Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Early the next morning, on Saturday, as crowds began to form outside Puente’s house as news of the discovery of a body came out, police began an intensive dig in her garden. Puente was looking visibly upset and worn down. She asked the senior investigator on the scene, Detective John Cabrera, if she was under arrest. Not yet, she was told. Putting on her most grandmotherly and fragile persona, her purple pumps, a pink dress, and red overcoat, Puente asked if she could get away from the noise and chaos for a few minutes and go down the block to the Clarion Hotel for a cup of coffee. If Cabrera had any doubts about the petite, frail, older lady’s intentions to flee, they were dissipated by her request that he escort her to the hotel through the crowd of press cameras and gawkers outside. As Cabrera guided Puente through the crowds, TV news crews filmed their departure. This would be the footage that Charlie would later see that weekend on TV in Los Angeles—but he did not link the woman he had met on Wednesday with the woman on TV, despite the same red coat.

  Cabrera watched Puente meet with some friends at the Clarion Hotel and felt the little old lady—even if she ran—would not shuffle very far anyway. Satisfied that Puente was not going anywhere, Cabrera returned to the dig at the house. He had no way of knowing that in her purse Dorothea Puente was carrying three thousand dollars in cash. No more than twenty minutes passed before police exposed a second body in a shallow grave. By the time Cabrera ran back to the Clarion Hotel, Dorothea was long gone. The more bodies police dug up that day—there would be seven in total eventually—the farther away Puente got.

  As soon as Cabrera had left Puente at the Clarion, she had taken a cab to Stockton, a city about forty miles away. It cost her seventy dollars. She had the cab take her to the Greyhound bus station at 1:00 p.m. While police were still looking for her in Sacramento, Dorothea was already on a bus from Stockton to Los Angeles. She arrived in L.A. late that night, stayed at a hotel near the bus terminal, and the next morning, on Sunday, she checked into the Royal Viking Motel—an elderly, anonymous lady nobody paid attention to. She stayed locked in her room, watching herself on TV, just emerging long enough to stroll down to the fast-food joints on 3rd Street for takeout meals.

  As she sat in her room for the next three days and followed the news reports, she began to realize that she needed to quickly find a place to hide and a source of income before her money ran out. On Wednesday afternoon, Dorothea put on her red coat and purple pumps and began slowly walking along 3rd Street, poking her head into stores and bars along the way, looking for an opportunity. Nobody in their right mind would have thought the grandmotherly woman strolling down the street in her bright red coat and purple shoes was a serial-killing predator on the prowl.

  When, after several hours of trolling, she walked into the Monte Carlo and saw a tired, sickly-looking old man, sitting alone, drinking in a shit-hole bar, on a weekday in the middle of the afternoon, she instantly knew that she had found exactly what she was looking for. She sat down directly in Charlie Willgues’s line of sight and went to work.

  When Dorothea returned to her room at the Royal Viking that late afternoon, she felt energized and refreshed. The alcohol she had drunk with Charlie sharpened her appetite and she ate one of the chicken meals that she had had him fetch for her. She was almost euphoric from the scent of the hunt—still focused in an animallike predatory state. She was pleased with herself. Los Angeles was not entirely familiar ground for her, but she had, within several hours of venturing out into the streets, quickly found herself a potential source of income she knew how to easily exploit—a lonely, sick old man on Social Security benefits with apparently nobody to notice him missing. Dorothea still had a buzz on from her performance when her phone rang later that evening. Only one person had that number—it was Charlie, confirming their dinner date at his apartment the next evening. Every fiber of her body must have been buzzing with the apparent success of her hunt so far. The next day she would take complete control and spring the trap shut. Dorothea popped a cold beer and contently ate the second takeout dinner.

