00:00:05
-On November the 11th, 1988,
police searching for missing
51-year-old Bert Montoya
00:00:12
paid a visit
to the boarding house where he'd been living
in Sacramento, California.
00:00:18
Rumors of suspicious
activity in the garden led detectives to begin
digging up the area.
00:00:25
-I'm sitting in this hole,
and I'm hanging on to what looks like
a human femur bone.
00:00:32
-Over the next 3 days, seven bodies would be
discovered under the ground at 1426 F Street.
00:00:40
The landlady
and number-one suspect was a 59-year-old woman
named Dorothea Puente.
00:00:47
-When you look at this person,
you don't automatically assume or even think
that this is a serial killer.
00:00:53
She looks like
everybody's grandma. -Puente had been stealing from
the tenants who trusted her.
00:01:00
The easiest way to keep them
quiet was to murder them. -She was a survivalist,
killing these people
00:01:08
when necessary
to survive, period. They had to go. -Dorothea Puente had
been unmasked
00:01:15
as one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It is one of the most
infamous homes in the USA,
00:01:45
1426 F Street in downtown
Sacramento, California became the makeshift
burial site of seven people.
00:01:55
Their landlady and murderer
was 59-year-old Dorothea Puente. Eventually charged
with nine murders in 1988,
00:02:06
she had poisoned her tenants
in order to steal from them. Puente died in 2011 at the age
of 82, but the house lives on.
00:02:16
Now under the ownership of
Tom Williams and Barbara Holmes, it's become
a macabre monument to her.
00:02:26
-It was built in 1895, and it's gone through
a lot of iterations, lot of people have been
in and out of it.
00:02:34
It can't be torn down. It's considered
a historic house in Sacramento, and they would not let anybody
tear it down, so here it sits.
00:02:44
-Detective John Cabrera helped
bring Puente to justice when he uncovered human remains
in the yard of 1426 F Street
00:02:53
in November, 1988. -As far as the interior of this
house, it's still the same. The floors in which
the victims walked on,
00:03:05
the floor in
the sleeping bedroom is where the victims lied. It's still the original floors
in here, everything.
00:03:15
-The Victorian house has become
a tourist attraction, and Tom and Barbara have embraced
the gruesome history of it.
00:03:22
-We love it. We have no problem
whatsoever with any of it. So this is just our house,
and we made it home,
00:03:30
and we're pretty happy with it. You still get people
walking by asking, you know,
00:03:34
how could we be crazy enough
to buy this house and stuff, but, between the two of us,
00:03:38
we've made it into a home,
don't you think? -Yeah, and, you know, we tried
to make it more comfortable
00:03:44
and tried to defuse
the whole mystique around it, and, yeah, we're doing our best.
00:03:52
-She was a hardened criminal
in the body of a little old lady, yeah. She was a hard, hard person.
00:03:56
-Pure evil.
-Despite the renovations, John still remembers the home
as the boarding house
00:04:03
where nine people
lost their lives. -This is what I would
call the death room. This is where Dorothea
would bring her victims
00:04:12
after giving them the drug
and alcohol combination, and then bringing them in here
and leaving them on the floor
00:04:19
until she could prepare
them at a later time. And when I pulled
the carpet back,
00:04:24
the odor was so overwhelming, it was unbelievable, but I knew
and recognized that smell,
00:04:31
and it was the smell
of putrefied body fluid that had seeped through the
wooden floor from her victims
00:04:38
who had laid there for anywhere
from 2 to 4 weeks probably. -The day after finding
the first body,
00:04:46
Saturday,
November the 12th, 1988, John vividly recalls the moment he realized the little old lady
living at 1426 F Street
00:04:56
was not what she seemed. -I looked up at one point
onto that balcony, and Dorothea was standing
there looking right
00:05:04
straight down at me, knowing that probably
within minutes, I was going to uncover
that second body,
00:05:12
and sidetracked me
from digging in order to walk her over to the motel, and it's there
she made her escape.
00:05:22
-Puente would remain a wanted
fugitive for 5 days, but her story begins
over 85 years ago.
00:05:32
She was born Dorothea Gray
in San Bernardino County, California on
January the 9th, 1929.
00:05:42
-She was one
of several children. She lost both of her parents
quite early on. She spent time in an orphanage.
