When She Was Bad

by Patricia Pearson

  If severe male violence is physical, bringing women like Hedda Nussbaum to the brink of death, it might be said that the most extreme form of female-perpetrated abuse is situational. Women can operate the system to their advantage. Donning the feminine mask, they can manipulate the biases of family and community, much as Marybeth Tinning did, in order to set men up. If he tries to leave, or fight back, a fateful moment comes when she reaches for the phone, dials 911, and has him arrested on the strength of her word: “Officer, he hit me.” The tactic is reminiscent of well-to-do late-nineteenth-century American men having their wives committed to insane asylums—for a week or forever—solely on the basis of their say-so. Since women had been stereotyped as fragile and prone to hysteria, it was possible to persuade authorities of their insanity. A century later, a confluence of social forces has created a parallel opportunity, but with the sexes reversed: Men can be committed to prison on the strength of stereotypes about them.

  With mounting pressure on North American police forces to disavow misogynistic attitudes and take the word of a woman over a man, female psychopaths and other hard-core female abusers have an extremely effective means to up the ante and win the game. It isn’t what abusive men do, the robbing of breath, but it is as surely the ruin of a life. The most common theme among abused men is their tales not of physical anguish but of dispossession—losing custody of children due to accusations of physical and sexual abuse, and having criminal records that permanently shatter their integrity as loving men and decent human beings.

  Andrea, the woman who never thought of her mother as an abuser, just a drunk, remembers when her mother flew into a tantrum because her exhausted husband refused to go out and buy her a bottle of gin. She called the police and claimed that he’d pushed her down the stairs. The investigating officer, a woman, saw the situation for what it was and declined to press charges. In the 1990s, that officer’s response would be held up as evidence of indifference to women, which is why several North American jurisdictions have now implemented mandatory arrest policies in domestic violence cases, overriding individual police discretion. Prosecutors may now also override the discretion of the complainant, ignoring her desire to recant or drop charges.

  “I got arrested twice,” says Peter Swann, pacing his boardinghouse room and completing his tale of how Dana undid him. “I did sixty days and two years’ probation. It was very unpleasant and scary, and I was wondering, what the hell did I do, what did I do to deserve this? The first time it happened, I spent one night in jail. Then I went to stay at a co-worker’s. Dana found out where I was, she called around, and she asked me to come home. Well, she had my daughter, so, yeah, I went back. The second time she got me arrested, I was still on probation. She nailed me two days before my last meeting [with the probation officer]. I was going to go camping that weekend, everything was packed. She had a fit. The gear went flying. Thrown out in the backyard. ‘You’re not going camping.’ You can tell when she starts. The look on her face. She’s building up the pressure like a volcano.” But Dana didn’t explode the way a man of her ilk might, by beating Peter senseless, because she couldn’t. What she could do was destroy his property and pick up the phone.

  On the strength of his first conviction, he was easily convicted again, and on the strength of that, Dana won custody of Grace. A new boyfriend came to live with her in their house. Having spent all his money fighting the custody battle, Peter had no resources left with which to fight for his household possessions. He fell into a downward spiral of poverty, alcohol, and self-recrimination. Having lost his job, he fell behind on his child support payments, and got branded, on top of all the other labels, a deadbeat dad.

  Dinnertime has come and gone without dinner. Peter’s landlady taps on his door and invites herself in, a plump woman in her sixties clad in a bright blue housecoat, to offer a plate of chocolate doughnuts. She listens to his meandering soliloquy for a moment, then interrupts. “You mustn’t blame yourself, dear,” she says, and she has clearly said it before. She turns to the visitor: “I was in that kind of situation myself. My husband was a very respectable banker. He beat me black and blue.” Settling herself in the room’s one chair, she offers her observations of Dana, and her Scottish accent lends a proper, even disapproving, air, though her face is relaxed and quick to smile. “She’s a spiteful woman, she is. The time I remember most it was Pete’s birthday, and Dana promised faithfully she’d bring Grace at four o’clock so Pete could take her to dinner. Well, hours and hours and hours later, he said to me, ‘She’s not coming, will you come and have a drink with me?’ So we did. Dana showed up, finally, at midnight, which is a disgusting time to bring a child over. She came in, took one look at the glass in his hand, and said, ‘She’s not staying here, you’re drunk,’ and off they went! I mean, that was a set-up.”