  Dorothea Puente’s Youth

  Dorothea Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, a small city in San Bernardino County in California. Born on the eve of the Great Depression, she was the sixth of seven children. Her father was Jesse James Gray from Missouri, a suicidal World War One veteran, disabled and mentally ill as a result of mustard gas injury. Her mother, Trudy Mae Gates from Oklahoma, was a dysfunctional drunk who frequently left the family for days or weeks at a time before returning again. Dorothea was essentially raised by her older brothers and sisters. The family was Grapes of Wrath dirt-poor, surviving as migrant laborers on local farms, picking fruit and vegetables. With their mother disappearing or being put in jail, and their father in and out of hospitals, the the family was eventually split up between relatives and neighbors.

  When Dorothea was seven, what remained of the family began to migrate first to Los Angeles and then to nearby San Dimas, seeking work continually. Along the way, on March 29, 1937, when Dorothea was eight, her father died. Her mother sank deeper into drinking and in 1938 she lost custody of her children. Dorothea was put into an orphanage run by the Church of Christ in Ontario, California. Several months later, her mother was killed while riding drunk on the back of a motorcycle.

  Certainly Dorothea’s childhood history immediately snaps into the typical pattern of disrupted attachment between mother and child that many believe is the seed of psychopathy. Teachers recall that Dorothea as a child told outrageous lies and grandiose stories about herself, yet another predictable sign of trouble ahead. As Dorothea’s older sister wisely commented in 1988 after her arrest, “Sometimes when people have a hard childhood, their own world is so hard, they make up a pretend one.”178

  Until the age of sixteen, Dorothea lived a nomadic existence, shuffled between foster homes, relatives, and her older sisters. She grew up to be a slim, beautiful young woman and she knew it. She learned to use the combination of her beauty and lies to get people to do what she wanted. She was a clever and stone-hard sixteen-year-old. She also decided to reinvent herself.

  Heading out to Olympia, Washington, in 1945, and giving herself the name Sheri, Dorothea began working as a prostitute. She also had a heavy drinking habit. It is unlikely that Dorothea became a prostitute at the age of sixteen as a virgin, and so she must have had an earlier sexual history that, again, is typical of psychopathic females—but nothing is known conclusively.

  Dorothea’s own accounts of her past are fabricated and unreliable. She claimed after an early incarceration, “When I was three years old, I had to start picking cotton, potatoes, cucumbers, chilies, then fruits. I finally married when I was thirteen; he died after a few years.” That was not true.

  Dorothea Marries

  In November 1945, Dorothea was married, at the age of 16, to Fred McFaul, a 22-year-old soldier just returned from the Pacific. They moved to the small, desolate town of Gardnerville, Nevada. Dorothea had two daughters between 1946 and 1948, but she rejected them both, sending one to relatives in Sacramento and giving up the other for adoption. For a while, Dorothea separated from Fred and lived in Los Angeles, but they reconciled a few months later. Dorothea became pregnant again but miscarried. In late 1948, McFaul became fed up and left her. Humiliated at being abandoned, Dorothea would lie that he had died within days of their marriage.

  When he was interviewed in 1988, the still very much living Fred McFaul was aging and his memory faded, but he remembered two things about Dorothea—that she was exceptionally beautiful and told all sorts of tall tales about her past: about being a former movie star, being related to royalty, coming from a wealthy family that lost its money in the Depression, etc. She had an amazing ability to pull people in to do whatever she wanted through a combination of her tales, charm, and beauty.

  After her divorce, Dorothea moved to San Bernardino and in 1948 was charged with a criminal offense for the first time when she attempted to pass a bad check. Sh
e plea-bargained into a reduced sentence and served four months before being released on probation. She immediately vanished. Although an arrest warrant was issued for her, she was such a minor offender that nobody was too concerned about searching her out.

  In 1952, Dorothea married her second husband, Axel Johansson, whose last name she used when she introduced herself to Charlie Willgues in 1988. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Dorothea continued to drink heavily and spin fantasies and lies. Her marriage with Johansson resembled that of her mother’s. She frequently quarreled and left on her own for weeks and months, eventually always returning to Johansson. She returned to prostitution, but when she felt her looks were fading, she established her own brothel in Sacramento. She became quite successful at it, eventually leasing a building for a “bookkeeping” service and staffing it with call girls. Police caught up with her, and after an elaborate investigation, in April of 1960, Dorothea was charged with running a house of ill repute but managed to plea down to a “found in” misdemeanor, serving only three months in jail.

