Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  This generous and lavish lifestyle—the clothes, the shoes, the hair, the donations and sponsorships, gifts, the intestinal bypass and other cosmetic procedures Dorothea would later have—was all paid for by money that she looted from the Social Security payments of her boarders and from thefts from people she visited at their homes as a “home-care nurse.”

  Disgraced

  Dorothea’s whole house of cards came tumbling down in 1978, when a former resident of her house was jailed, but while serving his term his Social Security checks kept getting cashed by Dorothea. The Treasury Department began to probe Social Security payments related to residents placed with Dorothea and when they totaled four thousand dollars in stolen funds, they figured they had enough for a felony charge and stopped investigating further.

  With a long list of recent civic accomplishments and her fragile granny persona, no judge had the heart to sentence the little old lady to prison. She received five-years’ probation and was ordered into psychiatric counseling. She was also ordered to give up the house on 2100 F Street.

  The former “socialite” was snubbed and stripped of her center, her staff, and all the people she had sponsored. Dorothea quietly skulked out of Sacramento and went south to Stockton, where she took on menial odd jobs as a cook, cleaner, or dishwasher. She was now 50 years old and most who experience the kind of rise and fall she did would have by now rolled over and stopped living. Not Dorothea. Psychopathy can work both ways: It can alleviate fear and empathy when victimizing, but it can also buffer against shame and guilt that would make anyone else, after being exposed in the way Dorothea was, reluctant to show her face. Psychopathy in Dorothea did what it was meant to do—it outfitted her with formidable survival tools, and in the end, a deadly predatory talent.

  As for Dorothea’s psychiatric counseling, she was diagnosed as “a schizophrenic, chronic undifferentiated type.”179 This is an entirely meaningless term, a diagnosis often attributed to other budding serial killers in the 1970s. Schizophrenia is an organic mental disorder characterized by hallucinations, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, delusions, and incoherent, delusional speech. There was nothing hallucinatory or incoherent about Dorothea Puente, but in the 1970s, as psychologists debated the exact nature of psychopathy and what to even call it, the term “chronic undifferentiated schizophrenic” became a convenient catchall phrase that encompassed all manner of unexplained behavioral problems.

  “I’ve Got a Psychiatric Condition. I Sometimes Forget My Actions.”

  In 1979, Dorothea returned to Sacramento and threw herself back into the same business, albeit on a smaller scale. She decided that a smaller operation run personally by her, without the need to sustain a socialite’s life, would suit her just fine. Presenting herself now as Dorothea Montalvo, she rented the second floor of another Victorian house on 1426 F Street, down the road from where she had her previous place. To make money, she passed herself off to private nursing businesses as a trained, live-in caretaker for the sick and elderly. She even got herself bonded under her new name and was sent out to feed and care for elderly shut-ins.

  In early 1980, a female patient for whom Dorothea was caring was brought into hospital with shallow breathing and an irregular heart rate. No sooner would her condition be stabilized and she be sent home than she would be back at the emergency ward with a relapse. The patient’s social worker noticed the hovering presence of Dorothea Montalvo during all these episodes. There were disturbing rumors: Montalvo might be using other names and might have poisoned several husbands. While the first was true, the second was entirely false, but ironically would become a premonition of the nature of Dorothea’s future.

  The social worker assigned to the elderly female met with the victim’s doctor and convinced him to run a toxicology test, which revealed traces of two powerful drugs: phenobarbital and digoxin, neither of which he had prescribed for the patient. In the meantime, the social worker learned that Dorothea was calling the patient’s family and telling them that they needed to increase her home-care expenses as she had been diagnosed with cancer. This was entirely untrue. The doctor convinced the patient to fire Dorothea. Afterward the patient had no more relapses, but died in a nursing home nonetheless.

