# 41: The Death House Landlady, Dorothea Puente (Part 1)

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 5 Sep 2023, 48 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880316/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851576-44100-2-631a5e13284ea6e7.mp3

Today's episode is on serial killer Dorothea Puente, also known as the death house landlady. 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.
[0:38] So today's video is going to be another solved true crime case.
[0:43] Today we're going to be talking about a female serial killer
[0:45] named Dorothea Puente, also known as the Death House
[0:49] landlady. So before we do, I just want to
[0:52] give my usual disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:55] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:57] This video is for educational purposes and everything that I'm
[0:59] about to say is just information that I have found on the
[1:02] Internet and I'm compiling into one video.
[1:05] Dorothea Helen Gray was born on January 9th, 1929 in Redlands,
[1:09] CA. She was the 6th of seven
[1:12] siblings and life was what I can only describe as traumatic for
[1:16] Dorothea right from the off. Her parents Trudy and Jessie
[1:20] were both abusive Alcoholics. They both earned their money
[1:24] working on a cotton field, however they just didn't make
[1:26] enough to support such a big family.
[1:29] On the evenings, her mother Trudy would do sex work for a
[1:32] little bit of extra money, but she would often bring her
[1:35] clients back to the house so all of her young children were
[1:39] seeing new men walk in the house every day.
[1:42] This case in the very beginning reminds me quite a bit of the
[1:45] Mary Bell case. I don't know if you've heard of
[1:47] it. I've done a video on it if you
[1:48] want to go and watch it. But she was another female
[1:51] serial killer who grew up with her mother doing sex work and
[1:55] bringing it back to the. House.
[1:57] It's just a lot of. Seeing and hearing things that a
[2:01] little girl does not need to be seeing and hearing at such a
[2:04] young age, you know? As well as bringing her clients
[2:06] back to the house, Dorothea's mother Trudy would often go away
[2:10] for days at a time to go and see clients.
[2:12] And on these trips she'd be partying and she'd come back
[2:16] drunk and disheveled. And she would leave the kids
[2:19] with her husband Jessie, who like I said, was also an abusive
[2:22] alcoholic and he just didn't care for the children.
[2:25] And Dorothea was the 6th of seven children, so she was one
[2:29] of the very youngest. She couldn't look after herself
[2:31] and neither could her younger brother.
[2:33] So her mother sometimes when she would go.
[2:35] Out on these trips would lock. Them in a closet with some food,
[2:39] food and just leave them there for hours at a time.
[2:42] I don't know if she thought she was doing a good thing by doing
[2:45] that, kind of locking them out of harm's way with some food
[2:48] until she could get back and look after them herself.
[2:50] But that's horrible. Jessie, Dorothea's father was
[2:53] always too drunk to care for them.
[2:55] He was always just kind of passed out on the couch.
[2:58] And when he wasn't passed out, he was very abusive.
[3:00] He was also very, very depressed.
[3:02] And I don't like to sit and speculate on people's potential
[3:06] mental illnesses, but I do believe.
[3:08] That there was. Possibly something else there as
[3:11] well because not only would he go through these super, super
[3:14] low lows, but he would also have really high highs and he was
[3:19] very unpredictable, very just worrying to be around.
[3:24] I don't know what other way to describe it other than scary for
[3:27] other people not knowing what he was going to do at whatever time
[3:30] he did survive this suicide attempt.
[3:33] However, he ended up passing away not long after from
[3:36] tuberculosis, leaving Dorothea to be cared for by her mother
[3:40] when she was just 8 years old. And bear in mind, her mother
[3:43] wasn't much better than her father.
[3:44] She was also an abusive alcoholic.
[3:47] One year after that, Dorothea's mother, Trudy, also passed away
[3:51] in a motorcycle cycle accident. And so when Dorothea was just
[3:54] nine years old, she was sent to various care homes, various
[3:59] relatives to care for her. She just had a very, very
[4:02] unstable childhood. Not only did she suffer so much
[4:05] loss at such a young age on top of all the abuse, but now she
[4:09] was being passed between all these different homes.
[4:11] She could never make friends in anyone area because she'd be
[4:14] whisked away to another home. And it was just like she never
[4:16] had any stability in her life. She never had a solid moment to
[4:20] kind of establish herself. And when she was in some of
[4:23] these care homes, kind of foster homes, some sources say that she
[4:28] did endure some kind of sexual abuse.
[4:31] Eventually, Dorothea settled permanently in Fresno in
[4:34] California with some relatives. Once she did grow up and became
[4:38] an adult, and she would get into conversations with people about
[4:41] her childhood, Dorothea would lie a lot.
[4:45] And I don't know whether that's out of embarrassment or just
[4:47] kind of wanting to sound fun and exciting, but she would say a
[4:52] lot of different things that just weren't true.
[4:54] She would say that she was born and raised in Mexico, which
[4:57] wasn't true. She would say that her parents
[4:59] abandoned her and that she was picked up by some random people
[5:03] and raised by them, which again, was not really true.
[5:06] Sometimes she would tell people that she had eighteen siblings,
[5:10] only fourteen of which reached adulthood, which is a very
[5:13] strange lie. Eighteen siblings.
[5:15] In 1945, when Dorothea was 16 years old, she married a 22 year
[5:21] old man named Fred Fred Mcfaul. Fred was a soldier who had just
[5:25] returned home from fighting. He met Dorothea very.
[5:27] Quickly, she was 6. Years younger than him and he
[5:30] was able to groom her essentially into this
[5:34] relationship and the two of them got married.
[5:37] At this point during her life, Dorothea lived in Washington.
[5:40] She was going by the name Sherry and she would earn her money
[5:44] through sex work. And weirdly enough, this is the
[5:47] thing that attracted Fred to her, which I think is so creepy
[5:52] and disgusting to think about. That a 22 year old man was
[5:55] attracted to a 16 year old girl because she was a sex worker.
[5:59] Because it proved that she was willing to do extreme things to
[6:05] be independent. Like he liked that she was
[6:08] independent and she was willing to do anything for it, including
[6:12] sex work. At 16 years old, Dorothea and
[6:14] Fred actually had two children together, two daughters,
[6:18] although they didn't keep either of them.
