In a photograph taken by the Sacramento police on the day of her arrest, Puente, posed like a schoolgirl with her hands behind her back, wears a simple, sleeveless, pink polka-dot cotton dress. Solemn, demure, of fascinatingly indeterminate age, she is all at once a small girl, a beautiful woman, and, with her puffed white hair, a granny. It is her eyes that determine who she is: black eyes staring at the mug-shot camera, knowing, hard, and hateful.
In constructing their fantasy selves, serial killers seem to be attracted to the flash of politics, perhaps because they can project public personae without close scrutiny. They also often cultivate a sense of themselves as moral creatures, who can appear to do good, though this comes at no actual cost to themselves. Gacy dressed up as a clown at Chicago-area children’s hospitals; Bundy volunteered on a rape crisis line; Dennis Nilsen was a fervent union activist; Christine Falling was an ideal babysitter; Genene Jones, a heroic pediatrics nurse. Some of Puente’s beneficiaries were homeless, others lived in the governor’s mansion. The photographs of her dancing with Jerry Brown and posing with George Deukmejian remind one of photographs of John Wayne Gacy with Rosalyn Carter and Ted Bundy with members of the Washington State GOP.
For years, these serial killers walk a hair’s-width line between apparent altruism and self-aggrandizement, doing devastating damage to our conception of the tangible markers between good and evil. “That was the most chilling part for me,” the social worker, Beth Valentine, says of Puente. “You know, you operate under a certain model of how this world works. And navigate yourself. And she shattered my model. She blew it to pieces. What’s evil? What’s good? That I would spend time with her, and I would know her, and she would tell me stories, and …” She pauses, chasing her confusion. “She was good and evil at the same time. She took care of them at the same time.”
Invariably, however, when male serial killers are unmasked, those who supported them in their goodness abandon that stance and come to terms with the fact that they were duped. Not so with female killers. Many to whom Puente did good stood by her. A stream of witnesses flowed down the coast to Monterey in the winter of 1990 to tell the court of Dorothea Puente’s generosity. Rosemary Arroyo was eleven when Puente took her under her wing. “I will never be able to repay you for all the things you’ve done for me,” the now grown Arroyo wrote to the killer in jail. Another character witness was a broadcaster to whom Dorothea gave his first break by using her connections in the Hispanic media. A third was an abused woman whose divorce Puente had paid for. Her jury deliberated for twenty-four days, a California record, because at least one juror could not get past that goodness.
The marked difference in public response to male and female serial killers reflects the difference in our archetypes of gender, but it also speaks to the effect on our sensibilities of their modus operandi. The violence they do is less visible, less offensive to us, somehow. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates once characterized the mutilated victims left in the wake of male serial killers as “nightmare artworks.” Insofar as there is an art, an expression, a politics to violence, it is assuredly evident in the methods of certain male serial killers. The Public Broadcasting Service program “Nova” toured the crime scenes of Arthur Shawcross, lingering over police photos of some of his eleven victims, swollen and disheveled, legs spread, mouths gaping. It was startling to see those pictures on TV, for identity is bound up in how we choose to present ourselves. Hair combed, mussed. Lipstick carefully applied. This is a right we reserve without thinking, and we honor it instinctively by covering the dead. Men like Shawcross mutilate their victims postmortem because they seem fully aware of this need for dignity. They desecrate their victims’ bodies the way others might vandalize a temple. Violence is a language of protest.
At first glance, female serial killers do not appear to aggress this way. If they mutilate a body, it’s usually for purposes of disposal, not for display. They rarely engage in sexual assault. Yet their crimes are equally expressive of their politics. The female serial killer’s version of sexual defilement will either be robbery or the sabotage of intellectual and political authority, because that is how she conceives of masculine power. Aileen Wuornos robbed all the men she killed in “self-defense.” Nannie Doss, Judi Buenoano, Martha Beck, Virginia McGinnis, and Louise Peete profited from insurance policies, bank account transfers, the sale of their victims’ possessions. Then they flaunted, rather than concealed, the wealth they acquired. Nurses and mothers who become multiple murderers manipulate the patriarchal medical establishment, taunting and confounding the doctors who rush to rescue their victims. No less than with male killers, these women seem to be commenting contemptuously on staples of power—intellectual, financial—that society has hitherto denied them. They are vandalizing men’s temples of prestige.