  In one of those typical stories, nobody bothered to call the police, have the County Welfare office bar Dorothea from caring for patients or inform the nursing agencies that had contracted her. Not enough evidence was the common excuse. And nobody could quite bring themselves to believe that the sweet, little, gray-haired granny, home-care worker was harboring some kind of lethal intentions. It seemed impossible.

  Dorothea was running amok. The same doctor who treated the first patient received another in similar circumstances. On a hunch, when he asked who the home-care worker assigned to the patient was, Dorothea’s name came back. By then the Sacramento Police and district attorney’s office were paying attention. Yet despite the fact that Dorothea was on everybody’s radar, nothing was done. Some social workers and doctors, aware of the problem, steered their clients and patients away from Dorothea, but officially absolutely nothing was done.

  It was only in 1982 that Dorothea finally went too far. She picked up a man in his seventies in a bar and convinced him to take her back to his apartment. At some point that evening she drugged him with a substance that paralyzed him, but did not make him lose consciousness. As he sat on his couch unable to move, he watched Dorothea go through his apartment, taking valuables, cash, checks, and his precious coin collection, dumping it all into an empty suitcase she had found. Finally, she took his hand, pulled off a ring he was wearing, and then left. The victim sat there in a paralyzed condition for about an hour before he could move again. He immediately called the police. Dorothea was quickly arrested and found with the victim’s checks, which she claimed he had willingly given her.

  Around the same time, posing as a county nurse, Dorothea had also shown up at a nursing home where an 82-year-old female was living. They had met earlier at a hairdresser. Dorothea “diagnosed” blood pressure problems and gave the woman some medication. Hours later, when she regained consciousness, she discovered the “nurse” gone and her diamond ring and all her medication missing. The police were able to identify and charge Dorothea through the hairdresser’s shop. The victim’s ring was never found.

  Two more separate cases that year involved elderly women who discovered property from their homes missing and checks cashed in their names after Dorothea was sent to their homes by a nursing agency as a caregiver. And police then found another case from the year before, where an 84-year-old woman reported three thousand five hundred dollars in gold rings and jewelry missing after hiring Dorothea as a home-care attendant.

  In all the cases, the victims recalled how solicitous, caring, and friendly Dorothea was. In some cases the victims were even reluctant to fire Dorothea, unable to believe that the warm and gracious caregiver who had attended so conscientiously to their needs harbored any kind of criminal intent.

  By the spring of 1982, Dorothea had been arrested four times but released on bail every time. Although she was 54 years old, Dorothea claimed to be in her seventies and presented such a fragile and helpless granny aura that no judge had the heart to detain her in jail. Dorothea argued that the victims had willingly presented her with checks and gifts, but just in case, she reminded them, “I’ve got a psychiatric condition. I sometimes forget my actions.”

  Nevertheless, by April 1982, Dorothea faced the prospect of felony convictions for grand theft, robbery, and forgery. In the middle of the preliminary hearing on those charges, police re-arrested Dorothea on additional check forgery charges from yet another victim. Nobody could understand why the fragile little granny was handcuffed and led away to jail once more. But once again, her lawyer argued she was old, had ties to the community, had made all her court appearances and bail payments, and cases against her were being dismissed. Dorothea was again released from jail.

  Dorothea Commits Her First
Murder

  It was at this moment, as she was in the middle of dealing with all her legal problems and a prospect of prison time—according to William P. Wood, the district attorney assigned to her case at the time—that Dorothea committed her first planned murder.180 That April, Dorothea entered into a business partnership with Ruth Munroe, a retiree whose recent marriage was falling apart as her husband was suddenly diagnosed with a terminal illness. Entirely unaware of Dorothea’s legal problems, Munroe agreed to go into the catering business with her. Ruth transferred several thousand dollars of her savings into a joint business account. Dorothea’s cooking skills were well known, she appeared as an efficient administrator, and besides, the two women had quickly developed a friendship. Not only that, to further save on expenses Dorothea invited Ruth to come live with her at the house on F Street. On April 11, Ruth’s sons helped her move into 1426 F Street. Seventeen days later, Ruth was dead.

