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3 min read. She tends to wear thick violet eye shadow and pink lipstick, both of a hue common to Toulouse-Lautrec paintings, and her body lotion of choice, Victorias Secret Love Spell, gives her the subtle bouquet of cherry blossoms. Puente was supposed to stick around to serve out her probation, but in a sign of things to come she skipped town instead. How Did Dorothea Puente Kill Her Victims? Know Her Death House Now I think they needed somebody and I was the easiest one around., Yet the most illuminating aspect of talking with Puente in prison arises from her silence about the dead. She holed up in the Royal Viking Motel for the next three days, seldom leaving her room. 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It was too humiliating, too shameful for her to admit responsibility for these crimes. The initial jolt of uncovering a dead body on Nov. 11 ebbed as Cabrera weighed three factors. Common sense says that if youve got [seven] people who have died in your house, somethings gone wrong, says Vlautin, who retired from the Sacramento Public Defenders Office in 2005. During my meetings with Puente, a number of prisoners softly greet herHi, Miss Dorothea; How are you, Miss D?as they walk past. That was my tomcat. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives), Dorfman drew up Puentes will years agoI dont know if its any good anymore; shes probably given away stuff she doesnt [even] ownand still receives Christmas cards from her. Her rapid decline perplexed her loved ones until they read the coroners report: the death was labeled a suicide caused by an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Being escorted to a police car after her capture in 1988, serial killer Dorothea Puente told gathering reporters 'I used to be a very good person, at one time'. 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. She would flee the city that morning. Newspapers dubbed Puente the "Death House Landlady". That I can die peacefully in my sleep without being sick or being a cripple. In her note, written on plain lined paper in a grade-schoolers swirling cursive, she invited me to visit. (Details of reports on such incidents are not public record.) On her release from prison, she began killing her victims. Pathologists testified that they hadnt been able to fix the cause of death for any of the corpses. She then asked Florez to transport the filled, sealed box to a storage depot. Discovery posts $217 MILLION loss in its streaming business after adding just 1.1M subscribers last quarter - despite HBO Max debuts like White Lotus and House of the Dragon, $113 BILLION on a war with no end in sight: DailyMail.com breaks down Joe Biden's enormous military package for Ukraine on the first anniversary of Vladimir Putin's brutal invasion, DAILY MAIL COMMENT:Make this Ukraine's last year of horror, 'Before the war, we saw Russians alive. Benjamin Fink, 55. She consented again, even lending a shovel to the men, who had brought only two. John Cabrera sits at a long wooden conference table inside Sacramento Police headquarters on Freeport Boulevard. She would later kill them by poisoning or strangling them. Scant evidence exists to suggest she socialized with Reaganwhen he divorced Wyman, Puente was 20 years old and living in the Bay Areaany more than she danced with the Rockettes. Back in Sacramento, police were digging up five more bodies, including Bert Montoyas. Cabrera scrambled out of the hole, pulse rate and thoughts quickening. It is late March and after midnight, the hour when shepossibly with the help of an unsuspecting Montoya or another accomplice, a mystery police never solvedburied bodies in the yard. The detective had yet to realize that, in the 59-year-old Puente, he had another serial killer on his hands. A 22-year-old soldier who had returned to the U.S. from the Pacific after World War II, he married Dorothea in 1945, and they moved to Gardnerville, Nevada to start a family. I now see them as tokens of loneliness, trifles to mark the time. Prosecutors said that Puente was one of the most cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen.. I wonder what its like to be known as a murderer. High-profile cases dotted his career, including those of convicted mass murderer Morris Solomon and the Unabomber. Exploiting her appearance of the sweet old lady, Puente would lure unsuspecting tenants to their grisly deaths by baking them cakes laced with sleeping pills. For years, the disappearances of these so-called shadow people who lived at the margins of society went unnoticed. Been here 27 years. Me and Nancy, she says, shaking her head. Beneath a black and white mug shot of Puente wearing a polka dot dress and round glasses, the bulletin reads, The above suspect wanted for murder after several bodys (sic) found buried in her backyard. (A charity she declines to name sends her $15 a month, her sole source of money.) I made them change their clothes every day, take a bath every day and eat three meals a day When they came to me, they were so sick, they werent expected to live.. The visitors hall at the Central California Womens Facility in Chowchilla brings to mind a church social as hosted for state convicts. But in the 1980s, their residence was a boarding house owned by Dorothea Puente, who killed her elderly and disabled