I want you to picture a specific kind of house.
It's Sacramento, California in the mid -1980s.
You're walking down F Street, and it's, you know,
it's a mix of gritty and kind of genteel, but
this one house, number 1426, it really stands
out. Oh, it does. It's a classic Victorian. Right.
It has that slightly imposing, look -high porch,
all that decorative trim, and a really well -tended
garden. And there... Tending that garden is a
woman who looks like she stepped right out of
a casting call for America's sweetest grandmother.
It's the perfect archetype, isn't it? The vintage
clothing, the natural gray hair. Yeah. The large
glasses that make her look a little bit owl -like,
a little vulnerable. She looks like the kind
of person who has, you know, hard candies in
her purse and probably knit sweaters for her
cat. Oh, absolutely. That's the vibe. That woman
was Dorothea Puente. And to her neighbors, to
the community, she was a saint. She was the woman
who took in the people nobody else wanted, the
elderly, the homeless, the shadow people of the
welfare system. She gave them a room, hot meals,
a place to belong. But, and this is the huge
gaping contradiction we're talking about today.
It was massive. Yeah. While she was playing the
benevolent matriarch upstairs, she was literally
burying those same tenants. in the flower beds
downstairs the death house landlady that's the
moniker that stuck but i think calling her just
a landlady almost it diminishes the complexity
of what she actually was it does she was a chameleon
a chameleon who killed and that's what we're
unpacking in this deep dive we've got a mountain
of source material here we've got the original
court transcripts from the 90s biographical records
of her early life The police files. The police
files are fascinating. And even analysis of her
cookbook. Yes, she wrote a cookbook. We will
get to that. The cookbook is a psychological
study all by itself. But our mission here, it
isn't just to recount the, you know, the gory
details. We want to understand the mechanism
of the deception. Exactly. How? How does an elderly
woman murder nine people, bury seven of them
in her own yard in a dense residential neighborhood
and keep cashing their checks for years without
anyone noticing? It really seems impossible.
You'd think the smell alone would give it away
or, you know, the fact that people are just vanishing.
But she exploited something very specific, didn't
she? She did. She exploded what we call the trust
bias. We are socially conditioned to see elderly
women as harmless, as nurturing our brains. They
just struggled to process the image of a grandmother
wielding a shovel to bury a body. She knew that.
She knew that. And she weaponized it. She weaponized
her age, her gender, everything about her appearance.
And she weaponized the system. Yeah. I was looking
at the breakdown of her tenants. These were people
on the absolute margins. But before we get to
the bodies in the garden, we have to look at
how Dorothea Puente was even created. Because
she wasn't born a sweet old lady. No, not at
all. She was born Dorothea Helen Gray in 1929
down in Redlands, California. And looking at
these biographical notes, her start in life was,
well, it was a complete nightmare. It's a textbook
case of severe early childhood trauma. We often
look for that seed of the serial killer. And
in her case, the soil it was planted in was incredibly
toxic. Both parents were severe alcoholics. Right.
Her father, Jesse James Gray, was reportedly
a man of. Extreme volatility. Volatility is putting
it so lightly. The records show he would repeatedly
threaten suicide right in front of the children.
He'd hold a gun to his head and make them watch.
Can you imagine being six or seven years old
and that is your Tuesday night? It's unimaginable.
It instills this profound sense of instability.
The child learns that their reality can just
be shattered at any second. And then the abandonment
starts. Her father died of tuberculosis in 1937.
She was only eight. And then her mother, Trudy
May, she lost custody of the children the very
next year. Right, because of her drinking and
her lifestyle. She was a sex worker at the time.
And then by the end of 1938, her mother's dead
too, a motorcycle accident. So before she even
hits puberty, she's an orphan. She's watched
her father almost kill himself, then die. She's
lost her mother to the state and then to death.
It's just loss after loss after loss. And then
she enters the system. She and her siblings are
sent to an orphanage. And we have to be really
clear about the orphanage system of the late
1930s and early 40s. This wasn't some therapeutic
environment. No, it was warehousing. It was warehousing,
exactly. And the reports we have indicate that
she was sexually abused while she was in care.