[6:20] One of them was put up for adoption very quickly and the
[6:23] other one was sent to live with Dorothea's relatives in
[6:26] Sacramento, CA. She actually fell pregnant 1/3
[6:30] time very quickly after the second in 1948.
[6:33] However, this time she suffered A miscarriage and very quickly
[6:37] after this miscarriage, her husband Fred left Dorothea and
[6:41] got a divorce. But just like with her
[6:43] childhood, Dorothea had a cover story that she would tell people
[6:48] a lie. She would actually tell people
[6:50] that Fred passed away from a heart attack.
[6:53] Now, I don't know whether that was to mask the embarrassment of
[6:56] being divorced at such a young age.
[6:59] Especially in those times. It probably would have been a
[7:02] level of shame. I think it was to save her from
[7:04] the embarrassment of telling people that he left her.
[7:07] I don't know what reason he left her for, but I presume it was
[7:11] just a lot easier to tell people that he died so she wouldn't
[7:13] have to explain things. You'll notice a trend here with
[7:17] Dorothea Puente. A lot of the lies that she tells
[7:20] are either ones that will gain her a lot of sympathy.
[7:23] They like her husband dying or. Ones that make her seem more
[7:26] interesting, like her being born and raised in Mexico and having
[7:29] eighteen siblings. She was actually just a straight
[7:32] up pathological liar. She would lie about every single
[7:35] aspect of her life, her job. She would tell people that she
[7:38] was an actress or a singer or a celebrity.
[7:40] She would lie about her connections.
[7:42] She would tell people she had a load of famous friends.
[7:45] She had links to the royal family.
[7:47] After Fred left her, Dorothea began turning to alcohol, just
[7:52] like her parents had when she was younger.
[7:54] At this point, she was still doing sex work as her job.
[7:57] However, it just wasn't paying her enough at this point and she
[8:00] wanted more. So it was at this point in her
[8:03] life that she began committing petty crimes.
[8:06] She would forge fake checks and steal things from shops.
[8:10] And then one day when Dorothea was 19 years old, she was in
[8:14] this one particular star. She was forging this fake check
[8:17] to pay for things with when the star clerk was getting a bit
[8:21] suspicious of it. The star clerk clerk called the
[8:24] police without Dorothea knowing. However, of course, the star
[8:28] clerk had to stall Dorothea and keep her in the store until
[8:31] police got there. And I think Dorothea was getting
[8:33] suspicious of the situation, knowing that police would come
[8:36] in. And in that moment, she knew
[8:38] that she didn't want to stay in that store.
[8:40] She didn't want to get arrested, she didn't want to do prison
[8:42] time. And so instead, she ran out of
[8:45] the store, hopped on the first bus she saw.
[8:48] However, at this point, police had already arrived and they
[8:51] watched her hop on this bus, so they knew exactly where she was
[8:55] going on the other side. When she got off of the bus,
[8:57] police in that area arrested her, so she still got caught.
[9:01] For this. She was sentenced to one year in
[9:03] prison for that fraudulent check and as part of her trial, she
[9:08] had to have a psychiatric assessment to kind of determine
[9:11] why she did this. The psychiatrist concluded that
[9:13] Dorothea did this because she had low self esteem due to her
[9:18] childhood and her divorce and everything.
[9:20] She found her kind of self worth in her clothes and in her
[9:25] possessions, so she wanted to steal things, to have the nicest
[9:28] things, to make people like her and to boost herself esteem.
[9:32] The psychiatrist concluded that Dorothea would probably be a
[9:35] repeat offender if she didn't have some kind of
[9:38] rehabilitation, like some kind of counselling or help to help
[9:41] herself esteem, so she wouldn't have to find it in outside
[9:45] sources like clothes. However, with our prison system
[9:49] that we have, rehabilitation never really ends up happening
[9:53] and Dorothea only served four months of her one year sentence.
[9:57] After her release from jail, Dorothea was put on probation
[10:01] for a year, but not long into that she decided to run away.
[10:05] Which is obviously a violation of your probation because you've
[10:08] got to let them know of every change in location.
[10:12] She physically just. Upped and left and no one knew
[10:16] where the hell she'd gone and so her probation officer had to
[10:20] report her as missing because what else was he supposed to do?
[10:23] And now she was a criminal for violating her probation.
[10:26] Police began an official search for Dorothea.
[10:29] There was a warrant out for her arrest.
[10:31] They were asking for leads. They were following every single
[10:34] lead. But everything came up short and
[10:37] eventually they just decided to stop looking.
[10:40] Meanwhile, Dorothea had moved to Francisco and continued to
[10:44] support herself with sex work there.
[10:46] It was rumored that she fell pregnant during this time,
[10:49] however I couldn't find that on too many sources so I don't
[10:52] know. In 1952, Dorothea was going by
[10:55] the earliest Taya when she met and married a Swedish man named
[10:58] Alex Johansen. Once again, she told this man so
[11:02] many lies that she was Muslim, that she was a mixed African and
[11:05] Asian descent. She also lied about her job.
[11:09] I don't know what she told him that she did, but it wasn't sex
[11:11] work that she told him. And because he was a fisherman,
[11:14] he was away for long periods of time on these fishing trips and
[11:19] so he never actually realized that that was what she did.
[11:22] But eventually, because this was her husband, they were married.
[11:26] Like how can you keep your whole job a secret from your husband?
[11:31] He began to get a little bit suspicious.
[11:33] Dorothea knew that Alex wouldn't like her being a sex worker, so
[11:37] she didn't want to tell him that she was one.
[11:39] So instead she decided to change her job, but not entirely.
[11:43] Instead she decided that she would run a brothel.
[11:47] So she was still within the sex working industry.
[11:50] However, she just wouldn't be taking clients as self.
[11:53] She would be managing other sex workers that did take on
[11:56] clients. She hired out this building and
[11:59] she told the landlord that she was renting it off, that she was
[12:03] going to be opening up some kind of book club or library.
[12:07] And he believed it. He had no reason not to.
