), Puente relates that, as a Rockette, she met John Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, and his wife, Jackie, and befriended actress Rita Hayworth. Dorothea Puente's former boarding house is at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California, between 14th and 15th streets. There, she quickly got back to her old tricks. She killed her husband after he abused her and her kids. A Latino woman with shoulder-length dark hair passes our table and whispers hello to Miss Dorothea. 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. After sixteen months, the couple separated, with Gray citing domestic abuse. Season 1 Episode 2 - Videos 1:11 Preview Dorothea Puente Runs From Police The only time [the boarers] were in good health was when they stayed at my home, Puente insisted from prison. Once, when I asked if she ever hears from her surviving siblings or two daughters, she shook her head. Witnesses, including her long-lost daughter, testified how Puente had helped them in their youth and guided them to successful careers. Florez agreed, and Puente assisted him. People viewed Puente as a sweet grandmother committed to giving back to society: she housed the old and homeless, attended political events, and donated money to charitable causes. A human leg and a badly discomposed foot were dug up separately in another part of the yard. This page was last edited on 18 February 2023, at 18:08. 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 responds with a burst of words, scanning the room as she talks. Given Dorothea Puente's image, this meant the controversial artist, Shane Bugbee, would collaborate with her on a cookbook. [3] Her parents were both alcoholics and her father repeatedly threatened to commit suicide in front of his children. According to an interview in the documentary, The House is Innocent, and the couple believed that changing the . Pathologists testified that they hadnt been able to fix the cause of death for any of the corpses. Why would I waste all my time to get these people cleaned up, make sure they have no diseases, get all their affairs in order if I was going to kill them?. Dorothea Puente after her arrest in Los Angeles, en route back to Sacramento. Stone, Michael H., M.D. Finally, four days after she skipped town, authorities traced her to a tumbledown motel in Los Angeles. But as the police prepared to leave, Sharp slipped them a message. She had a traumatic childhood after being raised by alcoholic parents. Dorothea Puente is an American serial killer.
Is Dorothea Puente From 'Worst Roommate Ever' Still Alive? - Distractify (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). Aug. 27, 1993 12 AM PT. Her body shapeless under a long-sleeve T-shirt and dungarees, she has pulled back her snowy plume of hair with a pink scrunchie. Inmates enter one at a time at irregular intervals through a gray metal door along the rear wall. She was the sixth of seven children but didn't grow up in a stable family environment. They prized her willingness to accept alcoholics, drug addicts and other difficult clients into her home, a sprawling, three-story Victorian that could sleep more than two dozen tenants. I dont know what to tell you, she said. Dick Schmidt/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images. Time has deepened the creases between her potato-like nose and dumpling cheeks, and her blanched skin has slackened at the neck. (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. 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. They wanted to question her about Bert Montoya, her onetime tenant who had been reported missing. As reported by Dailymail, seven year after Puente's death, a man named William Harder had claimed to be his grandson. Going to church every day. Bodies were found buried in what is now the yard at left. During the initial investigation, Puente was not immediately a suspect, and she was allowed to leave the property, ostensibly to buy a cup of coffee at a nearby hotel. Her eyes would fill with tears, but she would never admit it, he says. I wonder what she wants when death does come. William Vicary spoke with Puente for the first time about two months after her arrest. Puente was charged with a total of nine murders: Puente's boyfriend, Everson Gillmouth, 77; and eight tenants who lived at the boarding house: Ruth Munroe, 61; Leona Carpenter, 78; Alvaro "Bert/Alberto" Gonzales Montoya, 51; Dorothy Miller, 64; Benjamin Fink, 55; James Gallop, 62; Vera Faye Martin, 64; and Betty Palmer, 78. That is the question. John Cabrera sits at a long wooden conference table inside Sacramento Police headquarters on Freeport Boulevard. [19] It was then the subject of the 2015 documentary short The House Is Innocent and was again opened to tours for one day in conjunction with a local film festival's showing of the film.[20]. 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. I now see them as tokens of loneliness, trifles to mark the time. Dorothea Puente, a notorious, grandmotherly boarding house operator convicted in the 1990s of killing her tenants, has died in prison aged 82. How many other boardinghouses have one person die? She does not smile, laugh or joke much in my presence, but nor does she betray malevolence. Murdaugh is heckled as he leaves court, Ken Bruce finishes his 30-year tenure as host of BBC Radio 2, Ukrainian soldier takes out five tanks with Javelin missiles, Family of a 10-month-old baby filmed vaping open up, Missing hiker buried under snow forces arm out to wave to helicopter, Hershey's Canada releases HER for SHE bars featuring a trans activist, Moment teenager crashes into back of lorry after 100mph police race, This Guy Collects Artwork From Serial Killers - VICE. I think she truly wanted to rehabilitate [her tenants] as she could not the people in her own family, Vicary says. Do not sell or share my personal information. With Bill Courage, John Cabrera, Bill Clausen, Judy Moises. ', Puente died in 2011 aged 82 in her prison cell at the Central California Facility, in Chowchilla. 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. 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. One was missing its hands, head and feet.