This is where I really want to pause on the psychology
of it. Because we see this pattern so often in
the cases we look at. The abuse, the total lack
of control, the abandonment. How does that translate
into the person she became? Because she didn't
just become violent. She became a liar. A really,
really good one. It's all about control. When
your actual reality is that unbearable, when
it's filled with abuse and poverty and terror,
you learn to construct a new reality. It's a
survival mechanism. It's sometimes called mythomania
or pathological lying. Right. If you can lie
convincingly enough, you can be someone else.
You can be someone who matters. You can be someone
who's safe. For Dorothea, lying wasn't really
a vice. It was a shield. It was armor. And she
started using that shield very early. She got
married at 16. 16. Right at the end of World
War II to a soldier named Fred McFall. But she
couldn't play house for very long. They had two
daughters, but she didn't raise them. She sent
one to live with relatives in Sacramento and
put the other one up for adoption. And that's
a really critical data point, isn't it? It shows
this profound detachment from the maternal instinct
that she would later pantomime so well. Oh, that's
a good word for it, pantomime. She abandoned
her own children, yet decades later, she would
demand to be called mama by her tenants. It's
a performance of motherhood, but it's completely
devoid of the actual responsibility. And the
criminal record starts around here, too. 1948,
she's arrested in Riverside, forgery, buying
women's accessories with bad checks. It's petty
crime, but it sets the pattern. It does. I want
something. I don't have the money, so I will
use a piece of paper, a lie, to get it. But the
lies get so much bigger. In 1952, she marries
Axel Brand Johansson. He's a merchant seaman.
But she doesn't tell him, hi, I'm Dorothea Gray,
a high school dropout from Redlands with a forgery
conviction. No. Not even close. She invents this
completely wild persona. She calls herself Taya
Singuala Nayarda. Taya Singuala Nayarda. I had
to practice that one. Me too. It's so theatrical.
And she claimed to be a Muslim woman of Egyptian
and Israeli descent. Now, you have to think about
this. This is 1952. A white woman from Southern
California convincing people she is an Egyptian
Israeli Muslim named Taya. That takes a level
of confidence that it just borders on delusion.
How did she possibly pull that off? Well, people
were less traveled then. There was no Internet
to fact check her, no Google. And she clearly
played on the exoticism of it all. If she acted
mysterious and foreign, people bought it. It
made her special. It made her special. And it
separated her from the trauma of being Dorothea
Gray. But she wasn't just telling stories. I
mean, she was bleeding Johansson dry. He'd be
away at sea for months. And she was at home gambling
his money away, inviting other men over. She
viewed people as resources. She always did. Johansson
was a paycheck. When the money ran out or he
just became inconvenient, the mask would slip.
And it slipped in a big way in 1960. She was
arrested for running a bookkeeping firm that
was actually a front for a braille. A bookkeeping
brothel. She really was an entrepreneur of vice,
wasn't she? She was. And that arrest led to her
first major institutionalization. In 1961, Johansson
finally had enough. He'd caught her and he had
her committed to DeWitt State Hospital. The doctors
there observed her for weeks. They saw the drinking,
the wild mood swings, the constant fabrication.
And what did they diagnose her with? A pathological
liar with an unstable personality? They nailed
it in 1961. It's written right there in the file.
But the tragedy is that this diagnosis, this
label, it didn't follow her in a way that protected
the public. She got out. She divorced Johansson
in 66, but kept his name for a little while,
calling herself Sharon Johansson. And she starts
a new persona. A new one. She started pretending
to be a devout Christian nurse. Notice the shift.
She goes from the exotic, mysterious Taya to
the pious, caring Sharon. She is A -B testing
personas to see which one gets her what she wants.
That's a great way to put it. And the nurse persona
is so powerful, it commands immediate trust.
Then in 1968, she marries Roberto Jose Puente.
He was much younger, right? Yeah, 19 years younger.
The marriage was, uh... predictably volatile
and only lasted 16 months. But she got something
very, very valuable out of it. His last name.
His last name. She became Dorothea Puente. And
even though they divorced, she kept that name
for the rest of her life. It sounded established.
It sounded respectable. And this brings us to
the Sacramento era, the 1970s and 80s. She secures
this large two -story Victorian house at 1426
F Street. And this is where she begins to construct
the saint persona in earnest. It wasn't just
about the clothes, though the clothes were a
huge part of it. The transformation was total.