[12:09] But after a while, the landlord of this building that she rented
[12:13] began getting suspicious of what was actually going on in there,
[12:16] and so he called the police. Police decided to go undercover
[12:20] as clients to the brothel to try and kind of catch them in the
[12:25] act, and of course they did. Dorothea was arrested because it
[12:29] is actually illegal to run a brothel and she was sentenced to
[12:33] 90 days in prison. Following her release from jail,
[12:36] Dorothea and her husband Alex began arguing like hell and
[12:41] these arguments were getting so bad that Alex actually got
[12:45] Dorothea admitted to a psychiatric ward.
[12:48] The diagnosis given to her on the psychiatric ward was that
[12:51] she was a liar with an unstable personality that required
[12:55] antipsychotic medication. In 1966, when Dorothea was 36
[13:00] years old, her husband Alex divorced her.
[13:03] It was a mixture of her anger, her behavior, her lack of
[13:07] motivation as well. She was a very lazy woman.
[13:10] It. Was all just.
[13:11] Too much for Alex to handle. He just didn't want to be
[13:13] married to this woman anymore. I think it just made him kind of
[13:16] fall out of love with her. And so he left her very soon
[13:19] after the breakup of her last marriage in the same year.
[13:22] In fact, Dorothea actually married again, this time to a
[13:27] man that was over 20 years younger than her named Roberto
[13:30] Puente, which is where she got the name Dorothea Puente.
[13:34] And it was at this point that Dorothea decided to leave the
[13:37] sex work industry for good. She hadn't been taking her own
[13:40] clients for a very long time at this point, and she just decided
[13:44] that she didn't want to run a brothel anymore.
[13:45] There was too much risk. She found that she could make an
[13:48] honest living working as a nurse's aide in private homes.
[13:52] So she wasn't a nurse because she didn't have the
[13:54] qualifications to be 1, but she would work with, like, elderly
[13:58] people, disabled people, people with kind of things that meant
[14:02] that they couldn't properly care for themselves.
[14:04] Like she would work with a lot of Alcoholics.
[14:06] And her job was basically just to make sure that they've had
[14:10] their medication, make sure that they've eaten, maybe help them
[14:13] wash those kind of things. Dorothea's marriage to her
[14:16] husband, Roberta, only lasted 2 years.
[14:19] Well, that's when they divorced. They divorced after two years of
[14:22] marriage. However, a lot of sources said
[14:24] that Roberto had left Dorothea way before then.
[14:27] He didn't actually divorce her though, he just left her.
[14:30] So they were still married for a long time and obviously she
[14:33] didn't want to divorce him, so she just stayed married to him
[14:36] for as long as she could really. Until I think it got to a point
[14:39] where she didn't really want to be married to him anymore
[14:42] because they'd been separated for so long.
[14:44] So eventually she filed for divorce.
[14:46] A lot of people that were friends with Dorothea at the
[14:48] time believed that Roberto was only with her just to gain US
[14:52] citizenship. The relationship happened very
[14:54] fast. They had nothing in common,
[14:56] There was a huge age gap and then it fell apart very fast.
[14:59] And a lot of her friends seemed to think that there wasn't
[15:03] really anything, there wasn't like a mutual thing there.
[15:06] And now all that Dorothea had left in her life, her husband
[15:10] was gone and everything. She only really had her job as a
[15:13] nurse's aide. And so she was sat thinking,
[15:15] well, what do I do with my life now?
[15:17] And she decided to build on her career and it was a lot like
[15:21] with the sex working thing, she knew that she could probably
[15:24] make more money if she was managing other people doing that
[15:28] rather than actually doing the job herself.
[15:37] So in 19. 68 When Dorothea was 39 years old, she set about
[15:42] buying her own private home and that was when she found a
[15:45] property on F St. in Sacramento in California, 2100 F St.
[15:51] It had three stories, it had 16 bedrooms.
[15:54] It was perfect. It was exactly what she needed.
[15:56] And here she set up her own care home essentially for just anyone
[16:01] that needed somewhere to stay, to be cared for.
[16:04] So that was all people. It was people with disabilities.
[16:07] She would take on a lot of criminals that maybe had issues
[16:11] as well, like maybe they were Alcoholics or drug addicts, but
[16:15] because they were criminals and they were quite problematic in
[16:18] the way that they behaved, a lot of other care homes wouldn't
[16:21] take them on. However, Dorothea would.
[16:23] She still didn't have any qualifications in medicine.
[16:26] However she technically didn't need them for this job, even
[16:30] though she was dispensing their medication.
[16:32] Like she was in charge of what they had, how much they had at
[16:36] what times, which sounds very dangerous.
[16:38] And because of her lack of qualifications, she wasn't
[16:41] actually allowed to take on patients that had super complex
[16:44] needs. So it's not like she could ever
[16:47] get herself into a situation that she didn't know how to care
[16:50] for a patient, you know? So on the top floor of this
[16:52] house, so the way it was built, it had a basement floor, a
[16:55] ground floor and a second floor. Dorothea saved that second
[16:59] floor, the top one, all for herself.
[17:01] She had a bedroom. She had a full living quarters
[17:04] up there. She had an office room where she
[17:07] actually hung uploads of fake diplomas, so she was pretending
[17:11] like she had qualifications. Obviously because this.
[17:14] Wasn't like a licensed official care home.
[17:16] She had to have a professional come once a month just to kind
[17:20] of check how everything was going, check that all the
[17:23] tenants were having their needs met.
[17:25] And I think all these diplomas were just to make Dorothea look
[17:29] good and look official and look like she knew what she was
[17:31] doing. She also had just a bunch of
[17:34] drawers and cabinets full of medical stuff that she couldn't
[17:37] use, like syringes and stuff. She wasn't qualified to be able
[17:41] to use those on patients, but she had them anyway.
[17:44] So it was Dorothea's room on the 3rd floor and then on the ground
[17:48] floor and the basement is where the tenants would stay, tenants
[17:51] on the ground. Floor of the boarding house
[17:53] would have their own room each with a built in bathroom and
[17:57] that's not an ensuite, that is a built in bathroom.