  Maybe it was, but who would believe it? Take one look at Hedda Nussbaum and understand perfectly what she’s been through. But a stumbling, inarticulate, alcoholic, twice-convicted deadbeat dad? Where would you even begin? “Peter’s not perfect, he’s not a perfect man,” says his landlady, “he’s not a perfect husband, but he doesn’t deserve the punishment he’s getting. He doesn’t deserve this.”

  No person, male or female, gay or straight, complicit or not, deserves to wind up in the vortex of violence. But how will we find a way out if what we want is the simplest answer? Trying to make a neat and pretty package of relational discord is as impossible as bottling love. No two people live it the same. The one decent thing we can do in our rush to categorize, simplify, and hurl blame is to stop for a moment and recognize, as Ruben says, “the human face of pain.”

  WOMAN AS PREDATOR

  Methods of the Multiple Murderess

  There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

  CAMILLE PAGLIA, SEXUAL PERSONAE

  This is my ambition: to have killed more people, more helpless people, than any man or woman has ever killed.

  JANE TOPPAN, convicted of poisoning nearly one hundred

  patients in a Connecticut nursing home shortly after Jack

  the Ripper killed five prostitutes in London

  When Alvaro Montoya vanished without a trace from Sacramento, California, in the summer of 1988, no one put up posters, begged for information, or broadcast his fate on TV. The only person who noticed, in fact, was one of Montoya’s fellow tenants in a “board and care” home for the indigent and elderly in the leafy, gently rundown neighborhood known as Alkalai Flats. The home, at 1426 F Street, was run by a vigorous do-gooder named Dorothea Puente, who was widely admired in the city for her work with the poor. In the mid-1980s, she refurbished the pretty, Victorian-era house and divided it into eight tidy bedrooms, reserving the second floor for herself. Then she called on the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, of which she was a member, to send her people in need of care. When her tenants arrived, she briskly set about supervising their medicine, managing their social security benefits, and mending, as best she could, the tattered fabric of their lives.

  Alvaro Montoya, known as Bert, lived in a small room off the communal kitchen. He was a cheerful, round-bellied fellow in his fifties, who originally hailed from Central America. Nobody knew exactly where, but the trouble with asking was that Montoya heard voices in his head and generally preferred their company to anyone else’s. He puttered about on his own, for the most part, mild-mannered and content, knocking back a beer or two at Joe’s Corner down on Sixteenth Street, smoking a cigar in the sunshine on the gabled front porch, or watching TV in the chintz-curtained parlor.

  Down the corridor from Montoya was sixty-eight-year-old John Sharp, Puente’s most self-sufficient tenant. A tall, wiry Kansan, Sharp turned up at 1426 F Street in the fall of 1987, after landing in the hospital with a herniated disk and then being unable to afford a private clinic in which to recuperate. When he recovered, he decided to stay. He loved the rent—one hundred fifty dollars a month—the place was comfortable, as charming as a country b
ed and breakfast, and Mrs. Puente was an excellent cook: “swordfish, steak, salads, porkchops …”

  Sharp could usually be found in his room, flipping through novels and history books, absorbed, quiet, reclining in an easy chair, resting from his early morning shift as a cook at a nearby diner. He wasn’t especially curious about his housemates and had never said more than “hello” to Bert Montoya, receiving a friendly mumble in reply. But he did notice that the little fellow went “poof!” one day, just disappeared. One minute sitting in the living room, the next not there, and no discussion.

  It was true, of course, that tenants came and went at Mrs. Puente’s. But something wasn’t quite right about the way they were leaving that summer. They weren’t struggling out the front door with their bags, complaining about a sore back, helped by a hovering relative or church volunteer. Montoya left the same way Ben Fink, the drunk who lived upstairs, had. One night in July, Sharp heard the squeak of Ben’s mattress springs over his head, an old man sinking into a drunken sleep, and then he never saw him again, not the next morning, or ever.

  People were vanishing.