It was a conscious decision. She stopped dyeing
her hair, letting it go completely gray. She
started wearing these loose vintage dresses that
hid her figure. She bought those enormous thick
-rimmed glasses. She was actively aging herself
up. Yes. She wanted to look frail. She wanted
to look like a relic of a kinder, gentler time.
But she didn't just sit on the porch looking
the part. She hustled. She embedded herself in
the local political and social scene. She was
a donor, or at least she pretended to be. Right.
She gave money to charities. She sponsored scholarships.
She even had politicians over for dinners at
the house. She became this fixture in the Hispanic
community, despite not being Hispanic herself.
And she did it by filling this massive void in
the social safety net. And this is the part that's
really uncomfortable to admit. In a twisted way.
She was useful. She was. Sacramento, like a lot
of cities in the 80s, had a crisis of care for
the indigent. You had the deinstitutionalization
of mental health patients happening, which basically
pushed thousands of people out of hospitals and
onto the streets. And social workers were just
drowning in caseloads. Drowning. And here comes
Dorothea Puente. She says, send them to me. I'll
take them. Exactly. She marketed herself as the
solution. I take the hard cases. I take the alcoholics.
I take the schizophrenics who won't take their
meds. And if you are a social worker with 50
cases and absolutely nowhere to put a difficult
client, Dorothea Puente looks like a miracle.
You don't want to look too closely at the miracle.
You don't because you need it to be true. But
there were cracks. There were cracks in the miracle
long before the bodies were found. The system
knew she was a crook. In 1978, she was actually
convicted of illegally cashing 34 state and federal
checks that belonged to her tenants. 34 checks.
This wasn't a one -time clerical error. This
was systematic fraud. She was sentenced to five
years probation and ordered to pay restitution.
But it didn't stop her. The same persona was
just a cover for a predator. And then the violence
starts to creep in. In 1982 she was charged with
drugging people. She picked up a 74 -year -old
man, Malcolm McKenzie, in a bar. She took him
home, drugged him, and stole his coin collection.
The drugging is the key escalation. She's moving
from simple forgery to physical assault. She's
rendering her victims helpless so she can rob
them. It's a whole other level. And then we have
the death of Ruth Monroe in 1982. This is the
one that really signals the shift to murder.
And Ruth Monroe wasn't a random stranger from
a bar. She was a friend, a business partner even.
She was 61 years old. She moved in with Plente,
thinking she was going to be living with her
pal. Two weeks later, she's dead. Massive overdose
of codeine and acetaminophen. Now, Ruth had been
healthy. There was no reason for her to just
drop dead. But suddenly she was. Quindy told
the police Ruth was depressed. She spun this
whole story about Ruth's husband being terminally
ill, saying Ruth just couldn't handle it. And
they bought it. The coroner couldn't definitively
prove homicide at the time, so it was left as
undetermined. But looking back with everything
we know now, it's so clear Ruth Monroe was likely
the test run. Puente actually went to prison
after the McKenzie incident and some other thefts.
She was sentenced to five years, but she only
served three. Three years. She was released in
1985. And this is the moment where you just want
to yell at the history books, because if they
had kept her in or if they had monitored her
properly upon release, the next chapter just
wouldn't have happened. The parole board released
her, but they gave her one specific condition.
She was barred from running a boarding house
or caring for the elderly. And who was checking?
Exactly. Who was checking? She went right back
to 1426 F Street, and she went right back to
business. Let's talk about that business model,
because the House of Horrors wasn't just a slaughterhouse.
It was a factory. A factory for turning human
beings into cash. The mechanism was the representative
pay system. Now, for listeners who don't know,
if a Social Security recipient is deemed unable
to manage their own money, maybe due to addiction,
mental illness or cognitive decline, the Social
Security Administration assigns a representative
payee. And that person receives the checks and
pays the bills for them. Right. And Puente made
damn sure she was that payee. She controlled
the mailbox. She controlled the signature. And
once she established total control over the finances,
the person attached to that check became extraneous.
In fact, the person was a liability. They hate
food. They took up space. They could complain
or wander off. A dead tenant, however. A dead
tenant costs nothing. And as long as the Social
Security Administration thinks they are alive.
The check keeps coming in the mail every month.
It's so chillingly rational from a purely economic
standpoint. Kill the expense, keep the revenue.
And the way she did it, she wasn't using a knife
or a gun. She was using her care. She used what
she had. She had access to prescription drugs.
