# 42: The Death House Landlady, Dorothea Puente (Part 2)

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 7 Sep 2023, 54 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO8751161811.mp3

Today's episode is on serial killer Dorothea Puente aka the death house landlady and her house of horrors, and backyard cemetery. 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
[0:13] notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:17] 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.
[0:27] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:30] description for some resources and further information.
[0:38] So today's video is going to be Part 2 to my last video, which
[0:43] was on the Death House landlady, also known as Dorothea Puente.
[0:47] I said in that video that this was going to be a two-part
[0:50] series and it was. But then last night I was doing
[0:53] some more research and I struck an absolute goldmine of
[0:58] information. I have never done that before
[0:59] with a case. So for that reason, this is now
[1:02] going to be a three-part series. So this isn't the finale and
[1:06] this is like the middle chunk of the story.
[1:08] So if you want to Part 3, it'll be up on my channel in the next
[1:11] few days. But regardless, I'm going to
[1:12] give a little bit of a recap on Part 1 just to jog your memory
[1:16] and get you back up to speed. Dorothea Puente worked as a
[1:19] nanny for the Odorica family at 1426 F St. in Sacramento, CA.
[1:25] She once had her own boarding house on that same St. in
[1:28] Sacramento, but it was taken away from her because she was
[1:31] abusing her power and stealing from her tenants.
[1:34] She'd served short periods of time in prison and psychiatric
[1:37] wards, but now she was in her 60s and she was serving A5 year
[1:41] prison sentence for drugging and robbing 2 people on 2 separate
[1:46] occasions. But these weren't the only times
[1:48] she'd done it. There were at least five other
[1:50] victims of Dorothea's that she wasn't charged with, and it
[1:53] seemed that her crimes ran much deeper than that.
[1:56] Her best friend Ruth Monroe had recently moved in with her, but
[1:59] within just three months of living there, the perfectly
[2:02] healthy Ruth quickly got seriously ill and passed away.
[2:06] It was found that Ruth's cause of death was a a drug overdose
[2:09] that was eventually ruled a suicide, but her children didn't
[2:13] believe that for one minute and they had their suspicions of
[2:16] Dorothea. So the story picks up again when
[2:18] Dorothea is serving her prison sentence and she is having a
[2:22] pretty good time in prison. Actually, she was very popular
[2:26] among the other women there because she was interesting.
[2:28] She had a lot of interesting stories about her life, but as
[2:32] we know from Part 1, she lied a lot.
[2:34] All of these stories were fake. The women in that prison knew a
[2:38] completely different Dorothea to the rest of the world.
[2:42] To them, she was a lawyer, a doctor, she was a former actor,
[2:46] she'd been out with loads of famous people.
[2:48] She had an affair with foreign royalty.
[2:51] In prison, Dorothea formed a relationship with a pen pal, a
[2:55] 77 year old man named Everson Gilmouth.
[2:58] And this elderly man's wife had recently passed away.
[3:02] And he was talking to prisoners in order to get a new wife.
[3:07] Dorothea was hesitant to get into this relationship for
[3:10] multiple reasons. Obviously she'd never met this
[3:12] man, he was a lot older than her.
[3:14] But as soon as it came up in conversation that he was paid
[3:17] pension checks from the government every month, and he
[3:19] was earning quite a bit from those, Dorothea's mind suddenly
[3:23] changed. The two of them formed a
[3:24] romantic relationship via letters while she was in jail,
[3:29] and the two of them were going to be together when she was
[3:31] released, which was actually a lot sooner than she'd imagined
[3:35] it was going to be. She ended up serving just three
[3:37] years of that five year sentence, and she was released
[3:40] in 1985 when she was 56 years old.
[3:43] Before she left the jail, Dorothea underwent another
[3:46] psychiatric assessment. She'd had a few in her life
[3:50] before one of them diagnosed nosing her as a pathological
[3:53] liar, the other one actually diagnosing her with unspecified
[3:57] schizophrenia. This time the psychiatrist
[3:59] picked up on a lot of symptoms, a lot of behaviors of psychosis,
[4:04] but they didn't think it was actually psychosis just yet.
[4:07] They said that Dorothea tended to dissociate from her crimes,
[4:11] and that she probably needed to be constantly monitored to see
[4:14] if this actually developed into psychosis or something like
[4:19] that. And for the time being, they
[4:20] were happy just sticking with the schizophrenia diagnosis.
[4:23] They didn't add the psychosis one on, but they just wanted to
[4:27] monitor that. But due to the symptoms that she
[4:29] did have, the psychiatrist recommended that Dorothea should
[4:32] never be able to work in any kind of healthcare field or just
[4:37] care in general anytime that she's looking after a vulnerable
[4:40] person because she shouldn't be allowed that power dynamic when
[4:44] she's so unstable. Anyway, the time had come for
[4:47] Dorothea to leave prison and she was picked up that day by her 18
[4:52] year old boyfriend Everson Gilmouth in his red pickup
[4:55] truck. And this pickup truck had all of
[4:57] his belongings in the back because he'd actually picked up
[4:59] and left his whole life behind. All of his kids that he had to
[5:03] his previous marriage, his wife that passed away.
[5:06] He left his whole neighborhood, everything he knew to be with
[5:10] Dorothea, and on that journey home he actually proposed to
[5:14] her. So this was now her fiance, the
[5:16] 2. Of them moved.
[5:17] Back to the Odorika house on 1426 F St., which I was quite
[5:21] surprised to hear that after three years and a whole prison
[5:26] sentence, they were willing to let Dorothea back in their
[5:29] house. Anyway, Dorothea was put on
[5:31] parole after her prison sentence.
[5:33] However, the parole meetings weren't, they were non existent
[5:38] pretty much. They they just didn't check on
[5:40] her really. For example, at the request of
[5:42] her psychiatrist, they said that they wanted her to have regular
[5:46] psychiatric assessments to keep an eye on these psychosis
[5:49] symptoms. She didn't have a single one
[5:51] after leaving jail. They just really slacked with
[5:55] Dorothea's case. I don't know if that was kind of
[5:58] commonplace back then for them to just not really care once the
[6:01] person leaves prison very suddenly in September of 1985,
[6:06] as soon as he'd moved, moved in with Dorothea, ever since
[6:08] Gilmouth stopped replying to his family's letters.
[6:11] Like I said, he had a whole life back in Oregon that he'd left to
[6:16] be with an ex convict. So when he stopped replying to
[6:20] their letters, they were a bit concerned.
[6:22] They had voiced their concerns to him multiple times before he
[6:26] left to live with Dorothea, saying, look, you don't know
[6:28] this woman. Maybe you've written to her a
[6:30] few times. But she has drugged and robbed
[6:32] people multiple times in the past.
[6:34] Like, Are you sure you want to go through with this?
[6:37] But you know. This is what he wanted, so this
[6:39] is what he did. And as soon as he stopped
[6:42] replying to their letters, of course their mind went to the
[6:45] worst possible scenario. So they're called the police in
[6:49] Sacramento to go and check on him.
