# 43: The Death House Landlady, Dorothea Puente (Part 3)

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 12 Sep 2023, 45 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880339/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851601-44100-2-0f19f251a45651e0.mp3

Today's episode is part 3, the finale, of the death house landlady and the house of horrors on f street - Dorothea Puente's garden of corpses. Trigger Warning: suicide, domestic abuse Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, a true crime podcast where we crack open some of the most
[0:12] notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:16] investigating, it goes without saying that this show comes with
[0:20] a content warning. The details can get a bit heavy
[0:23] and you might find some of the themes we discuss triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:39] So today's video is going to be Part 3, the finale of the Death
[0:43] House landlady Dorothea Puente's House of Horrors.
[0:47] If you didn't catch the first two parts, I'll put them both in
[0:50] the little eye. So make sure you've watched both
[0:52] of those before you watch this one.
[0:54] You need the full story. But if you are up to date on
[0:57] parts one and two, I'm just going to give a quick little
[0:59] recap in the beginning of this one and then we'll jump straight
[1:02] into the rest of the story. So Dorothea Puente is a 60
[1:05] something year old woman who's done prison time for drugging
[1:08] and robbing people before but since her release she's been up
[1:11] to much much worse. A whole 9 victim murder spree.
[1:16] These 9 victims included her best friend Ruth, her fiance
[1:20] Everson and seven of the tenants at the boarding house she ran.
[1:24] Although the police have no idea about any of these murders, they
[1:28] believe that Ruth's death was a suicide because she died of drug
[1:32] overdose. Although her children do
[1:34] actually suspect Dorothea and they have told police and
[1:37] they've tried to get them to look into to it, but the case
[1:40] was eventually ruled a suicide. As for her fiance, Everson,
[1:44] police don't even know that he's dead.
[1:46] They've found his body, but they don't know that it's his.
[1:49] This body has remained unidentified and his family have
[1:53] no idea either because they live all the way in Oregon and they
[1:57] think they've been writing letters to him.
[1:59] Although it's been Dorothea that's been responding.
[2:01] As for the other seven tenants, no one knows that they're dead
[2:05] either. Dorothea just simply dug holes
[2:07] in the backyard, buried them there, and then made-up some
[2:10] excuses to why they'd left. And Part 3 picks up the story
[2:14] when one of the surviving tenants at the boarding house
[2:18] asks a police officer if he can meet him away from the boarding
[2:21] house because he had something to tell him.
[2:24] This tenant told the police officer that he heard banging in
[2:27] the middle of the night, and it sounded as though someone was
[2:31] dragging something heavy down the stairs, perhaps a human
[2:35] body. And the officer sat and listened
[2:37] to this tenant telling him that he believed that Dorothea was
[2:40] killing all of her tenants 1 by 1.
[2:43] And he took all of this information back to the police
[2:45] station and handed it over to the homicide unit.
[2:49] So the first order of business for the homicide team was to
[2:52] familiarize themselves with Dorothea Puente, get up all her
[2:55] records, have a look, see who she is, what she was about, what
[2:59] she did. The main homicide detective that
[3:01] we're going to talk about in this case is John Cabrera.
[3:04] He was was like the main guy on the unit.
[3:07] I don't know official police terms, but he was like the
[3:10] leader of the homicide team. So he gets on the system.
[3:14] He types in Dorothea Puente, and sure enough, all of her criminal
[3:18] history comes up, her extensive criminal history.
[3:21] He learned that Dorothea at that current moment was still on
[3:25] probation for drugging and robbing two different victims on
[3:29] two different occasions. He also found that she used to
[3:32] have a boarding house once for in the past before her prison
[3:36] sentence, however, she'd had that boarding house taken away
[3:40] from her because she was stealing her tenants government
[3:43] checks. So what was to say that she
[3:45] wasn't doing that right now? Immediately to John Cabrera,
[3:49] everything just seemed weird about Dorothea Puente, even down
[3:53] to her age. She would tell people that she
[3:56] was in her 70s, but on file it said that she was 59.
[3:59] So John Cabrera wasted no time investigating both Dorothea and
[4:04] the house, the whole boarding house situation, because it was
[4:08] clear that something wasn't right here.
[4:10] He was specifically concerned about the fresh holes being dug
[4:14] in the backyard. So Cabrera and two or three
[4:17] other officers assembled A-Team and went to 1426 F St. to go and
[4:21] speak to Dorothea on November 11th, 1988.
[4:25] And surprisingly, Dorothea was unnervingly calm.
[4:30] It was very odd. This was a team of four officers
[4:33] at her door and she knew damn well that she was a serial
[4:36] killer and she was almost cocky in the way that she was
[4:40] answering questions. She wasn't afraid to answer any
[4:43] questions. She never flinched once at any
[4:46] of the questions and when they asked to search the house, she
[4:48] was more than happy for them to do so.
[4:50] So the team began searching the house and what they were really
[4:54] there for primarily was Burt Montoya.
[4:57] He was the missing person, the person that Judy Moyes was very
[5:00] concerned about. That was why they went to search
[5:02] the house in the 1st place. So the looking all over the
[5:05] house for some kind of sign of Burt Montoya, be it him alive,
[5:10] his body, his belongings, anything he left, anything that
[5:13] could, you know, point to where he was or what he was doing
[5:17] missing. They weren't really planning on
[5:19] finding his body so much like looking under beds and in
[5:22] closets because he was a big guy and it would be kind of hard to
[5:26] hide, you know, a big 6 foot whatever man in a closet without
[5:30] anyone finding him. They found absolutely nothing in
[5:33] the whole house relating to Burt Montoya.
