FULL TEXT: SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- A psychiatrist,
acquaintances and legal records describe Dorothea Montalvo as a manipulative,
chronic liar who had drugged and stolen from elderly victims more than a decade
prior to the discovery of seven bodies buried in her boarding house yard.
But her statements show the 59-year-old multiple murder
suspect considered herself a charitable soul whose transgressions in life could
be chalked up to a string of mean husbands.
Montalvo was arrested late Wednesday [Nov. 16, 1988] at a
Los Angeles motel, police said, after disappearing Saturday while police
excavated her yard.
Nothing fits neatly into place when assembling a profile of
this white-haired, bespectacled matron in high-heeled pumps who delivered food
baskets to the needy but is suspected of murdering her elderly, troubled or
disabled boarders.
Born Dorothy Helen Gray in Redlands, to housewife Trudy
Yates and ex-serviceman Jessie Gray, Montalvo routinely told people she was of ‘Mexican
descent’ and responsible for the support of 17 siblings in her home country.
She also has said she was a survivor of the 1942 Bataan
Death March led by Japanese forces in the Philippines and a survivor of the
atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Acquaintances, describing her as alternately sweet-tempered
and foul-mouthed, said Montalvo recently claimed to be undergoing chemotherapy
treatment for cancer, but nobody is sure whether those claims are true.
She has lamented her inability to have children, but in fact
gave up a daughter for adoption -- Linda Bloom, 41, of South Pasadena. When
Bloom and her husband tracked down and visited Montalvo last year in
Sacramento, Bloom said her mother claimed to be both a doctor with a clinic in
Mexico and an actress and friend of Rita Hayworth.
[“Suspect has history of lying, hurting seniors,” The
Press-Tribune (Rosevelle, Ca.), Nov. 17, 1988, p. A-4]
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CHRONOLOGY
Jan. 9, 1929 – Dorothea Helen Gray born, Redlands, California
1945 – Dorothy (16), marries Fred McFaul.
1946 – 2 daughters born between 1946 and 1948, but she sent
one to live with relatives in Sacramento and placed the other child for
adoption.
1948 – McFaul left her, late 1948.
1952 – marries a Swede Axel Johanson (Swedish), and had a
turbulent 14-year marriage.
1960s – Gray was arrested for owning and managing a brothel
and was sentenced to 90 days in the Sacramento County Jail.
1966 – divorces Johanson in 1966 and married Roberto Puente,
a man 19 years her junior, in Mexico City. The marriage lasted two years.
1976 – Puente got married for the fourth time in 1976 to
Pedro Montalvo, who was a violent alcoholic. This marriage lasted only a few
months.
1976? – Puente started to spend time in local bars looking
for older men who were receiving benefits. Puente forged their signatures to
steal their money. She was caught and charged with 34 counts of treasury fraud,
for which she received probation.
Apr. 1982 – Ruth Monroe (61), tenant, murdered. overdose of codeine
and acetaminophen; ruled suicide.
May 1982 – Malcolm McKenzie (one of four elderly people
Puente was accused of drugging) accused Puente of drugging and stealing from him.
Aug. 18, 1982 – She was convicted of three charges of theft
on and sentenced to five years in jail.
1982? – in prison, corresponds with a Everson
Gillmouth (77), living in Oregon.
1985 – on release, Everson Gillmouth picks her up at prison;
make wedding plans.
Nov. 1985 – Everson Gillmouth murdered.
Jan. 1, 1986 – Everson Gillmouth body found.
1988 – all the persons whose corpses found in November 1988 were
considered by the Coroner’s office to have died in 1988. [Desert Sun, Dec. 12,
1988]
Nov. 11, 1988 – police inquired after the disappearance of
tenant Alberto Montoya (56).
Nov. 14, 1988 – end of yard exhumations.
Nov. 16, 1988 – Puente (59) captured in Los Angeles.
Nov. 17, 1988 – Sacramento Municipal Court arraignment; charged
with one murder: Alvaro “Bert” Montoya (52).