[18:01] In the room they had a single bed and ATV and then any other
[18:06] items that they they wanted to bring, but that was all they
[18:09] were provided with. The ground floor of the boarding
[18:11] house was for higher income tenants, people willing to pay
[18:16] more, but the lower income tenants were in the basement and
[18:20] they did not have their own rooms.
[18:22] This was actually just one big room with a bunch of single beds
[18:25] in it, all separated by curtains.
[18:29] So like a hospital ward. Every time she moved a tenant
[18:32] into the boarding house, one of the rules to stay there was that
[18:36] they had to sign over all of their benefits checks to
[18:40] Dorothea. So because a lot of them were
[18:42] unable to work, because obviously they had to be in a
[18:45] care home, they would get benefits money from the
[18:48] government just to like, pay for their living.
[18:50] And Dorothea said that they all had to transfer them to her to
[18:53] kind of pay for their upkeep and then she would help them manage
[18:57] their money from there. Because a lot of.
[18:59] Them were Alcoholics and they kind of needed that supervision
[19:02] with their money. And the business was going well.
[19:04] At first, Dorothea was still struggling with her alcohol
[19:07] dependency, but it wasn't getting in the way of her new
[19:11] business. She would kind of keep that part
[19:13] of her life for the evening and spend the day down in the care
[19:16] home, like actually doing her job.
[19:19] And as she was earning more and more money with this care home,
[19:22] she was getting more and more social outside of it.
[19:25] Her reputation was very. Important to her and as she.
[19:29] Was getting more money and she was spending more money on how
[19:32] she was perceived by other people.
[19:33] She was very well liked in the neighborhood.
[19:36] She would go out a lot. She would meet people a lot.
[19:38] She was in bars almost every single night.
[19:41] And you know, she was still the same pathological liar that
[19:44] she'd always been. And everyone always thought
[19:46] Dorothea was so interesting because she was a former actor
[19:50] and she had all these famous ex boyfriends.
[19:53] And because her care home was doing so well and she had so
[19:56] much money to spend. She would often go on nights
[19:58] out, pay for the full thing for everyone.
[20:01] She would pay for the full bill at a bar.
[20:04] She would go to events and buy rounds and rounds and rounds of
[20:07] drinks as she was socializing and getting to know people.
[20:10] And I know I've been saying as the business started doing
[20:13] better and better, but really, was it the business doing better
[20:17] and better or was she just bringing in more tenants?
[20:21] To take all of their government benefits money, she would often
[20:25] manage all of their money to the point where they didn't know
[20:30] where certain things were going. She wasn't telling them how much
[20:34] her fees were or how much the boarding fees were, how much
[20:37] food fees were. She would just take a big chunk
[20:40] of it every month and say, look, that's for your upkeep.
[20:42] But she wouldn't kind of break it down and show them, OK, so
[20:45] food is this much every month. It was very, very shady.
[20:48] In 1974, after Dorothea had owned A and run this business
[20:52] for many years at this point, she decided to hire a
[20:55] groundskeeper. He was a very attractive young
[20:58] man named Pedro Montalvo, and Dorothea very quickly took a
[21:03] liking to Pedro and she actually offered him his own room in the
[21:07] boarding house as part of his payment, which we all know it
[21:11] was so that she could spend more time with him.
[21:13] As his time at the boarding house went on, the two of them
[21:16] spent more and more time together.
[21:18] Dorothea started taking him on her lavish nights out where she
[21:21] would pay for everything and these nights would end up back
[21:25] in her bedroom. And over time, the two of them
[21:28] kind of developed feelings for each other.
[21:30] And as with all her other relationships, this one was also
[21:34] built on lies. She told Pedro that she was
[21:37] originally from Mexico just like he was, but of course she
[21:40] wasn't. She told him that she was a
[21:42] professional doctor and had all the qualifications, and she did
[21:45] all of her studying in Mexico. None of that is true.
[21:49] Before long, Dorothea and Pedro got married, making him her 4th
[21:53] husband when she was 45 years old.
[21:55] And just like her last one, Pedro was a lot younger than she
[22:01] was. And just like her other
[22:02] marriages, this one fell apart very quickly as well.
[22:06] Pedro quickly became very aware of the dark side of Dorothy's
[22:10] business. He suspected her of stealing
[22:13] from her tenants, not only from their checks that they were
[22:17] getting every month, but also physically stealing their
[22:20] possessions like jewelry and and different things that their
[22:23] family would bring in for them. And it was true, she was doing
[22:25] all of that and she was doing way more than that as well.
[22:28] She was going out to these bars without Pedra and she would rob
[22:33] men. She would have very flirtatious
[22:35] relationships with a few regulars at the bar so that they
[22:37] would buy her things. They would give her money, which
[22:40] I suppose is not a crime, but it's infidelity outside of their
[22:44] marriage. And Pedra just realized a lot of
[22:46] things that were going on that he was very naive to in the
[22:49] beginning, and he didn't want to be in this marriage anymore.
[22:52] But instead of bringing this open, like officially leaving
[22:54] her, Pedro decided to just run away after a month of marriage,
[23:00] and Dorothea was left to get it annulled.
[23:03] For the next few years, Dorothea continued to run her boarding
[23:07] house and she really enjoyed her job.
[23:09] This wasn't really a job. She was stealing from all of her
[23:12] tenants. That was how she was making the.
[23:13] Majority of her wage and surprisingly some of this money
[23:17] that Dorothea would acquire from stealing and other illegal
[23:21] activities, she would actually put back into the community.
[23:25] So there were a particular group of poor children that used to
[23:29] hang around on the street outside the boarding house.
[23:31] And Dorothea would go out to them, She would talk to them and
[23:34] play with them. She would take them food because
[23:37] some of their families couldn't even afford to feed them.
[23:40] And Dorothea would pay for their like kind of basic necessities
[23:44] that they needed like bags for school and books and pens.
[23:48] But in the late 70s, Dorothea was finally caught for her
[23:52] illegal cashing of her tenants checks.