  Soon after moving in with Dorothea, Ruth had a “nervous episode” over her marriage and needed to be sedated by doctors, according to Dorothea. On April 27, Ruth’s son visited 1426 F and was told by Dorothea that the doctor had just left, having given his mother another shot for her nerves. Despite being urged by Dorothea not to disturb Ruth, the son went up to see his mother. He later testified that he found her on her side facing the wall with her eyes open but entirely immobile, as if paralyzed. She appeared not to be aware of his presence. Assuming that was the effect of the drug, he recalled his last words to his mother were, “Don’t worry, Mom, everything’s going to be all right. Dorothea will take care of you.”

  He recalled that a tear trickled down from his mother’s eye, but otherwise she remained immobile. She was trying to scream for help, but couldn’t, paralyzed by a drug administered by Puente.

  The next morning, on April 28, Ruth Munroe was dead, dying in her sleep according to Dorothea. Police and paramedics arrived at the scene, as did Ruth’s family. As there was no physician present at the scene, an autopsy was conducted and high doses of codeine were found in her system. When the circumstances of Ruth’s collapsing marriage were revealed, her death was ruled by “undetermined cause,” but believed to have been a suicide. Nobody suspected the visibly upset and fragile, elderly Dorothea.

  The district attorney’s office in the meantime, while pursuing the conviction of Dorothea on the other charges, was entirely unaware of Ruth Munroe’s death and her connection with Dorothea. Nobody in the family realized that Ruth had made a large withdrawal from her bank account or that she had a joint account with Dorothea that had been recently emptied.

  At the same time, while awaiting her trial, Dorothea decided to flee Sacramento. On May 16, she phoned a former patient she was friendly with and invited herself over for a drink. By the time the victim regained consciousness, Dorothea had taken her credit cards and some blank checks. She then went out and purchased an airline ticket to Mexico, but was arrested by police before she could leave the country. This time Dorothea’s bail was revoked.

  The Sacramento press had by now picked up the story of Dorothea Puente, but it was all a big joke: the “quintessential granny” who seduced and drugged a man in his seventies. Ho-ho-ho. She continued to cultivate the persona of a harmless, helpless, fragile, little old lady much older than her actual age. During her presentencing interview in jail, a probation officer noted that when he was speaking with Dorothea she appeared distraught and tearful, but suddenly demanded an explanation for a word he wrote in his notebook. She was reading his notes upside down as she sat on the opposite side of the interview booth.181

  On August 19, 1982, Dorothea was sentenced to five years in prison. The next day, Ruth Munroe’s family called the district attorney to report their suspicions that Dorothea had murdered their mother. Content with having taken Dorothea off the street, the D.A.’s office decided there was not enough evidence to pursue the complaint: It looked too much like suicide.

  Dorothea’s Last Run

  Three years later, in August 1985, Everson Gillmouth, a retired widower in his seventies, was packing his things in preparation for a new life. He had been living in a trailer hitched to his red Ford pickup truck parked on his sister’s farm in Oregon, but now he was getting married. Everson was pretty excited, because he knew that at his age this was probably his last chance at marital bliss and an escape from the loneliness that had enveloped him since the death of his wife. He had never met his new bride in person—they had been writing each other through a pen pal exchange for female prison inmates for over a year, and his correspondent, Dorothea Puente, wrote she was ready to settle down and straighten out her life with somebody she loved.

  Puente was being released in August after serving three years of a five-year sentence. She invited Everson to pick her up in Fresno, where she’d been in a halfway house, and together they’d drive to Sacramento and move into an apartment she had in a house on 1426 F Street. (Puente had completely charmed the owner of the house, becoming a godmother to his children and a patron of his family. He continued to rent to her a floor in the house while she was in prison, and eventually the entire house after she was released.)