00:05:48
She was kind of passed
from pillar to post quite a lot, so she didn't form those stable,
00:05:53
secure attachments with her
caregivers that many of us do, and I think that went on
to shape the person
00:05:59
that she became. -Dorothea, you know, lived a
very difficult early childhood. She was deprived
in substantial ways.
00:06:08
She didn't have loving parents. She had to scavenge for food. -By the mid 1960s,
00:06:14
Dorothea had been
married three times and taken on the name
of her third husband, Puente.
00:06:21
She had already served time
in prison for forging checks and had found a new way
to earn money.
00:06:30
-She starts to get
involved in sex work, selling her body to basically put clothes
on her back and feed herself.
00:06:37
So she's living this quite
kind of feral existence. Now, here's an individual
for whom violence and abuse
00:06:43
was just normal for her if we look back at her
childhood experiences. They're certainly not normal
and warm and loving.
00:06:51
They are quite brutal
and quite cold, so this is the only thing
that she knows. It's those basic emotions
and those basic instincts.
00:06:59
-And then, after becoming
a prostitute, she discovered this occupation
of being a caregiver,
00:07:05
which requires
minimal qualifications, and, all of a sudden,
a world was opened up to her.
00:07:12
-In 1981, Puente began renting
an apartment at 1426 F Street in downtown Sacramento.
00:07:21
She took on the role of
caretaker for the other tenants in the Victorian boarding house.
00:07:27
Soon after, Puente met
61-year-old Ruth Monroe. Ruth's son, Bill Clausen
remembers his mother fondly.
00:07:37
-She was great.
I mean, she was my mom. I'm going to say she was great. But she was.
00:07:43
She brought up five kids
after my father passed away, and I thought
she did a good job.
00:07:50
We met Dorothea
through a gentleman that my mom met
while she was working, and he kept asking her out,
00:08:00
and she finally
went out with him, and then they started
seeing each other, and he introduced
her to Dorothea.
00:08:09
During their friendship, Dorothea decided she wanted
to open a restaurant, and my mom wasn't
working anymore,
00:08:19
and my mom had
a little bit of money, so she ended up opening
the little café at the Round Corner Bar.
00:08:30
-Ruth ended up marrying Harold, the man who'd introduced
her to Puente. But soon, he was diagnosed
with cancer
00:08:38
and living full-time
in a hospital. Ruth didn't want to live alone,
and Puente had an idea.
00:08:46
She could live with her
at 1426 F Street. It turned out to be
a fatal decision. -We moved her in there
on Easter Sunday, 1982,
00:09:00
and she died April 26th,
2 weeks later. I saw my mom every day from
the time I moved her in there.
00:09:10
I stopped by there
on my way home from work, and the last 3 days of her life, she seemed like
she was getting sick,
00:09:23
and when I went there, I'd noticed that she had
a drink in her hand, and my mom didn't drink.
00:09:30
So I asked her, I said,
"What's that?" And she said it was a drink that Dorothea fixed
to calm her nerves.
00:09:37
I said fine, and I didn't
think anything of it because I knew they were
friends, and, okay, fine.
00:09:43
-But Ruth deteriorated so badly
over the next few days that the next time
Bill went to visit her,
00:09:50
she was almost catatonic. -Mom was laying there. I sat next to her
and touched her and told her,
00:09:57
I said, "Dorothea is taking
care of you. You'll be fine." And she had a tear coming out
of her eye, and that was it.
00:10:05
She didn't say anything. She just laid there. The next time morning,
I got a call from my brother
00:10:15
telling me that mom was dead. Went over there, she had
already been taken away by the coroner's wagon,
00:10:24
and Dorothea had said
that she committed suicide. -The news stunned Bill.
-Totally out of character.
00:10:31
She had everything to live for. She had grandchildren.
She was happy. It's not easy, not easy.
00:10:38
You still have the pain
in your heart. -By August 1982, Dorothea was back in trouble
with the authorities.
00:10:48
She had been abusing
her position as caretaker for her fellow tenants. -Dorothea had pled
guilty to fraud.
00:10:57
She was forging signature
on the back of Social Security checks of her victims
and then cashing them.
00:11:03
She received a prison sentence
and was sent to the women's prison
down in Chowchilla.