Mar. 30, 1989 – charged with 8 additional murders. Judge
John V. Stroud.
Jul. 9, 1990 – Sacramento County Superior Court. Orders change
of venue to Monterey county. Judge W. J. Harpam.
1990 – book, Human Harvest, by Dan Blackburn published.
Nov.2, 1992 – trial. Monterey County.
Jul. 7, 1993 – trial closing arguments. 8-month trial.
Aug. 26, 1993 – convicted after 24 days of deliberation; guilty
of 2 counts of first degree murder (Miller, Fink), 1 count of second degree
murder (Carpenter). Jury deadlocked 11-1 of 4 of remaining 6 counts.
Nov 10, 1993 – sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Mar. 27, 2011 – Dorothy P dies.
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MURDER VICTIMS:
Everson Gillmouth, 77,
Ruth Munroe, 61;
Leona Carpenter, 78;
Alvaro “Bert/Alberto” Gonzales Montoya, 51;
Dorothy Miller, 64;
Benjamin Fink, 55;
James Gallop, 62;
Vera Faye Martin, 64;
Betty Palmer, 78.
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Wikipedia: Dorothea Helen Puente (January
9, 1929 – March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. In the
1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered her
elderly and mentally disabled boarders before cashing their Social Security
checks. Her total count reached nine confirmed murders, and six unconfirmed.
Newspapers dubbed Puente the “Death House Landlady”.
~ Background ~
Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray
on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California, to Trudy Mae (née Yates) and
Jesse James Gray. She had a traumatic upbringing; her parents were both alcoholics,
her mother was a prostitute, and her father attempted suicide in front of her.
Her father died of tuberculosis in 1937 when she was eight years old, and her
mother died in a car accident the following year. She was sent to an orphanage,
where she was sexually abused.
In 1945, Gray was married for the first time, at the age of
16, to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just
returned from the Pacific Theater of World War II. Gray had two daughters
between 1946 and 1948, but she sent one to live with relatives in Sacramento
and placed the other child for adoption. She became pregnant again in 1948, but
suffered a miscarriage. In late 1948, McFaul left her.
Gray was sentenced to a year in jail for forging checks; she
was paroled after six months. Soon afterwards, she became pregnant to a man she
barely knew and gave birth to a daughter, whom she placed for adoption. In
1952, she married a Swede named Axel Johanson, and had a turbulent 14-year
marriage.
In the 1960s, Gray was arrested for owning and managing a brothel
and was sentenced to 90 days in the Sacramento County Jail. After her release,
she was arrested again, this time for vagrancy, and sentenced to another 90
days in jail. Following that, Gray began a criminal career that over time
became more serious. She found work as a nurse’s aide, caring for disabled and
elderly people in private homes. In a short time, she started to manage boarding
houses.
Gray divorced Johanson in 1966 and married Roberto Puente, a
man 19 years her junior, in Mexico City. The marriage lasted two years. Shortly
after it ended, Dorothea Puente took over a three-story, 16-bedroom care home
at 2100 F Street in Sacramento; she would later rent an upstairs apartment at
1426 F Street. Puente got married for the fourth time in 1976 to Pedro
Montalvo, who was a violent alcoholic. This marriage lasted only a few months,
and Puente started to spend time in local bars looking for older men who were
receiving benefits. Puente forged their signatures to steal their money. She
was caught and charged with 34 counts of treasury fraud, for which she received
probation.
~ Murders ~
Puente’s reputation at the F Street boarding house was
mixed. Some tenants resented her stinginess and complained that she refused to
give them their mail or money; others praised her for small acts of kindness or
for her generous homemade meals. Her motives for killing tenants were
financial, with police estimates of her ill-gotten income totaling more than
$5,000 per month. The murders began shortly after Puente began renting out
space in the home at 1426 F Street. In April 1982, 61-year-old friend and
business partner Ruth Monroe began living with Puente in her upstairs
apartment, but soon died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. Puente
told police that the woman was very depressed because her husband was terminally
ill. They believed her and ruled the incident as a suicide.