[5:35] However, what John Cabrera did find was 2 pill bottles in
[5:39] Dorothea's bedroom, one that was empty and one that was full to
[5:43] the brim of sleeping pills. So he was looking at these pill
[5:47] bottles, and he realized that the empty bottle was prescribed
[5:50] to a woman named Dorothy Miller. And of course, that wasn't
[5:54] Dorothea Puente, his name. So why was that pill bottle in
[5:57] her possession? Of course, we know that Dorothy
[5:59] Miller was one of Dorothea's victims.
[6:02] She'd gone missing from the boarding house one night, and
[6:05] Dorothea had murdered her. However, when Cabrera asked,
[6:09] Dorothea said that Dorothy Miller was one of her relatives
[6:13] who had recently come to stay at the boarding house and just
[6:16] probably left that pill bottle behind.
[6:18] So the homicide team searched the whole house, and they found
[6:21] pretty much nothing other than that pill bottle.
[6:24] There was nothing there. And so before they left, they
[6:27] asked Dorothea if they could dig up the yard in a few places just
[6:32] to check there. And Dorothea said yes.
[6:34] She was, you know, willing for police to do whatever they
[6:38] wanted to do, but she asked why. And so Cabrera said, oh, well,
[6:42] you know, we've heard a couple of stories about how there's
[6:45] holes dug in your yard often, so we just want to check out what's
[6:50] going on there. Dorothea said, yeah, OK, that's
[6:52] fine. She even offered them another
[6:54] shovel because they'd only brought 2, and there was three
[6:56] of them. So she offered them another
[6:57] shovel. So they set out digging in three
[7:00] different sections of the yard. And they were going for about 40
[7:04] minutes, and they still hadn't found anything.
[7:06] And that was when one of them began digging up pieces of
[7:10] cloth. One of the pieces of cloth was
[7:12] like a section of like a blouse material or like a nightgown,
[7:16] like a very thin piece of cloth. And then another one was like a
[7:20] piece of leather. And so, you know, they seemed to
[7:22] be getting somewhere with it. And so they continued digging
[7:25] until they hit a tree root under the ground.
[7:28] So then the other two that were digging in other places of the
[7:31] yard came over to this one, and they all tried, like digging out
[7:34] this tree root, like moving it out of the way so they could
[7:37] continue digging. And so John Cabrera and got down
[7:39] into this hole and he grabbed it with his hands and he was just
[7:42] trying to like pull it and wiggle it with enough force to
[7:45] dislodge it. And then it came loose.
[7:48] He pulled it with so much force that he actually fell back into
[7:51] the hole behind him. And when he looked at this
[7:54] object in his hands that he thought was going to be a tree
[7:57] root, he realised it wasn't a tree root at all.
[8:01] It was a human bone. So the team all kind of look at
[8:04] each other and they're like, you're saying what I'm saying,
[8:06] aren't you? But they decide not to go and
[8:09] tell Dorothea just yet. They wanted to carry on digging
[8:11] and see if they found anything else.
[8:13] And sure enough, they found the rest of the remains of this
[8:17] human being. So John Cabrera goes and gets
[8:20] Dorothea from the house and brings her outside and points
[8:22] into this hole and just says look.
[8:24] And she looks and she's suddenly acting really shocked and really
[8:28] surprised and really scared and nervous and saying, Oh my God,
[8:30] what? How?
[8:31] So now the Homicide team realized that they just stumbled
[8:35] across something very real. And of course, they were just
[8:38] detectives. They weren't properly trained to
[8:40] handle and dig up dead bodies. And so they decided to pause it
[8:44] there and get a CSI team in. And the CSI team's job for the
[8:48] next few days was to dig up the whole of the yard around 1426 F
[8:54] St. and, you know, properly examine anything that they
[8:59] found. So the CSI team began the
[9:01] recovery of that body that John Cabreras team had found
[9:04] yesterday. But as they were looking at it,
[9:07] they realized that this was a woman, an elderly woman with
[9:11] Gray curly hair. And bear in mind, they were only
[9:15] looking for Bert Montoya. They didn't know that anyone
[9:18] else was dead, or that anyone else was even missing at this
[9:21] point. They were there because Judy
[9:22] Moyes had gotten in contact about Bert Montoya being
[9:25] missing. And if they were going to find
[9:27] anybody in the garden, they expected it to be Burt Montoyas.
[9:31] So they'd just found the body of an elderly woman that they were
[9:34] not expecting to find. And now they realized that this
[9:37] case was going to be way bigger than they originally imagined.
[9:41] And so they just continued digging.
[9:43] They continued digging the whole yard.
[9:45] And it was at this point in the case that Dorothea goes up to
[9:48] John Cabrera, who was actually helping dig in the yard with the
[9:51] CSI team, and she goes up to him and asks if she is under arrest
[9:56] officially at this point. And Cabrera said, well, no, not
[9:59] right now, but if you'd like to come down to the police station,
[10:02] they'd love to give her a lie detector test just to kind of
[10:06] rule her out for the most part, not fully rule her out, but, you
[10:09] know, get a good idea of whether she was telling the truth or
[10:12] not. And she said she was way too
[10:13] anxious to take one that day, so anxious that it had probably
[10:16] come out wrong anyway. But she was happy to take one
[10:19] the following Monday. In fact, she said she was so
[10:22] anxious right then that she needed to get away for a minute.
[10:25] She just needed to get away from 1426 F St. and all the press and
[10:30] all the investigation. And she just needed to clear her
[10:32] head. And so she asked Cabrera if it
[10:34] was all right, if she could just go for a walk to the end of the
[10:37] street and meet her nephew at the hotel and just have a coffee
[10:40] with him and just sit there for a while while the investigation
[10:43] was going on. And for some unbelievable
[10:45] reason, they said that she could, they deemed her not a
[10:49] flight risk and said, yeah, OK, sure.