  When Everson’s sister had not heard from her brother by mid-September, she called Sacramento Police, who dropped by the house on F Street and talked to Everson. Later that night, he called his sister, annoyed at her interference. This would be the last time she would speak with her brother. Then, to her surprise, in November she received a telegram from her brother stating that things did not work out with Dorothea and he was heading south—that she was not to stop him. She thought it strange that instead of telephoning or writing a telegram was sent, but there was not much she could do about it.

  In April 1986, the sister received a postcard from a woman claiming to be her brother’s new love. The postcard claimed he had a small stroke in January but was all right and living with her somewhere in a desert community. There was no return address.

  Everson was actually last seen at the F Street house in mid-December, looking a little ill as Dorothea attempted to help him with medications she prepared for him. Dorothea had already sold his trailer, which she claimed Everson had given her as a gift. After that, Everson was never seen again. In late December, Dorothea hired Ismael Florez, a man she met in a bar, to do some carpentry around the house she lived in. When he was done with the job, she also asked him to build a large storage box for her, about six feet by three. In exchange for the work, she offered him a red Ford pickup truck.

  Near the end of December, Dorothea asked Florez to help her load the box into the pickup truck and drive it to a storage unit outside of Sacramento. After they left town and approached the Sacramento River, Dorothea told Florez that she had changed her mind: There was no point in storing the junk she had in the box. She asked him to dump the box by the river. Putting it on a dolly, Florez and Dorothea maneuvered the box down to the riverbank and abandoned it, assuming the high water in the spring would sweep the box away.

  But on New Year’s Day, a local resident walking along the river discovered the box. When he opened it, he found a body wrapped in plastic and packed in mothballs and deodorant sticks. The autopsy revealed no wounds or injuries on the body, and advanced decomposition prevented the determination of cause of death. It appeared that the victim had been dead for approximately two weeks. There was no identification and the sheriff filed the case as a John Doe.

  In the meantime, Everson’s monthly pension checks continued to arrive at 1426 F Street. When there was a mixup in February 1986 over the payments, somebody wrote a letter to the pension fund complaining and the payments were quickly resumed.

  In the next two years, Dorothea murdered at least seven more people, whose bodies she buried in the garden of 1426 F Street, despite the fact that the yard was visible from the street and from neighboring houses. She hired individuals to dig shallow ditches in the yard in search of “sewer lines.” The next day, the ditches would be found filled in and covered with a birdbath, bench
, or planted flowers.

  During those years, Dorothea took over the entire house, and once again set up an informal, unlicensed boarding home for derelict, ill, and alcoholic Social Security recipients. Social services were, as usual, overworked and understaffed with a high turnover of employees. In the three years that Dorothea Puente was in prison, several new generations of social workers had taken the places of those who had known her. And Dorothea was using a different surname. Once again, social services people were impressed with Dorothea’s nurselike professionalism and friendly and caring demeanor with difficult clients, particularly Hispanics.

  All this was completely in violation of her terms of probation, which prohibited her from taking in boarders or cashing assigned Social Security checks. Since her release, Dorothea had had thirty-five contacts with Federal probation officers, fourteen of them at her residence at 1426 F Street.182 Despite that people were in and out of the house, and neighbors were aware of all sorts of activity there, on none of those fourteen visits did the probation officers detect that there were boarders living at F Street or that Dorothea was supplementing her own Social Security income in any way. As far as they were concerned, Dorothea was a polite, friendly, fragile, little old lady living out the golden years of her life after having made some desperate mistakes.

  Only in November 1988 was Puente exposed, when obstinate social workers could not trace the whereabouts of Bert Montoya, a mentally handicapped 50-year-old client who had been boarded with her. Dorothea kept insisting that Bert had left to go live in Mexico, but the social workers who knew him and his mental capacity well did not accept the story. Dorothea then recruited an unidentified accomplice to phone the social services office and claim to be Bert’s brother, explaining that Bert was now living with him in Colorado. However, Bert was not known to have any family in Colorado, nor could the caller put Bert on the phone.