A few weeks later, the police were back after a 74-year-old
pensioner named Malcolm McKenzie (one of four elderly people Puente was accused
of drugging) accused Puente of drugging and stealing from him. She was
convicted of three charges of theft on August 18, 1982, and sentenced to five
years in jail, where she began corresponding with a 77-year-old retiree living
in Oregon, named Everson Gillmouth. A pen-pal friendship developed, and when
Puente was released in 1985 after serving just three years of her sentence, he
was waiting for her in a red 1980 Ford pickup. Their relationship developed
quickly, and the couple was soon making wedding plans.
In November 1985, Puente hired handyman Ismael Florez to
install some wood paneling in her apartment. For his labor and an additional
$800, Puente gave him a red 1980 Ford pickup in good condition, which she
stated belonged to her boyfriend in Los Angeles who no longer needed it. She
asked Florez to build a box 6 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet to store “books and other
items”. She then asked Florez to transport the filled and nailed-shut box to a
storage depot. Florez agreed, and Puente joined him. On the way, however, she
told him to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter County and dump
the box on the river bank in an unofficial household dumping site. Puente told
him that the contents of the box were just junk. On January 1, 1986, a
fisherman spotted the box sitting about three feet from the bank of the river
and informed police. Investigators found a badly decomposed and unidentifiable
body of an elderly man inside. Puente continued to collect Everson Gillmouth’s
pension and wrote letters to his family, explaining that the reason he had not
contacted them was because he was ill. She maintained a “room and board”
business, taking in 40 new tenants. Gillmouth’s body remained unidentified for
three years.
Puente continued to accept elderly tenants and was popular
with local social workers because she accepted “tough cases”, including drug
addicts and abusive tenants. She collected tenants’ monthly mail before they
saw it and paid them stipends, pocketing the rest for “expenses”. During this
period, parole agents went and visited Puente, who had been ordered to stay
away from the elderly and refrain from handling government checks, a minimum of
fifteen times at the residence. No violations were ever noted.
Suspicion was first aroused when neighbors noticed the odd
activities of a homeless alcoholic known only as “Chief”, whom Puente stated she
had “adopted” and made her personal handyman. Puente had Chief dig in the
basement and cart soil and rubbish away in a wheelbarrow. At the time, the
basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. Chief later took down a garage
in the backyard and installed a fresh concrete slab there as well. Soon afterward,
Chief disappeared.
~ Arrest and imprisonment ~
On November 11, 1988, police inquired after the
disappearance of tenant Alberto Montoya, a developmentally disabled man with
schizophrenia whose social worker had reported missing. After noticing
disturbed soil on the property, they uncovered the body of tenant Leona
Carpenter, 78. Seven bodies were eventually found on the property. Puente was
charged with a total of nine murders: Puente’s boyfriend Everson Gillmouth, 77,
and eight tenants who lived at the boarding house: Ruth Munroe, 61; Leona
Carpenter, 78; Alvaro “Bert/Alberto” Gonzales Montoya, 51; Dorothy Miller, 64;
Benjamin Fink, 55; James Gallop, 62; Vera Faye Martin, 64; and Betty Palmer,
78.
She was convicted of
three murders, and sentenced to two life sentences. Ever since 1988 to 2011 she
served life without parole, and she passed away in 2011 of natural causes.
During the initial investigation, Puente was not immediately
a suspect, and she was allowed to leave the property, ostensibly to buy a cup
of coffee at a nearby hotel. Instead, after buying the coffee, she fled
immediately to Los Angeles, where she befriended an elderly pensioner whom she
had met in a bar. The pensioner, however, recognized her from police reports on
television and called the authorities.
Her trial was moved to Monterey County, California, on a
change of venue motion filed by her attorneys, Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin
III. The trial began in October 1992 and ended a year later. The prosecutor,
John O’Mara, was the homicide supervisor in the Sacramento County District
Attorney’s office.