[10:51] Bear in mind, a human body, human remains had just been dug
[10:55] up from this woman's garden, from a shallow grave.
[10:58] And they're like, Oh, yeah, sure.
[10:59] Oh, you're not going to be a flight race.
[11:00] Go for a coffee. And so John Cabrera escorted
[11:03] Dorothy Apuente through the rows and rows of media and press
[11:07] outside of her house and to the hotel at the end of the street.
[11:11] He left her there. And then he hurried back to
[11:13] continue with his digging. So Cabrera runs back to 1426 F
[11:17] St. and continues digging with the CSI team.
[11:20] And he must have only been digging for another 20 minutes
[11:22] or so when he hits something else.
[11:25] This time it was a leg. Still in jeans, still in a, it
[11:30] was a man's leg. So immediately the whole team
[11:33] begins panicking. They've just recovered two
[11:35] different sets of human remains. This is not an accident.
[11:39] And they're probably connected. And they're probably connected
[11:42] to the resident at the house, Dorothea.
[11:44] And so they're talking to each other, saying, well, where the
[11:46] hell is she? We need to arrest her now.
[11:48] And that is when John Cabrera had to confess to the rest of
[11:51] his team that he had let the main person of interest in this
[11:55] investigation go off for a coffee by herself.
[11:59] So Cabrera continued digging with the CSI team while another
[12:03] officer ran to that hotel at the end of the street to see if she
[12:06] was still there. He was there for about 10
[12:08] minutes, and then the rest of the team received a signal on
[12:12] their radio. It was that officer and Dorothea
[12:16] had taken off. And it was then that Cabrera
[12:18] realised that Dorothea was definitely guilty of something,
[12:21] because she'd waited until that exact moment to ask to go for a
[12:26] coffee. Until John Cabrera was just one
[12:28] foot above this body. He was almost there with his
[12:32] digging. And she'd noticed that, and she
[12:34] wanted to get away. She did not want to be there
[12:37] when they discovered that. So police began the process to
[12:40] try and track Dorothea down. But where do they even start?
[12:44] Where could she be right now? She could be anywhere.
[12:47] She'd been gone for about 20 minutes, so she could have
[12:50] travelled relatively far. And it wasn't long at all until
[12:53] they found yet another body. This time it was wrapped up in a
[12:57] bunch of blankets and a bunch of cloth and then a layer of
[13:00] plastic, and then it was all taped up.
[13:03] Like this body seemed to have been wrapped up way more than
[13:06] the others that were literally just dropped in the halls and
[13:10] filled over. So it seems in retrospect, that
[13:13] this body was probably one of the earlier killings when she
[13:16] was a lot more careful. She was a lot more meticulous.
[13:19] She took a lot more care with her victims.
[13:21] The search of the garden would take a number of days to
[13:24] complete and so in the meantime, other police officers were
[13:28] working on like other sides of the investigation, trying to
[13:32] figure out where these bodies had come from.
[13:34] So a number of them went door to door, speaking to Dorothea's
[13:38] neighbors on F St. asking them if they'd ever noticed anything.
[13:42] Heard anything, you know, One of the neighbors said that they had
[13:45] noticed a very foul odour coming from 1426.
[13:49] However, Dorothea explained it away, saying that she'd just
[13:52] laid out some fertiliser in the yard and that the smell had be
[13:55] gone in a few days. One neighbor also showed police
[13:58] a box of of items that he'd recovered from his garden that
[14:02] morning. And he believed that all of
[14:04] these items there were about 1520.
[14:06] He believed that they were human teeth and it just so happened
[14:10] that he found them in his garden on the morning that the CSI
[14:13] investigation began. That's not a coincidence.
[14:16] It was very likely that Dorothea knew that she would probably be
[14:19] caught or discovered that day. And so she was just trying to
[14:23] discard of any evidence that she had around the house, especially
[14:26] any evidence that would identify her victims.
[14:36] So police got in contact with social workers to put together a
[14:40] list of all the tenants that had stayed at the boarding house
[14:43] over the last however many years.
[14:46] So they could go down this list and just follow through with
[14:49] every single tenant to see if their family knew where they
[14:51] were, if they'd been any kind of medical records of them over the
[14:55] years, and just see how many of them had gone missing.
[14:59] And when Barrera received this list back from the social
[15:01] workers who was looking down it. And one name that jumped out to
[15:05] him in particular was Dorothy Miller.
[15:08] Now, if you remember, when he and the rest of the team were
[15:11] first searching the boarding house, he found an empty bottle
[15:15] of pills belonging to Dorothy Miller.
[15:17] And when he brought that up to Dorothea, she told him that
[15:21] Dorothy Miller had been a relative of hers that was
[15:24] staying over at the boarding house.
[15:25] And she must have just left that pill bottle behind.
[15:28] However, of course, now that was seeming very unlikely and now
[15:32] they were starting to question why Dorothea had lied about
[15:36] that. She was obviously covering
[15:38] something up. As the investigation went into
[15:40] its third day, there was still absolutely no sign of Dorothea
[15:44] Puente and police were doing everything they could to still
[15:47] track her down. They got in contact with people
[15:49] working on the Mexico border to kind of keep an eye out for her.
[15:53] And if they did see her, if she was trying to cross into the
[15:55] border, then they had to obviously hold her because if
[15:59] you remember what I said in Part 1 about how after she'd drugged
[16:03] and robbed Malcolm McKenzie, she bought a one way plane ticket to
[16:06] Mexico. So it was clear that she tried
[16:08] to flee there before. So there was nothing saying that
[16:12] she wasn't going to try that again.
[16:13] Meanwhile, back at the boarding house, they were still digging
[16:16] and searching in that yard and two more bodies were found on
[16:21] the 13th. And at that point that made for
[16:23] five bodies being recovered from the backyard of 1426 F St.