[6:50] So police stopped by at 1426 F St. to go and check on Everson,
[6:55] and there they found him, perfectly happy, perfectly fine,
[6:59] living his life, except now he was angry at his family back
[7:02] home for even getting the police involved in the 1st place.
[7:05] He was so furious in fact, but he pretty much cut contact with
[7:09] them completely. He stopped calling, he stopped
[7:12] writing letters to them. Actually, that's a lie.
[7:15] He did call them one more time just to tell them how angry he
[7:18] was about this whole situation. Dorothea did write to his family
[7:22] after this quite frequently, just to kind of keep them
[7:25] updated on ever since since he didn't want to.
[7:28] Right. To them, she would just tell
[7:29] them how his physical health was and what he was getting up to.
[7:33] She said that he started making wooden sculptures in the yard.
[7:36] However, she told them to never get the police involved again
[7:39] because it was against both of their wishes.
[7:41] I believe at this point the Odorika family moved out of
[7:46] their own house, but because they owned it, they continued to
[7:49] rent it to Dorothea and some other people as well.
[7:52] It was pretty much the same house that she had before.
[7:54] I think it was 3 floors like including the basement.
[7:57] So ground floor, second floor, and basement.
[7:59] And I think Dorothea had the main floor and the second floor
[8:02] and another woman was renting the basement.
[8:05] And obviously the ground floor and the second floor is a lot of
[8:07] space just for Dorothea and her now fiance.
[8:11] I don't think they ever got married.
[8:12] And so Dorothea, against the terms of her parole, decided
[8:16] that she wanted to turn 1426 F St. into a boarding house.
[8:21] She had to hide it from her parole officer.
[8:23] But let's be honest, she never really saw him.
[8:25] I think she saw him like 3 or 4 times after leaving prison.
[8:29] When you're supposed to see them what, regularly?
[8:31] I don't know exactly how regularly you're supposed to see
[8:33] them, but she somehow kept it a secret.
[8:35] She started slow and small, taking on only a few borders at
[8:39] once and slowly letting it grow over the years.
[8:43] In November of 1985, just two months after they'd called the
[8:47] police to go and check on him and Edison, Gilmouth's family
[8:51] received a letter from him, which was very surprising.
[8:54] And in this letter he actually said that his wedding to
[8:57] Dorothea was. Off.
[8:58] And that he was packing up all his things and he was going to
[9:01] move South and that he'd update them as soon as he got settled.
[9:04] But this wasn't true. It wasn't even Everson that
[9:07] wrote that letter. It was Dorothea and they were
[9:09] both perfectly happy together, still living at 1426 F St.
[9:13] Just before Christmas in 1985, the Odorica family left for
[9:17] Mexico to go and spend the holidays with their family.
[9:20] And just before they did, they stopped by at 1426 F St.
[9:25] Ricardo Odorika, the father of the family, went out into the
[9:28] yard to go and speak with Everson Gilmouth.
[9:30] And he noticed that Everson seemed very ill and rundown and
[9:35] just tired, not really himself. And when they returned from
[9:38] Mexico and went back to 1426 F St. to go and check on their
[9:42] tenants, Everson Gilmouth had gone.
[9:44] Dorothea told them that they'd split up and he'd just kind of
[9:48] moved on with his life. He'd moved out and gone and
[9:50] lived somewhere else. But of course, that wasn't true.
[9:53] Dorothea Puente had murdered her fiance, Everson Gilmouth.
[9:58] It's believed she could have done it either one of two ways.
[10:01] The first way is that she could have drugged him so much over
[10:04] time, just a little bit every day, that these drugs built up
[10:07] in his body and eventually poisoned him and he overdosed.
[10:11] Or the second way she could have done it was the that she drugged
[10:14] him and made him really drowsy, really sleepy, potentially even
[10:17] knocked out and then suffocated him to death.
[10:20] Either way, she killed Everton Gilmouth and then dragged his
[10:24] body to what will later be known in this case as the death room
[10:28] and locked it in there until she decided what she was going to do
[10:32] to dispose of the body. A few days passed and the body
[10:35] remained in that room. Dorothea couldn't think of a way
[10:38] to dispose of the body without raising suspicion, and she knew
[10:42] that the pressure was on soon. It was going to start
[10:44] decomposing. It was going to let off a really
[10:47] foul order. And she began getting desperate
[10:49] and she was thinking, well, what if the only way that she's ever
[10:52] going to get rid of that body? Is if she just.
[10:54] Asks someone to dispose of it for her.
[10:56] If she could find someone corrupt enough that would keep
[11:00] this a secret and not go to the police, then surely that's the
[11:03] easiest way, right? So she began thinking about who
[11:06] she could ask that she thought was just seedy enough that they
[11:10] wouldn't go to the police. And that was when she thought a
[11:13] bad out the tenant in the basement.
[11:15] But it wasn't the tenant in the basement that she wanted to
[11:18] tell. It was her boyfriend and this
[11:20] man's name was Jesus Mesa. So one day Dorothea approaches
[11:24] Jesus outside and just says, look, can you come in my house?
[11:27] I just have something to tell you.
[11:29] So she takes him in and opens the door to the living room and
[11:32] immediately the smell hits them and the body's not even in that
[11:35] room. She tells him that one of her
[11:37] tenants had died of a heart attack and since this tenant had
[11:42] no family members or or anyone to really take care of them, she
[11:46] was just left with this body. Now she had no one to dispose of
[11:49] it for her and so she asked Jesus if he would do that.
[11:52] Jesus obviously freaked out and refused to move the body.
[11:56] This was rather suspicious, even though it was a relatively
[11:59] believable story. I don't know, there was
[12:01] something weird about it to him, which obviously turned out.
[12:04] To be true. Dorothea could tell how freaked
[12:07] out he was and she kind of got freaked out herself thinking Oh
[12:10] my God, is he going to tell the police?
[12:12] So she was like OK OK, no worries.
[12:14] I'll I'll get someone else to sort it.
[12:15] Just please don't tell the police, which may seem
[12:18] suspicious but however, remember she was running this boarding
[12:21] house illegally. She technically wasn't allowed a
[12:24] job caring for anyone ever again, so if police found out
[12:28] that there was a dead body there, whether she'd killed them
[12:31] or not, she would still go to prison.
[12:32] So Jesus promised her that he wouldn't call the police, and
[12:35] the two of them just never spoke of it again.
[12:37] Around this time, Dorothea was getting some work done on the
[12:40] top floor of the house, and she hired a young man named Ismael
[12:44] Flores to come in and put in some new wooden floors.
[12:47] And while he was there doing this work on the property,
[12:50] Dorothea somehow persuaded him to buy a vehicle offer.
[12:55] But not just any vehicle, a red pickup truck.
[12:58] Ever since Gilmouth's red pickup truck.
[13:00] She told him that it was her boyfriend's, and her boyfriend
[13:03] had gone away to LA for a while and when he came back, he
[13:06] probably wouldn't want it anymore, so she was selling it.
[13:08] Dorothea offered to sell it for $800, which is actually quite
[13:12] cheap I believe, for something like that in that day, obviously
[13:15] because she was so desperate to get rid of it.
