Unchanged are his lean, square-shouldered build and animated manner, his eyebrows spiking and hands windmilling as he recounts the investigation. 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. In 2015, the Ghost Adventures crew investigated the house, due to reports of hauntings by the victims and Puente herself. The penalty phase of the prosecution was highlighted by her prior convictions introduced by O'Mara. After noticing disturbed soil on the property, they uncovered the body of tenant Leona Carpenter, 78. Procedural wrangling moved the trial to Monterey, after a judge ruled that the intense media coverage of Puente in the Sacramento region would preclude her from receiving a fair trial here. A well-researched play by Mark Loewenstern entitled "Dorothea Puente Tells All!" Six more corpses would follow, but Puente was still on the run. 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. 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. In a low, almost plaintive voice, she replies, Puente. Its sick., Clausen knows Puentes appeals ran out last year. In the end, Cabrera erred on the side of skepticism. Dorothea Puente, ne Dorothea Helen Gray, was born on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California. The two would continue to have a turbulent relationship, and Gray filed a restraining order in 1975. She answers without pause. Under the law, Puente received life without the possibility of parole. 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. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group, '2023 will be our year of victory! Dick Schmidt/Sacramento Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images. He was going with another movie star, she says. [4], Gray's first marriage at age sixteen, in 1945, was to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific theater of World War II. 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. 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 did not strike me as a person who had a major mental illness. Going to church every day. Hayden spent months processing thousands of pieces of evidence related to the case, including a shovel used to dig up human remains. He was a good-hearted man, very kind, she says. (Puente tells me she also had twin daughters who as young adults committed suicide one week apart. The grandmother would then sneak into the rooms of her incapacitated prey and smother them to death with a pillow. A lot of women shouldnt be here., She counts herself among them, even while conceding few people believe in her innocence. The candy proves popular with youngsters, whose sporadic laughter pierces the rooms hum. Stone, Michael H., M.D. [6], Following her divorce, Gray focused on running a boarding house located at 21st and F streets in Sacramento. I leave through a different door and make my way out of the prison, stepping into the cool afternoon air. Investigators soon found the decomposing body of an elderly man inside. According to Dailymail, seven years after the death of Puente, a man named William Harder had claimed to be her grandson. 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 watch as she pushes away the empty plastic container of fried chicken strips and french fries that she finished eating earlier. The police returned and searched the house. In 16 years at the facility, she has accrued only two rules violations, the last occurring in 2004. They all know who I am, she says. There, she quickly got back to her old tricks. Acres of almond trees and farmland border the prison, a vast archipelago of dun-colored, low-slung buildings moored inside electrified fences topped with razor coil. 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. The Boarding House Killer: Directed by Steve Allen. [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. I was struck by how pleasant and socially intact and intelligent she was, says Vicary, who works in Los Angeles. A year later her mother died in a motorcycle accident. She was found guilty in three cases and one juror held out on the other four. (To the question of which verse most resonates with her, she shrugs and replies, All of em.) She then quietly gathers the clothing of her slumbering roomies to wash later in the morning, when prisoners are allowed out of their cells. Dorothea - Dorothea (also spelled Dorothe, Dorotea or other variants) is a female given name from Greek (Drotha) meaning "God's Gift". Bodies were found buried in what is now the yard at left. The advanced state of decay, meanwhile, suggested the person had died long before Montoyas presumed disappearance in August. Me and Nancy, she says, shaking her head. 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. As far as theyre concerned, Im dead.. After Puente was released from her first spell in prison for three counts. Beyond that lurked the vexing conundrum of the accused herself. 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. A couple who braved the stigma of the house's curse purchased the home, fully aware of the history. And, she says, They like my tamales.. Some of the remains were in a mummified state - bound in bed sheets, cloth and duct tape (above), Puente would lure her victims to their deaths by baking them cake laced with sleeping pills. Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929. Time has deepened the creases between her potato-like nose and dumpling cheeks, and her blanched skin has slackened at the neck. She folds the towel several times into a tight square before clasping her hands together on her lap like a child attending Mass. 