[16:28] And at this point, none of them had gone for autopsy or been
[16:31] identified or anything yet. However, it was very clear to
[16:34] the CSI investigators digging them up that these bodies had
[16:37] been killed over different periods of time.
[16:40] Some of them were more decomposed.
[16:42] Some of them were eerily fresh. Some of the bodies they were
[16:46] digging up were pretty much just born like that first one that
[16:49] they found. But some of them seemed to have
[16:51] only been dead, only a matter of weeks, showing that whatever had
[16:55] been going on here had been going on for a very long time,
[16:59] flying under police's radar. And as all of this was hitting
[17:02] the news in real time, police were being contacted by all
[17:07] sorts of people that claimed that they had even more leads
[17:10] for them to follow up on. And one of these people, or
[17:13] should I say an organization, was a local halfway house.
[17:17] Now, if you don't know what a halfway house is, neither do I
[17:21] really. I don't actually know if they
[17:22] have them anymore, but it's kind of like a step between prison or
[17:26] jail and normal everyday life. It's for people that have just
[17:30] finished their sentences and they're on parole, but they've
[17:34] been in prison so long that they kind of need to reintegrate into
[17:37] society. So I think they stay at the
[17:39] halfway house overnight, and then during the day they'll go
[17:42] out and they'll get jobs. They'll pick cut work, they'll
[17:44] socialize and kind of get that bit back before they're just
[17:48] kind of let out into the world and just got to adapt to real
[17:52] life again. So this halfway house got in
[17:54] contact with the police and they said that they believed that
[17:56] they could help in this investigation.
[17:58] They had a little bit of information because they knew
[18:02] that it wasn't Dorothea that was digging all of those holes in
[18:05] her own garden because it was their parolees that were digging
[18:09] those holes. Dorothea had paid these men who
[18:13] were looking for work to come and dig holes in her garden on
[18:17] the premise that she was doing some renovation or, you know,
[18:20] putting new features in. This whole time, everyone in the
[18:23] community thought that she was a St. because she was helping out
[18:26] the community. These parolees would struggle to
[18:29] find work because of their criminal past.
[18:31] A lot of businesses and companies wouldn't let them work
[18:34] there. However, Dorothea was giving
[18:36] them that work and that pay that they needed.
[18:39] However, in reality, the only reason that she was choosing
[18:42] parolees to do this rather than doing it herself was because,
[18:46] you know, she was kind of old and she couldn't do all that
[18:50] physical labour herself. She needed someone else to do
[18:52] it. And the reason that she chose
[18:54] these parolees over, you know, any other kind of labourer that
[18:58] could have dug the holes for her was because who were these
[19:02] parolees really going to tell about it?
[19:04] It had never come up in conversation for them because
[19:07] they're not integrated into that society.
[19:09] They don't have friends that know Dorothea or go to the
[19:12] house. Their only friends are at that
[19:14] halfway house and as well, because they kind of stay at the
[19:17] halfway house and they only come out to work, they'd never notice
[19:21] if anything was really happening with those holes.
[19:24] If she told them to dig these holes so that she could do some
[19:26] kind of garden renovations. And then the next week, the
[19:30] holes were just filled over. Then they'd get a bit
[19:32] suspicious, but of course, they're never going to see that.
[19:35] And specifically, one of these parolees in particular wanted to
[19:39] sit and speak with police because he was just now
[19:42] realizing that maybe he had unknowingly had a hand in
[19:47] covering up these murders with Dorothea.
[19:50] Basically, Dorothea had asked this man if he could do her a
[19:53] favour. That seemed innocent at thirst,
[19:56] however, once he realized that five bodies had been found in
[19:59] her yard. He was now realizing that it
[20:04] wasn't so innocent. This parolee told police that
[20:07] Dorothea had asked him to call Judy Moyes, pretending to be
[20:12] Bert Montoya's uncle from Utah that he was staying with.
[20:16] Dorothea told him it was because the social workers were visiting
[20:20] too much. She just kind of wanted them off
[20:22] her back and to give her some peace for a bit.
[20:24] And so he agreed to do the call and make it sound as though he
[20:28] was Bert Montoya's uncle and that Bert was fine, not knowing
[20:32] that Dorothea had already murdered Bert.
[20:35] The next day of the investigation, police ripped
[20:37] down a shed that was in the yard of the boarding house.
[20:41] And what do you know, they found another body under there, making
[20:45] it 6 now. And once they felt like they dug
[20:47] up pretty much all there was to dig in the backyard.
[20:51] The backyard kind of went down the side of the house and then
[20:53] down the back, and they pretty much dug the whole thing.
[20:57] They decided to move on to the front yard.
[20:59] There was just a bit of a patch of grass out in front of the
[21:03] house and they began digging in there and once again they found
[21:07] one more body, which was the final one that they found,
[21:10] making the total 7. But this last body, the 7th, was
[21:14] the first one that the CSI team had come across that was
[21:18] mutilated. All the other bodies were still
[21:21] found pretty much whole. And if they weren't, then that
[21:24] was because of decomposition. But this one, this was the only
[21:28] body that had the hands cut off, the feet cut off, and it was
[21:32] decapitated. There was no head.
[21:34] So we believe that this body, the last one to be found, was
[21:38] actually the first one to be killed.
[21:40] The first tenant to be killed. Of course, she murdered Everson
[21:43] and Ruth. Before that, however, Betty
[21:46] Palmer was the first tenant that she murdered, and because it was
[21:50] her first and she realized that she was going to bury Betty on
[21:54] her own land, she wanted to make sure that Betty's body would be
[21:58] unidentifiable. So she cut off all the prints
[22:01] and of course, her head, where she could have been identified
[22:05] through her teeth. And Betty Palmer's hands, feet,
[22:08] and head have actually never been found.