[13:17] But Flores didn't know that. He just thought this was a
[13:20] really good deal and so he took the truck.
[13:22] She also asked Flores while he was there if he was any good at
[13:26] building because she wanted a new kind of storage unit made to
[13:30] keep books in and he said yes, he was pretty good with like
[13:33] wood and stuff, so she asked him to build this unit.
[13:37] This book storage unit would be 6 feet in length, 2 feet deep,
[13:42] and two feet wide. Does that shape sound familiar
[13:47] to anyone? A coffin perhaps?
[13:50] Regardless, Flores didn't ask too many questions and he just
[13:53] built up this book storage for Dorothea and it had a lid.
[13:57] However, Dorothea told him not to to put the lid on it just yet
[14:01] because she wanted to put all the books in first and then
[14:03] figure out how the lid would work.
[14:05] So Flores built it up and he took it to Dorothea's house and
[14:08] she loved it. She loved this storage unit.
[14:10] And then before he left, she actually asked for one more
[14:14] favor. Could he come back in the next
[14:16] few days and help her transport this unit to a storage facility
[14:21] that she had? Because she was thinking about
[14:23] moving. And of course he now had a
[14:25] pickup truck, so he had no excuse really.
[14:27] This woman had just given him a load of work, so he he said,
[14:30] yeah, OK. And he came back in a few days,
[14:33] and this book storage unit was nailed shut.
[14:37] So they began driving north along a river on the Garden
[14:40] Highway when Dorothea asked Flores if he could pull over by
[14:44] this kind of messy rural riverbank area.
[14:47] So he did. And that was when Dorothea said
[14:50] that she'd actually changed her mind about taking these books to
[14:53] the storage unit. She felt like they were just
[14:55] junk anyway. She didn't need them.
[14:57] They were taking up space and maybe they should just dump in
[15:00] this river. Of course, if Dorothea wanted to
[15:03] do that, then Flores was happy to help.
[15:05] And so the two of them took this heavy coffin out of the back of
[15:09] the pickup truck and then just left it on the riverbank and
[15:12] drove back to F St. So that was pretty much it for
[15:22] this book storage coffin type thing until 1986.
[15:29] New Year's Day of 1986 a man was walking along that riverbank
[15:33] where they'd left this book storage and he was looking for a
[15:37] good place to start fishing until he spotted this big wooden
[15:41] case on the side of a river, obviously not meant to be there
[15:45] and because of the shape and size it was immediately very
[15:49] suspicious. It was worrying what could be in
[15:51] this and so he walked over and the smell coming out of this
[15:56] wooden box was pungent. So this man fearing the worst
[16:00] called the police who came down and opened this coffin like box
[16:06] and sure enough they found a dead body in there, the dead
[16:09] body of an elderly man. However, they were unable to
[16:13] identify the body because it was so badly decomposed they
[16:16] couldn't even figure out the cause of death.
[16:19] They tried to do an autopsy but barely anything came from it
[16:22] that they literally could only really find his rough age and
[16:26] even then they could only say he was an elderly man.
[16:28] They tried to ask the public for information and leads, but
[16:32] literally nothing came forward. Nothing of value anywhere,
[16:36] nothing that led anywhere. So the unidentified body had to
[16:39] stay just that for the time being.
[16:41] Unidentified. It was just waiting in the local
[16:44] morgue and no one had any idea apart from Dorothea Puente that
[16:50] that was Everson Gilmouth's body.
[16:52] No one even knew he was dead. She continued writing to his
[16:55] family for the next few years, pretending that she and him were
[16:59] going off travelling and doing all this exciting stuff.
[17:02] She would literally just pretend to have a life with him.
[17:05] However, the people in her immediate life that she couldn't
[17:08] use that lie on, she just said that Everson had moved away,
[17:11] they'd split up, he'd moved away and not to worry, he was fine.
[17:16] However, she didn't tell any of this to the government, and so
[17:20] the government thought that Everson Gilmouth was still
[17:23] alive, still living at 1426 F St. and still paying his pension
[17:27] checks. So Dorothea was still getting
[17:29] his money every month. Everson Gilmouth's death didn't
[17:32] faze Dorothea in the slightest. She continued life as normal.
[17:36] In fact, she was taking on more tenants in the boarding house
[17:39] than ever. By this point in the case, I
[17:41] believe the woman that lived in the basement had moved out,
[17:44] leaving the whole of 1426 F St. to Dorothea.
[17:48] She was just renting the whole thing from the Odorica family
[17:51] and she had full reign over the whole building to make it a
[17:54] boarding house. She could fit up to.
[17:56] Eight people in the boarding house at once with, you know,
[18:00] individual bedrooms. She was no longer doing the
[18:02] thing that she did in the old boarding house where she had
[18:04] like hospital ward type layout with just curtains between beds.
[18:09] And she would do everything for her tenants.
[18:11] She would cook, she would clean, she would wash up, wash their
[18:14] clothes, make sure that they were presentable, give them
[18:17] haircuts, things like that. She did pretty much everything.
[18:20] She was like a housemaid. She was also something of a
[18:24] healthcare worker, although she still didn't have the
[18:26] qualifications. She was still doing very basic
[18:30] stuff like giving medication and stuff.
[18:32] She had a very mixed reputation among her borders among her
[18:36] tenants, which I find very interesting.
[18:39] Some of them thought she was an absolute St. for the way that
[18:42] she cared for them and they loved her and they had really
[18:44] good relationships. But other tenants hated Dorothea
[18:48] and they were only there because either they were put there by
[18:50] their families or they couldn't afford to be anywhere else.
[18:54] I've read some reports that said she would be abusive to some
[18:57] tenants either physically or mentally.
[19:00] She would scream at them a lot. However, I did only read that on
[19:03] some sources. However, I do believe the abuse
[19:06] allegations are true when it comes to the alcoholic tenants.
[19:10] Dorothea just had no patience for Alcoholics when it came to
[19:14] the elderly patients or the patients with disabilities or
[19:17] learning difficulties or you know, anything that they
[19:21] couldn't really control. She was a St.
[19:24] She was lovely. However, with the Alcoholics,
[19:27] she didn't like them, she couldn't put up with them and
[19:30] she herself was an alcoholic. At certain times in her life,
[19:34] she would get herself out out of it and then she would fall back
[19:36] into it. So it's surprising that she
[19:39] would hate other Alcoholics so much.
[19:42] I think a lot of it came from bad memories from her childhood.
[19:45] Both of her parents were abusive Alcoholics, so being around
[19:50] other Alcoholics probably triggered a lot of memories in
[19:53] her which made her act the way that she did.
[19:55] Of course I'm not excusing that, I'm just saying I think that's
[19:58] probably the reason that she was so patient with everyone else.
[20:02] But not. The ones that dug up all these
[20:06] old, horrible feelings for her. But people continued to go to
[20:10] Dorothea's boarding house or take their family members to
[20:12] Dorothea's boarding house for a reason.
[20:15] And that was because she seemed to work wonders for her tenants.