One of our worst inclinations is to believe that, because this violence is visually less horrifying, it is somehow more forgivable. To the degree that their victims were more likely to know and trust them, one could even argue that the opposite is true. The prosecutor at the trial of Blanche Taylor Moore, who murdered three husbands in North Carolina, observed, “Poisoning is a cloak-and-dagger kind of crime. What better cloak to wear than a cloak of appearing to be loving, appearing to be caring, and appearing to be kind?”
The men and women Dorothea Puente victimized had to know that she was killing them. But Puente was their nurse and friend. She was fine, wasn’t she? Affable and committed, ordinary. They get up in the morning and she’s made their breakfast, set out a little row of pills with their juice glass. Yet they keep succumbing to sudden, catastrophic illness; their energy seeps away with frightening swiftness; their mind swims. They need to be soothed, and she does that. She reassures them that they’ll be all right, this woman in tender control of their lives, smiling her broad smile, of course, like their mother years ago, adjusting their pillows, plying them with crème de menthe or tea. They know something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. But how do they believe it? Family members say that Mrs. Puente will take care of them, and the doctors agree, and the social workers have lodged them in her home with visible pleasure. But she’s poisoning them slowly to death.
The children of Dorothea Puente’s first murder victim, Ruth Munro, believe their mother went through this awful recognition in the spring of 1982. At sixty-one, Munro was a vivacious woman, retired from a drug store, with four grown children. Her husband, Harold, met Dorothea in a cocktail lounge and thought she and Ruth would hit it off. They were both gregarious and inventive. They had flair. And they loved their cocktails. Ruth and Dorothea did indeed spark together. Just before Harold checked into the hospital for his final battle with cancer, Puente suggested that she and Munro go into business together as caterers. It would be fun. It would give Ruth a sense of purpose after Harold died. Not long after that, on April 11, 1982, Ruth moved in with Dorothea, to save money she would need for hospital bills and to concentrate on the new business.
In the middle of April, the many people in Sacramento who loved Ruth Munro began to watch her die. “She seemed to be not her normal self, just kind of in a fog, just looking kind of trancelike. It wasn’t normal,” said her son, Alan Clausen. A few days before Easter, Carmella Lombardo ran into her old pal at the hairdresser’s. Munro looked awful. Lombardo was shocked. Surrounded by the chatter of hair-do instructions, this week’s news, the drone of the driers, Munro confided to her friend that she thought she was dying. She was dying, she said, but she didn’t know why. Her friends and family wanted, urgently, to try to find out.
But the murderess ran interference, posing as Munro’s protector, dissuading her children from actually seeing their mother in person when they dropped by. When Alan Clausen did manage to see her in late April, she seemed stuporous, propped in an armchair, sipping crème de menthe with an unsteady hand. He saw her one last time after that, with Puente hovering over his shoulder. Munro was in her bedroom, perfectly still as if asleep, except that a tear ran down her cheek. Puente used a p
oison that paralyzed. Munro couldn’t move or cry out. She could see her son, but she couldn’t tell him to save her. On April 28, she was dead. The coroner found massive amounts of Tylenol, codeine, and the tranquilizer Miltown in her blood. The cause of death was ruled to be inconclusive. No one noticed that the joint bank account Munro had set up with her partner was empty.