[22:11] Cabrera says that they could well be on the property and they
[22:14] just hadn't found them that whole time.
[22:16] Or maybe Dorothea had, you know, disposed of them, discarded of
[22:21] them somewhere else. During this investigation,
[22:24] police actually got a tip off from one of the neighbors on F
[22:27] St. that said they'd actually seen Dorothea digging in an
[22:31] empty lot across the road. There were plans to begin the
[22:35] construction of two houses on that lot in the coming months.
[22:39] And so it makes sense if there's going to be two houses built
[22:42] there anywhere, and no one's ever going to be able to dig it
[22:45] up ever again, then it makes sense that she would very bodies
[22:49] there. The CSI team moved over onto
[22:52] that empty lot, and they were digging for a while, but they
[22:55] didn't find anything over there. Absolutely nothing.
[22:58] No sign of any other bodies, no sign of the rest of Betty
[23:02] Palmer's body. Unfortunately, the rest of Betty
[23:04] Palmer's remains were never found, and Dorothea never told
[23:08] anyone, never so much as hinted to anyone where she'd disposed
[23:12] of them. Meanwhile, all the searches were
[23:15] still going on inside the boarding house.
[23:17] All of the borders that were still there when all of this
[23:20] came out were moved out into temporary accommodation and
[23:24] police went in there and they recovered over 300 separate
[23:29] items of potential evidence. This included pill bottles,
[23:33] books of different kinds of information.
[23:35] There was one book all about different types of drugs.
[23:38] So they believed that that was what Dorothea used to kind of
[23:41] educate her self on what drugs could kill people, what doses
[23:45] could kill people. They took cuttings of the carpet
[23:48] from the death room because, like I said, bodies would be in
[23:51] there so long that bodily fluids would soak through the floor
[23:56] into the carpet, into the woodwork.
[23:59] And you know, that was evidence police got in contact with
[24:02] whoever kind of ran and managed the government benefits system.
[24:08] So whoever was giving out the money for pensions and
[24:10] disability allowances, all of the money that Dorotheas tenants
[24:14] would be receiving from the government that she stole.
[24:17] And they basically just asked for a list of everyone that had
[24:20] claimed benefits at that address at 1426 F St. for the past
[24:26] however many years. And it wasn't surprising that
[24:29] pretty much all of the benefits that were being claimed to that
[24:32] address were under Dorothea's name somehow.
[24:36] And the most shocking thing is, is that benefits were being
[24:39] claimed at that address from people that didn't even live
[24:42] there anymore, from people that hadn't lived there for years.
[24:45] James Gallup, Vera Fair, Martin, Dorothy Miller, Leona Carpenter,
[24:49] Betty Palmer, all still somehow claiming for checks at that
[24:54] address. And none of them had been seen
[24:56] for months, if not years. And the reason that they were
[24:59] still being paid out was because no one even knew that they were
[25:02] missing. Dorothea picked her victims very
[25:05] well. She would pick people that
[25:07] didn't have much family, people that, you know, didn't have
[25:10] anyone checking on them, didn't have people calling the police
[25:13] if they weren't missing. By day five of the
[25:16] investigation, there was still no sign of Dorothea Puente.
[25:20] And at this point it was pretty much international news.
[25:23] This was a huge case. 7 bodies had just been found in the
[25:26] garden of a home and the suspected murderer is on the
[25:30] loose somewhere. It was on news stations in
[25:32] Europe, in Asia. There were reporters flying in
[25:35] from all corners of the globe to come to this house and report
[25:39] outside the house. As this whole investigation was
[25:42] going on inside, they were getting videos of the CSI team
[25:46] recovering certain things from the garden.
[25:49] And as the case was gaining this much attention, it was
[25:52] inevitable that the news was going to end up getting back to
[25:55] ever sing. Gilmouth's family, who of course
[25:57] recognized the name Dorothea Puente as their father's new
[26:01] wife. And of course, they were very
[26:03] worried. So they called the Sacramento
[26:05] police and they just said, OK, this woman that is suspected of
[26:09] seven murders is our father's wife, and we just want to know
[26:12] if he's OK. But of course, there really
[26:14] wasn't much that they could do at this point.
[26:16] They hadn't seen him or spoken to him just yet, and none of the
[26:19] bodies were identified yet. So they just had to tell his
[26:23] family that they would keep a lookout and they'd keep them
[26:25] updated. That same evening, police
[26:28] finally got their first lead on where Dorothea Puente could be
[26:32] right at that moment. It was from a man who believed
[26:35] that he'd been speaking with her the night before in a bar.
[26:39] He thought that Dorothea had looked familiar the whole time
[26:41] that he was speaking to her, but it was when the conversation
[26:44] changed to his government checks and kind of how much money he
[26:49] was receiving on benefits that it all clicked in his head and
[26:53] he realized that this was the woman that he'd seen on the
[26:56] news. But luckily, at this point,
[26:58] Dorothea had already shared with this man where she was staying
[27:02] at that moment in time. She told him that she was
[27:05] staying in a motel just outside of Sacramento, and so police
[27:09] went straight there to arrest her.
[27:10] When she answered the door to police, she originally gave a
[27:14] fake name and of course police weren't buying it at all.
[27:17] And so they asked to see some form of ID, which she obviously
[27:21] couldn't provide. And so instead of resisting or
[27:24] coming up with a cover story, she just said, OK, I'm Dorothy
[27:28] Appointe. And they arrested her and took
[27:30] her to the police station. Meanwhile, at this point,
[27:33] autopsies were finally beginning on all of the bodies and all of
[27:37] the different materials and stuff that were found in the
[27:40] garden. Now if you remember one of the
[27:42] first things they found in that first hole, before they even
[27:46] found a body, they found two pieces of material, one that was
[27:49] kind of like a blouse nightgown type material and 1:00 that
[27:53] seemed more leather like. As they began looking at this
[27:56] leather like material under a microscope, they realized that
[28:00] it actually wasn't leather at all.