Many of her tenants were already heavily medicated,
so she would hoard their pills or she'd get new
prescriptions from different doctors. The toxicology
reports later showed this really consistent pattern
of flurazepam. Delmaine. Delmaine. It's a very
strong sedative hypnotic for insomnia. In the
80s, it was commonly prescribed. But in high
doses, especially when it's mixed with alcohol,
which she allowed and even provided, it suppresses
the respiratory system. Just go to sleep. Never
wake up. Let's walk through the victims because
they aren't just names on a court docket. Everson
Gilmuth. This story is particularly heartbreaking
because he really thought he was in a romance.
Everson Gilmuth was 77 years old. He lived up
in Oregon. He and Puente had become pen pals
while she was in prison. Can you believe that?
She was working him even from her cell. Wow.
So when she got out in 1985, he drove down to
Sacramento in his little red Ford pickup truck
to marry her. He brought his life savings with
him. He moves in. And by November 1985, he's
gone. But he doesn't just disappear into the
yard. This is the coffin box incident. This is
one of the most brazen acts in the entire timeline.
For some reason, maybe she couldn't dig a grave
deep enough for a man of his size quickly, or
maybe she just didn't want him in the yard yet.
So she hired a handyman, a guy named Ismael Carrasco
Flores. And she told him she needed a storage
box built. A storage box? I have the dimensions
here. Six feet long, 30 inches wide, 30 inches
deep. I mean, come on. If someone asks you to
build a box that is the exact dimensions of a
human body, I'm sorry, I am asking some questions.
She told him it was for books and things. Ismail
built it. Then she asked him to help her move
it and dump it. It was nailed shut. It weighed
over 300 pounds. And she tells him it's just
junk. Just junk she needed to get rid of. They
loaded this junk into Gilmout's own truck, which
he was now driving, and they drove north to Sutter
County. Can you just imagine that car ride? You're
the handyman. You're driving with this sweet
old lady. There is a box in the back that smells
like mothballs and decay, and she's just chatting
away like it's a trip to the grocery store. They
dumped it on a riverbank. A fisherman found it
on New Year's Day, 1986. When the police opened
it, the body was wrapped in plastic and bed sheets,
and it was packed with mothballs and toilet deodorizer
blocks to mask the scent of decomposition. But
he wasn't identified. No, because he was from
Oregon and had no local ties to Sacramento. Nobody
identified him. He was a John Doe for three years.
And during those three years, Puente is writing
forged letters to his sister. I'm happy. I'm
traveling. We're having a wonderful time. She's
keeping him alive on paper just to keep the money
flowing. It creates a buffer. If the family thinks
he's happy and on the road, they don't call the
police. But Gilmuth was the outlier because he
was moved. The rest, the rest stayed home. Between
1986 and 1988, the yard at 1426 F Street became
a graveyard. She was burying them right under
the windows of the other tenants. The brazenness
of the yard burials is just hard to comprehend.
We're talking about a residential lot in the
middle of the city. Houses are coaxed together.
People have windows. Betty Mae Palmer, 78 years
old. She was found in a shallow hole in the front
yard. But get this, they found her without her
head, her hands, and her lower legs. Dismemberment.
It suggests Puente was struggling with the physical
reality of disposal. A full body is heavy and
hard to fit into a small hole. By removing the
extremities, you make the package smaller and
easier to handle. It's gruesome, practical, and
just horrifying. It really is. Then there was
Leona Carpenter, also 78. She was discharged
from a hospital right into Puente's boarding
house. She was sick, vulnerable. She died of
an overdose and went straight into the ground.
And James Gallop, 62. This one gets to me. He
had survived a heart attack and had a brain tumor
operation. He was terrified the tumor had come
back. And Puente told him, oh, I spoke to the
doctor. The tumor is benign. You're fine. She
gave him hope. She gave him false hope so he
wouldn't go back to the hospital where doctors
might notice he was being systematically drugged.
Then she killed him and buried him. And then,
this is the detail that feels like it's straight
out of a horror movie. She had a gazebo built
over the spot. A gazebo? A place to sit and drink
tea. directly on top of James Gallop's body.