  In 1966, when Dorothea was 37, Johansson finally had enough and sued for divorce. Her second marriage was over, she was almost forty, her looks had long faded, she had ballooned in weight, she had a drinking problem, and pimping prostitutes did not seem to her all that secure an activity. If they have not been apprehended by then, most serial killers at this age begin to slow down and even cease in their killing activities. They still occasionally fantasize, sometimes relive their past murders through trophies and souvenirs they kept from the murders, they may occasionally even rise to a kill here and there, but their long-cultivated, fantasy-driven, constant obsession for murder has loosened its grip on their imaginations. But not Dorothea—it would still be another fifteen years, as far as we know, before she would actually begin killing.

  Dorothea Goes into the Good Samaritan Business

  Sometime in 1968, Dorothea turned her attention to the sick, elderly, and alcoholic. It could be that she saw they had come from the same place she had and might be harbingers of what she herself could end up being if she did not do something. She leased a small building and began making the rounds of Sacramento social services offices, introducing herself as the proprietor of “The Samaritans”—a board-and-care center for alcoholics. When social workers inspected her facility they were impressed with the firm but loving care Puente doled out to the residents assigned to her home. She was kind and loving with the ill and alcoholic boarders, but would not hesitate to swear or physically push them if they resisted taking their medication or bent the house rules slightly.

  Sacramento social workers were happy to refer their difficult-to-place alcoholic clients to Dorothea’s home, even on her strict condition that their Social Security payments be transferred directly to her. She would deduct the cost of room and board and make sure that the residents spent their remaining money on necessary healthy things and not booze, she insisted. Since Dorothea did not offer any health services or psychological therapy, her facility did not need a license, and inspections were lax. To supplement her income, she hired herself out as a home-care worker and “nurse” for the elderly and disabled.

  In her private life, Dorothea was unraveling. She now carried a weight of 200 pounds on her five-foot-eight frame and was drinking steadily throughout the day and heavily in the evening, despite the fact that if any of the residents in her facility appeared drunk she would lash out and berate them viciously. Dorothea also began to take on the identity of a Hispanic, claiming that her family came from Mexico. She had grown up among Mexican fieldworkers in the 1930s, spoke some Spanish, and was familiar with the culture, so it was not a difficult act.

  At the age of 39, Dorothea married a 21-year-old Hispanic, Roberto Jose Puente. The marriage ceremony was held in Reno, Nevada. The marriage fell apart within two weeks, leaving behind only the name “Puente,” under which she would become famous as a serial killer. In 1969, Dorothea divorced Roberto and declared “The Samaritans” bankrupt with a debt of ten thousand dollars.

  Very quickly she set up a new residence in a large, sixteen-bedroom Victorian house on 2100 F Street near 21st. She picked up her business where she had left it off, but now even better organized and under her new married name of Puente.

  Every several weeks Dorothea hosted a banquet for social workers and alcoholic residents where the quality of her food and care was put on display. The dinner table would always be carefully set with spotless tableware. Inspectors were always offered a choice slice of pie or lunch in the immaculately kept kitchen. This was not a show—the boarders themselves confirmed they ate well even when nobody from social services was around. Puente hired two cooks and she carefully supervised their performance in the kitchen.

  Dorothea ruled over her facility from the third floor of the house where she set up her own apartments. On the first and second floors she housed the more affluent, federally assisted clients in neat little bedrooms, each with a closet and television, just like in a hotel. The poorer, county-assistance recipients she stacked in the basement in little cubicles separated only by curtains. But they all ate well.