[28:03] It was human flesh that had fallen from the bone and then
[28:07] just gotten really tough over time.
[28:09] Pathologists knew that the autopsies of the full bodies
[28:12] were going to be really hard to do because of how decomposed the
[28:16] bodies were. It was going to be really hard
[28:18] to identify who was who, what they died of.
[28:21] However, there was one body that was going to be pretty easy to
[28:25] identify. It was the 4th 1 one recovered
[28:27] from the yard, a middle-aged male that was identified using
[28:31] his tattoos. This one was Benjamin Fink, the
[28:35] man that was in the boarding house due to his alcoholism.
[28:39] The man that Dorothea had murdered one night when he was
[28:43] particularly rowdy at the dinner table.
[28:45] Two of the bodies that were recovered actually had
[28:48] salvageable fingerprints or footprints or whatever, so they
[28:52] were easy to identify as Dorothy Miller and Bert Montoya.
[28:55] The other bodies were slow, fully identified one by one over
[28:59] the course of the rest of the investigation, of course, the
[29:02] remaining 4 being Vera Fey, Martin, James Gallup, Betty
[29:06] Palmer and Leona Carpenter. But of course, just because
[29:10] these were the only bodies found in the backyard of the boarding
[29:13] house, that doesn't mean that they're Dorothea's only victims.
[29:17] She could have had other victims that she'd just disposed of
[29:20] their bodies elsewhere. And so police had a plan, and
[29:24] they just asked all of these police departments to look
[29:26] through any unsolved murders that they had over the past
[29:30] however many years and just see if any of the characteristics
[29:34] line up with these seven. And sure enough, one department
[29:38] did get in contact with them and said that they had an
[29:41] unidentified unsolved murder from 1986.
[29:46] This was the unidentified, very decomposed body of an elderly
[29:50] male that had been wrapped up and left in a wooden box by a
[29:54] river. And it was at this point in the
[29:56] investigation and that that body could finally be identified as
[30:00] that of Everton Gilmouth and that part of the case was put to
[30:04] rest. And it was around the same time
[30:13] that Ruth Monroe's family once again got in contact with
[30:16] police, begging them to reopen the case of their mothers death.
[30:22] They'd ruled it a suicide. However, this woman died of a
[30:26] drug overdose under the care of Dorothea Puente.
[30:30] And now they had seven other people that had also died of the
[30:34] same circumstances. So it was obvious that this
[30:37] probably wasn't a suicide. So finally police began taking
[30:41] Ruth Monroe's death seriously. The case was reopened.
[30:45] They looked at all the information, all the evidence
[30:48] and finally Ruth Monroe was considered one of Dorothea
[30:52] Puente's murder victims. This was finally ruled a murder.
[30:56] Altogether. Dorothea was to be put on trial
[30:59] for 9 different murders, seven of which were her tenants that I
[31:03] just ran through, plus her ex fiance Everson Gilmouth and her
[31:07] best friend Ruth Monroe. The trial was due to begin in
[31:11] 1990, but it didn't actually end up happening until 1993 due to
[31:16] loads of different reasons, like there was a venue change.
[31:20] Because obviously this case, this was so high profile and so
[31:23] widely reported on that the amount of press, like once the
[31:27] press found out where the trial was going to be held, they all
[31:30] flocked there and made it unsafe.
[31:32] So they had to change venues secretly.
[31:34] Before the trial, Dorothea was offered a plea bargain.
[31:38] They said to her, look, if you plead guilty to all of these
[31:41] murders, then you will get life in prison.
[31:45] But she didn't have to be tried for the death penalty.
[31:48] So the plea deal is basically saying, do you want guaranteed
[31:51] life in prison but you keep your life, or do you want to try and
[31:54] get a lower sentence but potentially lose your life?
[31:57] And Dorothea chose that second option.
[31:59] She wanted to plead not guilty because she thought that she
[32:03] could get away with a lot lower sentence than life in prison.
[32:07] And so the trial went ahead in summer of 1993.
[32:10] It was a relatively tricky trial to navigate because no one had
[32:15] actually seen or heard or had any evidence of Dorothea
[32:21] actually killing these people. And even though their causes of
[32:25] death couldn't be determined through their autopsies due to
[32:28] the level of decomposition, the fact that the bodies were
[32:31] wrapped up and then, you know, put in holes in the ground, they
[32:35] hadn't done that to themselves. This was obvious homicide.
[32:38] But that is exactly where Dorothea's legal team kind of
[32:41] wedged their way in. They couldn't deny that Dorothea
[32:45] had stolen the money from her tenants because her name was on
[32:48] all the checks. They could barely even deny the
[32:51] fact that she'd buried them in the yard due to those parolees
[32:54] digging the holes in the yard, and of course, the fact that
[32:57] this was her property. She didn't own it, but she
[33:01] rented that house. So who else is going to bury
[33:04] bodies on your property? You know, even though no one had
[33:08] actually seen physically with their own two eyes?
[33:11] Dorothy appointed. Burying bodies on her own land,
[33:15] there was still too much circumstantial evidence to even
[33:18] try to argue it. Like they just kind of had to
[33:21] accept the fact that that is what happened.
[33:24] So the way that the defence went at it was, yeah, OK, Dorothea
[33:27] buried these bodies on her own land, but she didn't kill them.
[33:31] They said that all of those tenants, all of those bodies
[33:35] that were buried had died of natural causes, be it, you know,
[33:40] from their conditions or alcoholism.
[33:42] They said that they all died, but Dorothea didn't murder them.