How does one respond to a nurturant monster? What archetype do we possess for that? Detective Cabrera points to the clothes that Puente regularly donated to homeless people through the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The people who received them were beneficiaries of Dorothea Puente’s kindness. The people who’d owned them were dead by her hand. Communal complicity in female multiple murder adds a dimension of trauma in the aftermath of the crime that is generally quite distinct from male serial homicide. The victims of men are rarely handed to them on a plate. No one would willingly permit children to go off with strangers; hitchhiking is universally understood to be risky for women; no one idealizes the johns who prey upon prostitutes. But when Dorothea Puente was arrested, the community that had assisted her so ably in achieving her ends fell in upon itself in self-recrimination and guilt. Fingers were pointed. Organizations ceased working together. Friendships, including that of Judy Moise and Beth Valentine, broke up. “I retreated,” says Valentine. “I really retreated. I think that we were all traumatized, and each person deals with that alone. We didn’t even come together as a community to try to resolve all the security problems. We stopped communicating. I think the ombudsman, child welfare people, people less involved came in to do the cleanup.”
What those people discovered was how many warning signs had been posted around the city and ignored. Sacramento magazine, for example, ran an article in the early 1980s, before Ruth Munro died, about Dorothea Puente’s fall from grace. She had been caught skimming from her tenants in the late 1970s and served time in prison, but by the late 1980s nobody remembered the prominant benefactress brought down in scandal. Then there were the social security administrators who allowed a convicted check forger to deposit thousands of checks on behalf of their recipients. Federal parole board officials visited F Street and unaccountably failed to notice that their parolee was running another board and care operation. She had them convinced it was just her private residence. Even Detective Cabrera, who knew what he was up against, had trouble “seeing” Dorothea Puente. “She played me as much as I was trying to play her,” he says. “That’s what made her so dangerous, was that she fit right in like a polished nail. She moves like a shadow, she moves like smoke in the air. She was deadly because she manipulated society.”
Puente capitalized on a potent blend of idealism, desperation, and prejudice that brought clients to her door and at the same time silenced them when they voiced warnings. Nobody is going to listen to someone who’s mentally ill, aged, or drunk. One of the ignored whistle blowers was Joyce Peterson, a scrappy old alcoholic who hobbled into Puente’s trial and testified to the callousness of which Puente was capable when she knew the weight of community sentiment would be on her side. Puente evicted Peterson abruptly, with virtually no notice, refused to hand over her social security check, cashed it for herself instead, and, when Peterson tried to fight, Puente pushed her down the stairs, called the police, and had her hauled off to a detox center.
“We did place a resident there who thought Puente was completely mad, and wanted out,” Valentine recalls, when asked about Peterson. “It just didn’t jibe with my image of Dorothea, and I thought ‘Oh, Joyce is just an angry alcoholic, she’ll shoot at anything around here.’ She just painted a very different picture of Dorothea Puente, [and] we couldn’t integrate those two images.” Another person who struggled to articulate the different picture was Bert Montoya, and that is a deep source of pain for Beth Valentine. She remembers when Bert ran away from F Street and reached out for help. “Bert went back to Front Street [a men’s shelter], which wasn’t that unusual for people I’ve placed. He’d been living there for almost nine years. That was his family, the people there cared about him. So he went back, and one of the staff brought him back to [Puente], and we’d go to see how he was.… I have to really ask myself this question of whether he was truly happy there. A lot of the information, to be honest, came through her. That’s hard to admit. I don’t know if any of us really listened to him.”
“Bert was freaked out,” Cabrera says. “I really believe that he saw something that made him very uncomfortable. But we fall into that stereotype. ‘Bert, you’re imagining something. It’s just your spirits.’ “That it wasn’t his spirits, or Joyce Peterson’s drink, or Brenda Trujillo’s dope, is something that this community must live with.
“I was real naive about evil,” says Valentine. “I kept it very far away from me. I never looked it in the face, ’cause I didn’t have a coping mechanism for it. Before I went into the trial, I thought, ‘I’ve got to look at her.’ There’s just nothing more horrifying to me than that face in this entire world. It’s the beast, it’s looking directly into the beast. But I needed to do that, because for some reason in this lifetime I crossed paths with a serial killer. I mean, who crosses tracks with a serial killer? Whose choice would it be? And that happened to me. It’s part of the fabric of my life. Whether she’s evil or not, I don’t know. I do know her motive is always going to be destructive. Always.”
