Chapter 40

The Grifter

Dorothea Puente—Sacramento

Despite her Hispanic surname, Dorothea Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in the San Bernardino County town of Redlands. Dorothea’s father, Jesse James Gray, a World War I veteran, was originally from Missouri. His lungs were damaged from a gas attack on the front lines in France, and he was a frail and sickly man. Puente’s mother, Trudy Mae Gates, hailed from Oklahoma and was a promiscuous drunkard who ran with a tough crowd. Allegedly, Trudy was a part-time prostitute. She was rarely home, and when she was, she argued incessantly with Jesse. Dorothea was the sixth of seven children born into this hellhole.

Sometime during the 1930s, the Gray family moved to Los Angeles so that Jesse could be closer to the veterans’ hospitals. His condition turned into tuberculosis and he had no hope of getting better. Trudy spent more time at the Los Angeles County jail than she did at home. Jesse died in 1937, and Trudy lost custody of her children the next year. The children were all placed in an orphanage. By the end of 1938, Trudy had died in a motorcycle accident and Dorothea and her siblings were orphans.

Dorothea coped with her sad and lonely childhood by telling tall tales and outright lies about her life. By the time she was sixteen years old, Dorothea was working as a prostitute in Olympia, Washington. She met her first husband, a soldier, while working at a cathouse there. But married life bored Dorothea. She drank alcohol and told stories about hobnobbing with movie stars and being in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. She left her husband for long periods of time, yet managed to give birth to two daughters between 1946 and 1948. Relatives raised her first daughter; her second daughter was put up for adoption.

Dorothea went on to marry three other men and decided to keep her third husband’s surname, Puente. She stole checks and prostituted herself to make ends meet. An occasional stint in jail was just part of the cost of doing business. Because Puente was incapable of telling the truth, she always took a plea bargain to avoid cross-examination.

By the time Puente was thirty years old, she was overweight and looked twice her age. In the early 1960s, Dorothea started a bordello under the guise of a bookkeeping firm in a rented storefront in Sacramento. Her house of ill-repute charged the odd sum of $7.50 for oral sex. The place was eventually raided, and Dorothea pleaded no contest, as she always did.

In the late 1960s, Puente finally found a real job, working at an outpatient home for alcoholics. She used that experience to start her own home for the indigent and addicted, except that she would take, with or without their consent, their Social Security and government assistance checks. If they complained, she’d toss them out of the home and call the police.

Puente took her tenants’ money and bought beautiful and fashionable outfits to wear. Her hair was always done in a neat and conservative updo, and she donned expensive jewelry and perfume. She generously donated money to charities and political campaigns. It was part of her fantasy to be an important person. Her compulsive lying helped her considerably. She told anyone who would listen that she was a former model, doctor, or lawyer. The poor orphan had climbed up out of her hellhole and made good.

Puente now looked like a harmless elderly grandmother, but it was a façade. She drank alcohol to excess, but hated drunken people. She wouldn’t hesitate to punch out an inebriated tenant before she tossed him down the front stairs.

After one of Puente’s alcoholic tenants was incarcerated and didn’t receive his social security checks while in jail, he started making inquires. He soon discovered that his signature had been forged. An investigation was initiated and Puente lost her business, her social standing, and her income.

Ever resourceful, Puente started a catering business with a tenant, Ruth Munroe. She also padded her income by dressing up as a nurse and sneaking into hospitals to steal patients’ belongings. Another of her scams was to dope the drinks of unsuspecting friends and casual bar pickups and then steal their money, checks, drugs, and jewelry while they were unconscious. She was eventually arrested for this pattern of crimes.

At the time of Puente’s arrest, Ruth Munroe took ill and died. The police suspected that Puente had killed her, but lacked the evidence to charge her. Puente was sentenced to five years at the California Institute for Women at Frontera. She was paroled after two and a half years.

Next, Puente started an unlicensed boardinghouse for the elderly, infirm, and alcoholic at 1426 F Street in Sacramento’s Alkali Flats neighborhood. Once again, she quickly got control of her tenants’ Social Security and federal assistance checks. This time, she was determined to keep her scheme a secret. When her tenants became too sick or troublesome, she’d spike their food with the sedative Dalmane. After letting them fall into unconsciousness, she would smother them with a pillow. She would bury them in her backyard and continue cashing their benefit checks. Eventually, she had murdered Alvaro Montoya, James Gallop, Ben Fink, Dorothy Miller, Vera Faye Martin, Everson Gillmouth, Leona Carpenter, and Betty Palmer. For some unknown reason, Puente buried Palmer in the front yard, having severed Palmer’s head, arms, and feet severed so that she wouldn’t have to dig too deep. Gillmouth was put into a makeshift coffin and dumped by her handyman on the banks of the Sacramento River.

After many relatives and case workers reported missing people whose last address was 1426 F Street, the police swooped down on the house. While they were digging up bodies from her yard, Puente charmed a police detective into allowing her to go around the corner to get a cup of coffee. She promptly got on a bus to Los Angeles, much to the embarrassment of the Sacramento Police Department. She was caught a few weeks later in Los Angeles when a man that Puente was seducing saw her photo on the television news.

After a grueling three-year trial, Puente was convicted of only three counts of murder and was sentenced to life in prison. She died of natural causes on March 27, 2011, at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla. She maintained her innocence all the way to her deathbed.