[20:19] She'd clean them up when they got there, She'd make sure they
[20:21] had regular haircuts. She'd buy them new clothes, make
[20:24] sure they were washed and fed. And they always just seemed
[20:27] happier and healthier within just weeks of being there.
[20:30] And her tenants and their families also loved that
[20:33] Dorothea knew how to work the benefits giving system in the
[20:39] US. She knew how to get people more
[20:41] money every month from their government checks.
[20:43] So if they weren't claiming for certain things, certain
[20:46] disability allowances, she could spot that and get them that
[20:50] money that they were entitled to.
[20:52] But the kicker is Dorothea would keep that extra money for
[20:55] herself because one of the rules of the boarding house was that
[20:58] people had to sign their checks over to Dorothea so that all the
[21:02] money went to Dorothea and then she would distribute it to her
[21:05] tenants. She said she did it so that she
[21:07] could just take her chunk of their money and then just give
[21:11] them the rest. So, like their living costs and,
[21:13] you know, her fees. But of course, the real reason
[21:16] she did this was because she was taking a lot more money than she
[21:20] was supposed to. She was scamming them.
[21:22] She was stealing from their government checks.
[21:25] But there were some tenants, particularly the ones whose
[21:28] families were very involved, that wouldn't sign over the
[21:32] cheques to Dorothea. And, you know, she of course
[21:35] couldn't force them to do that. So instead they would keep the
[21:39] cheque in their name. But every time it came to the
[21:41] house, it came to the mailbox. Dorothea would intercept it
[21:45] there and steal it and then give them the rest.
[21:48] And when she'd had enough of a tenants, maybe they were getting
[21:51] worse in their physical health conditions, they required more
[21:55] and more care, and she just wanted to clear up a bed in the
[21:58] boarding house, Dorothea would resort to murdering her tenants.
[22:03] She particularly would do so when the tenants or their
[22:06] families would start asking questions about finances.
[22:09] Why did Dorothea need the checks in her name?
[22:12] How much was she taking every month?
[22:14] How much would they getting every month?
[22:16] And she'd already killed two people in her life for two
[22:18] separate reasons. The first being Ruth Monroe, who
[22:21] she started a business with and then somehow persuaded to set up
[22:25] a joint bank account and put most of her life savings in that
[22:29] bank account. And then as soon as she had all
[22:31] the money under her name as well, she killed Ruth so that
[22:34] she could take all of that money out of the bank account.
[22:37] And her fiance Everson Gilmouth, who became too much for her to
[22:40] care for and so she ended his life and continued to receive
[22:45] his pension checks. Money was Dorothea's main and
[22:48] pretty much only motivator. In 1987, an 8 year old woman
[22:53] named Betty Palmer joined the boarding house.
[22:56] And Betty Palmer was a very eccentric woman.
[22:59] She had a very high spirit. She had a great sense of humor.
[23:02] She was just one of those cheeky little old ladies, you know, She
[23:06] was always flirting with her doctors and making jokes around
[23:09] the boarding house. She was kind of the whole spirit
[23:12] of the house. But within just a couple of
[23:14] weeks at 1426 F St. Betty lost her sparkle.
[23:19] She was always I'll. She was always tired.
[23:21] She kept going back to her room to sleep.
[23:24] Betty Palmer was only at the boarding house for a month when
[23:28] she suddenly disappeared and Dorothea told all the other
[23:31] tenants that her daughter had come to pick her up and she'd
[23:34] taken her back home or something.
[23:37] But of course that wasn't true. Dorothea Puente had murdered
[23:41] Betty Palmer in the same way that she murdered Everson
[23:44] Gilmouth. However, of course that cause
[23:47] couldn't be identified, so it was either drugging her so much
[23:51] over time that it eventually poisoned her and she overdosed,
[23:54] or she drugged her and then suffocated her.
[23:57] I feel like the first explanation is the most likely
[24:00] considering she was getting more and more ill as her time was
[24:03] going on and she was getting tired her and tired her.
[24:06] I feel like that was all the drugs entering her system and
[24:09] just piling up. Now this is where the case gets
[24:12] one of its most famous characteristics.
[24:14] It was how Dorothea pointed disposed of her victims bodies
[24:19] for the time being. She took Betty Palmer's body to
[24:23] the death room, which was an empty bedroom in the boarding
[24:26] house where she would take the bodies after she killed them,
[24:30] but before she figured out how to dispose of them.
[24:32] She locked the body in there and then realized that she had to do
[24:36] this by herself. She couldn't get anyone else
[24:39] involved to help dispose of this body, otherwise it would rat her
[24:42] out eventually. And that was when Dorothea had
[24:45] the idea to bury the body in the yard and this would be the first
[24:50] of many bodies buried in the garden at 1426 F St.
[24:54] Now everything was running through her mind when she was
[24:57] figuring out how to do this. Of course there was the
[25:00] possibility that this body could one day be dug up and identified
[25:05] as Betty Palmer. And then of course, that could
[25:07] link back to the boarding house, and as soon as that was linked
[25:10] back to the boarding house, it would be linked to Dorothea
[25:12] Puente and she'd be caught for the murder.
[25:14] So she knew she couldn't let this body ever get identified if
[25:18] it was ever dug up. And so to avoid identification
[25:22] of the body one day, Dorothea knew that she had to get rid of
[25:25] any identifying characteristics of a human body.
[25:29] So that was teeth and fingerprints and footprints.
[25:33] So Dorothea Puente, in the middle of the night, went into
[25:36] the death room where 80 year old Betty Palmer's body was, and she
[25:40] cut off the hands, the feet, and decapitated her.
[25:44] She left Betty's remains, Betty's body, in the nightgown
[25:49] that she was killed in, and then wrapped her in even more cloth
[25:52] to kind of conceal it all. And then in the middle of the
[25:55] night, she went out into the garden, into the front yard,
[25:58] right on the front by the street, and dug a hole in the
[26:02] garden. She then went back upstairs,
[26:04] grabbed the body and dragged it down the stairs.
[26:08] Now, this made a really loud noise, and the tenants did hear
[26:11] it, although, of course, your mind doesn't go straight to
[26:14] she's dragging a body. You'll hear much later that the
[26:17] tenants actually heard a lot of what was going on when their
[26:21] fellow tenants were dying, but they just hadn't realized what
[26:25] it was. Dorothea dragged Betty's body
[26:27] out to the front yard, put her inside the hall and then filled
[26:32] it over again. And then the next day she
[26:34] actually got someone to come in and put concrete over the top.
[26:38] Dorothea did actually garden lay at night some nights, and so if
[26:43] any of the neighbors saw her do this, then it wouldn't be too
[26:46] suspicious. Because after all, when you're
[26:48] caring after 10 people all day every day, nighttime is the only
[26:52] time you really have to keep up with the garden.
[26:54] Now, I don't actually know what Dorothea pointed did with Betty
[26:58] Palmer's hands, feet and head because they were actually never
[27:02] found. Dorothea never gave it up.
[27:04] Police never, you know, found them during a search.