00:11:07
Well, in 1985, she was paroled,
and when she paroled, she came back to Sacramento,
00:11:13
and she came back
to 1426 F Street. -The caretaker was back
in business. The next time police arrived
on Dorothea Puente's doorstep,
00:11:25
they would be armed
with shovels, searching for a missing man, and what they would unearth
in the yard of 1426 F Street
00:11:33
would shock the world. In September 1985, 56-year-old Dorothea Puente
was out of prison
00:11:44
after serving 3 years for fraud and back living
at 1426 F Street, the boarding house
where she acted as landlady
00:11:53
for her ne'er-do-well tenants. Despite being on parole, Puente continued to exploit
the other residents
00:12:01
by collecting their
Social Security checks and keeping most
of the money for herself.
00:12:07
-She knows that
vulnerable people aren't really looked after, that the people
are forgotten about,
00:12:13
that people don't care
about them, and she goes,
and she targets them. So she's a predator
who's not just picking up
00:12:20
on individual vulnerabilities, but she's picking up
on social ones, as well. -For 3 years,
Puente went undetected.
00:12:28
Tenants at the Sacramento
boarding house came and went until
November, 1988, when a local social worker,
Judy Moise,
00:12:38
filed a missing-persons
report after losing touch with a 51-year-old
called Bert Montoya.
00:12:46
Bert suffered
from mental disabilities and was a diagnosed
schizophrenic. His last known address
was 1426 F Street.
00:12:57
-I got a copy of the report, and what I started doing then
was running a background check
00:13:04
on the missing person
who was Bert Montoya and trying to get a little bit
of background on him
00:13:09
and also running a check
on the caretaker who was in charge
of this particular individual,
00:13:18
and Bert was a disabled adult, and the caretaker,
Dorothea Puente, was apparently in charge
of him living here.
00:13:28
-On November the 11th, 1988,
John Cabrera, his partner, Terry Brown, and Puente's
parole officer, Jim Wilson,
00:13:37
decided to pay a visit
to 1426 F Street to search for some clues into the disappearance
of Bert Montoya.
00:13:47
-Prior to leaving on that day,
we were starting to leave, and Judy Moise turned
to me and said,
00:13:55
"You guys better
take some shovels." And I went, "Well, what for?" And she said, "Because
I've driven by in the past,
00:14:01
and I've seen mounds
of dirt out there, and it kind of looked
like a burial ground."
00:14:07
-Armed with shovels, John, Terry, and Jim arrived
at Puente's boarding house. -Well, we come
to the front door,
00:14:15
knock on the door, the three
of us, and she answered. And she's dressed very nicely.
00:14:24
She looked at me and said,
"I was expecting you guys." You know, it kind of
caught me off guard.
00:14:31
And I said, "Okay." Well, I said,
"You know why we're here. We're here to see, you know,
00:14:36
about Bert,
what happened to him." And she said, "Yeah." And I asked if we could come in.
00:14:42
-John's first task was to find out more
about the mysterious house. -What is this place,
1426 F Street?
00:14:51
What is it here
that you're running? What is this place? What are you doing here?
00:14:56
And, at that time,
she looked at me. She looked at her
parole officer, and she just said, you know,
00:15:03
"Jim, I'm in violation
of my parole." -Puente had been ordered
not to run a boarding house
00:15:12
after her release
from prison in 1985. She'd got away with it
for 3 years due to her seemingly
charming persona.
00:15:23
-Dorothea Puente played
this role. She crafted this incredibly
skilled performance
00:15:28
as a harmless little old lady, so she would often
take her teeth out. She would tell people
she was 10 or 15 years older
00:15:35
than she actually was. She wanted to present herself
as innocent and kindly when she was anything but.
00:15:42
-While Jim and Terry chatted
with Puente in the kitchen, John began his search
of 1426 F Street.
00:15:50
It appeared that Bert Montoya had simply vanished
into thin air. -After I completely looked
through the rooms,
00:15:59
didn't find anything,
I came back, and, bearing in mind
what Judy had talked about
00:16:06
as far as the mounds of dirt,
I asked Dorothea, I said, "Look, I'm going to be able to tell the
social worker that we looked,
00:16:14
and we didn't find anything." And she was somewhat
agreeable with that, "Okay, you know, that's good."
00:16:19
And then I said, "I have
one more question for you. Can I dig in your yard?" And she says,
"Why don't we do this?"