[23:55] This happened when one of her tenants at the boarding house
[23:58] was out one day and they got arrested while they were out and
[24:02] they were taken back to police custody.
[24:04] And somehow while they were in a cell, their checks were getting
[24:09] signed for. And police were thinking, well,
[24:12] how? Because they've been in a cell
[24:14] this whole time. So they decided to look into it,
[24:17] and they found that it was actually Dorothea Puente who was
[24:21] signing the checks. So police decided to look
[24:24] further into this, and they were finding that all of the checks
[24:27] that were being delivered or being, you know, assigned to the
[24:32] boarding house were all being signed by Dorothea, which is
[24:36] illegal. They found that she'd done this
[24:38] to at least 40 other people, totalling over $4000.
[24:43] Dorothea was arrested and given five years on probation, so no
[24:48] jail time, but only on the condition that she gave up the
[24:51] boarding house and she couldn't work in anything like that
[24:55] again. Once again, she had another
[24:57] psychiatric appointment and this time she was diagnosed with
[25:00] unspecified schizophrenia. So I believe there's multiple
[25:04] types of schizophrenia and she was showing behaviors of more
[25:10] than one. So they just said it was
[25:12] unspecified. At least I believe that was how
[25:14] they diagnosed people back then. I don't know what it's like now.
[25:17] During this five year probation, Dorothea Puente was allowed to
[25:21] move around and she took this opportunity with open arms.
[25:25] She was moving all over California.
[25:27] She was picking up jobs everywhere she went, but none of
[25:30] them really stuck. She didn't enjoy any of them.
[25:33] She wanted nothing more than to have her care home back.
[25:36] She really enjoyed it. And so she attached a plan to
[25:39] kind of work her way back to that.
[25:42] Eventually, she moved back to Sacramento in 1979, and she
[25:46] decided that the way that she was going to get her foot back
[25:49] in the door of that industry was that she was going to be a carer
[25:53] for a family. So a family's private carer.
[25:57] But in order to do this, she knew that she had to change up
[26:00] her look because she was going back to Sacramento.
[26:02] This was the exact same place that she was a known criminal
[26:06] in. So she had to change up her
[26:08] look. She knew that the best look to
[26:10] go for when you want in that kind of job is to look as
[26:14] innocent and trustworthy and wise as you possibly can.
[26:19] And so she made herself look intentionally older.
[26:22] She stopped dyeing her hair. She let it grow out naturally
[26:25] Gray. She would dress older than her
[26:28] age. She would lie about her age.
[26:30] So at this point, I think she was in her 50s and she would
[26:33] tell people she was in her 60s. She would wear these big round
[26:36] glasses and she was just basically trying to look the
[26:40] part of this like kind little old lady, and it worked.
[26:44] She found a family on F St. in Sacramento, the exact same
[26:49] street where she once had the boarding house, and they wanted
[26:53] her to be their kind of nanny, almost.
[26:57] And this family were the Odorika family.
[27:00] They were Mexican and Spanish speaking, and the reason that
[27:03] they chose Dorothea over anyone else was because she could also
[27:07] speak Spanish and they kind of wanted that nanny figure around
[27:11] their children to help them learn.
[27:13] As part of her payment, Dorothea was also allowed to live in the
[27:16] house. They actually gave her the full
[27:18] top floor of their house. And her job was basically to be
[27:21] a nanny, a healthcare worker, kind of a general house
[27:25] housekeeper, just kind of like someone to be there pretty much.
[27:29] And quickly Dorothea became part of the family for the Odorikas.
[27:34] She was so close. She was just like a grandmother
[27:37] figure to the children, even to the point where when they had
[27:40] another child, they actually asked Dorothea to be the
[27:43] godmother. And because she was employed
[27:45] full time with the Odorika family, but they didn't
[27:47] necessarily need her full time because, I mean, she's not
[27:51] always going to be busy, is she? Dorothea decided that she wanted
[27:54] to go out and get herself some other work on the side, kind of
[27:58] healthcare work in the same field that she was in before.
[28:02] So Dorothea went out and she was looking for a job, and she
[28:05] eventually came across a company that didn't ask for your
[28:10] criminal history. So she went for that one.
[28:12] And the job that she was given was pretty much a nurse's aide.
[28:15] She'd pretty much done this job before, but instead of being in
[28:18] one place and all the tenants being there, she would go to
[28:22] their own individual houses. And this was going really well
[28:25] for Dorothea. She was enjoying her job.
[28:28] That was until a lot of them suspected that maybe she was
[28:32] stealing from them. But Dorothea was very good at
[28:35] manipulation and gaslighting. And obviously all the people
[28:40] that she was going to care for were vulnerable in some way,
[28:42] whether they were old or disabled.
[28:45] And once Dorothea realized that she could get away with this and
[28:48] that she was good at talking her way out of this, she decided to
[28:52] step up her crimes and get more out of it.
[28:55] So Dorothea had this one particular woman that she would
[28:58] go and care for named Esther. And Esther had pretty bad heart
[29:02] problems, but they were on the mend and she didn't require as
[29:06] much care anymore. But Dorothea didn't want to lose
[29:09] Esther as a client because Esther was wealthy and she had a
[29:13] lot to steal. And Esther was doing really,
[29:15] really well in terms of her heart condition.
[29:18] And then all of a sudden it got really bad again and she was
[29:22] being rushed to hospital every single week for like irregular
[29:26] heartbeat and other issues like that.
[29:28] Of course the doctors did treat her for every single time, but
[29:31] they were just very confused as to where the sudden decline had
[29:34] come from. That was until 1 social worker
[29:38] at the hospital pointed out the fact that Esther always seemed
[29:42] to be quite sick in the days after Dorothea visit and all the
[29:46] other doctors agreed that this was very suspicious.
[29:49] And so to check on Esther, they decided that they were gonna
[29:52] visit her house one time when Dorothea was there just to kind
[29:56] of observe the dynamic of observe what's going on.
[29:59] So the doctors went there, and Dorothea was very helpful.
[30:02] She was very reassuring that Esther was getting all the
[30:05] medication she needed. And Esther herself even told
[30:08] doctors that she was really glad that Dorothea was there because
[30:12] she just really liked having her around.
