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4. Vera Faye Martin, 64. But looks can be ext Their relationship developed quickly, and the couple was soon making wedding plans. Many of them found dead and buried in the boarding house's yard. When she was eight her father died of tuberculosis. Designers Joelle and Mikel visit the current owners to replace the home's negative energy with a new makeover. When attempts to extract it with a shovel failed, Cabrera climbed into the hole. Somehow a neighbor got suspicious, when the police officers investigated the house, the back yard, at least five bodies were buried in her back yard! Sometimes she includes small handmade gifts: Christmas ornaments constructed from cardboard and yarn, a greeting card stitched with fine thread. Sacramento Co. By Remy Millisky / March 14, 2022 11:13 am EDT. Puente's heinous crimes were eventually discovered in 1988, when Alberto Montoya, a mentally disabled and schizophrenic tenant, was reported missing by a social worker. She trails Cabrera, his police badge clipped to the front of a dark blue jacket and his jeans tucked into knee-high black boots that he had donned for the days dig. An undercover cop posing as a trucker arrested her after she offered to perform fellatio on him; she served 90 days in county lockup. The checks I cashed, yes. In a cryptic aside, she added, I used to be a very good person at one time., The public heard little from Puente for more than 20 years after that clip aired. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and . The seven tenants who had lived at 1426 F Street died with a variety of drugs in their bodies: anticonvulsants, antidepressants, antipsychotics, painkillers, tranquilizers. The jokes on me. She would flee the city that morning. In the 1970s, she opened her first boarding house in Sacramento. A pair of Christmas ornaments made by Puente in prison. Heres this grandmotherly figure in this beautiful, restored Victorian house with all these azaleas and other flowers, OMara says. On a subsequent visit, her vanity recedes when a guard, apparently new to working the visitors hall, asks her name. I wonder what she wants when death does come. Ill be waiting for her.. Dorothea Puente, ne Dorothea Helen Gray, was born on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California. . (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). Some were in an almost mummified state, wrapped tight with cloth, bed sheets and duct tape. But Puente has lodged in his psyche as the rarest predator he confronted: in age, gender and disposition, she inhabits an extremely narrow strata of serial killers. Puente told them that they were welcome to do so, and even provided an extra shovel. She has sent me more than 15 letters and postcards in the months since I first wrote to her. As the story goes, while shopping at a department store called The Emporium in San Francisco in 1948, a 19-year-old Puente felt a tap on her shoulder. Florez agreed, and Puente assisted him. It wasn't until the first body was found in her backyard that authorities realized Dorothea was not the sweet old woman she first appeared to be. Dorothea Montalvo Puente might seem like "a grandmotherly figure," says prosecutor John O'Mara. An officer dispatched to the house that morning interviewed Puente and one of her tenants, John Sharp. She answers without pause. Puente passed away in 2011 from natural causes at the Central California Facility in Chowchilla, aged 82. I wonder if the tenants know about the homes notorious history. Con su simpata lograba escapar de la. This was a money-making scheme, but I do not believe she was a murderess.. Another tenant, John Sharp, backed her up. As the trial neared, Vicary found her in an agitated, paranoid state. Peter Vlautin addressed the jurors in confidential tones, contrasting with O'Mara's shouting: We are here today to determine one thing: What is the value of Dorothea Puente's life? [6], Gray was arrested in 1960 for owning and operating a bookkeeping firm as a front for a brothel in Sacramento;[5] she was found guilty and was sentenced to ninety days in the Sacramento County Jail. I think she truly wanted to rehabilitate [her tenants] as she could not the people in her own family, Vicary says. Coverage spanned from the national networks and Time, Newsweek and The New York Times to the National Enquirer, National Examiner and news outlets from as far away as England and France. 31 of the Royal Viking. Puente was acquitted in the poisoning death of his mother, Ruth Munroe, and Clausen, who testified at trial, regards the convicted killers every living day as a denigration of his mothers memory. She does not once voice sadness over the deaths of her boarders, as if fearful that merely referring to them would imply her guilt. Most of the luminaries are connected to her years in Sacramento, where she moved in the mid-50s with her second husband, Axel Johansson, who now lives in Orangevale. The Boarding House Killer: Directed by Steve Allen. (A charity she declines to name sends her $15 a month, her sole source of money.) The Bogle Family's winemaking story begins in 1968 when Warren V. Bogle wanted to try a new crop and planted potatoes on their farm just south of Clarksburg. John Cabrera sits at a long wooden conference table inside Sacramento Police headquarters on Freeport Boulevard. 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. Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house for down and outs. 