories hew closer to fable than fact. An extensive five-day search for the elderly fugitive ended when a stranger she'd befriended in Los Angeles recognized her face from the news and turned her into police. Axel Johansson rates as Puentes favorite of her four ex-husbands, a presumably unwanted distinction. [8], Puente told Florez to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter County and dump the box of "junk" on the riverbank at an unofficial household junk dumping site. Things happen for a reason., Nov. 12, 1988: Homicide detective John Cabrera (right) ushers Puente out of her home to a nearby hotel. I think you can only truly understand why so many people testified and asked you to spare Dorothea's life only if you have ever fallen down and stumbled on the road of life and had someone pick you up, give you comfort, give you love, show you the way. On a subsequent visit, her vanity recedes when a guard, apparently new to working the visitors hall, asks her name. To vary her diet, Puente sometimes cooks in her room, making tamales with tortillas, canned chili, cheese and other ingredients bought in the prisons canteen or mail-ordered through a food-delivery service. The visitors hall at the Central California Womens Facility in Chowchilla brings to mind a church social as hosted for state convicts. Dorothea Puente's House Has Been Bought. Sacramento landlady Dorothea Montalvo Puente was found guilty Thursday of murdering three of her tenants for their government benefit . With a smile, I ask whether she and the actor shared a romantic attraction. Puente occupies a lower bunk owing to her age and tenure at the prison, sleeping on the same kind of thin, lumpy mattress as other inmates. Unchanged are his lean, square-shouldered build and animated manner, his eyebrows spiking and hands windmilling as he recounts the investigation. Working in my yard.. We lapse into a short silence, and in that span, the incredible feats of a younger Dorothea diminish in the distance. 31 of the Royal Viking. But their marriage was brief only three years and hinted at trouble beneath the surface. I dont know that she ever did anything good without a bad motive.. Between 1982 and 1989, Puente would take in the vulnerable and homeless people. 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. Back in Sacramento, police were digging up five more bodies, including Bert Montoyas. She will send me the list in a few daysthe bill will total $114.70but I already know I wont oblige. She falls silent for a moment. I wonder if she ever wishes she had received the death penalty. Several were referred there by social workers who viewed the home as a last-resort refuge for their ailing or most erratic clients. However, it would be three more years before authorities could identify the body as one of the tenants in Dorothea Puentes house. Her words return to me. She steams the tamales in plastic bags placed in a pan of water warmed with two electric immersion coils. Puente claims she spent time in the 70s with California governors Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan. In her telling, after showering and dressing, she prays, recites the rosary and reads a few pages of the Bible, favoring Proverbs and Romans. He returned to the house, grabbed a shovel and began to dig. She did not strike me as a person who had a major mental illness. "They immediately died," says Warren's grandson, Warren W. Bogle, who today serves as President and Vineyard Director. After a number of legal hurdles, Puente's trial eventually went ahead four years later. Soon afterward, Chief disappeared. I dont think anyone would pick this kind of life, she says, drying tears with a piece of coarse brown paper towel. She declines to disclose the fathers name, when and where they were born and died or the circumstances of their deaths.). [citation needed], Suspicion was first aroused when neighbors noticed the odd activities of a homeless alcoholic known only as "Chief", whom Puente stated she had "adopted" and hired as her handyman. One girl was placed in the care of relatives, the other put up for adoption. Sacramento Co. By Remy Millisky / March 14, 2022 11:13 am EDT. She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", a Muslim woman of Egyptian and Israeli descent. In his sessions with her, Vicary had inched up to the subject of guilt, knowing that she would withdraw if he asked directly whether she had killed people. I dont know what to tell you, she said. She had breached her federal probation by running a boardinghouse, yet admitted to the offense when asked. [9], Puente continued to accept elderly boarders and was popular with local social workers because she accepted referrals of the "tough cases", including drug addicts and abusive tenants. His head cocked to the side, he looks back at her, preparing to usher her past the crowd that looms outside the frame. Procedural wrangling moved the trial to Monterey, after a judge ruled that the intense media coverage of Puente in the Sacramento region would preclude her from receiving a fair trial here. She was incarcerated at Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, California. The home belonged to seemingly sweet Dorothea Puente, who was arrested in 1988 and later convicted as a serial murderer. To my surprise, an envelope stamped with the words Central California Womens Facility State Prison arrived a few weeks later. Since Ive been in here, she says, its like all of that never happened.. He speculates that running a boardinghouse began for her as a humane endeavor rooted in a desire to undo painful childhood memories. In a low, almost plaintive voice, she replies, Puente. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Two decades after he yanked the leg bone from the ground behind the boardinghouse, his dark hair has shaded silver and he has shaved off his boomerang-curved mustache. I ask why shes here. In turn, I know that when she receives my letter telling her as much, shell cut off contact. I have talked to her attorneys, to the cop who unmasked her, to the prosecutor who tried her for murder, to jurors who found her guilty. During this period, parole agents visited Puente at least fifteen times; though she had been ordered to keep away from the elderly and refrain from handling government checks, no violations were ever noted. As the search expanded, cabin fever seized Puente. Puente then married Pedro Angel Montalvo, but he left her only a week after they were wed. They all know who I am, she says. Unlike many who passed through Puentes boarding house, however, someone had their eye on Montoya. Six more corpses would follow, but Puente was still on the run. She told me Dorothea had given it to her to help calm her down, says the 55-year-old Clausen, who runs a furniture upholstery shop in South Land Park. The Victorian on F Street. The serial killer shuffles into the room with a chickens hitched gait. She gave them clothing, she gave them food. (Puente tells me she also had twin daughters who as young adults committed suicide one week apart. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and . Drab and worn, the space, about the size of a single-car garage, has scuffed concrete flooring, dull fluorescent lighting and two windows; one faces a grassy prison courtyard, the other an interior hallway. Shes got everything she needs, her life is taken care of. Today she repeats a tale she first spun for me three months ago, showing remarkable fidelity to the specifics of the earlier version. Twenty-one minutes laterhe remembers the time preciselyhe exhumed sufficient evidence: the remains of a second body buried about a foot deep in the earth. "Which is gross," Hayden said. (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.) The three men carried shovels as they fanned out across the backyard of the two-story Victorian at 1426 F Street. 22 ratings3 reviews. But, behind the scenes, Puente had embarked on a path that would lead her to murder. But the jury had a difficult time believe the matronly grandmother was capable of carrying out such menacing crimes. Rene C. Byer Sacramento Bee file. Thats just too much coincidence., Finally, on the 24th day of deliberations, the holdout juror acquiesced, voting guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and one second-degree count. As police exhumed corpse after corpse, TV crews jammed F Street while gawkers scaled trees to peer into the yard. Around the same time, she slipped a heavy sedative into the drink of a 74-year-old man she met at the Zebra Club in midtown. A dark thought arrived. Dorothea Puente is an American serial killer. On her release from prison, she began killing her victims. Throughout the trial, Dorothea Puente was portrayed as either a sweet grandma-like type or a manipulative criminal who preyed on the weak. Dorothea - Dorothea (also spelled Dorothe, Dorotea or other variants) is a female given name from Greek (Drotha) meaning "God's Gift". When the police arrived, Puente told them that Monroe had been depressed due to her husbands terminal illness. But to the end of her life, Dorothea Puente insisted that she was innocent and that she had been taking good care of the people under her charge. He sits in his downtown office, shock of silver hair combed straight back from his high forehead, untucked short-sleeved shirt spilling over his jeans. (Obituaries for Ingemar Johansson, who died earlier this year, list his sole surviving brother as Rolf.). It's been 20 years since Sacramento's most notorious murderer, Dorothea Puente, buried seven bodies in the garden of her F Street boardinghouse. The detective had yet to realize that, in the 59-year-old Puente, he had another serial killer on his hands. Dorothea Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California, on January 9, 1929. Others spoke of a calculating criminal who feigned altruism to mask her avariceand a homicidal bent. William Vicary spoke with Puente for the first time about two months after her arrest. He was a good-hearted man, very kind, she says. Hard living had stolen much of Dorotheas youthful beauty by the time she landed her third husband in 1968 and settled in Sacramento. With age and health concerns relieving her of work duty, she considers her self-assigned morning chores, attending chapel and other diversions a means of survival. Her upstanding reputation concealed a habit of forging the signatures of tenants on their benefits checks before signing them over to herself. The only time [the boarers] were in good health was when they stayed at my home, Puente insisted from prison. It is a stifling backdrop in which to live out the years. Disguised as a kind-hearted boarding house owner, Dorothea Puente allegedly murdered tenants who lived on her property, and buried them in her backyard, according to the Los Angeles Times. Dorothea Puente was a convicted serial killer who ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California in the 1980s. The jury deliberated over a month and eventually found Puente guilty of three murders. Some might interpret that as a kind of confession, I finally say. The guards will come by and go, What you got cooking today? , She marks much of the day reading mind-candy fictionshes a fan of John Grisham and Dan Brownand watching TV; her favorite prime-time shows include CSI, Criminal Minds and Cold Case. Look at Job, John, Paul, Moses. [citation needed]. They know what shes done., Puente conveys a pride in her renown that, now and then, gives way to embarrassment, or perhaps weariness. A lot of women shouldnt be here., She counts herself among them, even while conceding few people believe in her innocence. 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. She would flee the city that morning. Grandson of Dorothea Puente, shared a 'real connection' with her - Daily Newshttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGIQ4XcqArGYqiw70QoKcvw?sub_confirmation=1Grand. Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929. Ruth was not just Puente's friend but was also her business partner and had moved in with her just three weeks before the murder. Investigators opened the box and found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside. Wood earlier sent Puente to prison for drugging and robbing the elderly. Her eyes fix on the mural of Winnie the Pooh. Eleven jurors were convinced of Puentes guilt in killing the seven boarders found in her yard; one juror disagreed. 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. The jokes on me. Another tenant, John Sharp, backed her up. Montoya struggled with mental health issues and had been homeless for years. As jury foreman Mike Esplin recalls, the man simply said, Thats all Im going to give. Puentes composure cracked after the last verdict was read. [citation needed], A few weeks later, the police returned after Malcolm McKenzie, a 74-year-old pensioner (one of four elderly people Puente was accused of drugging), accused Puente of drugging and stealing from him. Six months after her release, she left Riverside. The pensioner contacted local law enforcement who then quickly arrested Puente.