[33:46] However, she felt the need to hide these bodies because she
[33:51] knew that she was running an illegal boarding house.
[33:54] So if she was to call a coroner to come and pick up this body
[33:57] from the house, she would then have to explain that they were
[34:01] one of her tenants at her boarding house.
[34:03] Police would then find out that she was running an illegal
[34:05] boarding house, which was against her probation, which
[34:08] would then put her back in prison.
[34:09] She said that she knew that what she was doing was wrong.
[34:13] She knew it was wrong, but in order to keep her job, to keep
[34:17] her business, she just had to take care of disposing of the
[34:21] bodies herself rather than do it the official legal way of
[34:25] getting a coroner to come and take the body away.
[34:27] And this put the prosecution in a very sticky situation because
[34:30] how do they argue that that's a very believable story?
[34:34] And because the bodies were so badly decomposed that their
[34:37] cause of death couldn't be identified, how do you say that
[34:41] they were murdered? They could well have died of
[34:43] natural causes, but we'll never know.
[34:45] But there was one piece of evidence that pointed to the
[34:48] fact that Dorothea was drugging all of these people, and that
[34:52] was the fact that they actually all had Dalmain in their system
[34:57] when they were killed. Dalmain being that sedative drug
[35:00] that I said she liked to use, the one that is believed to have
[35:03] killed Ben Fink. Dorothea argued that she gave it
[35:06] to all of her tenants because it helped them sleep.
[35:09] It was a very common drug. However, something seemed off
[35:14] about that to the court. Looking back through medical
[35:17] records of both hers and her tenants, the prosecution found
[35:21] that Dorothea Puente in total had been prescribed somewhere
[35:25] near 1000 pills of Dalmen in the time that she had her boarding
[35:30] house. Which is an insane amount.
[35:32] Even if they were being used for their intended purpose every
[35:36] single night, which they're not supposed to be because they
[35:39] build up in your system, that would still be an excessive
[35:42] amount. That would still be too many for
[35:45] her to have possibly used. After hearing over 150 witness
[35:49] statements and enduring over 50 days of this trial, the jury
[35:54] finally went to deliberate. However, it wouldn't be so
[35:58] straightforward because not all of them believed that Doris was
[36:02] guilty. It took the jury over six
[36:05] months, months of deliberation, which is the longest in U.S.
[36:11] history, for them to finally come to a messy verdict.
[36:15] They didn't even come to a solid verdict.
[36:17] Bear in mind in these kind of videos, you've heard me say
[36:20] things like after three hours of deliberation, the jury came back
[36:23] six months, six whole entire months, half a year. 11 members
[36:28] of the jury believed that Dorothea was guilty.
[36:31] However, there was one, the final 12th member of the jury
[36:35] just wasn't convinced she was guilty.
[36:37] They couldn't all agree on the different charges that they
[36:40] would give her for the different victims, Of course, 9 victims
[36:44] and there's so many different options.
[36:46] There's first degree, second degree, third manslaughter,
[36:48] whatever. And they all have to agree on a
[36:52] charge for each victim, which of course is going to to be very
[36:55] hard. It's going to take a lot of
[36:57] debate and discussion and conversation.
[37:00] Anyway, finally, after six months, the jury came back and
[37:04] they shared exactly what they thought Dorothea was guilty of
[37:07] and for what victim. They found Dorothea Puente
[37:10] guilty of the first degree murder of Dorothy Miller and
[37:14] Benjamin Fink. They also decided that she was
[37:17] guilty of second degree murder in the case of Leona Carpenter.
[37:21] However, the other six murders were all declared A mistrial.
[37:27] And I believe that was because the 12th juror, the one that,
[37:30] you know, was persuaded against his will to agree to those
[37:34] three, said that he wasn't going to deliberate any further.
[37:37] He was like, fine, OK, I'll agree with you guys for those
[37:40] three. But, you know, that's all you're
[37:41] getting out of me. But for those 3 murders that
[37:44] they did find her guilty of, Dorothea Puente was sentenced to
[37:47] life in prison without the possibility of parole.
[37:51] The jury then went back to deliberate whether she would get
[37:55] the death penalty or not. However, they came back
[37:59] deadlocked. They just couldn't decide.
[38:01] And so it went to the judge who decided that life in prison was
[38:05] enough for Dorothea. Dorothea Puente spent the rest
[38:09] of her life in a prison in Chowchilla, and during her time
[38:13] she had a lot of pen pals on the outside who were desperate to
[38:18] speak to an infamous serial killer.
[38:20] In 2004, one of these pen pals actually helped Dora Rithia
[38:25] write a book from inside prison because she was an avid cook.
[38:30] She really liked cooking. This guy who would have been
[38:33] writing to her said, look, send me loads of recipes, loads of
[38:36] your favorite recipes that you've made during your life,
[38:40] and he would make them into a cookbook and get it published.
[38:44] This guy's name was Shane Bugby, and he successfully got this
[38:48] cookbook published for her. And it's still available to buy
[38:51] like just on Amazon or whatever it's called.
[38:54] Cookbook Working with a serial killer Recipes from Dorothea
[38:57] Puente Eventually, on March 27th of 2011, Dorothea Helen Puente
[39:03] passed away, still in prison from natural causes, aged 82.
[39:08] After the case, more specifically after the murder of
[39:11] Bert Montoya, Judy Moyes had to quit her work as a social
[39:16] worker. Well, she wasn't a social
[39:18] worker. Well, she was, she was a street
[39:20] counsellor helping the homeless. And that meant that she worked
[39:24] with people like Bert every single day and she just found it
[39:28] way too triggering knowing that she'd failed someone in the
[39:33] past. I personally don't think she
[39:34] failed him. She wasn't supposed to know, but
[39:37] that's how she felt. She had a lot of guilt due to
[39:41] what happened to Burt Montoya since the murders.