00:16:31
You guys go back to the office. I know you have a lot better
work to do than to be over here,
00:16:37
and then I'll make a phone call. I'll call some people,
they'll come over here, and they'll do
the digging for you,
00:16:41
and then you can come back. I thanked her, and I said,
you know, "We're here. We have the shovels.
00:16:48
We'll just go ahead
and dig around. If there's anything
we put out of place, we'll do our best
to get it back,
00:16:53
you know, the way it was." And so she says, "Okay." And that's when we went
outside to dig around.
00:17:00
-The three men
only had two shovels, so John borrowed on from Puente. -So we had three shovels.
00:17:09
Three of us were digging,
and then one of the holes is what we started finding
something similar to cloth,
00:17:15
and it just seemed
out of place in the ground. And then I dig
a little bit further,
00:17:22
and I was down to about 3 feet, and that's when I thought
I struck a tree root. So I took the shovel,
and I started banging on it,
00:17:30
and I started trying to dislodge
this root or sever it so I could continue to dig down,
and I couldn't do it.
00:17:37
It just wouldn't break,
so I got down in the hole, and, with both of my hands
and bracing my feet,
00:17:43
I just kept pulling on this
what I thought to be a root. And I pulled on it
and pulled on it, and, finally,
00:17:49
it dislodged itself. And I'm sitting in this hole, and I'm hanging onto what looks
like a human femur bone.
00:18:00
And, at that time,
"Get out of the hole," and I realized something's up. We've just come across
human remains.
00:18:08
-The three men were completely
stunned, as was Puente. -She looked down into the hole,
00:18:15
and she could see the bone,
and she grabs her mouth, and she's, "Oh, is that
what I think it is?"
00:18:23
"Yeah. What can you
tell me about this?" She says, "I don't know, but there's been other people
that's been living here.
00:18:32
I was in prison," and there was a lot more people
living here before her. -John halted the dig.
00:18:39
A full forensic search
of the yard would have to begin
the next day. -At that time, I decided
I was going to take Dorothea
00:18:48
back down
to the Hall of Justice, and I was going to now
question her in full. I questioned her
about what I found,
00:18:55
and I questioned her
about where Bert was. I'd even told her as part of
my technique in my interview,
00:19:03
I said,
"I bet, if I dig anymore, I'm going to find more bodies," and she just looked
right at me and said,
00:19:11
"Well, if you do,
I didn't put them there." -As news spread of
the discovery of human remains,
00:19:18
the press were in attendance at
1426 F Street the very next day, Saturday, November
the 12th, 1988.
00:19:27
Deputy coroner Laura Santos
was in charge of the excavation. -I think there's a mode
you go into
00:19:34
when you're an investigator
that you just know you have a job to focus on,
and you just focus on that,
00:19:40
and there were
a lot of distractions because there were reporters
from all over the world,
00:19:46
and there were crowds of people
lining the streets, and people would shout at me
and tell me things like,
00:19:52
"Turn towards the camera
when you're digging." And, you know, I just had to
ignore it and shut it all out
00:19:59
because I just felt
I had a job to do, and I knew it was
a really important job in that a lot of what
happened in the future
00:20:05
was going to hinge
on what I did as far as whether she was
prosecuted or not. -Despite having a body
unearthed in her yard,
00:20:13
59-year-old Dorothea Puente had not been charged
with any offense. There was no reason to suspect
she may be responsible.
00:20:23
As John Cabrera
continued his dig, Puente called him
into the house. -And she says,
"Am I under arrest?"
00:20:32
And I just thought, "How odd? What was it that gave her
the impression that she was under arrest?"
00:20:41
Immediately, I said, "No." And I said, "Why do you ask?" And she said, "Well, all of this
is making me nervous."
00:20:49
And she goes, "I would like
to get a cup of coffee, and I'd like to go over
to where my nephew
00:20:54
is around the corner
at the hotel." And I said, "Okay. Get what you need, and then
I'll walk you over there."
00:21:03
She comes walking out,
has a little red coat, has her purse, walked down
the stairs, walk out.
00:21:10
But what I told her
was that I would escort her because there were a lot
of people starting to gather,
00:21:15
and I thought, "I don't want anyone walking up
to her or bothering her, so I used that ruse
to walk her down to the corner.