  The next person to notice that Bert Montoya had disappeared was his social worker, Elizabeth Valentine, who paid one of her occasional visits to F Street on a hot September morning. Valentine worked long hours for the Volunteers of America, scouring malls for downtrodden souls. She was in her late twenties, lanky and loose, with long, brown hair, and a uniform of Levi’s jeans. Together with her VOA partner and childhood friend Judy Moise, Valentine was a native of Sacramento, raised in the liberal ferment of California in the 1960s, streetwise but idealistic. “I believed that all people were inherently good,” she says, “and that that good would rise to the surface. Give a person enough love, enough attention, a higher quality of life …” They would flourish and reform.

  Although forty years younger than Dorothea Puente, the young social workers felt she shared their values, possessed that same combination of resilience and optimism. And in the person of Alvaro Montoya, they had a shared project. “Bert,” says Valentine, with rueful affection, “had a very gentle presence.” Neither irascible nor self-destructive, he conversed with his voices as if a whole family of siblings and friends lived inside his head. If he couldn’t be persuaded to part with them through antipsychotic medication—and he could not—then at least he could be kept safe, clean, and cared-for.

  When Moise and Valentine found a room for him with Dorothea in the fall of 1987, they watched with pleased relief as the older woman took charge. Puente chatted with him in his native Spanish, which endeared her to him at once, and she wasn’t afraid of his psychosis, which made her endearing twice over. Within weeks, she had tackled his psoriasis—intractable for years—and persuaded him to wear new shoes. “He looked better,” says Valentine. “That’s what we went on.”

  Now she must reach back beyond the intervening years and permit herself to recall the trust she felt. “I can walk into the kitchen and smell all the wonderful food Dorothea would cook every day. Sitting in her living room in nice, comfortable chairs, a very welcoming entrance to her home. Very homey. Cozy, and clean, and smells good, and she’s smiling. She was like the quintessential grandmother. Open arms, take the people that we could not. She was there to provide hope.”

  Puente wasn’t just sweet. She had a rare degree of fortitude, sophistication, and savvy. She more nearly resembled a diplomat than a grandmother, more Pamela Harriman than Grandma Lee. Always impeccably dressed, trailing a mist of perfume, manicured just so, she had a talent for gracious conversation, which is what had brought her to prominence in Sacramento civic life. She was a revered godmother to the Hispanic community. And in her parlor there were photos of her dancing at a late-1970s fund-raising ball with then-Governor Jerry Brown. The consummate benefactress.

  When Dorothea told Valentine that she’d sent Bert to Mexico to stay on a ranch with her own extended family, the social worker was surprised but not suspicious. She and Moise only wondered about his legal status, since they’d just spent the past year hunting down his birth certificate, finally figuring out he was from Costa Rica. They were still in the process of procuring his documents, so they asked Dorothea if she’d arrange for someone from Mexico to call VOA. “We just wanted to hear a voice, probably talk to her brother, see how it was going.”

  A busy week passed, then another, and the women realized they still hadn’t heard. A call to Puente brought apologies and reassurances. Then things took a peculiar turn. Dorothea phoned one day in October to tell them that Bert had come back from Mexico but almost immediately had been picked up by a long-lost cousin from Salt Lake City, who took him to live there. Now Moise and Valentine were concerned. They had never heard of a relative in Utah. They could imagine Bert feeling frightened, his spirit voices arguing and hissing in his head as a stranger trundled him off in a van. It bothered them. A lot.

  But the real “flag,” remembers Valentine, was the change in Dorothea Puente’s demeanor. She was growing openly hostile to their inquiries. It was jarring. She was on their team. It didn’t make sense. In early November, returning to the boardinghouse, Moise and Valentine found the older woman at the top of her landing on the porch, staring down at them in a way that they suddenly found chilling. “God,” says Valentine, “I’ll never forget walking up on that porch. She was not a happy camper. The look in her eye was very different, very cold, very direct. It was a stare down. That’s when I began to think, ‘Now, wait a minute,’ and sort of a crack appeared in my image of her.”