[30:14] And she felt like she couldn't really look after herself at
[30:17] this point. All of a sudden, after this
[30:19] doctor's visit, Esther stopped coming to the hospital.
[30:23] It was kind of like her heart condition was cured.
[30:26] But of course, doctors knew that that couldn't be the case.
[30:29] And not long after that, doctors at that hospital received a call
[30:33] from doctors at another hospital saying that Esther had arrived
[30:38] at their hospital for these heart problems.
[30:40] And they just wanted to communicate with her old doctors
[30:43] just to kind of get a better idea of what she was going
[30:46] through. And when the doctor from the
[30:48] first hospital realised that Dorothea had taken Esther to a
[30:53] different hospital miles and miles away, just to avoid seeing
[30:57] that one doctor that was suspicious of this whole thing,
[31:00] that was pretty much confirmation to him that
[31:02] something was going on. It was as if Dorothea realised
[31:06] that the doctors were suspicious of her.
[31:07] And she thought, well, I can't be taking Esther back to that
[31:10] hospital. We'll go to a different one.
[31:18] So the first doctor advised the second to have a look at Ester's
[31:22] toxicology reports, and sure enough, there were high levels
[31:26] of various different drugs in Ester's body, none of which were
[31:31] prescribed to her, all of which were prescribed to Dorothea.
[31:36] And so doctors concluded that Dorothea had been drugging
[31:41] Esther to keep her just unwell enough that she needed someone
[31:46] to go and check on her every week so that Dorothea could be
[31:49] going and stealing all of her possessions.
[31:52] Of course, when all of this came out, Esther fired Dorothea as
[31:56] her carer and they all tried to take it to the police.
[31:59] The doctors, Esther, Esther family, they all went to the
[32:02] police. However nothing could really be
[32:05] done because there was no evidence that Dorothea actually
[32:09] gave those drugs to Esther. Frustratingly enough, Dorothea
[32:13] just continued on with her career, she wasn't even given so
[32:17] much as a warning. In 1982, Dorothea was 53 years
[32:21] old and she was out at a bar one night when she met a
[32:25] significantly older man, 74 year old Malcolm McKenzie, and the
[32:29] two of them got flared in and Malcolm suggested that Dorothea
[32:33] come back to his that night. So the two of them got in a cab
[32:36] and they went back to Malcolm Mackenzie's house.
[32:39] But as they were coming to get out of the cab, Malcolm realized
[32:43] that he was a lot more intoxicated than he thought he
[32:46] was. He could barely even get out of
[32:48] the cab. He was stumbling all over the
[32:50] place, he was almost collapsing. Bear in mind, this was a 74 year
[32:54] old man and Dorothea had to pretty much carry him into his
[32:58] house and lay him on the sofa. He was fine back at the club,
[33:01] fine enough to be flirting and dancing with Doris Thea and
[33:05] charming her back to his house. So how was he so intoxicated as
[33:10] soon as he arrived home? And what he couldn't understand
[33:12] was why he was so awake and alert in his thoughts and kind
[33:17] of sober in his brain, but his body was just the complete
[33:21] opposite. It was like his body was drunk
[33:23] but his mind was so bad. He quickly realized exactly what
[33:26] was going on when Dorothea laid him on the couch and he watched
[33:30] as she got up and began rummaging through all of his
[33:34] things. Dorothea had drugged this man so
[33:37] that she could go around his house and steal all of his
[33:39] possessions. She got out a big red suitcase
[33:42] and she laid it on the floor and she was filling it with
[33:45] everything. She was grabbing loads of stuff
[33:47] from his drawers and just on the side, anything that looked
[33:50] valuable. And then right before she left,
[33:52] she went over to Malcolm McKenzie who was laid on the
[33:55] couch, still alert in his brain, he understood and knew
[33:59] everything that was going on. She walked over to him, picked
[34:02] up his hand, took the pinky ring off of his finger, and left his
[34:06] house. Obviously, Malcolm McKenzie knew
[34:09] who Dorothea was. He knew her full name because
[34:11] he'd been speaking to her all night and so I don't know how
[34:14] she thought she was going to get away with this.
[34:16] But as soon as he was alert again, he was able to call the
[34:19] police who showed up on Dorothea's doorstep 2 days
[34:23] later. She was arrested and a court
[34:25] date was set for three months time.
[34:27] All she had to do for three months was just stay out of
[34:30] trouble after she lost her job with Esther.
[34:33] Dorothea was very worried about her career and how she was going
[34:36] to make money from now on and that was when she had the idea
[34:39] to enlist the help of one of her friends.
[34:42] This friend was 61 year old Ruth Monroe.
[34:45] Ruth's husband had sadly been diagnosed with terminal cancer
[34:49] and she was very worried about what her life was going to look
[34:53] like once he passed away and Dorothea saw this as an
[34:57] opportunity for them to help each other.
[35:00] Ruth needed a friend and Dorothea needed money.
[35:04] Dorothea suggested to Ruth that the two of them should set up a
[35:07] catering company almost entirely funded by Ruth, and this would
[35:11] give them something to do. It would give them a brand new
[35:14] hobby and a career. But I'm sure you already see the
[35:17] issue with this. Most of the initial funding,
[35:20] pretty much all of the initial funding had to come from Ruth
[35:24] because Dorothea didn't really have much money.
[35:26] But she did swear that once the business was up and running,
[35:29] Ruth would see all of her money back and more.
[35:32] Dorothea suggested that the two of them open a joint bank
[35:35] account for the catering business, and Ruth was perfectly
[35:38] happy to do so. She went and opened this joint
[35:40] bank account and Ruth deposited $2000 into it, which was their
[35:45] initial Kickstarter fee. And then the two of them got to
[35:48] planning and budgeting this new business.
[35:51] In April of 1982, Ruth's husband was getting very, very ill.
[35:56] He was nearing the end of his life and of course, this was
[35:59] having a huge effect on Ruth. She was watching the love of her
[36:02] life and Dorothea had no patience for this whatsoever.
