Dorothea Puente

What the record shows

Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house at 1426 F Street in downtown Sacramento, California, where seven bodies were dug out of the yard in November 1988. Prosecutors charged her with nine murders committed between 1982 and 1988. According to the federal habeas order in Puente v. Mitchell (N.D. Cal., 2006), which recites the facts found by the California Court of Appeal, a Monterey County jury convicted her on August 26, 1993 of two first-degree and one second-degree murder with a multiple-murder special circumstance and deadlocked on six counts. She received two concurrent life terms without parole and died at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla on March 27, 2011.

The earliest charged death was that of Ruth Munroe, 61, a friend who moved into Puente's flat in April 1982 and died there on April 28, 1982; the court record says toxicology showed a massive codeine overdose and the coroner listed the cause as undetermined. In August 1982 Puente was convicted of administering a controlled substance, grand theft and forgery, and was released from a five-year term on September 9, 1985. Everson Gillmouth, 77, who had moved in with her, was last heard from that September. On January 1, 1986 a body was found in a nailed wooden box beside the Sacramento River in Sutter County; a handyman testified that Puente had him build the box and dump it there. It was later identified as Gillmouth.

From 1986 Puente took in boarders, many referred by a county social worker. The court record lists the tenants named in the charges: Betty Palmer, 78; Leona Carpenter, 78; James Gallop, 62; Vera Faye Martin, 61; Dorothy Miller, 65; Benjamin Fink, 55; and Alvaro "Bert" Montoya, 51. Each disappeared within weeks or months of arriving, Puente gave explanations for their absence, and their benefit checks kept coming to 1426 F Street, where she forged the endorsements. She filled 35 prescriptions for the sedative flurazepam (Dalmane) between 1985 and 1988, and sedatives were detected in some of the remains.

The case broke after Montoya, last seen on August 24, 1988, missed appointments and his social worker, Judy Moise, filed a missing persons report; the Associated Press reported that police reopened the matter on her complaint. On November 11, 1988, detectives and Puente's parole officer visited the house, she gave permission to dig, and officers found bones and a shoe containing a foot that morning. Digging on November 12, 13 and 14 uncovered seven bodies. On November 12 Puente left for a nearby hotel and did not return. She was recognized at a Los Angeles motel bar and arrested on November 16, 1988.

An information filed July 3, 1990 charged nine counts of first-degree murder. A change of venue was granted in February 1992 because of local publicity, and the trial ran about eight months in Monterey County in 1993. The defense argued that the boarders had died naturally, or by suicide in Munroe's case, and that Puente had hidden the bodies to keep collecting their checks. The jury found her guilty of the first-degree murders of Fink and Miller and the second-degree murder of Carpenter; it deadlocked on the other six counts, 11 to 1 on four of them, and those counts were dismissed. The penalty jury also deadlocked, so no death sentence was imposed. On December 10, 1993 she was sentenced to two concurrent terms of life without parole and a concurrent 15 years to life.

The California Court of Appeal, Sixth District, affirmed the convictions on August 28, 1997 but ordered a hearing on juror misconduct claims, which the Monterey County Superior Court rejected on September 25, 1998; the California Supreme Court denied review. On March 10, 2006 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California denied her federal habeas petition, rejecting the argument that the evidence failed to prove the deaths were homicides. The Associated Press reported that she died of natural causes on March 27, 2011, aged 82.

Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California, on January 9, 1929, according to Wikipedia, which also records convictions for forgery in 1948, for running a brothel in 1960, and in 1978 for cashing tenants' government checks.