[27:08] So that is something that remains a mystery about this
[27:10] case to this day. So like I said, the way that
[27:13] Dorothea explained Betty's absence to the other tenants was
[27:16] that her daughter had come and picked her up and just taken her
[27:19] back home, which was a believable lie until Betty's
[27:23] daughter actually came to the boarding house to come and check
[27:26] on her. And of course she wasn't there.
[27:28] Luckily for Dorothea, she wasn't in the boarding house when
[27:32] Betty's daughter came knocking. However, the other tenants did
[27:35] sit and speak with her. Betty's daughter eventually left
[27:39] and when Dorothea came back, the tenants said, well, well,
[27:42] where's Betty? You said that her daughter came
[27:44] and picked her up, but we just spoke with her daughter and she
[27:47] doesn't know where she is. And so Dorothea was quickly
[27:49] trying to think of another lie, and that was when she told them
[27:53] that she'd put Betty Palmer in a care home without telling
[27:57] anyone. And she just didn't want to tell
[27:58] them because she felt quite embarrassed that she couldn't
[28:01] care for Betty herself anymore. It was too much for Dorothea.
[28:05] And Dorothea just said she felt really bad about this whole
[28:07] situation and she was really sorry for lying to everyone, but
[28:10] she did what was best so already.
[28:13] This is the first. Tenant murder and she's already
[28:16] getting into hot water because she can't keep her story
[28:18] straight and she's not good at cover stories.
[28:20] She hadn't had this same issue with Everson Gilmouth because
[28:23] she could easily explain it as them to splitting up and people
[28:27] wouldn't want to ask too many questions because that's an
[28:29] awkward situation. And none of his family lived in
[28:31] California. So it was easy to lie to them
[28:34] via letters that she continued to send for years after his
[28:38] death and just lie to them and say that he was still alive.
[28:41] She didn't have them constantly coming in and checking on him
[28:44] and, you know, foiling her plans.
[28:46] But. How do you?
[28:47] Explain to 10 other people, ten other tenants, that this one
[28:51] friend of theirs just randomly disappeared one night.
[28:54] It's a lot harder to do. Dorothea's next victim was 62
[28:57] year old James Gallup, who was an alcoholic that she met at a
[29:01] bar one night. The two of them got speaking at
[29:04] this bar one night and Dorothea realized that he was an
[29:07] alcoholic and was struggling to look after himself.
[29:10] But it was when he mentioned that he got checks from the
[29:13] government every month that Dorothea said Oh well, I run a
[29:16] boarding house. If you want to come, I can take
[29:19] care of you. And Gallup thought this was a
[29:21] very good idea. He had a lot of issues on top of
[29:24] his alcoholism and he knew he just wasn't very good at caring
[29:27] for himself, so he was willing to come and join the boarding
[29:30] house. That was until he found out that
[29:33] he would have to sign all his cheques over to Dorothea.
[29:36] He just didn't want to do it. He knew that he could look after
[29:39] his own money. He was perfectly sound in his
[29:41] mind. Yes, he was an alcoholic, but
[29:43] that doesn't mean he can't manage his money.
[29:45] And so this led to a lot of arguments between him and
[29:48] Dorothea. I don't think Gallup ever signed
[29:51] over his cheques to Dorothea, however she would intercept them
[29:56] between the mailbox and them getting to him, so I don't know
[29:58] if he would ever receive his. Full.
[30:01] Amount of money. James Gallup also had a brain
[30:11] tumor and not long into his stay at the boarding house, he
[30:14] actually had to have brain surgery on this tumor to kind of
[30:17] control it. And when he got out of the
[30:19] hospital, the doctors put Dorothea in charge of his
[30:23] medication and making sure that he got it every day and was
[30:25] having the right amounts. But of course, Dorothea cannot
[30:29] be trusted with other people's medication.
[30:32] And she began giving him more and more, larger and larger
[30:35] doses, more and more times every day, kind of overdosing him over
[30:40] a gradual amount of time. And he was getting ill and he
[30:43] was getting super drowsy. But he just kind of thought it
[30:46] was the after effects of the surgery.
[30:48] He thought this was normal. And then all of a sudden, one
[30:51] day the other tenants woke up and James Gallup was no longer
[30:54] there. Dorothea said that he'd gotten
[30:56] drunk and just left in the middle of the night.
[30:58] He just packed up all these things and left.
[31:00] But of course, Dorothea had murdered him too.
[31:03] It's unclear in what way, probably one of the two ways
[31:06] that I've mentioned before. However, I do think it was
[31:08] probably the drugging over a period of time.
[31:11] And again, Dorothea did almost the exact same thing with James
[31:15] Gallop's body as she did with Betty Palmer's.
[31:18] She first took him to the Death Room for the time being.
[31:21] This time, she didn't cut off his head or hands or feet.
[31:25] Instead, she just dug a hole out in the yard, wrapped him in a
[31:29] bunch of cloth and plastic, and then buried him in this hole and
[31:34] covered it up. In the aftermath of the murder
[31:36] of James Gallop, Dorothea began thinking about possible ways
[31:40] that she could be tracked down for that one.
[31:42] And then she remembered. Of course, the brain surgery
[31:46] would require regular checkups to make sure that everything was
[31:49] fine. And she realized as soon as the
[31:51] doctors got in contact, they'd realized that James was missing.
[31:55] So she decided to call up the doctors 1st and she just said
[31:58] hi. James has left my care.
[32:01] I don't know where he's gone, but he's decided that it's time
[32:04] to move on from my boarding house.
[32:05] And he's probably in contact with another doctor now, so
[32:08] don't worry about him. But this doctor didn't really
[32:10] believe Dorothea. This was a very odd story.
[32:14] It just came across really weird.
[32:16] And why hadn't James got in contact with him?
[32:19] And why had he left it to Dorothea?
[32:21] You know, this doctor just knew something wasn't right.
[32:24] And so so this doctor took it upon himself to look into James
[32:27] Gallop's history just a couple of months before the surgery and
[32:32] before his disappearance. And he found that just a few
[32:36] weeks prior to this, a pharmacist had prescribed James
[32:40] Gallop with a sleeping medication named Dalmain.
[32:44] But what the doctor didn't know was that James Gallop was of
[32:47] course, long since dead. And it wasn't him that got that
[32:51] prescription. It was Dorothea collecting that
[32:54] prescription under James Gallup's name.
[32:57] And Dorothea would collect this drug, Dalmen.
[33:00] It was a sedative. She would stockpile it.
[33:03] She had bottles upon bottles of this.
[33:05] And this is the drug believed to be her murder weapon of choice.
[33:09] It was a sedative that when it was in the body, it would stay
[33:13] there for quite a long period of time, meaning that with small
[33:17] doses regularly, you could build up the amount in the body.
[33:20] So like I said, the patients would often seem very ill for
[33:23] weeks before their disappearance and that was probably that drug
[33:28] piling up in their body and, you know, slowly their organs
[33:32] failing. But of course, Dorothea was just
[33:34] one woman. There was number way that
[33:36] pharmacists and doctors would ever prescribe her enough
[33:39] Dalmain for her to kill multiple people because, you know, she'd
[33:43] need a huge amount of this drug to be able to do that.