[39:44] The house 1426 F St. remained empty for a long, long time
[39:49] because of course no one really wants to buy and live in a house
[39:54] that so many people have died in.
[39:55] That was until 2011 when Tom and Barbara Holmes were house
[40:00] searching in the area and 1426 caught their eye.
[40:04] They were originally looking to buy the house next door when
[40:07] they saw 1426 and they were like, can we view that one?
[40:11] Like, is that one available? And the real estate agent said,
[40:13] well, yeah, it's available, but like, do you know, it's history?
[40:17] Do you really want to do that? And Tom and Barbara, they
[40:19] weren't from the area, so they didn't know.
[40:21] And the real estate agent explained it all to them, but it
[40:25] didn't faze them. And they still wanted to go and
[40:27] look around. And eventually they purchased
[40:29] that house. To them, the house was
[40:31] beautiful. It served all of their needs.
[40:34] Their whole mindset on living in this house is, well, the house
[40:39] is innocent. The house didn't do anything.
[40:41] The house didn't commit the murders.
[40:43] It was simply a vessel where this all took place.
[40:47] But the house itself doesn't deserve to be treated like that,
[40:51] you know, So the two of them snatched it up and moved in.
[40:54] And, you know, everyone in the area was quite intrigued about
[40:58] this new couple that had moved into the neighborhood, moved
[41:01] into the House of horrors in the neighborhood.
[41:03] And people would always go and stand outside the house and look
[41:06] in. And it's, you know, quite a dark
[41:09] tourist attraction. Things like that always are.
[41:12] And so Tom and Barbara decided to have a sense of humor about
[41:16] the whole thing. And they decorated the garden
[41:19] with lots of little jokes referring to the murders.
[41:22] They put a mannequin out on the porch that they dress in a red
[41:26] coat because that's what she was wearing in those famous pictures
[41:29] where she went out for a coffee. They've put a grey head wig on
[41:32] her. Sometimes they put a shovel in
[41:35] her hands. They put a purse around her arm.
[41:38] And sometimes they leave getaway money in.
[41:41] There's signs up around the garden saying things like
[41:44] trespassers will be drugged and buried in the yard.
[41:47] There's another one saying, please don't park on the
[41:49] driveway. The ghosts like to get out at
[41:51] night and terrorize the neighborhood.
[41:53] That one I don't think is too bad.
[41:55] But that first one, like I said, people would stop outside the
[41:58] house and stare in, and they would say a lot of things.
[42:01] And they would talk to Tom and Barbara and be like, how can you
[42:04] live in there? And all of this kind of made Tom
[42:07] and Barbara quite upset. So the two of them decided to
[42:10] make and put up a plaque outside that said it was that awful,
[42:14] awful woman that did it. Don't blame me, signed the
[42:18] house. They have a similar sign that
[42:19] says it was that crazy bitch that did it.
[42:22] Not me signed the house, but they moved that one inside
[42:26] because of the language. There's another sign in the
[42:29] garden that says keep out from under the grass, referring to,
[42:33] of course, the buried bodies. Surprisingly, they've actually
[42:36] kept all of the original hardwood flooring in the house,
[42:39] which I find rather strange considering in the death room
[42:43] sometimes bodies would be left in there so long the bodily
[42:47] fluids would literally seep into the woods.
[42:50] The couple themselves don't believe that the house is
[42:52] haunted. It's not that they're non
[42:54] believers, they do believe in the paranormal or they would
[42:57] like to believe in the paranormal.
[42:59] It's just that they personally haven't seen or heard or
[43:02] experienced anything in that house.
[43:04] Although Barbara's elderly mother that once lived with them
[43:08] does believe that the house is haunted and she has a couple of
[43:12] stories actually. She recalls one night she went
[43:15] to bed as normal and then she woke up in the middle of the
[43:18] night to the light switching on in the room.
[43:21] And when she opened her eyes, she recalled seeing a woman
[43:25] piercing around the room and it was as if she was looking for
[43:28] something. And then this woman came right
[43:30] up to her, got right in her face and lent in so far that her eye
[43:35] was right in front of Barbara's mother's eye.
[43:38] She just stayed there for a while.
[43:40] She didn't say a word and then she got up and left the room.
[43:43] This woman was wearing dark black lipstick and she would
[43:47] smile a lot, but Barbara's mother somehow knew that she
[43:51] didn't like her like the ghost. This woman didn't like her being
[43:56] there. She just got this feeling.
[43:58] Another time, Barbara's mother was walking from the hallway
[44:01] into her bedroom when she stopped in the doorway, just out
[44:05] of paralyzing fear. For some reason, she was just
[44:07] really scared to enter her bedroom and because of this
[44:10] feeling, she decided to peer into her bedroom, not walking
[44:15] like leaning. And that was when she saw a
[44:17] really big orange orb floating around in front of the window.
[44:23] Like the size of your fist. Other than that, there's been no
[44:26] more activity at that house. And the house has been blessed
[44:29] by priests and cleansed and whatever several times by
[44:34] several different people. And I suppose it's up to you
[44:37] what you believe in terms of paranormal activity and good.
[44:41] But yeah, that completes this case.
[44:47] Thank you so much for listening to Usual Disclaimer.
[44:50] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[44:53] by any of the topics we discussed today, please check
[44:55] the description where we've left some helpful resources.
[44:59] If you want to hear more cases like this one, make sure to
[45:01] follow Usual Disclaimer on your podcast app so that you get
[45:05] notifications when we post new episodes.
[45:07] And if you really enjoyed, I'd love it if you could leave a
[45:10] rating and a review too. Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[45:13] Neil is an Audio Boom Studios production.
[45:16] See you next time.

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