O’Mara called over 130 witnesses. He argued to the jury that
she had used sleeping pills to put her tenants to sleep, then suffocated them,
and hired convicts to dig the holes in her yard. Clymo concluded his closing
argument by showing a picture commonly used in psychology that can be viewed in
different ways and saying “Keep in mind things are not always as they seem.”
The jury deliberated over a month and found Puente guilty of three murders. The
jury was deadlocked 11 to 1 for conviction on all counts, and the lone holdout
finally agreed to a conviction of two first degree murder counts including
special circumstances, and one second degree murder count. The penalty phase of
the prosecution was highlighted by her prior convictions introduced by O’Mara.
The defense called several witnesses that showed Puente had
a generous and caring side to her. Witnesses, including her long-lost daughter,
testified how Puente had helped them in their youth and guided them to successful
careers. Mental health experts testified of Puente’s abusive upbringing and how
it motivated her to help the less fortunate. At the same time, they agreed she
had an evil side brought on by the stress of caring for her down-and-out
tenants.
O’Mara’s closing argument focused on Puente’s acts of
murder:
Does anyone become responsible for their conduct in this
world? ...These people were human beings, they had a right to live-they did not
have a lot of possessions-no houses-no cars-only their social security checks
and their lives. She took it all... Death is the only appropriate penalty.
Kevin Clymo responded by evoking Dorothea the child and
caregiver. Peter Vlautin addressed the jurors in confidential tones,
contrasting with O’Mara’s shouting:
We are here today to determine one thing: What is the value
of Dorothea Puente’s life? That is the question. Does she have to be killed?”
Vlautin spoke gently about Puente’s childhood touching on the traumatic aspects
that shaped her life and urged the jurors to see the world through her eyes. “You
have heard of the despair which was the foundation of her life, the anger and
resentment...If anyone in the jury room tells you it was not that bad, ask them
would you want that to happen to yourself? Would you want that to happen to
your children? ... I am led to believe if there is any reason for us to be
living here on this earth, it is to somehow enhance one another’s humanity, to
love, to touch each other with kindness, to know that you have made just one
person breathe easier because you have lived. I submit to you ladies and gentlemen
that is why these people came to testify for Dorothea Puente ... 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. Then you will understand why these people believe Dorothea’s life is worth
saving. That is mitigating. That is a human quality that deserves to be
preserved. It is a flame of humanity that has burned inside Dorothea since she
was young ... That is reason to give Dorothea Puente life without the
possibility of parole.
One juror said “Executing Puente would be like executing
mine or your Grandma.”
~ Conviction ~
She was convicted of three of the murders, though the jury
could not agree on the other six. After several days of deliberations, the jury
was deadlocked 7–5 for life. The judge, Michael J. Virga, declared a mistrial
when the jury said further deliberations would not change their minds. Under
the law, Puente received life without the possibility of parole. She was
incarcerated at Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla,
California. For the rest of her life, she maintained her innocence, insisting
that all her tenants had died of “natural causes”.
~ Death ~
She died on March 27, 2011 in prison in Chowchilla at the
age of 82 from natural causes.
Media
Puente has been featured on numerous true crime television shows
including Crime Stories, Deadly Women, A Stranger In My Home and World’s Most
Evil Killers.
In 1998, she began corresponding with Shane Bugbee. The
result was Cooking with a Serial Killer (2004), which included a lengthy
interview, almost 50 recipes, and various pieces of prison art sent to Bugbee
by the convicted murderer. Jodi Picoult mentions Puente’s crimes and cookbook
in her novel House Rules.
The house at 1426 F Street was included in the 2013 home
tour held by the Sacramento Old City Association. 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. A
2017 episode of the series Ghost Adventures also had Zak Bagans, his ghost hunting
team, and a medium visit Puente’s home.
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[345-1/5/21;966-2/2/22]
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