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. Drugs Puente used to knock . Dorothea followed up the drugging by carrying out the . The first episode centers around one of the worst of all: Dorothea Puente, a Sacramento, California woman who has been dubbed Sacramento's most notorious murderer. When the police arrived, Puente told them that Monroe had been depressed due to her husbands terminal illness. I felt like someone had pulled my insides out.. However, Dorothea's outward demeanor was a smokescreen, concealing [] Arrested for the scam in 1978, court records show, she received five years federal probation, the terms of which proscribed her from operating a boardinghouse. Subscribe to Sactown Magazine . Shes making me lie for her.. Grandson of Dorothea Puente, shared a 'real connection' with her - Daily Newshttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGIQ4XcqArGYqiw70QoKcvw?sub_confirmation=1Grand. To my surprise, an envelope stamped with the words Central California Womens Facility State Prison arrived a few weeks later. I scan the room out of empty impulse, certain I havent missed her. The union lasted just two years. But, behind the scenes, Puente had embarked on a path that would lead her to murder. Infamous serial murderer . Im not that kind of person. I prod for more, to no avail. While there, doctors diagnosed her as a pathological liar with an unstable personality. Ballenger began to suspect Puente of more nefarious behavior after learning that two elderly women in her care had suffered recurring spells of illness that baffled doctors. Now 80, she speaks out in a series of rare interviews on her crimes, her "relationships" with the Kennedys and the Reagans and whyin the endthe person she really wanted to kill was herself Martin Kuz Others wave and smile. No, Dorothea Puente is no longer alive as of 2022 as she died on March 27th, 2011. They made a date to go shopping the next day, but Willgues returned to his apartment shadowed by an inkling that he somehow knew her face. In any case, after more than 20 years behind bars, and despite the withering of her features, she retains a physical vitality and a fondness for cosmetic excess. Clausen checked on her in April 1982 and saw his pallid, suddenly enfeebled mother, who rarely drank alcohol, sipping crme de menthe. Only after unearthing seven corpses at 1426 F Street in November 1988 would prosecutors charge Puente with killing Munroe. [citation needed], In November 1985, Puente hired a man named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her apartment. [10] According to investigators, most of her victims had been drugged until they overdosed; Puente then wrapped them in bed-sheets and plastic lining before dragging them to open pits in the backyard for burial. (AP Photo/Walt Zeboski). They had a turbulent marriage; Gray took advantage of Johansson's frequent trips to sea by inviting men to their home and gambling away his money. He pieced the puzzle together a couple of hours after they parted, and later that night, police converged on room No. According to an interview in the documentary, The House is Innocent, and the couple believed that changing the . For his labor and $800, Puente gave him the red Ford pickup, which she stated belonged to her boyfriend in Los Angeles, who no longer needed it. [1] Puente's total count reached nine murders; she was convicted of three and the jury hung on the other six. On subjects unrelated to her misdeeds, she will open up, weaving anecdotes that are sometimes embroidered, sometimes made from whole cloth. Puente and her siblings were subsequently sent to an orphanage, where she was sexually abused. Investigators soon found the decomposing body of an elderly man inside. [2], Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California, to Trudy Mae (ne Yates) and Jesse James Gray. Me and Nancy, Puente says, shaking her head, we never got along. (A similar epitaph could apply to her marriage to her fourth husband, Pedro Montalvo, who left her in 1976, the same year they exchanged vows in Reno. I am waiting for Dorothea Puente. But in reality, he contends, she is the nation's most prolific female serial murderer ever . It doesnt fit., At least three peopledefense attorneys Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin and their clientharbored scarce empathy for the prosecutor. Within two weeks, Munroe fell ill, her body so weak she struggled to stand. She was paralyzed. (The Rockettes alumni association has no record of someone named either Sharon Neyaarda or Dorothea McFaul performing with the company, nor of two dancers tumbling into an orchestra pit. Dorothea Puente Home - Part 1: Directed by Star Price. 13, as designated by the plastic placard atop its faux-wood surface. The four women and three men, ages 52 to 79, had boarded at the two-story, powder-blue Victorian. During my meetings with Puente, a number of prisoners softly greet herHi, Miss Dorothea; How are you, Miss D?as they walk past. [6], In 1978, Gray was charged and convicted of illegally cashing thirty-four state and federal checks that belonged to her tenants. Puente claims she spent time in the 70s with California governors Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan. While Puente was charged with the murders of nine people, she was convicted of only three of them in 1993: A jury could not decide on the other six deaths. "I was hooked when I saw that she had published a. After the notorious female serial killer Dorothea Puente died in prison at the age of 82, the filmmaker Nick Coles stumbled upon her obituary. It was too humiliating, too shameful for her to admit responsibility for these crimes. Petitioner raises several claims and a request for a federal evidentiary hearing. Does she have to be killed?" Mental health experts testified of Puente's abusive upbringing and how it motivated her to help the less fortunate. Didnt know that at the time., The detective walked about halfway to the Clarion with Puente and her boarder, John McCauley. The silence here feels powerful enough to swallow space. Nonetheless, with decades to mull what she might say about her case, she sounds as unpersuasive now as during her plane ride from Los Angeles. Under the law, Puente received life without the possibility of parole. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. Dorothea Puente's former boarding house is at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California, between 14th and 15th streets. During the 1992 proceeding, investigators revealed that Puente - who was then 63 - had been killing the tenants for money, making $4,000 a month from cashing their social security checks. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group, '2023 will be our year of victory! I am led to believe if there is any reason for us to be living here on this Earth, it is to somehow enhance one another's humanity, to love, to touch each other with kindness, to know that you have made just one person breathe easier because you have lived. 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. It was a human leg bone, he recalls. Then learn about Aileen Wuornos, historys most terrifying female serial killer. The three law officers had stopped by the house to try to learn the whereabouts of Alvaro Bert Montoya, who had gone missing three months earlier. [citation needed]. In 16 years at the facility, she has accrued only two rules violations, the last occurring in 2004. In theory, the blend of narcotics detected in the victims could have proven lethal, or weakened them to the point of defenselessness against suffocation with a pillow or blanketa nearly untraceable cause of death. The house at 1426 F St., where police found seven of Puentes tenants buried in the yard, as it looks today. Inside Dorothea Puente's Tragic Childhood. In late 1981, his mother, Ruth Munroe, went into business with Puente, leasing and running the restaurant side of the Round Corner Tavern in midtown. At age 16, she drifted off on her own to Olympia, Wash. Comely and flaxen-haired, with soft blue eyes and a beguiling smile, she worked as a prostitute to earn money and caught the attention of Fred McFaul. A dark thought arrived. Puente and McCauley had caught a cab from the Clarion Hotel to a West Sacramento bar. In the 1980s, she worked as a personal caretaker who drugged her clients and stole their valuables. Dorothea Helen Gray met the world on Jan. 9, 1929, in Redlands, Calif., the sixth of seven children born to Jesse James Gray and Trudie Gray. She was notoriously known as the "Death House Land Lady" after committing nine murders. One was missing its hands, head and feet. Her body shapeless under a long-sleeve T-shirt and dungarees, she has pulled back her snowy plume of hair with a pink scrunchie. (Puente tells me she also had twin daughters who as young adults committed suicide one week apart. Trapped by tan cinderblock walls that climax in a Tsteepled ceiling, chatter and laughter create a kinetic mood amid the dense scent of microwaved pizza, burgers and fried chicken strips. After their deaths she continued to draw their social security cheques. FacebookDorothea Puente right before she fled Sacramento. Hes not a flirt.. 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'. By 1948, McFaul asked for a divorce and Puente drifted south to California. (Clymo died in 2006.) It is a wistfulness that lays bare the depth of chaos that defined Puentes status quo long before they married in 1952. They know what shes done., Puente conveys a pride in her renown that, now and then, gives way to embarrassment, or perhaps weariness. Prosecutors charged Puente with killing nine people. Her upstanding reputation concealed a habit of forging the signatures of tenants on their benefits checks before signing them over to herself. Today she repeats a tale she first spun for me three months ago, showing remarkable fidelity to the specifics of the earlier version. Then you will understand why these people believe Dorothea's life is worth saving. William Vicary spoke with Puente for the first time about two months after her arrest. She is to be considered dangerous, and her living environment and/or employment should be closely monitored. The following year, without a license and in violation of her federal probation, she opened a boardinghouse at 1426 F Street, with enough space for as many as eight tenants. Gray would continue to use the surname Puente for more than twenty years. She will send me the list in a few daysthe bill will total $114.70but I already know I wont oblige. Dorothea - Dorothea (also spelled Dorothe, Dorotea or other variants) is a female given name from Greek (Drotha) meaning "God's Gift". Puentes vanishing ignited a manhunt that stretched to Mexico. Vera Martin, 64. 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. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution. Puente took in so-called shadow people people who were marginally homeless without close family or friends. She had a terrible adolescence after being . Rene C. Byer Sacramento Bee file. But police tracked her down in Los Angeles after a man in a bar recognized her from TV. Theres a waiting list of people who want to be in my room. (This is true in the broadest sense: The prisons population hovers around 4,000 from month to month, roughly double its capacity. Police and forensics experts swarmed Puentes property the next morning. Most disregarded the warning in the face of a paucity of housing options for alcoholics, drug addicts and the mentally ill, and even after her release from prison in 1985, social workers and homeless advocates, ignoring or unaware that she was an ex-con running a boardinghouse without a license, sent their clients to her. I wondered whether, when thinking back to 1988, she saw her past as her own or that of a different