00:21:23
-A photographer
captured the moment John escorted Puente
out of the house. No one yet knew it,
00:21:30
but Dorothea Puente would never
return to 1426 F Street. -I watched her go
all the way down
00:21:39
and then go up into the hotel, and that was the last
I saw of her at that time. So I run back,
and I continue digging again.
00:21:48
Short time later,
I hit something, and I'm fiddling around
with my shovel. I'm trying to get it up,
figuring, "What's down here?"
00:21:57
And I keep trying to bring it up
and bring it up, and I do, and in my shovel is a human leg.
00:22:06
So, immediately, I stop. I yell to my commander,
"We have another one." And he runs over,
and the first thing he asks is,
00:22:14
"Where's Dorothea?" -It was a good question. Where was Dorothea Puente? A second body had been found
buried in her yard,
00:22:24
and she was nowhere to be seen. She wasn't at the hotel
having a coffee. It had all been a ruse so that
she could make an escape.
00:22:33
Dorothea Puente was on the run. On Saturday, November the 12th,
1988, a police forensic team
00:22:44
were digging up the yard
of a boarding house in Sacramento, California. They had just unearthed
a second body.
00:22:53
Dorothea Puente, the 59-year-old
landlady of 1426 F Street had left the house and headed to a nearby hotel
to have a coffee,
00:23:04
but detectives were now
very keen to speak with her. -I said I took her and watched
her go to the coffee shop.
00:23:11
She's supposedly over there
at the hotel. So then another detective
came and found out,
00:23:16
by speaking with the person
at the counter in there, that, in fact, Dorothea
had come into the hotel,
00:23:23
walked through the lobby, went to a pay phone,
picked up the pay phone and apparently called a taxi cab
00:23:29
because a cab arrived
and took off. -Puente had absconded, and detectives had no idea
where she was headed.
00:23:39
-And so, at that time,
we called in the FBI and, you know, enlisted the help of other
resources and outside agencies
00:23:47
in trying to locate her because that is what
was key right now is to try to find her
as fast as we could.
00:23:57
-Back at 1426 F Street, one of the many people who had
gathered to watch the dig
00:24:03
had given some
important information to deputy coroner Laura Santos. -He told the story that he had
dug holes in this yard
00:24:14
for Dorothea,
and she had paid him cash, and she just told him
she was burying trash,
00:24:21
so he came in and pointed out
where he had dug holes. -Over the next 3 days, the excavation
of the yard continued.
00:24:33
-Just as we kept digging, we kept finding bodies
and more bodies, and it just seemed endless.
00:24:42
Whatever we took down,
whatever we moved, wherever we were digging,
we'd find a body.
00:24:48
It was just unbelievable. She put seven people
in this small yard, and there wasn't even a witness
to any of these burials,
00:24:58
not one. -The seventh and final body
was found on Monday, the 14th of November. It was buried right in front
of the house,
00:25:09
just feet from the sidewalk. -Well, she was kind of
bundled up in almost like a scrunched up seated position,
00:25:19
but she was missing her
head, hands, and feet. I went through every flowerpot and emptied them out
to make sure
00:25:27
that we weren't
missing anything, but those appendages
were never found. -To this day, we've never
recovered the head,
00:25:34
hands, or feet. Their whereabouts,
it's anybody's guess. If the walls in this home
could talk,
00:25:46
we would probably be horrified. -Three days after the discovery
of the seventh body,
00:25:54
Thursday, the 17th of November, Dorothea Puente
was finally found. She had been spotted
by a man in a bar
00:26:02
almost 400 miles
from Sacramento in Los Angeles. -He goes home,
and, while he's watching TV,
00:26:12
he sees her on TV
as being wanted on the news, so he calls LAPD,
gives the information,
00:26:20
"I was just having drinks
with this person." -The man told the police which
hotel Puente was staying in,
00:26:26
and she was promptly arrested. John Cabrera immediately
flew down to John Wayne Airport
00:26:33
in nearby Santa Ana. -We landed. LAPD pulled up
out on the tarmac. We got out of the plane,
and there she was.
00:26:43
They had her in cuffs. You know, we ceremoniously
walked over, and they transferred her to me.
00:26:52
I asked her, you know,
"Are you okay?" "Yeah. I'm okay." And then, out of nowhere,
she just says,
00:27:00
"Mr. Cabrera, I'm sorry." -John had many questions to ask
about the seven bodies
00:27:09
buried in Puente's yard, but there was still no proof
that they had been murdered,
00:27:14
and the 59-year-old fugitive
wasn't planning on a confession. -We got back here
to Sacramento.
