In April 2020, the house and current owners were showcased in the Quibi series Murder House Flip. A state psychologist who evaluated Puente before her release from prison in 1985 diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Given Montoyas history as a transient, his disappearance would have escaped notice without the persistence of Judy Moise. [17] The result was Cooking with a Serial Killer (2004),[18] which included a lengthy interview, almost fifty recipes, and various pieces of prison art sent to Bugbee by the convicted murderer. He pieced the puzzle together a couple of hours after they parted, and later that night, police converged on room No. World's Most Evil Killers - Season 2, Episode 8 - Dorothea Puente - Full Episode FilmRise True Crime 676K subscribers 160K views 1 year ago #truecrime #famous #truecrimedocs In 1988, Puente had. Kara Goldfarb is a writer living in New York City. I made them change their clothes every day, take a bath every day and eat three meals a day. They know what shes done., Puente conveys a pride in her renown that, now and then, gives way to embarrassment, or perhaps weariness. Didnt know that at the time., The detective walked about halfway to the Clarion with Puente and her boarder, John McCauley. In another twist to the case, Sacramento police escorted her back to the city on a plane chartered by KCRA for its news crew. Puente had Chief dig in the basement and cart soil and rubbish away in a wheelbarrow. 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. A stream of people tour Dorothea Puente's former home on Sept. 15, 2013. Dorothea Puente was a California landlady who ran a boarding house in Sacramento during the 1980s. After Puente was released from her first spell in prison for three counts. Dorothea Puente died in prison of natural causes on March 27, 2011, at age 82. The visit was my first of six with Puente, who turned 80 in January. Puentes next two marriages would be short-lived. Some of them began to disappear. But police tracked her down in Los Angeles after a man in a bar recognized her from TV. For her and the others, one factor in particular undercut Puentes claim of innocence. When police arrived at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, they noticed some disturbed soil in a vegetable patch, but not thinking Puente to be a suspect they allowed the grandmother to flee the scene, In her absence, the officers dug-up the entire garden (left) where they discovered seven bodies. She turns to look at me. Shes making me lie for her.. 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. Shes not hurting there in prison, he says. 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. Her narrow lips, pinched and lined at the corners, curl slightly upward. So you knew she was a liar.. The noise inside the prisons visitors hall amplifies on Valentines Day. In summer 1982, Clausen and his siblings spotted a story in the Bee about Puentes conviction on theft and forgery charges related to her drugging four elderly people. Or about the white-haired woman who turned the yard into a mass grave. 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. Several were swaddled in bed sheets that matched linens found in the house. Puente told them that they were welcome to do so, and even provided an extra shovel. She declines to disclose the fathers name, when and where they were born and died or the circumstances of their deaths.). At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. She parlayed its success by pumping money into political campaigns and charitable causes, contributions that bought her the appearance of legitimacy and access to elite circles. As we talk on Valentines Day, I broach her long-ago brushes with the law, only to find myself stymied again. 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. Cops hauling away body bags. She was the sixth of seven children but didn't grow up in a stable family environment. 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. Mental health experts testified of Puente's abusive upbringing and how it motivated her to help the less fortunate. The two then separated, with McCauley returning downtown and Puente taking another cab to Stockton, where she hopped a bus to Los Angeles. 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. If you lived anywhere else, theres still a good chance you recognize it, or at least the rough outline of her crimes. The founder of MurderAuction - an auction house for serial killer memorabilia - Harder's macabre obsessions have also seen him befriend the likes of Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez. Then, she asked if it would be ok if she went to buy a coffee. Dalmane, which is a drug used for insomnia, was found in all seven of the exhumed bodies. She holed up in the Royal Viking Motel for the next three days, seldom leaving her room. Puente drugged three women with tranquilizers to steal checks, money and valuables from their homes in the early 80s, as recounted in court records. She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", a Muslim woman of Egyptian and Israeli descent. 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. Silver-haired, dressed in a long red coat and wearing large rounded glasses, the 59-year-old resembled just a regular grandmother - proving looks truly can be deceiving. The erstwhile prostitute had turned a new trick. She has sent more than 15 letters and postcards in the months since I first wrote to her. That is a human quality that deserves to be preserved. 