How Did Dorothea Puente Kill Her Victims? Know Her Death House Now She was tried for killing seven people by drugging them with Dalmane and alcohol. Yet for all the local, national and international coverage of the bizarre case in ensuing years, the public heard virtually nothing from its main character. The conversation soon veers toward why I want to interview her, and before I finish explaining, she interrupts. Her demeanor is, for the most part, politely docile, and I begin to perceive how so many could consider her trustworthy. As it happened, her shovel was used to dig the hole that yielded a human leg bone, a decomposed foot inside a dark dress shoe and what looked like pieces of tattered fabric that in fact were rotting flesh. James Gallop, 62, (continued left to right) Dorothy Miller, 64. In addition to the usual fare sold in the halls chow line, there are heart-shaped boxes of chocolates for $7. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution. She met and married Fred McFaul in 1945. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. They first spoke with Dorothea Puente, who ran the clean, cozy home as a boardinghouse for low-income tenants. I stroll up the paved outdoor path that runs between the check-in station and the visitors hall, a walkway flanked with manicured rose bushes of the sort Puente once might have planted and pruned. Artifacts from the Dorothea Puente case splay out before him: a faded article published in a local Spanish newspaper with a black and white photo of a younger Puente; a pair of her mug shots, blue eyes dimmed and weary in both; a prescription label in her name for diazepam, a tranquilizer sold as Valium; the original wanted bulletin from Nov. 12, 1988, the day she went on the lam. Puentes mechanical response echoes what she has told me during prior meetings, and what I will hear on subsequent visits. Some of them began to disappear. She also established herself as a respected member in Sacramento's Hispanic community, funding charities, scholarships, and radio programs. On her lap bounces a pony-tailed girl in a red-buttoned vest who giggles Mama! Two tables over, a stout, fortyish black woman with a toothy smile banters with her parents and younger brother, to judge from the physical semblance. I wondered how the last two decades had changed her, how she had endured. He returned to the house, grabbed a shovel and began to dig. There are so many sad stories in here. Hed been referred to Dorothea Puentes house because of her sterling reputation welcoming people like him. After noticing disturbed soil on the property, they uncovered the body of tenant Leona Carpenter, 78.
Serial Killer Dorothea Puente's Home Featured In 'Murder House Flip [6], In 1968, Gray married Roberto Jose Puente.
Dorothea Puente's house now: All you need to know - TheNetline Heres this grandmotherly figure in this beautiful, restored Victorian house with all these azaleas and other flowers, OMara says. He speculates that running a boardinghouse began for her as a humane endeavor rooted in a desire to undo painful childhood memories. "You have heard of the despair which was the foundation of her life, the anger and resentmentIf anyone in the jury room tells you it was not that bad, ask them would you want that to happen to yourself? Montoya struggled with mental health issues and had been homeless for years. An Asian woman in her mid-thirties, with sharp cheekbones framed by long glossy black hair, wears standard-issue prisoner garb: white T-shirt with long navy blue sleeves, dungarees and blue sneakers. Dalmane, which is a drug used for insomnia, was found in all seven of the exhumed bodies. But God always puts obstacles in peoples way. . By 1952, she had wed Johansson, whom she met in San Francisco. Vlautin spoke gently about Puente's childhood touching on the traumatic aspects that shaped her life and urged the jurors to see the world through her eyes. She'd later return to smother her incapacitated prey. They were met by Dorothea Puente, an elderly woman with big glasses, who repeated her story that Montoya was simply on vacation. I dont feel like confessing my sins to anyone, she says sharply. Finding nothing, they asked permission to dig up the yard.
Dorothea Puente - Alcatraz East Pigeon Forge Dorothea Puente at the Central California Womens Facility, February 21, 2009 (Courtesy of Central California Womens Facility). For a moment the prisons visitors hall feels bereft of other people and sounds. 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. Dorothea often took in the elderly and homeless and placed them as her tenants. Setting his feet, he grabbed hold of the object and, with a violent jerk, loosed it from the earths grip. 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. Their theory hardened into subjective truth when they discovered that, following the funeral, the nurse had drained thousands of dollars belonging to Munroe from a joint business bank account. The 1991 film Evil Spirits, starring Karen Black and Arte Johnson, is loosely based on the Puente murders. At the time, she was serving two life sentences and a concurrent 15-year-to-life sentence. She collected tenants' monthly mail before they saw it and paid them stipends, pocketing the rest for "expenses". READ: Serial Killer Puente's Former Home Becomes Classroom For Law. Prison persuades some inmates to repent, their perspective evolving with time as they forsake their younger selves. Look at Job, John, Paul, Moses. Despite being convicted of murder in 1993 and sent to prison, Puente. I felt like someone had pulled my insides out.. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Dorothea Puente believed herself to be an able caretaker. Dorothea Helen Puente (ne Gray; January 9, 1929 March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. 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. 'Never judge a book by its cover,' said retired police officer John Cabrera in 2018, the lead investigator on the case. Federal probation officers visited her numerous times in the next two years without suspecting she ran a business, lulled by her kindly facade and clean home as much as by her lies that those staying at the house were friends or guests. She got in serious trouble for the first time in her life after bouncing a check in San Bernadino and spent four months in jail. Given Montoyas history as a transient, his disappearance would have escaped notice without the persistence of Judy Moise. She gasped at sight of the remains, hands bracketing her cheeks.