Dorothea Puente, one who, over time, had faded into something of a stranger. Her evasive answersfirst claiming he had traveled to Mexico, then that he had returned and moved to Utahtripped Moises suspicion. Following her year-long trial which ended in 1993, Dorothea was convicted on three counts of murder and was. Puente offered a place where they could hang on. Grandson of killer granny Dorothea Puente, who laced cakes with sleeping pills and then smothered them at her California boarding house, reveals how he shared a 'real connection' with her and. She received a life sentence without possibility of parole, and as before the trial, she granted few interviews in its wake, observing a self-imposed gag order. For her and the others, one factor in particular undercut Puentes claim of innocence. This woman is a disturbed woman who does not appear to have remorse or regret for what she has done, he wrote. After spending part of Valentines Day with Miss Dorothea, as other inmates call her, I returned later in February and stopped by for a final chat in April. Some months earlier, another tenant, a longtime alcoholic on a bender, had vanished after Puente went to his room to make him feel better. The acrid stench of rotting flesh soon spread through the home and beyond, an odor she blamed on sewer problems and that drew complaints from neighbors. Puente was convicted in. She then asked Florez to transport the filled, sealed box to a storage depot. Court files indicate Johansson had his wife committed to a psychiatric ward in 1961, and doctors placed her on antipsychotics. (Obituaries for Ingemar Johansson, who died earlier this year, list his sole surviving brother as Rolf.). Granddaughter Of Dorothea Puente Victim Visits Boarding House Exclusive Granddaughter Of Dorothea Puente Victim Visits Boarding House Dorothy Miller was eventually found buried in the yard of Dorothea Puente's boarding house. 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. But there were seven dead bodies in your yard. Would you want that to happen to your children? Newspapers dubbed Puente the "Death House Landlady". 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. 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. As reported by Dailymail, seven year after Puente's death, a man named William Harder had claimed to be his grandson. She gasped at sight of the remains, hands bracketing her cheeks. She recalls the future president and his first wife, Jane Wyman, as her good friends. When I mention the Gippers second wife, Puente frowns. Though born in Redlands, Puente, who speaks passable Spanish, claimed Mexico as her birthplace, a ruse she perpetuated by alternately using the surnames of her last two ex-husbands, Roberto Puente and Pedro Montalvo. Then there was the riddle of Puente. 'Never judge a book by its cover,' said retired police officer John Cabrera in 2018, the lead investigator on the case. [6], Gray and Johansson divorced in 1966, although she continued to use Johansson's name for some time following their separation. But 26 years after her conviction - and seven years after her death - a man who claims to Puente's grandson, William Harder, has stepped forward to reaffirm his grandmother's claim that she wasn't always bad. She was just pure evil, Ballenger says. If Im thinking about getting away, you think Im going to ask permission?, Police escort Puente after apprehending her in L.A.; Cabrera walks behind her. When she was eight her father died of tuberculosis. Clymo responded by evoking Dorothea the child and caregiver. But before the cop left, Sharp managed to slip him a hand-written note that read, Shes making me lie for her. He later divulged unsettling details about life at the house. Investigators opened the box and found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside. In November 1992, the same month jury selection started, she rejected a plea deal that would spare her the death penalty if she pleaded guilty to all nine murders. Puente was charged for seven murders, but her trial wouldn't begin for another four years. Now, as I sit at table No. Sacramento Bee Two more murders She'd. The visitors hall at the Central California Womens Facility in Chowchilla brings to mind a church social as hosted for state convicts. Cops hauling away body bags. Even probation officers who stopped by accepted Puentes explanation that the people living at her house were guests or friends not boarders. She met and married Fred McFaul in 1945. That didnt seem right, but Dorothea had conned our whole family into thinking she was a nurse.. Then working as an in-home caregiver, Puente displayed an odd obsession with her own health, lamenting to clients and caseworkers alike that she suffered from cancer. They belong to a litany of famous names she drops during our meetings. I didnt know if anyone was going to look after him.. She sat there so totally motionless and emotionless, says Honey Hewlett, one of 12 jurors seated for the trial, who stopped buying Giorgio perfume after learning Puente also wore the scent. One was missing its head, hands and feet. Throughout the trial, Dorothea Puente was portrayed as either a sweet grandma-like type or a manipulative criminal who preyed on the weak. She gave birth to a daughter in 1946 followed by a second less than a year later, but public documents suggest she inherited her mothers aversion to childrearing. Dorothea Puente died in prison of natural causes on March 27, 2011, at age 82. (Courtesy of John Cabrera). Then aged 63 (above), 103 witnesses were called to testify against her in the trial, Suspicion arose in 1988 when Alberto Montoya, a mentally disabled and schizophrenic tenant, was reported missing by a social worker, Puente's victims: (left to right)Everson Gillmouth, 77.