00:27:22
I took her down
to the Hall of Justice. At that time, I asked her
if she wanted to give me
00:27:28
any kind of a statement
and she declined, and so we just booked her
into Sacramento County Jail,
00:27:34
and that would be the last time
that I'd ever speak with her. She would never
speak to me again.
00:27:38
-With Puente safely
locked away, the task of identifying
the seven bodies had begun.
00:27:45
-Most of them
didn't have teeth, or they had one or two teeth. In the case of the one body
in the front yard,
00:27:51
she didn't have any hands,
so we couldn't do fingerprints. So we started
gathering information.
00:27:57
-Most of the tenants
at 1426 F Street were either homeless or
estranged from their families,
00:28:05
which made identifying them
even more difficult. -In the beginning,
there were people saying,
00:28:12
"Oh, you're never going
to be able to do this." And so I was pretty happy that I
was able to identify everybody,
00:28:18
and they all had some kind
of disposition, you know, as far as most of them had
some family members somewhere,
00:28:25
and so they are all buried. -Among the seven names
was Bert Montoya, the man whose disappearance had
initiated the dig on F Street.
00:28:37
-Bert would be the third
body that I found. He was buried under a concrete
basin in the backyard.
00:28:46
He was number three,
and that puzzle was now solved. -Bert Montoya
had wandered away.
00:28:54
He had some type
of mental deficiency, and his parents had
always taken care of him.
00:29:00
About 13 years before he died, he disappeared from their home
in New Orleans, Louisiana,
00:29:06
and they had no idea
what had happened to him, and it turned out
that his 92-year-old
00:29:11
mother was still alive, and she had been searching
for him her whole life, or, you know, even since
he'd been missing,
00:29:18
and so they were really,
really grateful to know, even though it was such a sad
ending, they were very thankful
00:29:24
that they were able
to have him come home. -As well as
identifying the victims, Laura needed to find out
the cause of their deaths.
00:29:34
Toxicology reports showed
that each of the seven bodies had traces of the same
prescription sleeping pill.
00:29:42
-We did find traces of Dalmane,
the drug in the bodies, and that was another thing
that I was able to determine
00:29:49
by gathering all these
medical records on everyone, none of the victims had
ever been prescribed Dalmane.
00:29:55
Only Dorothea Puente
had been prescribed Dalmane. -This particular drug,
when coupled with alcohol,
00:30:02
could be deadly. It just simply
put you in a catatonic state and, with the alcohol, overwhelm
the body and stop the heart.
00:30:14
-Poisoning is one of the ways we've seen female
serial killers operate because it's a way
that doesn't require
00:30:19
a lot of physical strength, and so you don't have to
overcome your victim physically
00:30:23
because that's more
difficult for a female, particularly, in this case,
an elderly female,
00:30:28
to overcome the victim
physically. -As detectives delved
into Puente's past, they found even more evidence
00:30:35
that exposed her
as a callous killer. -All in all, in the very end
of the investigation,
00:30:41
she would be charged
with nine murders, seven in the yard
and which we would uncover,
00:30:46
and then they added Ruth Monroe. -Ruth's death had initially
been ruled a suicide back
00:30:54
in April, 1982. The new revelation was a shock
for her son, Bill Clausen. -That kind of just
pulled my stomach,
00:31:05
and that's, like I said, that's when it brought
everything back to where, "Okay, now we can go after her."
00:31:13
You know, because all this time, we know that mom
didn't commit suicide, especially with the amounts
of the drugs that were in her,
00:31:22
all the undissolved pills
in her stomach. There's no way that she could
have taken all of that
00:31:27
and lived long enough
to take everything. -The ninth victim was
a 77-year-old man from Oregon
00:31:34
called Everson Gillmouth. He had become pen pals
with Puente during her 3 years in prison for fraud.
00:31:42
-And then,
when she paroled in 1985, he went and picked her up and drove her back here
to the boarding house,
00:31:50
and this is where
he would be staying. -Within months, Everson had
seemingly disappeared
00:31:57
and severed all ties
with his family. -Every time they would call,
he was always out.