  The only thing that was slightly off about Dorothea as far as social services were concerned was that she had a tendency to exaggerate her past. She claimed acquaintance with celebrities and said she had been not only in the Bataan Death March* but had been in Hiroshima when the atom bomb was dropped.

  What slipped by the social workers was that Dorothea was increasingly posing as a doctor, hanging fake medical diplomas on the walls of a small office in the basement, and buying medical equipment like syringes and blood pressure cuffs. A social services physician, who was assigned to monthly visits to Dorothea’s house, recalled how she would sit herself down with him during the checkups of the residents. She claimed that she, too, was a doctor and would review with him the pharmacological aspects of the medicines he might prescribe. But everyone was too impressed with the smooth running of her home to begrudge the woman her “eccentricity.” In the mostly Hispanic neighborhood, Dorothea began presenting herself as “La Doctora” and offered medical advice and “vitamin” injections to locals.

  By 1975, Dorothea Puente had reinvented herself once again, now as a major social figure in Sacramento’s Hispanic community. She sponsored numerous charity events and donated money frequently. She dropped her seductive, former hooker persona and now cultivated a much older persona than her 45 years—that of an elderly, gray-haired, wealthy matron. She claimed she owned numerous properties around the world. She sponsored Hispanic performers, assisting them in getting entry into the United States and secured them plays through her contacts with Spanish-speaking radio and television.

  In 1976, Dorothea married for the fourth time, again in Reno. Her husband once more was a Mexican ten years younger than she, Pedro “Angel” Montalvo, a laborer she had employed at her boardinghouse. People who worked around Dorothea recalled that he seemed to be mentally disturbed, full of some kind of strange, chatty, unfocused energy. The marriage lasted a few weeks before it was annulled, but it gave Dorothea yet another available alias—Montalvo.

  By 1977, Dorothea had become a major contributor to political candidates from both the Democratic and Republican parties. She purchased entire banquet tables at fundraisers, appearing grandly at the events. She chatted intimately with congressmen and state and county officials. At one event, California Governor Jerry Brown approached the regal Dorothea, hugged and kissed her, and then danced with her among the powerful and wealthy contributors at the event. Impeccably dressed and groomed, charming and generous, the socialite Dorothea was a welcomed guest at the pinnacle of California’s political establishment.

  Puente paid particular attention to young Hispanic girls from troubled families, “adopting” them, sponsoring their schooling and sometimes sheltering them. Puente had her lawyer handle all sorts of legal problems for the girls and their families. She often introduced the girls to visitors as her “daughters,” although she never
legally adopted them. It was not all bullshit. Perhaps she saw herself in those girls—perhaps she knew exactly what they needed in their lives and it was easy for her. After her arrest for serial murder, several young Hispanic women came forward, claiming that regardless of her guilt, Dorothea had saved their lives. One said, “I just hate to think about where I would be today if this woman had not touched my life.”

  If Dorothea Puente’s story here is familiar, then it should be. It has echoes of another case of a place-specific serial killer, John Wayne Gacy, a successful construction contractor and a respected figure in his community in Chicago. He led the annual Polish Constitution Day Parade and in his spare time he volunteered to entertain sick children at local hospitals, dressed as Pogo the Clown. He was a Democratic Party precinct captain and when the U.S. President’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, was in Chicago on a visit, he was one of her escorts. In his house, buried in a basement crawl space, police found the trussed-up corpses of twenty-eight boys and young men, whom he had invited into his home office and then brutally tortured, raped, and murdered.

  In 1977, Dorothea checked into a hospital for a weight-reduction procedure involving an intestinal bypass (jejunal-ileal). This procedure has since been discontinued because of the severe effects on the liver and other organs. Before and after the surgery, Dorothea told everyone she was suffering from heart disease and cancer, and on the eve of her surgery she made out a will leaving millions of dollars to her “stepdaughters” and to various foundations and trusts that would be established. It was a will worthy of the wealthy dowager she presented herself as, even if there was no money to back it had she actually died.