15 Notorious Female Serial Killers - The Lineup 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. These entities fall through the cracks, said Kathleen Lammers, executive director of the California Law Center on Longterm Care, about boarding houses like Puentes. A well-researched play by Mark Loewenstern entitled "Dorothea Puente Tells All!" I wait for her to speak. Cooking what I want. (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.) Puente claims she spent time in the 70s with California governors Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan. At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. Police later accused Puente of lacing food or drinks she served her victims with a lethal mix of prescription drugs, poisoning them to collect their Social Security checks, a scheme that netted more than $5,000 a month. 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. Her escape brought coast-to-coast ridicule of Police Chief John Kearns and his department while authorities chased dead-end leads from Las Vegas to Mexico. WITH her chiffon dresses, thick-rimmed glasses, grey hair and litter of kittens, Dorothea Puente looked like a sweet old lady - even insisting to some, "Call me Grandma". I have also done this: Late at night, when it is said her deeds turned darkest, I have pondered the vastness of human nature as I stood outside the tiny yard where she buried her victims. However, in 1978, she was convicted of illegally cashing state and federal assistance checks that belonged to her tenants. One girl was placed in the care of relatives, the other put up for adoption. Now she watched from her second-story porch as the trio began to dig. After their deaths she continued to draw their social security cheques. Im not that kind of person. I prod for more, to no avail. Questions about her criminal record will elicit short answers trailed by awkward silence, during which she will stare at the table or the far wall, in the direction of Winnie and friends. [citation needed], In November 1985, Puente hired a man named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her apartment. Several were referred there by social workers who viewed the home as a last-resort refuge for their ailing or most erratic clients. The candy proves popular with youngsters, whose sporadic laughter pierces the rooms hum. 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. Another tenant, John Sharp, backed her up. She falls silent for a moment. Investigators opened the box and found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside. She was the sixth of seven children, all of whom struggled in a less-than-stable family environment, with little income and love to speak of in the Gray house. 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. 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. 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. When they returned to his apartment, he watched in a stupor as Puente helped herself to his checks and cash; before leaving, she slipped a diamond ring off his pinky. Officers rushed to the hotel to arrest Puente, but by then, she had bolted. In April of 1982, a 61-year-old woman named Ruth Monroe moved into Dorothea Puentes house. When we later part, Puente disappears through the gray metal door at the back of the hall. Social workers in the 1970s looked upon Dorothea Puente and her boarding house with admiration. But looks can be ext
What Happened To Dorothea Puente, AKA The "Death House Lady" - Bustle The prosecution stated that Puente used sleeping pills to drug her tenants, suffocated them, and then hired convicts to bury them in the yard. A year earlier, he had probed the case of Morris Solomon, a Sacramento handyman who would be convicted of murdering six women across the city.
Evidence from Dorothea Puente Case Preserved at Center for - FOX40 His eyes popped wide. I started working her, Cabrera says, but all along, she was working me. The subject of personal health preoccupies Puente as much as the next octogenarian. After the notorious female serial killer Dorothea Puente died in prison at the age of 82, the filmmaker Nick Coles stumbled upon her obituary. She was notoriously known as the "Death House Land Lady" after committing nine murders. Im certain they were just dying of natural causes, and she started burying them so she could keep the checks coming. I just dont believe that strongly in coincidence. Granddaughter of Dorothea Puente Victim Talks About Her Disappearance The granddaughter of one of Dorothea Puente's victims recalls finding out that Puente had run away from the police.
Watch 'The House is Innocent': Female Serial Killer Dorothea Puente's After her mother passing Dorothea and her 18 siblings . So when I wrote to Puente last summer, nearly 20 years after the discovery of her victims, I had little expectation she would respond, let alone agree to talk. However, it would be three more years before authorities could identify the body as one of the tenants in Dorothea Puentes house. [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. [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. She inflated her age by 10 to 15 years to further disarm her elderly clients, whom she set about exploiting under the guise of ministering to them. After learning about the murders inside Dorothea Puentes house, read about the serial killer known as the Angel of Death. Im here until I die.. I dont know what to tell you, she said. The Montoya file landed on Cabreras desk within a day. They were men and women who had skidded toward lifes edges. Get Sactown's top stories in your inbox by signing up for our weekly newsletter. 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 was known as the "step house lady" after filing nine homicides. Puente watched the images flicker across the TV screen in her Los Angeles motel room. But police tracked her down in Los Angeles after a man in a bar recognized her from TV. We spent 2 hours in here looking and reading most of the items. She sits erect, legs crossed at the ankles and tucked beneath her chair. [2], Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California, to Trudy Mae (ne Yates) and Jesse James Gray.