22 ratings3 reviews. He was a good-hearted man, very kind, she says. 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. ), 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. According to Dailymail, seven years after the death of Puente, a man named William Harder had claimed to be her grandson. She married Roberto Puente in 1968, but the relationship dissolved sixteen months later. 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. They were met by Dorothea Puente, an elderly woman with big glasses, who repeated her story that Montoya was simply on vacation. I was on stage when the girl next to me broke her heel and bumped into me. Hed been referred to Dorothea Puentes house because of her sterling reputation welcoming people like him. Clausen checked on her in April 1982 and saw his pallid, suddenly enfeebled mother, who rarely drank alcohol, sipping crme de menthe. However Harder insists that's where he draws the line. 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 claims he has sent her Christmas cards in prison, and as she talks about that small act of kindness, her eyes mist over. But there were seven dead bodies in your yard. That is mitigating. 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. Sacramento landlady Dorothea Montalvo Puente was found guilty Thursday of murdering three of her tenants for their government benefit . In the narrative of her life that unfurled at her murder trial and in news reports and books about the case, she grew up poor, deprived in equal measure of material comforts and parental nurturing. A contrary perception derived from Puentes strong ties to Hispanic residents living in downtown and midtown. As the search expanded, cabin fever seized Puente. When Puente offered to perform a sex act on an undercover cop at a house of ill-repute, her husband sent her to a psychiatric ward. Some of the bodies were mummified in cloth, bed sheets and duct tape. 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. But volatility seemed to follow Puente wherever she went and the new couple argued frequently about Puentes drinking and gambling. In turn, I know that when she receives my letter telling her as much, shell cut off contact. 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. READ: Serial Killer Puente's Former Home Becomes Classroom For Law. My oldest grandson is 15 and wanted to do this attraction. So we knew wed have an uphill battle in convincing the jurors that all of those were accidental deaths.. Puente cashed in the Social Security checks of the elderly and disabled boarders living in her house. The discovery prompted Cabrera to summon Puente to the backyard. One-time hitman Julio Santana (right) stopped counting after he reached 492 kills. 'We had a real connection,' Harder told VICE. Frequent quarrels and separations marred the marriage, with much of the discord brought on by Dorotheas appetites for drinking, gambling and other men. She consented again, even lending a shovel to the men, who had brought only two. The police dug up 78-year-old Leono Carpenter and then six more bodies. 'Executing Puente would be like executing your grandmother', one juror is reported to have said in response to the death sentence looming over the defendant at the time. The Story Of The Unsolved Delphi Murders And The Chilling Video Evidence Left Behind, Scaleless, Slimy, And Extremely Rare: Introducing The Deep-Sea Oarfish, What Stephen Hawking Thinks Threatens Humankind The Most, 27 Raw Images Of When Punk Ruled New York, Join The All That's Interesting Weekly Dispatch, Owen Brewer/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images. We spent 2 hours in here looking and reading most of the items. I leave through a different door and make my way out of the prison, stepping into the cool afternoon air. He ferried Puente to police headquarters and grilled her for two hours. An undercover cop posing as a trucker arrested her after she offered to perform fellatio on him; she served 90 days in county lockup. As we continue talking, the topic switches to her life before prison, and I ask what she misses most about Sacramento. The business supplied her with steady revenuesteady and, apparently, inadequate. She purchased the refills through a pair of doctors who, presumably oblivious to her past drugging of clients, trusted her stories that she simply wanted to help boarders sleep. In 1961, Johansson had Gray briefly committed to DeWitt State Hospital after a binge of drinking, lying, criminal behavior, and suicide attempts. MONTEREY . Her bedroom was on the second floor. She was the sixth of seven children born to Trudy Mae Gates and Jesse James Gray, whose "lungs were damaged from a gas attack" while fighting in World War I. 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. [6], In April 1982, 53-year-old Ruth Munroe began living with Puente in her upstairs apartment, but soon died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. They described a woman of contradictions. Her demeanor is, for the most part, politely docile, and I begin to perceive how so many could consider her trustworthy. Intense news coverage led to Puentes trial moving to Monterey. There, she quickly got back to her old tricks. Dorothea Puente awaiting arraignment in Sacramento, California on November 17, 1988.