00:32:03
They never got
to speak with him, and she always had a reason why. But, in actuality,
he picked her up in late 1985.
00:32:13
He was laying in
a homemade coffin along the Sacramento River
in early 1986, and Everson would
remain a John Doe
00:32:23
until this case in 1988 broke, and that's when his family
contacted our office in saying,
00:32:29
"We're looking for our father." -Puente remained on remand
for over 4 years. Her defense lawyers were worried
00:32:37
she wouldn't get
a fair trial in Sacramento due to her notoriety. Eventually, it was agreed
that the trial would be held
00:32:45
in Salinas
in nearby Monterey County. -We got a court date, and what
I wanted to do was get in there,
00:32:53
give my information,
give my testimony and, for the sake of
the families of these victims,
00:33:00
wanted to make sure
that she would never walk on the public streets again, that she wasn't going to do that
or harm anybody anymore.
00:33:10
-But the trial would not be
as straightforward as investigators hoped. Puente's refusal to admit
to the murders
00:33:18
meant they would
somehow need to prove that the sweet little
old lady in the dock was,
00:33:23
in fact, a heartless killer. After being on remand
for over 4 years, the trial of Dorothea Puente
finally began
00:33:33
at the Monterey
County Courthouse on February the 9th, 1993. The 64-year-old admitted
to burying the bodies
00:33:43
of seven of her tenants and continuing to claim
their Social Security money, but maintained she was innocent
of the nine counts of murder
00:33:52
against her. Bill Clausen testified
during the trial. His 61-year-old mother,
Ruth Monroe,
00:34:00
was one of the women that Puente
was accused of killing in 1982. -When I walked to the jury box,
or to where I needed to be,
00:34:14
she just had just a cold
stare, just a cold stare, and, after I testified,
I walked away.
00:34:24
She just kept staring
straight ahead up by the judge. It angered me at the time.
00:34:31
When I walked back facing her,
as I was walking back to go back and sit down, my thoughts
were just to strangle her,
00:34:41
but I have more control
than a lot of people, and I just walked past
and went back and sat down
00:34:49
and listened to the rest. -During the 5-month trial,
the jury heard from both sides.
00:34:58
Puente's defense team
admitted that she was a thief but not a murderer, while the prosecution argued
that the traces of Dalmane
00:35:07
proved that all the victims
had been poisoned. On August the 26th, 1993,
after deliberating for 24 days,
00:35:17
the jury found Dorothea Puente
guilty of three murders, but were deadlocked
on all the other charges.
00:35:25
-I think what disappointed me
as an investigator, and I think it
disappointed people
00:35:33
that were involved in the case, that, of all the nine
charges of murder, seven of them were so similar
00:35:43
there was no doubt
that the seven bodies that we found in this yard
should have all been guilty.
00:35:51
However, only three
of the seven in the yard would be charged against her. Four others would go 11 to one
with one juror saying no.
00:36:07
He didn't believe
that's what happened. -The juror's refusal
to deliberate meant
00:36:13
that the judge,
Michael Virga, had no choice but to declare a mistrial
on the other six charges,
00:36:20
one of them being
the murder of Ruth Monroe. -They were talking about doing
a retrial because of that,
00:36:29
but then they decided not to
because of the cost, which, I mean, I understand. It took a lot of money
as it was,
00:36:38
and then the district attorney
kept telling me, "Well, she's not going
to get any more time.
00:36:42
She's already going to
spend life in prison." So we just kind of, "Okay,"
we had to accept it.
00:36:49
-On December the 10th, 1993,
Dorothea Puente was sentenced to life imprisonment
without parole.
00:36:58
She was immediately sent
to the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.
00:37:04
The 64-year-old landlady
had killed her tenants for no other reason
than to steal their money.
00:37:13
-She wanted their
Social Security checks. She wanted that cash, so she just had to dispose
of them to get to it,
00:37:19
so she saw her victims
as obstacles. They were barriers that were
getting in the way
00:37:23
of something that she wants, and she very cool and calm,
and in a very calculated manner,
00:37:28
dispatched them
so she could have their money. -Although no charges were
brought against any others,
00:37:35
it has long been suspected that Puente must have
had an accomplice. -The issue of her
disposing of the bodies
00:37:43
creates one of the big
mysteries of her case because Dorothea was
not a large person.