[36:07] This was making Ruth not useful in the business and she couldn't
[36:10] have that. So to try and fix this, Dorothea
[36:14] invited Ruth to come and stay with her where she lived at the
[36:17] Odorika family's house and hopefully this would cheer her
[36:21] up, being able to live with her friend.
[36:23] And Ruth and all of her children thought that this was a really
[36:25] good idea because Ruth really needed someone now that her
[36:28] husband was gone. And this was the perfect answer.
[36:32] Her best friend, all of her children helped her move in and
[36:35] she was really happy she was really settled in the Odorika
[36:38] house. But then her health seemed to
[36:43] take a sharp decline. When Ruth would meet up with
[36:45] friends, they all noticed how spaced out she seemed.
[36:49] And all of her kids noticed the same thing as well.
[36:51] They'd never seen their mum like this before. 1 of Ruth's
[36:54] daughters actually got quite concerned when she went to the
[36:57] Odorika house to go and visit her mother and she found her
[37:01] asleep on the couch in the middle of the day and Ruth
[37:04] wasn't the type to have midday naps.
[37:07] So Ruth's daughter sat Dorothea down and she said look, you live
[37:11] with my mum now, can you tell me what's going on?
[37:14] Like why is she suddenly really ill and tired and spaced out?
[37:17] And Dorothea explained Ruth's very spaced out state to her
[37:22] daughter by saying that Ruth had actually had a nervous breakdown
[37:27] earlier that day. And because Dorothea was such a
[37:29] good best friend to Ruth, she'd taken her to the emergency room
[37:33] and the doctors had given her like a tranquilizer shot that
[37:36] had made her really drowsy. And this did seem very likely
[37:40] because Ruth was going through a lot.
[37:42] And so her daughter believed exactly what Dorothea had said.
[37:45] She even thanked Dorothea for being such a good friend to her
[37:48] mother. A few days later, Dorothea got
[37:51] in contact with Ruth's children and told them that their mother
[37:54] was in a very bad way in terms of her physical health.
[37:58] So her son Bill came to check on her, and when he walked in the
[38:01] room, he saw his mother curled up in a really tight ball,
[38:06] staring at the wall, unable to move, unable to speak to him.
[38:10] And this was obviously very concerning for Bill because he'd
[38:14] never seen his mother like this before.
[38:16] However, he just thought it must have been some kind of bad flu,
[38:19] since his mother didn't actually have any underlying health
[38:23] conditions. Anything that would be overly
[38:26] worrying. However, in the early hours of
[38:28] the next morning, Dorothea called all of Ruths children and
[38:32] told them to get to the house as quick as they possibly could
[38:36] because Ruth had passed away. A coroner was called as well to
[38:40] come and collect the body and at one point Dorothea was stood
[38:43] speaking to the coroner and all of Ruth's children and she said
[38:48] that she believed that Ruth had taken too much of her medication
[38:52] and that is what killed her. She said she didn't know whether
[38:55] it was an accident or maybe even Ruth intentionally trying to
[38:58] take her own life, but that's just what Dorothea thought the
[39:02] cause was. But Ruth's kids were stood there
[39:05] saying, no, that's not my mum at all.
[39:07] They knew their mother better than anyone else did in the
[39:10] whole entire world, and they knew that she wouldn't take her
[39:14] own life, especially without telling anyone or discussing it.
[39:17] She was very much the type to do things.
[39:19] Very matter of fact. If she was going to take her own
[39:21] life, she wasn't going to do it in secret.
[39:23] One night she was going to tell her kids that she was going to
[39:26] do it. She was going to sort out her
[39:27] assets. They just knew that their mother
[39:29] hadn't taken her own life. That just wasn't even an option.
[39:33] The coroner insisted that they have an autopsy on Ruth's body
[39:36] because no one was actually there when she passed away.
[39:39] There was no witnesses, so there's no one to say for sure
[39:43] what killed her. And when the results came back,
[39:45] it was confirmed that Ruth had passed away from a drug
[39:49] overdose, particularly Tylenol and codeine, neither of which
[39:53] were actually prescribed to Ruth.
[39:55] So her cause of death was a drug overdose.
[39:57] However, the actual way that she overdosed on the drugs was not
[40:02] determined at this point. So whether it was a suicide,
[40:05] whether it was. You know, accidental overdose,
[40:08] whether she'd been drugged and actually killed, none of that
[40:12] was determined. But her kids weren't happy with
[40:15] that. Her kids weren't happy with them
[40:16] just ruling it as a drug overdose and not looking into it
[40:19] further. Neither of these drugs were
[40:21] prescribed to their mother. So where had she got them from?
[40:24] And it was at this point that one of Ruth's son in law's began
[40:28] voicing concerns about Dorothea because Ruth had been perfectly
[40:33] physically healthy before she went to live there.
[40:35] And now all of of a sudden, what?
[40:37] She's really, really ill and then passes away from a drug
[40:40] overdose. He wasn't convinced that this
[40:42] was suicide or that his mother had just randomly found some
[40:46] drugs and accidentally overdosed on them.
[40:48] He wanted to do his own investigation, so he began
[40:52] looking through Ruth's medical records and everything that he
[40:56] could get his hands on and he found that Ruth had actually
[40:59] never been seen by a professional.
[41:03] So like Dorothea said, she took her to the hospital when she had
[41:06] a nervous breakdown and they gave her tranquilizers.
[41:09] That never happened. So Ruths son-in-law took this
[41:12] information to the police and said, look, my mother-in-law has
[41:15] passed away in a very strange, suspicious way, and her best
[41:20] friend that she lived with is lying about this, like, this
[41:24] looks weird. Can you please look into this?
[41:26] And the police pretty much said, yeah, that looks bad, but
[41:29] there's nothing we can really do because this is all
[41:32] circumstantial evidence. There is nothing to prove that
[41:36] Dorothea gave those drugs to Ruth.
[41:39] And by this point in the case, it had been three months since
[41:43] Dorothea had drugged and robbed Malcolm McKenzie.
[41:46] And so it was time for her court date.