It serves a dual purpose. It's an amenity for
the house, adding to that charming boarding house
aesthetic. But more importantly, it caps the
grave. You can't accidentally dig up a body if
there's a concrete slab and a wooden structure
built over it. Unbelievable. There was Vera Faye
Martin, 61, buried under a metal tool shed. Dorsey
Miller, 65, an Army veteran. She vanished just
weeks after arriving. Puente hired a carpet cleaner
to scrub a foul -smelling slime out of Miller's
room. That was almost certainly decomposition
fluid. It seems she kept the bodies in the rooms
for days sometimes, likely until she could figure
out the logistics of the burial at night. And
Benjamin Fink, 55. He was kind of the town drunk
character in her narrative. He was struggling
with severe alcoholism. And just before he disappeared,
Puente went out and bought 12 bags of cement.
Fink was found wrapped in a bedspread, secured
with duct tape. She had poured a concrete slab
right over him in the side yard, and she told
the other tenants she was just fixing up the
property. But how is she digging all these holes?
I mean, she's an old woman with a bad back. She
used the tenants. She was a master delegator.
She'd ask one of her tenants to dig a hole for
a new fruit tree or a trench for plumbing. Then
she'd send them away on an errand, dump the body
in and fill it in partially. Or she'd hire day
laborers for the heavy lifting, then finish the
job herself under cover of darkness. The neighbors
must have smelled something. You cannot have
seven bodies decomposing in shallow graves without
a scent. Oh, they did. Neighbors complained constantly
about a sweet, sickly smell, like rotting fruit
or backed -up sewage. But Puente had an answer
for everything. It's the old sewer lines. The
city really needs to fix them. Or her favorite.
The fertilizer. Oh, that's just the fish emulsion
fertilizer I use for my prize -winning roses.
Which is clever. Because fish emulsion smells
terrible and organic. It masks the scent of death
with the scent of gardening. She was always one
step ahead. Until she got sloppy. Or rather,
until she underestimated the persistence of one
particular social worker. Enter Alvaro Burt Montoya.
Burt was 51, but he functioned at a much younger
level intellectually. He had schizophrenia and
developmental disinclinities. He called Dorothea
Mama. He was, in her eyes, the perfect victim
-compliant, trusting, completely isolated. But
he had Judy Moyes. Judy was a social worker with
the Volunteers of America, and unlike some of
the others who were maybe just looking to clear
their caseload, Judy really, truly cared about
Burt. And when Bert disappeared in August of
1988, Puente gave her standard line, oh, he went
to Mexico to visit his brother. But Judy knew
Bert. She knew he didn't like to travel, he spoke
very little Spanish, and he would never, ever
leave without telling her. She didn't buy it
for a second. So she kept pestering Puente. Let
me talk to him. Give me a number. Where is he?
Puente started to panic. The Mexico lie wasn't
holding up, so she tried this wild, desperate
gambit. She took one of her handymen and drove
him out of town. She told him to call Judy Moyes
and pretend to be Bert's brother -in -law, a
guy named Michel Obregon. But the accent was
wrong. Right, it just didn't sound authentic.
The handyman didn't sound like the person he
was supposed to be. Judy was immediately suspicious.
Then Puente had a letter sent to Judy. supposedly
from Bert, but the letter was typed. Bert couldn't
type. And this is the detail that broke the case.
The letter arrived wrapped in a paper towel.
A paper towel. Why a paper towel? To avoid fingerprints.
Puente was trying to be clever, but normal people
don't mail letters wrapped in paper towels. It
was such a bizarre, paranoid action that it confirmed
to Judy that something deeply nefarious was happening.
She called the police. She filed a missing persons
report. And that brings us to November 11th,
1988. Police detective John Cabrera and his team
arrive at the house, and it's just a welfare
check. They are not expecting to find a serial
killer. They walk in, and Puente is the picture
of calm. She lets them look around. But while
they are there, a tenant named John Sharp, who
was terrified of Puente, manages to slip a note
to one of the officers. And the note says, she
wants me to lie to you. That note changed everything.
It went from a routine check to a real investigation.
Detective Cabrera went out to the yard. He noticed
the soil was disturbed in several places. It
just looked uneven. He asked Puente if they could
dig. And she said yes. Sure, go ahead, dig up
my prize -winning roses. Why would she do that?
Hubris. Or maybe she thought they wouldn't dig
deep enough. Maybe she thought the fish emulsion
story would hold. But Cabrera got a shovel. He
started digging near an apricot tree. He didn't
have to dig very deep, did he? No. About a foot
down, he hit something hard. He broke through
the dirt and found a shred of cloth. Then he
uncovered a human leg bone. This is the climax.