00:37:48
Some of these people
were fairly large. And even to move
a 100-pound sack of potatoes
00:37:54
takes a fair amount of force. There's reason to believe
that Dorothea actually enlisted
00:37:59
the help of some other tenants who would prefer to be
her helper in the burial than her victim being buried.
00:38:10
-It was obvious to us,
given the bodies, especially Bert, someone helped her
carry these bodies down.
00:38:17
I have suspicions. I have my own opinion
who I believe helped her, but that's just something
00:38:25
that I will always leave
for the investigation. -During her time in prison, Puente remained
in the limelight.
00:38:33
She released a book
of recipes called "Cooking With
A Serial Killer" in 2004. And in 2008, she agreed to meet
with Sactown Magazine
00:38:45
journalist Martin Kuz
in the prison visitor's hall. -I waited, and I waited,
and I waited some more,
00:38:54
and as I sat there,
I thought, "I've been duped. I've fallen for another
Dorothea Puente ruse."
00:39:03
I scanned the room, wondering
if perhaps I had missed her but knowing that I hadn't,
00:39:08
and that's when the door
clanked open once more, and in walked Dorothea. -Martin was keen to speak
to the 79-year-old
00:39:17
who hadn't been seen
or heard for 15 years. -This was the first time I had ever interviewed
a serial killer,
00:39:25
so I stood up to greet her. We shook hands. Her hand felt small, bony. She gave me a tight smile,
and we began.
00:39:38
-Puente seemed happy
to make small talk, but whenever Martin steered the
conversation towards her crimes,
00:39:45
she gave him short shrift. -I said very explicitly to her
that we were coming up
00:39:51
on the 20th anniversary
of her arrest and that I was interested in
talking to her about the case.
00:40:00
Before I got very far into that
preamble, she interrupted me, and, for the first time,
she looked me square in the eye
00:40:08
and said, "I'm not guilty." -She would never have
admitted to her crimes because what purpose
would that serve?
00:40:17
I mean, often, when we see
cases of serial killers who are caught
and sent to prison,
00:40:21
we think that's
the end of the story, but it's not because
they will continue to manipulate
people behind bars.
00:40:26
They will continue to
pull people's strings and get the things
that they want. -After meeting
with Puente six times,
00:40:33
Martin's visits suddenly stopped
after the killer had asked him to buy her $115 worth of gifts.
00:40:42
-In our final conversation,
I asked her, "How does it feel to be
known as a murderer?"
00:40:49
And she looked me square
in the eye and said, "I don't give a shit
what anyone else thinks."
00:40:54
And that, to me, was as telling
as any comment that she had made to me in the time
that we had been talking.
00:41:02
This was someone who is,
in effect, revealing that, no matter what people may think
of her, she didn't care.
00:41:12
-On March the 27th, 2011,
Dorothea Puente died in prison. She was 82 years old. She took all her secrets
to the grave.
00:41:26
-When I heard she died, I mean,
it made me feel good. I had, like, a relief. If she was still alive, and I
saw her, I couldn't forgive her.
00:41:37
I should because it's
the human thing to do, but, in my heart, no. I really wouldn't want to.
00:41:47
There's nothing I can do though. She's gone. Mom's gone.
She's gone. So it's over.
00:41:58
-Dorothea Puente was
a predator. She didn't look like one. She was a wolf
in sheep's clothing,
00:42:03
but the way that
she choose her victims, she would pick people
who others didn't care about,
00:42:08
people who she could prey on. She's essentially a parasite
who hooks onto people,
00:42:13
gets what she wants out of them and then coldly disposes
of their bodies. So she really is an incredibly
dangerous character.
00:42:21
-She was a very evil woman and a woman that,
when she made her mind up what she was going to do,
00:42:29
she did it without hesitation,
without remorse. She set out on a journey,
and that journey ended
00:42:39
November 11, 1988
when we arrived at her doorstep. -When you look
at 1426 F Street today,
00:42:49
it's difficult to imagine the
horrors that took place inside. When tenants arrived here,
they would have felt comfortable
00:42:56
meeting
the sweet-looking landlady, but in Dorothea Puente's eyes,
they were subhuman.
00:43:03
Her only reason for taking them
in was to kill them, steal their money,
and bury them in her yard.
00:43:10
Puente took any remorse
she may have had for her victims to the grave. She will always be remembered
00:43:18
as one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