The Life and Deaths of Dorothea Puente Detailed Notes

The Life and Deaths of Dorothea Puente Dorothea...grew up poor...Her father died of tuberculosis when Dorothea was 8; her mother lost her life in a motorcycle wreck the same year, orphaning Dorothea before she turned 10. Through her early teen years, young Dorothea found herself handed off to a series of relatives and foster homes...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...[who] split from his young wife in 1948. Later that year, Dorothea moved to San Bernardino and picked up her first criminal conviction after trying to float a check under a false name. She wound up serving four months in jail and shortly afterward fled Riverside County, flouting the terms of her probation. By 1952, she had wed [Axel] Johansson...Frequent quarrels and separations marred the marriage, with much of the discord brought on by Dorothea’s appetites for drinking, gambling and other men. Court files indicate Johansson had his wife committed to a psychiatric ward in 1961, and doctors placed her on antipsychotics. The hospitalization occurred a year after Sacramento police busted Dorothea in a raid on a residential “house of ill fame” on Fulton Avenue that had fronted as a bookkeeping service, according to court records. An undercover cop posing as a trucker arrested her after she offered to perform fellatio on him; she served 90 days in county lockup...[and] Johansson divorced Dorothea in 1966... She landed her third husband in 1968 and settled in Sacramento. At 39, she was 16 years older than Roberto Puente, a Mexican émigré whose interest in his heavyset bride concerned “money and American citizenship”...They separated in 1969, and not long after, Dorothea, who had briefly run an unauthorized rehab program for alcoholics, opened a boardinghouse at 21st and F streets... Puente cultivated a strong rapport with social workers. They prized her willingness to accept alcoholics, drug addicts and other difficult clients into her home...Her upstanding reputation concealed a habit of forging the signatures of tenants on their benefits checks before signing them over to herself. The erstwhile prostitute had turned a new trick. 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. 1 Over the next few years, she adapted by working as an in-home caregiver...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. Puente drugged three women with tranquilizers to steal checks, money and valuables from their homes in the early ’80s...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. 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. The string of thefts led to her arrest, and in 1982, a Superior Court judge sentenced her to five years in prison... A state psychologist who evaluated Puente before her release [wrote] “This woman is a disturbed woman who does not appear to have remorse or regret for what she has done...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. 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... Though born in Redlands, Puente, who speaks passable Spanish, claimed Mexico as her birthplace... “She was a respected figure to the Mexican community,” says Donald Dorfman, a longtime Sacramento criminal attorney who handled some of Puente’s legal affairs before her 1988 arrest. “She gave them clothing, she gave them food. She’d give advice to all these young Mexican women who came to her when they were trying to get divorced.” For William Clausen, by contrast, the [eventual discovery of seven] bodies buried in Puente’s yard confirmed what he already considered fact: she killed for profit. In late 1981, his mother, Ruth Munroe...moved in with Puente to save money. Within two weeks, Munroe fell ill, her body so weak she struggled to stand. Clausen checked on her in April 1982 and saw his pallid, suddenly enfeebled mother, who rarely drank alcohol, sipping crème de menthe. “She told me Dorothea had given it to her to help calm her down...That didn’t seem right, but Dorothea had conned our whole family into thinking she was a nurse.” Four days later, Munroe died at Puente’s home. Her rapid decline perplexed her loved ones until they read the coroner’s report: the death was labeled a suicide caused by an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. The family suspected Puente of poisoning her. 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. 2 In summer 1982, Clausen and his siblings spotted a story in the Bee about Puente’s conviction on theft and forgery charges related to her drugging four elderly people. They appealed to authorities to reexamine their mother’s death, a probe that ended with investigators upholding the suicide ruling... ------On November 11, 1988, Puente had stayed poised... when [police officer John] Cabrera showed up with a fellow homicide detective and a federal probation agent. They wanted to question her about Bert Montoya, her onetime tenant who had been reported missing. She stuck to her story that he had left for Utah after a trip to Mexico, and agreed to let her three visitors search the two- story house. When they finished without noticing anything suspicious, Cabrera asked if they could dig in her yard. She consented again, even lending a shovel to the men, who had brought only two. 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. The discovery prompted Cabrera to summon Puente to the backyard. She gasped at sight of the remains, hands bracketing her cheeks. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said... The initial jolt of uncovering a dead body on Nov. 11 ebbed as Cabrera weighed three factors. Old bones sometimes turned up in downtown and midtown yards, vestiges of the early 20th century, when families unable to afford a cemetery plot interred loved ones on their property. The advanced state of decay, meanwhile, suggested the person had died long before Montoya’s presumed disappearance in August. Then there was the riddle of Puente. Slight and demure, with her ivory-white hair and solicitous demeanor, the landlady resembled any other elderly woman with a kitchen full of pots and pans and a cat calendar hanging next to the stove. She had breached her federal probation by running a boardinghouse, yet admitted to the offense when asked. Her past crimes belied her pose of pure benevolence, yet she had submitted to the house and yard searches without protest. In the end, Cabrera erred on the side of skepticism. He ferried Puente to police headquarters and grilled her for two hours. She parried, unwavering in her account of Montoya’s departure, her voice calm as the detective pressed her. “Sir,” she said, “I have not killed anybody”... “I started working her,” Cabrera says, “but all along, she was working me. She was tough. She never blinked, never broke a sweat.” After the interview, he allowed her to return to the house, where a patrolman stood sentinel outside through the night. Police and forensics experts swarmed Puente’s property the next morning. She watched from her porch, and before Cabrera put spade to soil, she requested a moment of his time. Speaking softly, she asked, “Am I under arrest?” When the detective told her no, she explained that the police presence and the growing mob of onlookers had her on edge. To soothe her anxiety, she wanted 3 to walk to the nearby Clarion Hotel with one of her boarders to meet her nephew for a cup of coffee. Cabrera’s superiors approved her request, deciding they held insufficient evidence to detain her...The detective walked about halfway to the Clarion with Puente and her boarder, John McCauley. Once free of the throng, Cabrera stopped and watched the pair until they entered the hotel. He returned to the house, grabbed a shovel and began to dig. Twenty-one minutes later—he remembers the time precisely—he exhumed sufficient evidence: the remains of a second body buried about a foot deep in the earth. Officers rushed to the hotel to arrest Puente, but by then, she had bolted. Word reached Cabrera. “I had such a sick feeling,” he says. “I felt like someone had pulled my insides out”... 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... As the search expanded, cabin fever seized Puente. On her fourth day as a fugitive, she dropped by a dive bar near the motel, introducing herself as Donna Johansson to a retired carpenter named Charles Willgues. The two talked through the afternoon, with Willgues both attracted to and wary of the well-dressed stranger who sipped screwdrivers. She came on a little hard, what with her questions about his Social Security benefits and abrupt suggestion that they consider living together. 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. He pieced the puzzle together a couple of hours after they parted, and later that night, police converged on room No. 31 of the Royal Viking. Puente surrendered quietly... ------William Vicary spoke with Puente for the first time about two months after her arrest. The forensic psychiatrist, assigned to evaluate the alleged serial killer as her case proceeded toward trial, would spend 12 hours talking with her over the next four years. During their initial meeting, he encountered a woman of utter ordinariness, one far removed from the media caricature that depicted her as the embodiment of evil. “I was struck by how pleasant and socially intact and intelligent she was,” says Vicary, who works in Los Angeles. “She did not strike me as a person who had a major mental illness. I was bewildered as to what in the world was going on with all these people in her yard.” 4