They have a bone. They have a body in the yard.
The house is swarming with cops. Yeah. And what
does Dorothea Puente do? This is the moment that
studies in Trust Bias should focus on forever.
Puente is standing there on the porch. She's
watching them dig up her victims. And she turns
to Detective Cabrera and says, Officer, I'm very
upset. Would it be all right if I walked down
to the Clarion Hotel to get a cup of coffee and
calm my nerves? She asks to go for coffee. While
there is a human leg bone sticking out of her
apricot orchard. It's insane. And Detective Carrera
looks at this 59 -year -old grandmotherly figure
in her nice red coat looking all frail and shaken.
And he says, okay. They let her walk away. Now,
to be fair to the police, she wasn't technically
under arrest yet. They hadn't identified the
bone as human for certain in that split second
or connected it directly to her. But the optics
are just unbelievable. They saw a little old
lady who needed a break, not a serial killer
fleeing the scene of the crime. So she walks
to the hotel. And she keeps walking. She walked
right past the coffee shop, hailed a cab, went
to the bus station, and bought a one -way ticket
to Los Angeles. By the time the police realized,
hey, she's been gone an awfully long time, she
was halfway down the state. The manhunt begins.
Every news station in California is blasting
her face. The Death House landlady. But she just
can't help herself. She gets to L .A., checks
into a seedy motel, and what does she do? She
immediately heads to a bar. The pattern just
repeats itself. She's at the Monte Carlo bar
in L .A. She meets an elderly pensioner named
Charles Wildis. She introduces herself as Donna
Johansson. Within an hour, she's asking him about
his pension checks. No. Yes. She's asking if
he lives alone. She is literally scouting her
next victim while the entire state of California
is looking for her. Did Charles Wildis watch
the news? He did. And he looked at this woman
asking about his money. He looked at the red
coat she was wearing and he realized this is
the woman from TV. He excused himself, went to
a payphone, and called the CBS station in L .A.
He called CBS, not 911. He called the news. It's
a very L .A. thing to do. But the news, to their
credit, called the police. LAPD swarmed the motel.
They knocked on her door. She didn't fight. She
just came out and said, I suppose you want to
talk to me. So she's brought back to Sacramento.
And now begins the trial of the century. We have
to spend some time here because the legal battle
was absolutely fascinating. It was not a slam
dunk. It really wasn't. The trial didn't even
start until 1993. That's five years after the
arrest. That's how long the legal wrangling took.
The prosecution, led by John Amara, had to prove
not just that the bodies were there, that was
undeniable, but that she murdered them. Right,
because finding a dead body in your yard, as
bad as it looks, doesn't automatically mean murder.
It can be natural causes, right? And that was
exactly the brilliant strategy of her defense
attorneys, Kevin Climo and Peter Vlotin. They
looked at the evidence and said, OK, we can't
deny she's a thief. She's a fraudster. She buried
these people. Absolutely. She's a bad person,
but she's not a murderer. That was their narrative.
These were old, sick people. They were alcoholics.
They were drug addicts. They died of natural
causes or accidental overdoses because they were
just unhealthy. And Dorothea, panicking that
she would lose the income, buried them to keep
the checks coming. So they argued she was guilty
of improper disposal of a body and theft. But
not homicide. And it was a deviously smart defense.
Because the bodies were so decomposed, the medical
examiner couldn't point to a stab wound or a
bullet hole. There was no smoking gun, so to
speak. It was all circumstantial. Exactly. It
relied on the toxicology the domain found in
the tissues. But the defense argued, well, these
people were prescribed sleeping pills. Maybe
they took too many by accident. Maybe they were
hoarding them. But the prosecution had the handyman,
Ismael Flores. He was their ace in the hole.
They gave him full immunity. He testified about
building the coffin box for Gilmeth. And that
was the most damaging piece of evidence for that
particular murder because it showed clear premeditation.
You don't build a custom coffin for someone who
died of a heart attack unless you are planning
to hide the body. The trial went on for months.
They called over 150 witnesses. The jury was
sequestered. And when they finally came back
with a verdict, it was a total mess. It was a
partial deadlock, and this is crucial to understanding
how effective that sweet old grandmother defense
really was. The jury convicted her of three murders,
Benjamin Fink, Leona Carpenter, and Dorothy Miller.
