When Dorothea Puente was finally put on trial in 1992, the prosecutor called her one of the most "cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen

When Dorothea Puente was finally put on trial in 1992, the prosecutor called her one of the most "cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen." And though Puente didn't look the part, the prosecutor was absolutely right.

For six years in the 1980s, Puente preyed on the elderly tenants of her boarding house in Sacramento, California. She'd welcome them into her home — then drug them, strangle them, and dump their bodies in a nearby river or bury them in her garden. All the while, she'd cash their benefit checks, eventually raking in thousands of dollars a month thanks to her grisly scheme. This is the full story of the "Death House Landlady": Dorothea Helen Puente (née Gray; January 9, 1929 – March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. In the 1980s, she ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered various elderly and mentally disabled boarders before cashing their Social Security checks.
Puente's total count reached nine murders; she was convicted of three and the jury hung on the other six. Newspapers dubbed Puente the "Death House Landlady". Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California, to Trudy Mae (née Yates) and Jesse James Gray. Her parents were both alcoholics and her father repeatedly threatened to commit suicide in front of his children.
Her father died of tuberculosis in 1937; her mother, who worked as a sex worker, lost custody of her children in 1938 and died in a motorcycle accident by the end of the year. Puente and her siblings were subsequently sent to an orphanage, where she was sexually abused. Gray's first marriage at age sixteen, in 1945, was to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific theater of World War II. They had two daughters between 1946 and 1948; Gray sent one child to live with relatives in Sacramento, and placed the other for adoption. She also suffered a miscarriage. McFaul left her in late 1948.
In the spring of 1948, Gray was arrested for purchasing women's accessories using forged checks in Riverside. She pled guilty to two counts of forgery, serving four months in jail and three years' probation. Six months after her release, she left Riverside. In 1952, Gray married merchant seaman Axel Bren Johansson in San Francisco. She created a fake persona, calling herself "Teya Singoalla Neyaarda", a Muslim woman of Egyptian and Israeli descent.
They had a turbulent marriage; Gray took advantage of Johansson's frequent trips to sea by inviting men to their home and gambling away his money. Gray was arrested in 1960 for owning and operating a bookkeeping firm as a front for a brothel in Sacramento; she was found guilty and was sentenced to ninety days in the Sacramento County Jail.
In 1961, Johansson had Gray briefly committed to DeWitt State Hospital after a binge of drinking, lying, criminal behavior, and suicide attempts. While there, doctors diagnosed her as a pathological liar with an unstable personality. Gray and Johansson divorced in 1966, although she continued to use Johansson's name for some time following their separation. Gray assumed the identity of "Sharon Johansson", hiding her delinquent behavior by portraying herself as a devout Christian woman. She established her reputation as a caregiver, providing young women with a sanctuary from poverty and abuse without charge. In 1968, Gray married Roberto Jose Puente. After sixteen months, the couple separated, with Gray citing domestic abuse. In 1967, she attempted to serve him with a divorce petition[inconsistent], but Puente fled to Mexico; the divorce wouldn't be finalized until 1973. The two would continue to have a turbulent relationship, and Gray filed a restraining order in 1975. Gray would continue to use the surname Puente for more than twenty years. Following her divorce, Gray focused on running a boarding house located at 21st and F streets in Sacramento.
She established herself as a genuine resource to the community to aid alcoholics, homeless people, and mentally ill people by holding Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and assisting individuals to sign up to receive Social Security benefits. She changed her public image to that of a respectable older matron by putting on vintage clothing, wearing large granny glasses, and letting her hair turn gray. She also established herself as a respected member in Sacramento's Hispanic community, funding charities, scholarships, and radio programs. She eventually met and married Pedro Angel Montalvo, though Montalvo abruptly left the relationship a week after their marriage. In 1978, Gray was charged and convicted of illegally cashing thirty-four state and federal checks that belonged to her tenants. She was given five years' probation and ordered to pay $4,000 in restitution.
In April 1982, 53-year-old Ruth Munroe began living with Puente in her upstairs apartment, but soon died from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. Puente told police that the woman was very depressed because her husband was terminally ill. The authorities left the cause of death as undetermined, since there was such an excessive amount of both these drugs, and she was bedridden at the time. A few weeks later, the police returned after Malcolm McKenzie, a 74-year-old pensioner (one of four elderly people Puente was accused of drugging), accused Puente of drugging and stealing from him. On August 18, 1982, Puente was convicted of three theft charges and sentenced to five years in prison; there, she began corresponding with Everson Gillmouth, a 77-year-old retiree from Oregon. A pen pal friendship developed, and when Puente was released in 1985 after serving three years of her five-year sentence, he met her outside the prison, driving a red 1980 Ford pickup. Their relationship developed quickly, and the couple was soon making wedding plans. In November 1985, Puente hired a man named Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her apartment. For his labor and $800, Puente gave him the red Ford pickup, which she stated belonged to her boyfriend in Los Angeles, who no longer needed it. She asked Florez to build a 6-by-3-by-2-foot box to store "books and other items". She then asked Florez to transport the filled, sealed box to a storage depot. Florez agreed, and Puente assisted him. Puente told Florez to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter County and dump the box of "junk" on the riverbank at an unofficial household junk dumping site. On January 1, 1986, a fisherman spotted the suspicious looking coffin-like box near the river and called police. Investigators opened the box and found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside.
Puente continued to collect Gillmouth's pension and wrote letters to his family, explaining that the reason he had not contacted them was because he was ill. She continued to maintain a boarding house, taking in forty new tenants. Gillmouth's body remained unidentified for three years. Puente continued to accept elderly boarders and was popular with local social workers because she accepted referrals of the "tough cases", including drug addicts and abusive tenants. She collected tenants' monthly mail before they saw it and paid them stipends, pocketing the rest for "expenses". During this period, parole agents visited Puente at least fifteen times; though she had been ordered to keep away from the elderly and refrain from handling government checks, no violations were ever noted. Suspicion was first aroused when neighbors noticed the odd activities of a homeless alcoholic known only as "Chief", whom Puente stated she had "adopted" and hired as her handyman. Puente had Chief dig in the basement and cart soil and rubbish away in a wheelbarrow.
 At the time, the basement floor was covered with a concrete slab. Chief later dismantled a garage in the backyard and installed a fresh concrete slab there as well. Soon afterward, Chief disappeared. Puente died in prison at Chowchilla on March 27, 2011, from natural causes; she was 82. Continue reading