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Dorothea Puente’s Background

Dorothea Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9th, 1929, in Redlands, California.

Her childhood was rough as her parents were alcoholics, and her mother was in the sex industry. Her father passed away in 1937 of tuberculosis, and a year later, her mother died in a motorcycle accident.

Puente and her siblings spent time in an orphanage, where Puente suffered more trauma as she was violated.

By 1945, the 16-year-old was married; by 19, she had two children. She sent one to live with a relative and put the other one up for adoption.

Dorothea Puente’s Life of Crime

Her life of crime started in 1948 when she was 19 years old. She went to a store in Riverside, California, and bought some women’s accessories with forged checks. She was busted and pleaded guilty to forgery. A judge sentenced her to four months in jail and three years probation.

Soon after she got out of jail, her husband left her.

Puente married again in 1952, and for the most part, she stayed out of legal trouble for an extended period. But she was a lousy wife and would constantly cheat on her merchant seaman husband, Axel Bren Johansson when he was away. She would also spend his money.

By 1960, she looked like a successful, law-abiding citizen running a bookkeeping firm in Sacramento. But it was a front to hide that she was running a brothel. She ended up in handcuffs and spent 90 days in jail.

In 1961, her husband had her committed to a mental hospital due to her criminal activities, excessive drinking, and suicide attempts.

Puente and Johansson divorced in 1966, and Puente began presenting as a religious woman. She started to provide abused women a place to stay without charging them a fee.

By 1968, she was on her fourth marriage to Robert Jose Puente. The marriage went downhill fast and ended after just 16 months. The couple divorced in 1973, but Puente used the surname for the rest of her life.

By the 1970s, Dorothea Puente moved on from helping women to running a boarding house in Sacramento to help the addicted, homeless, and mentally ill. She would hold alcoholics anonymous meetings and help many of these people sign up for Social Security benefits.

People trusted the small, aging woman with gray hair and thick glasses, but they shouldn’t have. In 1978, authorities caught the 49-year-old cashing 34 checks that belonged to her tenants. She received five years’ probation and had to pay $4,000 in restitution.

On January 16th, 1982, she met a 74-year-old man at a bar. She returned to the man’s place. He probably thought he was about to get laid, but he was wrong. Instead, she drugged him and then ransacked his home. She got away with coins, jewelry, and other items.

Crimes Escalate To Murder

In April 1982, 61-year-old Ruth Monroe went to stay at Puente’s home. Soon, she started getting sick, and two weeks later, she died. The medical examiner ruled the death to be an accidental overdose.

On May 16th, 1982, Puente visited 49-year-old Dorothy Osborne. She drugged the woman and stole credit cards and other items.

Two months later, she was back in jail after being convicted of three counts of grand theft. She was sentenced to 5 years, but she was released on September 9th, 1985

After leaving prison, she was picked up by 77-year-old Everson Theodore Gillmouth and his friend Ricardo Ordorica. Ordorica and his family had been staying at Puente’s boarding home.

Gillmouth, on the other hand, was writing Puente while she was locked up, and he went to stay with her.

Within weeks, he was dead, and Puente was cashing his Social Security checks.

In October 1985, Puente offered a handyman $800 and Gillmouth’s truck to build her a six-foot-long wooden box. After the job was complete, Puente put Gilmouth’s body in it and nailed it shut. She convinced the oblivious handyman to help her dump the 300-pound box near the Sacramento River, an hour away from the boarding house.

The body was found soon after, but it was classified as a John Doe until 1998.

In the fall of 1986, 78-year-old Betty Mae Palmer started staying at Puente’s boarding house. Within days, Puente got an ID card with her photo beside Palmer’s name.

At some point, Palmer was killed and dismembered, and some parts of her were buried in Puente’s yard.

Puente went on to cash $7,000 worth of social security checks that belonged to Palmer.

Around the same time Palmer was killed 78 year old, Leona Carpenter was in and out of the hospital with health issues. Puente became the woman’s power of attorney and started cashing her social security checks soon after.

When Carpenter left the hospital in December, she went and lived with Puente. She later had another hospital stay before returning to Puente’s residence. By February 1987, Carpenter was dead and buried in Puente’s yard.

62-year-old James Gallop moved into Puente’s place in February 1987 but disappeared soon after a July 20th doctor’s appointment.

61-year-old Vera Faye Martin went to stay with Puente on October 2nd, 1987. Three days later, Puente was cashing her social security checks. By October 19th, Martin was dead as she didn’t contact her daughter on her birthday.

65-year-old Dorothy Miller moved into the home on October 21st, 1987. A month later, Miller was gone, and Puente brought over a carpet cleaner to remove a stain.

On November 29th, 1987, Brenda Trujillo, who had met Puente in jail in 1982, sent a letter to the Social Security office accusing Puente of stealing $3,500 worth of Social Security checks.

51-year-old Alvaro “Bert” Gonzales Montoya moved into Puente’s place in February 1988. By March Puente was the beneficiary of his checks, and by August 24th, he was gone, and someone was cleaning out his room.

55-year-old Benjamin Fink moved in in March 1988. He disappeared after staying at Puentes’s home for six weeks.

Investigation

Puente had killed multiple people, thinking no one would care or notice, but she was wrong. Killing Montoya was the beginning of her end.

Puente told people he had left town and gone to Mexico. His social worker didn’t buy it and spent the next three months trying to contact him.

After getting the runaround from Puente, the social worker went to the police station, and on November 7th, 1988, they showed up at Puente’s home. A man who had previously stayed at the home lied and told police he saw Montoya two days earlier, but he secretly slipped police a note that said, “She wants me to lie to you.”

He spoke to the police at a later time and alerted them to some suspicious activity in the backyard.

On November 11th, police came back, and Puente permitted them to dig in her yard, and they found a body within 30 minutes.

By then, Puente had slipped away from the home, but she was arrested five days later in Los Angeles.

Autopsies would later reveal all of the victims were killed with prescription drugs. Police estimated Dorothea stole about $87,000 from her victims and spent some of it on a facelift.

Legal Proceedings

She went to trial in February 1993 and faced nine murder charges. The case went to the jury in late July, and after 11 days of deliberation, the jury was deadlocked on all nine counts.

She was very close to being a free woman, but the jury continued to deliberate for another 24 days.

When it was all said and done, they convicted Puente for the murders of Benjamin Fink, Leona Carpenter, and Dorothy Miller. They deadlocked on the other six cases.

The jurors didn’t have the balls to send the 64-year-old to death row. She was sentenced to life in prison, where she died on March 27th, 2011; she was 82 years old.