These were the cases where the evidence of Delamain
overdose and the circumstances were just the
strongest. But they deadlocked on the other six,
including Everson Gilmuth in the coffin box.
They couldn't agree. Some jurors just could not
get past reasonable doubt. They couldn't be 100
% sure she killed them versus just finding them
dead and panicking. It shows how difficult it
is to convict on circumstantial evidence, especially
when the defendant looks like Mrs. Doubtfire.
So she's convicted of three counts of first -degree
murder. Now comes the penalty phase. And the
prosecutor, John Amara, he wants the gas chamber.
He wants the death penalty. And again, the jury
deadlocked saved her. They debated for days and
days. Ultimately, several jurors refused to sign
a death warrant for an elderly woman. They just
couldn't bring themselves to do it. The optics
won again. So she was sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole. She goes to
the Central California Women's Facility in Chochilla.
She's in her 60s. You'd think she would just
fade away into prison history. But Dorothea Puente
had one more act. Of course she did. Her narcissism
just wouldn't allow her to fade away. She maintained
her innocence to anyone and everyone who would
listen. She insisted she was a saint who was
persecuted by the system. And then in 2004, she
engaged in one of the most surreal publicity
stunts in criminal history. She released a cookbook.
A cookbook? Cooking with a Serial Killer. I have
the title right here. It's actually called Cooking
with a Serial Killer. Recipes from Dorothea Puente.
She corresponded with this publisher named Shane
Bugbee. She sent him her recipes from prison
things like tamales, pork roast, burritos. She
also sent him poems and drawings she'd made.
Just imagine making a burrito from a recipe written
by a woman who poisoned her houseguests. It is
the height of dark irony. It's more than irony.
It's pure pathology. She wanted to be remembered
as a nurturer. Food was her tool. It was how
she lured people in. It was how she drugged them.
And in the end, it was how she wanted to be defined.
I wasn't a killer. I was a cook. And the house.
1426 F Street is still there. I looked it up
on Google Maps. It's a nice looking place now.
It is. It's a duplex. For a while, it was empty.
Then a couple bought it, knowing the full history.
And they actually leaned into it. They put up
a sign that said, the public is invited to keep
out. They even put a mannequin on the porch that
looked like Dorothea. That is bold. It's become
a piece of Sacramento dark folklore. People take
tours. It's a physical monument to the crime.
Dorothea Puente died in prison in 2011. She was
82 years old. Which is, ironically, the same
age or older than many of the people she killed.
She got to live out the full lifespan that she
stole from them. So we've gone from the orphanage
to the Victorian house to the garden to the prison
cell. When you step back and look at this entire
unbelievable saga. What is the piece that really
sticks with you? For me, it's the failure of
the safety net. We like to think of serial killers
as these evil geniuses who outsmart the police.
Prenta wasn't a genius. She was sloppy. She left
a paper trail a mile wide. The reason she succeeded
for so long wasn't because she was brilliant.
It was because her victims were invisible. Society
just didn't look for them. Exactly. If she had
been killing wealthy, young socialites with concerned
families, she would have been caught in a week.
But she was killing the people we walk past on
the street without making eye contact. The system,
the social workers, the police, even the neighbors,
they were all too happy to have someone else
deal with the problem people. She was providing
a service. She was a disposal system for the
unwanted. And that is a much harder, much more
uncomfortable truth to face than just one bad
woman did a terrible thing. It forces us to ask,
are we complicit? By underfunding social services,
by ignoring the mentally ill, by warehousing
the elderly, did we create the perfect environment
where a Dorothea Puente could thrive? I think
the answer is, on some level, yes. Predators
hunt where the prey is vulnerable. And we left
the gate wide open. That is a heavy thought to
end on. But it feels like the right one. Before
we go, I want to leave you with a question. Dorothea
Puente operated in plain sight for nearly a decade.
She was a nice lady on the corner. So the next
time you drive past a quiet boarding house where
you see a care home sign in a window with drawn
lace curtains, ask yourself, how much do we really
know about who is watching The Watchers? And
how many other invisible people are disappearing
right now? And we're all just grateful that we
don't have to ask where they went. Thank you
for listening to The Deep Dive. Stay curious,
stay critical, and maybe check in on your neighbors.