Guest Author - Vance Rowe
This is coincidentally the second article in a week that is profiling a serial killer from Sacramento, California. This time the serial killer is a woman named Dorothea Puente and she allegedly killed men and women who had stayed in her boarding house. She allegedly killed these men for their pension and social security checks.
On the outside, Dorothea Puente was a normal elderly woman who was a loving grandmother. However, on the inside, Dorothea Puente was a vicious killer with a long criminal history. Her idyllic pale blue Victorian style home was the stuff of fairy tales. However, that was on the outside. In reality, the house was a literal death trap. The bodies found under her garden, under a tree and under concrete pads used for a patio of sorts, told a different story of the idyllic home.
Dorothea Puente was arrested and convicted of murder as she was killing boarders at her home so she could get their pension and government checks for herself. They signed papers stating that Dorothea Puente was in control of their checks and then they would be killed some time after that. She was smart in accepting only boarders who had no family ties with anyone so no one would miss them if they had disappeared. She didn’t count on a social worker though. A social worker had reported one her clients, a mentally retarded gentleman named Alvaro "Bert" Montoya, missing.
According to a newspaper called the Sacramento Bee, on the morning of November 11, 1988, some detectives came to the house to see about the missing man. Dorothea Puente let them look around. Detectives noticed that some ground was recently disturbed in a corner of the back yard. They dug up the spot and a human bone was found. Dorothea seemed shocked as well. The detectives stopped digging when they found a shoe with a piece of human foot wedged in it. They returned the next morning with a large forensics team and heavy digging equipment.
During the dig, Dorothea Puente asked a detective if she was under arrest and when he told her that she wasn’t, she asked if she could go to a hotel three blocks away to have a cup of coffee in the restaurant. She eventually wound up in Los Angeles instead. The police dug up seven bodies from her yard. She was eventually found and arrested n Los Angeles when a man she was trying to pick up on a bar had recognized her. He telephoned the local television station that he had seen a news story about her. The television station in turn called the police department.
She stood trial and was found guilty of murdering three of nine people. The jury could not reach a verdict on the remaining deaths but the three she was convicted of gave her life in prison with no eligibility of parole. The conviction came six years after the first bodies were dug up on December 10, 1993. She was sent to the largest women’s prison in the country, Central California Women's Facility near Chowchilla,
At almost 80 years of age, she's doing her time at Chowchilla State Prison and is currently the oldest female convict in a state penitentiary doing life without parole. She has also never admitted to poisoning people and burying the bodies.