[33:46] So she would have to find other ways of getting hold of this
[33:49] drug. She herself had a prescription.
[33:51] She would make most of her tenants get a prescription, just
[33:55] saying that it was a good drug to have if they ever couldn't
[33:57] sleep or whatever, but she would steal it from them.
[34:00] She was pretty much cheating the prescription system, if that
[34:03] makes sense, making lots of people get this prescription so
[34:06] that she could have all the drugs.
[34:08] Just whenever she had the chance to get any extra Dalmane, she
[34:13] would get it. And it didn't matter whose it
[34:14] was, it didn't matter how much it was, even if she could only
[34:17] find an extra pill here or there, that would go towards
[34:20] killing her next victim. And that next victim was 64 year
[34:23] old Vera. Fear Martin and Vera had a lot
[34:27] of health conditions that were rapidly getting worse and worse.
[34:31] And Dorothea quickly found that she just couldn't care for Vera.
[34:35] So her solution was not to send her to a proper healthcare
[34:39] center or a care home where she could get this care.
[34:41] Her solution was to murder her. But of course, she kept Vera in
[34:45] her care for long enough that she had time to sign over the.
[34:48] Cheques to Dorothea. And then she killed her.
[34:50] I believe this was the shortest amount of time that a tenant had
[34:54] been in the house before disappearing.
[34:57] Vera was there for just one week and then she disappeared and I
[35:01] don't know what excuse Dorothea gave to the other tenants as to
[35:04] why she disappeared, but I assume it was good enough for
[35:07] them to not ask questions. The next addition into the
[35:10] boarding house was 55 year old alcoholic Benjamin Fink.
[35:14] And just something to know while we're here in the.
[35:17] Case is that other. Tenants did come and go
[35:19] naturally in that time. Dorothea didn't kill every
[35:23] single tenant she would have at the boarding house.
[35:25] Some of them would leave off their own accord.
[35:27] She wouldn't have problems with the ones that were kind of
[35:30] easier to care for. She would only kill them when
[35:32] they were getting too much for her and she just wanted the
[35:34] money. Of course, in this video I'm
[35:36] only going to talk about the ones significant to the story,
[35:39] but there were a lot of them that survived a long time in the
[35:42] boarding house and then just left when they were ready.
[35:45] Anyway, back to Benjamin Fink. He was 55 years old and he
[35:49] actually survived at the boarding house for a long time.
[35:52] He was there for at least a year, although he was an
[35:55] alcoholic and we know that Dorothea does not like
[35:58] Alcoholics. She put up with him and his
[36:00] behavior for a long time. Although the two of them didn't
[36:03] really get on. They would always argue because
[36:05] of his alcohol consumption. But then one night in one of the
[36:09] communal rooms during dinner or something like that, Ben Fink
[36:13] was getting rowdy. He was very drunk and he was
[36:16] getting really loud and really aggressive.
[36:18] And the other tenants recalled Dorothea getting very visibly
[36:22] angry at Ben Fink. And so she told him off and she
[36:26] dragged him up to his bedroom upstairs to go in, you know,
[36:29] scold him. But then the next morning, the
[36:31] rest of the tenants woke up and Benjamin Fink had gone.
[36:36] And Dorothea just said he left after that argument and he was
[36:39] just too drunk and too stubborn to let her care for him.
[36:42] However, of course, Dorothea had murdered him that night.
[36:45] This time it seems more likely that she will have suffocated
[36:49] him because he wasn't ill in the run up to his death and he did
[36:52] die after an altercation. So this time it did seem to be a
[36:55] more spontaneous killing out of anger.
[36:58] And then Dorothea dealt with the aftermath of this kill in the
[37:02] same way that she dealt with the last two.
[37:04] She took the body to the death room, wrapped it up and then dug
[37:08] a hole in the yard and buried the body.
[37:10] However, around this time in the case, the tenants at 1426 F St.
[37:15] and even some of the neighbors around the house were noticing a
[37:19] very strong order coming from certain rooms in the house.
[37:25] It was Even so bad that they couldn't put the air con on
[37:28] because it would just spread the smell through the whole house
[37:31] and it was unbearable. Dorothea told everyone that she
[37:34] just put some fertilizer out in the yard and that the smell
[37:36] should be gone within a few days.
[37:38] However, the smell was actually coming from the death room in
[37:42] that room, because she'd had to leave the bodies in there for a
[37:45] few days at a time before she had chance to dig the hole and
[37:48] then wrap the body up and put it in.
[37:50] The bodies had began decomposing in there, and all of the bodily
[37:54] fluids would come out of the body and seep into the carpet
[37:58] and even seeping to the hardwood floor, which would be the
[38:02] ceiling of the room underneath. And that smell was just
[38:05] spreading through the whole house.
[38:07] And of course it had soaked into the the woods, so no matter how
[38:10] much Dorothea cleaned the carpet, there was huge stains in
[38:13] the woods. But you know, she was pretty
[38:15] good at explaining it away with the fertilizer and other things.
[38:19] So people obviously didn't think it was the smell of decomposing
[38:23] human flesh. Around this time, Dorothea
[38:26] murdered yet another tenant. Now this tenant had actually
[38:30] been one of the first ones that she took in when she first set
[38:34] the boarding house up again a couple of years prior. 78 year
[38:37] old Leona Carpenter had joined the house in 1986, so she'd
[38:42] survived there for a while. She was one of Dorotheas
[38:44] favourites actually. However, at this point she was
[38:48] becoming too hard to care for. She had a lot of health
[38:51] conditions, at least 5 or 6 things that she needed caring
[38:54] for, including anemia, syphilis. She became addicted to alcohol
[38:59] as well. But Dorothea liked Leona
[39:01] Carpenter because she was a very easy tenant to fool.
[39:06] She never questioned where her money was going or why it had to
[39:09] go to Dorothea. She never questioned how much
[39:11] Dorothea took or how much she received a month.
[39:14] But like I said, after a year or two at the boarding house,
[39:17] Leona's health conditions were getting worse and Dorothea,
[39:21] lacking any form of human empathy or compassion, didn't
[39:24] take her to a care home or a hospital.
[39:27] She just murdered her. Again, I don't know the cause of
[39:30] death for this one, however Dorothea did exactly the same
[39:33] with her as what she did with all the other ones buried her in
[39:36] the yard, and by this point the yard was becoming like a full on
[39:39] graveyard. The front yard was full, she'd
[39:42] moved on to the side and she was planning to get like a shed to
[39:47] go over the top of some of the bodies so that they couldn't be
[39:49] easily dug up. The next tenant at the boarding
[39:52] house was 51 year old Alberto Montoya, better known as Bert,
[39:56] and he was there because he had learning difficulties and he
[40:00] also had schizophrenia where he would talk to the voices in his
[40:04] head out loud, so he didn't. Actually require any physical
[40:07] care or even really any medication.
[40:10] He just kind of needed supervising.
[40:12] He just couldn't really look after himself alone, so he
[40:15] always needed a carer. He was a very smiley, very
[40:18] gentle, very kind natured soul. He was very childlike.