This, above all, is what we must understand about extremely violent women, as we have always understood it about men. They were once needy girls, yes. Their lives were exploited, indeed. Patriarchal oppression incited them to desperate responses, perhaps. But none of that can be relevant to our social response. They are human first, and gendered second. They will destroy you in an instant, no slower than the men.
WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Women as Partners in Violent Crime
Most often, [women] are merely the distaff half of a murderous couple whose brain-power is supplied by the man.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
I wasn’t, you know, just one of those women who like to have a strong, domineering man. In this case it was a fantasy that just got badly out of control.
CAROL BUNDY, convicted of multiple murder, in testimony at the trial of Douglas Clark, Los Angeles, 1980
Myra Hindley was tall, aloof, older than her twenty-one years. She knew she had to get married—that was the way, after all. But she didn’t fancy her suitors, until she met Ian Brady. He stood back from the world more coolly than she. A man with an air of culture, appraising life disdainfully through darkly hooded eyes. They were moving to the mundane beat of working-class Manchester, two antisocial souls fed up with the rules. Ten months in the same clerk’s office and not a word between them, but Myra Hindley was watching, and Ian Brady watched her back. “Ian’s taking sly looks at me at work,” Hindley wrote in her journal, on August 1, 1961. It was one of many terse notations. “He loves me, he loves me not.” Then an entry with an exclamation point: “Out with Ian!” Their first date, and the mad, secretive thrall of Brady and Hindley began.
They unfolded their love affair up on the moors, stretching blankets across the stone-gray earth, collars hoisted in the chill, drinking German wine. He introduced her to the Marquis de Sade and turned her on to Hitler. Within Nazi ranks she found her own heroine, Irma Grese. She began to wear short, brown military skirts: a shapely platinum blond “looker” in a uniform, lining up with her beau to see Judgment at Nuremberg. Up on the moors, they wove grandiose notions into the curtain they drew between themselves and the city below. Notions of power and risk, of transcending the rules. Hours spent planning bank robberies to extricate themselves from society once and for all. Joining forces, all that comes to matter is him, is her, everything else recedes in shades of gray. Freed from needing, they could invent their own codes of conduct, become Romeo and Juliet in Lord of the Flies, and play their own, private jokes upon the world.
The first to go was twelve-year-old John Kilbride, murdered one day after John F. Kennedy�
�November 23, 1963. Myra and Ian were exhilarated by the coincidence of initials. Hope perishing, at home and abroad: the world mourns J.F.K., and Manchester mourns at their hands. Next was ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, tortured and killed in Myra’s bedroom on Boxing Day, the girl’s screams recorded with an overlay of jingly Christmas music.
Springtime and three more children gone. Long legs stretching up from the armchair, feet on the fireplace mantel, Myra Hindley dragged on a cigarette and mused aloud to her brother-in-law, the terrified David Smith: “Ooh, that was a messy one.” Cool and amused. Before them on the carpet lay the bloodied corpse of Edward Evans, 17, whom Brady had just bludgeoned with an axe. Smith had been invited unawares to observe their glorious game. Brady had wanted a new “first lieutenant.” Myra was bitterly jealous. What bound her to Brady was their secret, a promise of forever. David Smith was a usurper; she argued with Ian for weeks. Never in those arguments, however, was the possibility put forward that Smith might turn them in. They were so far beyond the law at this point that they failed to grasp its moral sway on other mortals.
Smith, shaken to the core by what he’d seen, withdrew politely and immediately called the police. The police found Evans wrapped up in a parcel and arrested Ian. Myra was left behind. She was utterly shocked by the separation. She went down to the station and wouldn’t leave. “Wherever he has been,” she explained to detectives, “I have been.” She was bewildered that they couldn’t see this. “He has never been anywhere without me.”
When She Was Bad Page 21