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. [7] On August 18, 1982, Puente was convicted of three theft charges and sentenced to five years in prison; there, she began corresponding with Everson Gillmouth, a 77-year-old retiree from Oregon. But God always puts obstacles in peoples way. 31 of the Royal Viking. They were met by Dorothea Puente, an elderly woman with big glasses, who repeated her story that Montoya was simply on vacation. The only time they were in good health was when they stayed at my home. Nor could anyone rule out that the four women and three men had taken the drugs on their own, considering their assorted substance addictions, physical maladies and mental illnesses. A few days later I drive to Chowchilla for my final visit with her. After a number of legal hurdles, Puente's trial eventually went ahead four years later. Puente claims she spent time in the 70s with California governors Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan. Finding nothing, they asked permission to dig up the yard. She gasped at sight of the remains, hands bracketing her cheeks. The jury deliberated over a month and eventually found Puente guilty of three murders. The 9/ . The jokes on me. For years, the disappearances of these so-called shadow people who lived at the margins of society went unnoticed. This is the disturbing story of Dorothea Puente, the Death House Landlady.. Police found seven bodies. Puentes mechanical response echoes what she has told me during prior meetings, and what I will hear on subsequent visits. He was good to me. (Johansson did not respond to interview requests.). 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. Removed from her violent crimes, it actually makes perfect sense to use Puente's image on a cookbook, as she has the perfect visage of a kind old lady who probably knows a secret recipe or two that her tenants all would . In November 1985, Dorothea Puente hired a handyman named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her home. 'Never judge a book by its cover,' said retired police officer John Cabrera in 2018, the lead investigator on the case. Didnt know that at the time., The detective walked about halfway to the Clarion with Puente and her boarder, John McCauley. 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. We next met days before Thanksgiving, when the recent election of Barack Obama had boosted her hopes for the countrys future, and again in mid-December. Her lawyers argued that she might be a thief, but not a murderer. James Gallop, 62, (continued left to right) Dorothy Miller, 64. The initial jolt of uncovering a dead body on Nov. 11 ebbed as Cabrera weighed three factors. 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. He sits in his downtown office, shock of silver hair combed straight back from his high forehead, untucked short-sleeved shirt spilling over his jeans. I wait for her to speak. A gentle bear of a man, the 52-year-old Montoya suffered from untreated psychosis, a condition that for years had consigned him to the streets and homeless shelters. 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. [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]. A lot of people saw your running away as a sign of guilt. After what was then the longest deliberation in a murder case in state history24 daysthe jury convicted her of three killings. (Courtesy of The Sacramento Bee/Genaro Molina). I didnt know if anyone was going to look after him.. For William Clausen, by contrast, the bodies buried in Puentes yard confirmed what he already considered fact: she killed for profit. Look at Job, John, Paul, Moses. 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. Familiar in name, she remained an enigma. Or about the white-haired woman who turned the yard into a mass grave. 22 ratings3 reviews. A person like her, the retired sergeant says, theres no forgetting. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes). 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. Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929. Even probation officers who stopped by accepted Puentes explanation that the people living at her house were guests or friends not boarders. Dorothea Helen Gray, ms conocida como Dorothea Puente, naci el 9 de enero de 1929 en Redlands (California, Estados Unidos), en el seno de una familia trabajadora. They wanted to question her about Bert Montoya, her onetime tenant who had been reported missing. On a subsequent visit, her vanity recedes when a guard, apparently new to working the visitors hall, asks her name. [citation needed], A few weeks later, the police returned after Malcolm McKenzie, a 74-year-old pensioner (one of four elderly people Puente was accused of drugging), accused Puente of drugging and stealing from him. 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 . Dorothea Montalvo Puente (hereinafter "Petitioner") petitions for a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C 2254 challenging her 1993 conviction following a trial by jury. Their first series of holes dislodged only soft dirt and a vague sense of futility. Dorothea was convicted of three out of nine murder counts and sentenced to life in prison in August of 1993. The comments below have not been moderated. A nonfiction book, "The Bone Garden" (1994), is the definitive account of serial killer Dorothea Puente, who was the subject of a nationwide hunt after nine bodies were dug up from her Sacramento, California yard. She seems entirely harmless. Her statement hangs between us. Grandson of Dorothea Puente, shared a 'real connection' with her - Daily Newshttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGIQ4XcqArGYqiw70QoKcvw?sub_confirmation=1Grand. As police exhumed corpse after corpse, TV crews jammed F Street while gawkers scaled trees to peer into the yard. I think she truly wanted to rehabilitate [her tenants] as she could not the people in her own family, Vicary says. On January 1, 1986, a fisherman spotted the suspicious looking coffin-like box near the river and called police. She never intended to show, I realize. Dorothea often took in the elderly and homeless and placed them as her tenants. 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. Shes got everything she needs, her life is taken care of. That same year, the Victorian bungalow Puente used to commit her crimes was sold to a Sacramento couple at a public auction for $215,000. As most serial killers, Dorothea had a rough 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. Her father died of tuberculosis when Dorothea was 8; her mother, an alcoholic who alternated between abusing and deserting her children, lost custody of them in 1938. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. 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.
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