[40:23] He couldn't hurt a family. He was very much that, very
[40:25] sweet, innocent, tight, and before he was living at the
[40:29] boarding house with Dorothea, he was actually homeless.
[40:32] He was sleeping on the street and a few nights a week he would
[40:35] go and sleep in this hostel. And one of the workers there at
[40:39] the hostel, one of the volunteers, actually grew quite
[40:43] an attachment to Bert. Her name was Judy Moyes and she
[40:47] worked particularly with people like Bert, people with either
[40:50] learning difficulties or mental health conditions that stopped
[40:54] them from working and that were the reason that they were on the
[40:58] street. Judy befriended Bert and
[41:00] eventually just felt so bad for this man that she got him a room
[41:04] at 1426 F St. and everything was going well.
[41:08] At first. Judy actually met Dorothea
[41:12] herself when she took Bert to kind of look around the home
[41:14] before they actually put him in there.
[41:16] And both of them really liked Dorothea.
[41:18] She told them that she was in her 70s, which we know was
[41:21] false. She also told them a bunch of
[41:23] other lies, like she was a nurse in World War 2.
[41:26] And Judy felt confident leaving Bert with Dorothea because the
[41:30] two of them really liked her when they met her.
[41:32] She could speak Spanish as well, which was Bert's first language.
[41:36] So that kind of helped them connect, helped him feel a bit
[41:39] more comfortable. And under Dorothea's care, Bert
[41:42] Montoya absolutely blossomed. The next time Judy came to visit
[41:47] him, he had a new haircut, new clothes.
[41:49] He was, he just seemed so much happier and healthier in
[41:52] himself. And Bert would repair Dorothea's
[41:55] kindness by doing work for her around the house.
[41:59] He was the youngest and most like able bodied out of the lot
[42:03] of them because he didn't have any physical health conditions.
[42:06] So he would always do like, the lifting around the house and
[42:09] just odd little DIY housework, things that Dorothea needed
[42:13] doing. But unbeknown to both Bert and
[42:16] Judy, the charity worker, Dorothea had actually put
[42:20] herself down on Bert's government checks as his cousin.
[42:24] She said that he wasn't, you know, in a good mental place to
[42:27] be able to deal with his own money.
[42:29] So the money was supposed to go to her, and she was supposed to
[42:31] deal with it for them. But no one knew she was doing
[42:34] that, apart from her of course, because no one knew that that
[42:38] was going on. Things continued with Bert at
[42:41] the house very smoothly and he very much enjoyed his time
[42:44] there. But around this time, yet
[42:46] another tenant from 1426 F St. suddenly disappeared.
[42:51] This time it was 64 year old Dorothy Miller.
[42:54] But the way that Dorothea explained this one to the
[42:56] tenants was completely different to the rest.
[42:59] She told them that Miller had been arrested and so she kicked
[43:03] her out of the house. Dorothea had actually told her
[43:06] not to come back after she came back from the police station
[43:09] because because she didn't want those kind of people in her care
[43:12] home, criminals. But of course, we know that
[43:14] that's not true. We know that Dorothea murdered
[43:18] Dorothy Miller. She probably used that excuse
[43:20] because there's not too many questions you can ask about
[43:24] that. It was probably just that
[43:25] Dorothy Miller started requiring more and more care.
[43:28] Or maybe she was asking questions that Dorothea didn't
[43:30] like and so she took her life. It did seem likely that maybe
[43:35] Dorothy Miller was starting to get suspicious of Dorothea and
[43:39] the stealing of her government checks because Dorothy Miller
[43:43] never actually received a single penny of her money from the
[43:47] government because Dorothea actually hadn't put it in her
[43:50] own name in the name of Ricardo Odorika, her landlord.
[43:55] So normally Dorothea would receive all of their money every
[43:59] month. She would take out a huge chunk
[44:01] of it for herself, way too much for herself, and then she would
[44:04] give them little bits of it and she would also buy them gifts.
[44:08] So it seemed as though they were getting more every month.
[44:12] However, Dorothea was obviously keeping the money, but say if
[44:15] she bought her alcoholic tenants a bottle or two every month,
[44:19] they wouldn't need the money to go out and buy.
[44:23] So they wouldn't question where their money was as much because
[44:25] they didn't need it, you see. However, Dorothy Miller didn't
[44:28] even get that and so she was always very confused where her
[44:31] money was. And of course Dorothea couldn't
[44:34] put every single tenants check in her name, otherwise that
[44:39] would look really suspicious. Of course Dorothea couldn't put
[44:42] like 10/11/12 people's checks all in her name because that
[44:46] would look insane. That would look so suspicious.
[44:49] So she began figuring out other ways that she could have the
[44:53] money, but not in her name. And of course, because Ricardo
[44:56] Odorica was her landlord and she had to pay him a certain amount
[44:59] of money every month to be able to have 1426 F St. she decided
[45:04] to just put a few of the tenants checks straight to him so that
[45:08] that was her payment for the house.
[45:10] It's hard to tell if the Odorica family were in on this.
[45:15] I don't think they knew about the killings at all, but maybe
[45:18] they knew about her stealing her tenants money.
[45:22] My best guess is that they knew she was running an illegal
[45:25] boarding house because of course it was against her probation,
[45:29] and so they didn't mind her setting up a bit of a seedy
[45:32] deal, just as long as they got their money.
[45:35] Anyway, back to Bert Montoya. In late 1988, Judy Moyes, his
[45:40] charity worker, suddenly stops hearing from him and so she gets
[45:44] in contact with Dorothea. Dorothea told Judy that Bert's
[45:48] tuberculosis was getting worse and worse, and so she'd actually
[45:51] taken him to Mexico to go and see her brother, who was a
[45:55] doctor, and he was just spending some time there with him trying
[45:59] to get some treatment, and that he would be back at the boarding
[46:02] house very soon. And Judy had no reason not to
[46:05] believe Dorothea. Up until now, everything had
[46:08] been smooth sailing with Bert at the boarding house.
[46:10] It had actually been better than smooth sailing.
[46:13] He'd improved so much physically and mentally from just being in
[46:17] the boarding house. So Judy trusted Dorothea and she
[46:20] said, OK, well, when Bert's back at the boarding house, get him
[46:23] to give me a call, I want to see him.
[46:25] But a few weeks passed and Bert still hadn't called Judy and
[46:29] neither had Dorothea. And Judy, he was getting a bit
[46:32] suspicious now. So she called Dorothea and she
[46:35] said, look, if you don't get Bert to contact me in the next
[46:38] few days, I'm going to go to the police because this is weird.
[46:40] Like where is he? And why isn't he speaking to me?
[46:43] And what do you know? A few days later, Judy Moyes
[46:46] gets a call from a man. But but it wasn't Bert.
[46:49] This man on the phone claimed to be Bert's uncle in Utah.
[46:54] He said that he'd gone to the boarding house.
[46:56] He'd gone and collected his nephew, Bert Montoya, and taken
[46:59] him back to Utah so that he could live there with them
[47:01] instead of in a boarding house with a bunch of strangers.