tenants to steal their Social Security checks. Over the next few years, she adapted by working as an in-home caregiver, affecting a matronly mien with her modest dress, oversized glasses and tremulous voice. Instead, after buying the coffee, she fled immediately to Los Angeles, where she befriended an elderly male pensioner whom she had met in a bar. If she had been held accountable for murdering my mother, Clausen says, then maybe there wouldnt have been any other victims.. Following her year-long trial which ended in 1993, Dorothea was convicted on three counts of murder and was. Still, prison has changed Puente in one profound aspect, reforming her into an obedient citizen. After her mother passing Dorothea and her 18 siblings . He stares at the photo and points at her purse. But eventually, police searching for a missing tenant spotted a patch of disturbed dirt near the boarding house and uncovered the first of several bodies. I wonder what she wants when death does come. Hes the brother of Ingemar Johansson, you know, she says, referring to the late heavyweight boxing champ. [citation needed], On November 11, 1988, police inquired after the disappearance of tenant Alvaro "Bert" Montoya, a developmentally disabled man with schizophrenia, who had been reported missing by his social worker. I have arrived seeking to somehow pierce Puentes carapace of denial, to find a crack or contradiction in her answers that might expose her deceit. Its the same thing. Dorothea Puente was a California landlady who ran a boarding house in Sacramento during the 1980s. And then theres the contradiction: beneath this house there are all these bodies. In the 70s, while running her first boardinghouse at 21st and F streets, Puente cultivated a strong rapport with social workers. These were peoplethe Salvation Army wouldnt take them. ), Thanks to her ties to Reagan, Puente tells me, she met Vice President Spiro Agnew and U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, and in the mid-70s, she ate dinner with longtime Republican booster Clint Eastwood when he visited town. Her statement hangs between us. I didnt know if anyone was going to look after him.. O'Mara's closing argument focused on Puente's acts of murder: Does anyone become responsible for their conduct in this world? Explaining away the corpses in her yard, she says, Not one person who worked for me saw me doing anything wrong. The visit was my first of six with Puente, who turned 80 in January. At the same time, they agreed she had an evil side brought on by the stress of caring for her down-and-out tenants. Scattered about the house were photos of her with the likes of California governors George Deukmejian and Jerry Brown, who once danced with her at a fundraising ball. But on the way to the storage facility, Puente abruptly asked Florez to pull over near a riverbank and just push the box into the water. The police dug up 78-year-old Leono Carpenter and then six more bodies. 'We had a real connection,' Harder told VICE. Puente died of natural causes at the Central . On the other hand, when these people, as could be expected, would act upat that point, she snapped and decided to kill them.. I didnt need to kill anyone. He was a good-hearted man, very kind, she says. Gawkers gather outside 1426 F St. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Archives), Domestic bliss and her maternal instinct failed to take root. He speculates that running a boardinghouse began for her as a humane endeavor rooted in a desire to undo painful childhood memories. The house at 1426 F St., where police found seven of Puentes tenants buried in the yard, as it looks today. Through her early teen years, young Dorothea found herself handed off to a series of relatives and foster homes, bouncing between Napa and Los Angeles, court records reveal. Police make a grisly discovery in Dorothea Puente's lawn Word reached Cabrera. [citation needed], O'Mara called over 130 witnesses; he argued to the jury that Puente had used sleeping pills to put her tenants to sleep, then suffocated them, and hired convicts to dig the holes in her yard. Prosecutor John OMara, then as now head of the Sacramento District Attorneys homicide unit, recognized the difficulty of cultivating compassion for victims he dubbed the shadow people. He had the added burden of building his case with witnesses of the same ilk: alcoholics, the homeless, once and future convicts. The police bulletin sent out after Puentes escape (Courtesy of John Cabrera), Throughout our meetings, Puente furtively points out inmates and comments on their crimes. Dick Schmidt/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images. No one else would want that name., Prison protocol bans inmates from talking to each other in the hall apart from brief exchanges. So we knew wed have an uphill battle in convincing the jurors that all of those were accidental deaths.. In effect, every cell has a waiting list.) Time has deepened the creases between her potato-like nose and dumpling cheeks, and her blanched skin has slackened at the neck. Some of the bodies were mummified in cloth, bed sheets and duct tape. Dorothea Puente is one of the criminals whose crimes are detailed in 'Worst Roommate Ever.' Puente was known in her neighborhood for housing individuals who were homeless, elderly, or otherwise unable to care for themselves.