[41:49] And her trial in that time between the crime and the court
[41:52] date, police had done as much investigating as they possibly
[41:57] could to see if anyone else had possibly had interactions like
[42:01] this with Dorothea. And they actually found at least
[42:05] three other victims that claimed that they had been drugged and
[42:09] robbed by Dorothea Puente. However, none of these other
[42:13] cases were actually willing or physically able to testify
[42:17] against Dorothea. And so the only kind of witness
[42:20] statement used in this court date was Malcolm Mckenzie's.
[42:24] So the court date was coming up. It was in literally like a few
[42:27] days. And Dorothea knew that it wasn't
[42:29] looking good. She knew that she was probably
[42:31] going to go to prison and it was going to be for a long time as
[42:34] well. So she needed to do something.
[42:36] So she went down to the bank, and she took all of the money
[42:40] out of that joint account for the catering company that she
[42:44] set up with Ruth. There was like $2000 in that
[42:47] account. And with that money, she bought
[42:50] a plane ticket to Mexico. After that, she took a trip to
[42:53] her friend's house. And at this point, it was like
[42:55] 11 AM, and the friend opened the door to Dorothea standing there
[43:00] with a bunch of bottles of alcohol in her hand.
[43:02] And she was like, yeah, I know it's early, but I'm really
[43:05] stressed. So can we just drink?
[43:07] And this friend wanted to be there for Dorothea, so she was
[43:10] like, yeah fine, come in, we'll have a couple of drinks.
[43:13] This friend was called Dorothy Osborne, and to save confusion,
[43:17] I'm just going to call her Osborne.
[43:18] So Dorothea went straight to the kitchen.
[43:21] She was like, don't worry, I'll take care of it, I'll make the
[43:23] cocktails. And she made 2 glasses and
[43:26] brought them into the living room where Osborne was sat on
[43:29] the couch. Osborne remembers taking a sip
[43:31] of this cocktail and it was like the strongest thing she'd ever
[43:35] tasted in her whole life. There were like 3 different
[43:38] types of liquor in it. After Osborne finished this
[43:41] cocktail, she actually needed another drink to kind of wash
[43:43] the taste out of her mouth. It was that strong.
[43:46] And the next thing she recalls was that she was waking up on
[43:50] the surfer 12 hours later and Dorothea was gone.
[43:54] So Osborne gets up. She's really confused and
[43:57] disorientated. She's thinking, well, did I
[43:59] drink so much that I passed out? And so she starts tidying up in
[44:02] her living room. She's grabbing all the glasses,
[44:04] taking them to the kitchen and that's when she notices some
[44:08] white powder on the side in the kitchen, and this wasn't hers,
[44:13] so this had to have been Dorothea's.
[44:15] Osborne continues looking through her house and she
[44:18] quickly notices that a lot of stuff is missing.
[44:21] Loose change on the side, cheque books, credit cards, debit
[44:25] cards. And in that moment it was very
[44:27] clear to Osborne that she had just been drugged and robbed by
[44:31] one of her closest friends, Dorothea Puente.
[44:33] So Osborne called the police who came to her house, and they took
[44:37] the powder and what was left of the cocktail as evidence, and
[44:41] then they began an official search for Dorothea Puente.
[44:44] She was found three days later with a bunch of Osborne's
[44:48] belongings. She hadn't even tried to either
[44:50] sell them or get rid of them or flee to Mexico.
[44:54] She had that plane ticket. They found the plane ticket on
[44:57] her. So why hadn't she gone?
[44:59] It was obvious that she was trying to flee and that she was
[45:01] trying to get some last money, some last possessions that she
[45:06] could sell before she went to Mexico just to make sure that
[45:09] she had enough. After this incident, police knew
[45:12] that they couldn't just let her back home until her court date
[45:14] because she was trying to get away.
[45:16] So they put her in a holding cell and eventually the court
[45:20] date came around. And now not only was she on
[45:22] trial for the drugging and robbery of Malcolm McKenzie, but
[45:26] also of her friend Dorothy Osborne.
[45:28] And all the evidence was right in front of her.
[45:30] She was literally caught with Dorothy Osborne's things still
[45:35] in her bag. And so Dorothea Puente pled
[45:37] guilty to all of the charges against her, and she was
[45:40] sentenced to five years in prison.
[45:42] So the news broke in the town that this had happened and that
[45:45] Dorothea was arrested for it. And as soon as Ruth's children
[45:49] found out, this was pretty much confirmation that that is
[45:53] exactly what she'd done to their mother as well.
[45:55] And so Ruth's children tried to reopen this case with the police
[45:58] saying, look, this woman that we think drugged our mother has
[46:02] admitted to drugging two other people.
[46:04] But somehow this ended even worse for Ruth's kids.
[46:08] The case was kind of reopened, but not in the way that they
[46:12] wanted, not in the way that they were looking for suspects.
[46:15] It was reopened in the way that they were trying to figure out
[46:18] how she'd overdosed. Like I said, they didn't work
[46:20] out whether it was suicide, homicide or accidental overdose.
[46:24] And once this case was looked at again, it was ruled that Ruth
[46:27] Monroe's death had been a suicide, which is exactly the
[46:31] opposite of what her children wanted to happen.
[46:33] Dorothea Puente served just three years of her five year
[46:37] sentence. And it was then, when she was
[46:39] finally free, that the worst of her crimes truly began.
[46:43] The crimes that she'd already committed seemed miniscule in
[46:47] comparison to the three-year long murder spree that she was
[46:50] about to embark on at the unlikely age of 60 something.
[46:54] And that is where I'm going to leave Part 2 of this case.
[47:01] Thank you so much for listening to Usual Disclaimer.
[47:04] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[47:06] by any of the topics we discussed today, please check
[47:09] the description where we've left some helpful resources.
[47:12] If you want to hear more cases like this one, make sure to
[47:15] follow Usual Disclaimer on your podcast app so that you get
[47:18] notifications when we post new episodes.
[47:21] And if you really enjoyed, I'd love it if you could leave a
[47:24] rating and a review too. Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[47:27] Neil is an Audio Boom Studios production.
[47:30] See you next time.

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