[47:04] So now Judy is even more suspicious.
[47:07] First he was in Mexico, and now he's in Utah with an uncle that
[47:10] she didn't even know he had. So she asked this uncle if she
[47:13] could speak to Bert, you know, just to check on him, just to
[47:16] let him know that she's thinking about him.
[47:18] And the uncle said, no, he's actually I'll at the moment, so
[47:21] you can't speak to him, but I'll get him to give you a call.
[47:24] And Judy just knew that something was wrong, something
[47:27] was not right here. And so she just put the phone
[47:29] down on Bert's uncle and called Dorothea and said, look, you've
[47:32] got to tell me what's going on here because I'm very suspicious
[47:35] of this now. But somehow Dorothea had yet
[47:39] another story to tell, a completely different 1 to the
[47:41] first one. She said that a couple of weeks
[47:44] earlier, she'd gone to church one day, and then she returned
[47:47] back to the boarding house, and there was a note on the side,
[47:51] and Bert was gone. And this note was from Bert's
[47:53] uncle saying that he'd actually come and picked Bert up, packed
[47:56] all his stuff, and he'd taken him to Utah to live with him.
[47:59] And Judy just wasn't buying this story.
[48:02] Why hadn't Dorothea gotten in contact with Judy weeks ago when
[48:05] she found that note, just to update her on Bert?
[48:08] And Judy just didn't believe any of this.
[48:11] And so she called the police and she asked them to go and check
[48:14] on the boarding house, go and check on all the tenants there,
[48:17] and most importantly, look for Bert and see if they can find
[48:22] any of his belongings or even him or just any idea of where
[48:25] he'd gone. And she told them while they
[48:27] were there to speak to a particular tenant named John
[48:29] Sharp, who was a very reliable, reasonable person.
[48:34] He was very alert in his brain. He wasn't an alcoholic and he
[48:37] wasn't so old that he might have memory issues.
[48:41] Judy just thought that police speaking to John Sharp would be
[48:44] the best bet to try and get some truth from this situation if
[48:47] Dorothea was lying. And so police went to the house
[48:50] and they looked around and there was no sign of Bert anywhere.
[48:53] There was none of Bert's belongings, absolutely nothing.
[48:56] They spoke to Dorothea, they spoke to John Sharp, but both of
[48:59] them gave the exact same story, that Bert had disappeared one
[49:03] morning and they found a note on the side saying that he'd gone
[49:05] to live with his uncle. So the officer believed what
[49:08] Dorothea and John Sharp were saying, and he was pretty
[49:11] satisfied with what he'd found at the house that day.
[49:14] So he went to leave, and as he was out in the yard, he was just
[49:18] approaching in the gate, he felt a tap on the shoulder.
[49:20] He turns around and there is John Sharp, the man that he'd
[49:23] just spoken to, the man that Judy told him to speak to.
[49:26] And John slips him a note. And this note told the officer
[49:30] to meet him at a different location that day, somewhere
[49:33] away from the house, because John Sharp had something he
[49:36] wanted to tell them. So sure enough, the officer went
[49:39] to meet John Sharp at a park later that day.
[49:43] And John confessed that he'd actually lied back at the house.
[49:47] He didn't think, but had gone off with his uncle.
[49:50] He actually only said that because Dorothea had gone round
[49:53] the whole house and told every single tenant in the boarding
[49:56] house that if anyone ever asked, they should tell them that
[49:59] story. They should lie and tell them
[50:01] that story. But in reality he had no idea
[50:04] where Bert Montoya was. But he was very concerned
[50:07] because recently he'd heard Dorothea yelling at him quite a
[50:11] bit, and he'd never heard this before.
[50:13] Dorothea and Bert always got on really well, apart from in the
[50:17] weeks before his disappearance. John Sharp recalled one time
[50:21] just a couple of weeks before Bert disappeared.
[50:24] But he locked himself in one of the rooms and called the postal
[50:28] office and tried to tell them that Dorothea was stealing his
[50:32] money from his government checks.
[50:33] However, the woman on the phone at the postal office could
[50:36] barely hear Bert Montoya on the phone because Dorothea was
[50:39] screaming in the background, telling him that she'd kick him
[50:42] out on the streets if he did this.
[50:44] He must have rang the postal office like 3 times that day and
[50:48] tried to sort it with them every single time, and the woman on
[50:50] the phone told him that they'd do what they could.
[50:53] However, the real problem now was that he'd angered Dorothea.
[50:57] John Sharp also told this police officer that there was another
[51:01] time, just a few weeks before that, that he recalled Bert
[51:05] coming home from the pub. Well-being carried home from the
[51:08] pub because he thought he'd been drugged and he'd only been at
[51:12] the bar for like an hour or so, so he'd only had like 2 who
[51:15] drinks Max in that time, maybe 3.
[51:17] And for an alcoholic like Bert, I'm just now realizing that I
[51:21] don't think I've mentioned that he's an alcoholic at all in this
[51:24] video so I'm really sorry about that.
[51:25] But he was an alcoholic and so for someone like him that can
[51:30] handle large amounts of alcohol, 2-3 drinks isn't going to knock
[51:35] him like that. Intoxicated, you know?
[51:39] But what's interesting about this is that the drug that
[51:42] Dorothea really like to use on her victims, Dalmen, the
[51:46] sedative drug, didn't work well with alcohol.
[51:49] So this could have been the very starting point of where Dorothea
[51:52] began drugging Burt Montoya and it began building up in his
[51:56] system. John Sharp also told the officer
[51:58] some even more worrying things. Just for context, John Sharp
[52:02] actually had the bedroom underneath the stairs at the
[52:06] boarding house house. So he heard a lot that went on
[52:10] in the hallways and in the stairs.
[52:12] He told this officer that during his time at the boarding house,
[52:15] he would sometimes in the middle of the night, hear banging
[52:19] noises as if something was being dragged down the stairs.
[52:23] And that some mornings he would wake up and there would be a new
[52:26] hole in the yard or a freshly covered up hole.
[52:29] Or, you know, Dorothea would hire people to come in and dig
[52:33] holes in the garden for different garden projects she
[52:35] was working on. But then they'd quickly be
[52:38] covered up and there were never any new projects in the house.
[52:41] And after everything he just heard, that officer realized
[52:45] that something very sinister could be going on at 1426 F St.
[52:50] And so he got the homicide team involved.
[52:53] And that is where I'm going to leave Part 2 for now, right on a
[52:56] cliffhanger. There you go.
[52:57] In the next episode, we're going to talk about how this case was
[53:02] resolved and where this police investigation ended up going.
[53:09] Thank you so much for listening to Usual Disclaimer.
[53:12] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[53:14] by any of the topics we discussed today, please check
[53:17] the description where we've left some helpful resources.
[53:20] If you want to hear more cases like this one, make sure to
[53:23] follow Usual Disclaimer on your podcast app so that you get
[53:26] notifications when we post new episodes.
[53:29] And if you really enjoyed, I'd love it if you could leave a
[53:32] rating and a review too. Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[53:35] Neil is an Audio Boom Studios production.
[53:38] See you next time.

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