  Striding past Puente into the house, the women went room to room, banging on doors, demanding to know if the tenants had seen Bert. That was when they met John Sharp. It began to emerge that the tenants at F Street knew more about Dorothea Puente than anyone had ever sought to ask them. They knew, for instance, that she kept “gallons of booze” upstairs in her pretty dining room, and Sharp saw where it went, which was down her gullet. When nobody but her needy charges were about, Dorothea Puente had a volcanic temper. “You son-of-a-bitch,” she’d spit, if someone made a small mistake.

  Sometimes, Sharp told the social workers, in the middle of the night he had woken to harsh whispers and curses, followed by a “bumping sound … then something rolling, crashing down the stairs.” Flipping back the covers, peering out his door, he would see “a small refrigerator and some picture frames.” Or, shortly after Ben Fink left, “a rug shampooer.” Objects hurled with surprising strength and rage.

  There was something else, just after Ben Fink left. An inexplicable odor. Sharp caught the tang in his nostrils when he passed the little room just off the kitchen. He couldn’t comprehend the fact of that scent in this place, but he knew very well what it was. Sharp had worked for the Kansas City Mortuary Service. “You never,” he said, “forget that smell.”

  “When we heard there was a smell of dead bodies, we went, Jesus Christ!’ “Valentine recalls, stretching her arms out, palms down, across the VOA boardroom table, as if flattened by the weight of the memory. “Judy and I were walking down the K Street Mall, just shaking our heads, trying to get a grip, looking at each other: ‘Could this really, could this really be true?’ “In an instant, all the hints they’d ignored for so long came together, and crushed them.

  Detective John Cabrera of Sacramento Police Department Homicide met the social workers’ fears by raising one bushy brown eyebrow. Their allegations were fantastical. How could he even broach the subject with Puente? “I can’t just go there empty-handed,” the mustachioed detective protested. “This woman is highly praised, by politicians, by ambassadors from other countries, plus our officers go by and she gives them tamales and burritos.” She’s an insider. One of the good guys.

  Yet there was something about the address, 1426 F Street. He’d had some woman, a junkie named Brenda Trujillo, under arrest six months earlier. “I remember we were walking to the jail,” he says now, his dark eyes wide, “and she’s hostile, she’s yellin: ‘What about Dorothea? You gu
ys don’t do nothin’ about her.’ “Cabrera has adopted a falsetto, altered his gestures. In the tiny interrogation room on the fourth floor of the police department, he reenacts the drama. “ ‘She’s buryin’ people in her yard. I lived there, I know, and you guys don’t even care.’ We said, ‘All right.’ “He drops his voice so it’s cool, reassured. “We parked it. I kinda checked on a few things, any problems with that address”—he shrugs—“nothin’.”

  But here it was again: 1426 F Street. So, Cabrera says, he hit the phones and did a little more research. “It took us four days,” he continues, “[but] finally I find out. She’s on federal parole.” Dorothea Puente, Sacramento’s premier provider of care for the poor, had been convicted in 1982 of fraud, theft, and attempted murder. She had built a small fortune by posing as a home-care nurse, stupefying her patients to the point of death with drugs and robbing them, for months at a time.

  For the small Sacramento social services community, for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and the parole board and the people who lived on F Street, the world had just turned upside down.

  On the morning of November 8, Dorothea Puente greeted Detective Cabrera and his partners as she once had welcomed Beth Valentine, in a spirit of perfect ease. “All I’m trying to do is read her,” says Cabrera, remembering how he stood in her foyer, watching this calm, dark-eyed woman in her polka-dot dress. “I’m just watching her, feeling her out. She’s probably one of the toughest encounters I’ve ever had. I really tried to read her, and I couldn’t.”

  “Cabrer-a,” Puente said, sounding out the detective’s name as she turned to him, “Cabrer-a … are you Hispanic?” He said he was. They talked about that. “We kinda, kinda hit it off for a second,” he remembers, a bit discomfited. “Then I simply told her, ‘Look, here’s the deal. We’ve had a complaint about a missing person, and we need to check if there’s been any foul play.’ She said, ‘Oh, gosh, no, I’ve had all kinds of problems with Beth.’ “Nonchalant as a busy housewife who waves in the meterman to take his reading, Dorothea Puente gave the officers the run of her house and yard. Then she went upstairs and began to drink screwdrivers in slow succession.