Dorothea Puente was more than just a prisoner, she was a media event.
When word had reached Sacramento that Puente had been apprehended in Los Angeles, the local news media had scrambled to cover the story, but was frustrated to find that no commercial airline would be flying south from the city's airport for several hours. Outmaneuvering the competition, KCRA-TV, Sacramento's NBC affiliate, and
The Sacramento Bee
,
the city's largest paper, had chartered the jet and then invited the police to come along.
During the flight, Puente sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup and submitted to a short interview. At one point, in response to a question by Channel 3 reporter Mike Boyd, Puente softly admitted, "I cashed checks, yes," but maintained, "I have not killed anyone." She also made the cryptic statement, "I used to be a very good person at one time." Then she clammed up.
A few hours later, Dorothea Puente was booked into the Sacramento County Jail. Police confiscated her purple leather purse containing a wallet, a California driver's license, a Seiko watch, a notepad, stamps, Tiffany cologne, miscellaneous cosmetics, two pairs of earrings, three rings with clear stones, a pack of Sweet 'n Low, and one sealed plastic envelope containing $3,042.55.
She traded her nice red coat, pink dress, and purple pumps for a regulation orange jumpsuit with "Sacramento County Jail" stenciled across the back.
Later that morning, looking tired, pale, and bewildered, Dorothea was brought into the jammed courtroom of Judge John V. Stroud. She looked especially small standing between Assistant Public Defenders Peter Vlautin and Kevin Clymo, more like a victim than a culprit.
She spoke just once during the seven-minute arraignment. When the judge addressed her as "Dorothea Puente Montalvo" she softly corrected him, "It's Dorothea Montalvo Puente," and all the reporters took note, as if this would tell any of us who she really was.
She nodded when the judge asked if she needed a public defender, but uttered nothing that might dispel the mystery of how so many bodies had come to rest in the yard of such a sweet-looking old woman. She listened solemnly as she was arraigned on one count of murder—that of Bert Montoya—and ordered held without bail.
As soon as these somber proceedings concluded, an international assemblage of reporters elbowed in close to Puente's attorneys, hoping for quotes, and the public defenders were happy to oblige. It was highly improper to confine a suspect with the press at close quarters
for a long period, they declared. Puente's legal right to remain silent had been compromised. "It's unheard of to have a suspect transported with a reporter and cameras on the plane before she even has a chance to talk to an attorney," Peter Vlautin fumed. He accused the police of "enlisting the aid of the media to create a circus atmosphere in this trial," adding, "I'm surprised she wasn't on
Geraldo!
this morning."
(Geraldo would get his chance later.)
A deeply chagrined Police Chief Kearns meanwhile responded that he'd only just learned of the unorthodox travel arrangements, declining to comment further until he had more information.
While the cops squirmed about having committed yet another embarrassing blunder, the media seemed nothing short of delighted with its news coup. "Our job is to aggressively cover the news and to run after things when they happen. And frankly, I'm quite proud of what we did," crowed Bob Jordan, KCRA's news director. "We literally offered the police a ride. They accepted."
In a sense, Dorothea Puente had been apprehended by the media. She'd become a cause célèbre. The movie moguls were already making plans. Television or big screen? Mini-series or movie of the week? Whatever they would ultimately decide, the public-interest barometer clearly indicated it was time to prepare some contracts.
Of course, Chuck Willgues had his photo splashed from coast to coast. In front-page headlines, the
Los Angeles Times
dubbed him the "Tipster" who had "Led Police to Death House Suspect.” In one interview, Willgues summed up,
"
Everything happened so fast. The next thing I knew, I'd seen her on TV
."
(His sudden rise from obscurity had a happy footnote: Willgues was reunited with his three children, whom he hadn’t seen in thirty years.)
Under the scrutiny of observers, Patty Casey's eyes teared up as she watched the noontime news and heard how her onetime friend had tried to con Chuck Willgues. The cabdriver who had been so taken in by Puente's guise said, "Bless her heart…. It's ironic that she went back to the same environment, the same hustle."
Casey wasn't the only one who wept for Dorothea Puente.
"Sometimes she would have a heart of gold, sometimes she was
the demon. She had many personalities," said one who should know, Dorothea's fourth husband, Pedro Montalvo, who still resided in Stockton. Remembering his brief but passionate marriage to Dorothea, the old man's eyes spilled with tears. "Poor woman. The poor woman stole from innocents and gave to other people." Montalvo sat very still, obviously affected by the woman he once loved. "One minute she is in this world, the next minute she is in another world. It is like a nightmare," he said.
But Montalvo didn't believe that the police had yet solved the case. "I don't doubt that she committed crimes. What I doubt is the manner in which she could drag them out and bury them. That is what I doubt. Some
bandido
must have helped her. Or two of them, or more
bandidos.
"
Now that Dorothea Puente had been apprehended, law enforcement fell strangely silent about possible accomplices. Was it logical to believe she'd acted alone? Or was it possible, even with such suspicious circumstances, that she was actually innocent?
With Puente locked up, Judy Moise felt safe enough to move back home, but she was still fearful that Puente's accomplices might be freely roaming the city. It seemed pretty darned unlikely to her that Puente had gone solo.
She'd given the police the inept letter written by "Michel Miguel Obregon," or someone named Don Anthony, yet they hadn't made any new arrests.
Meanwhile, Judy stubbornly clung to the hope that Bert might still be alive somewhere. Asleep or awake, she had visions of Bert smiling, laughing, walking toward her. Always inclined to look for a spiritual interpretation of dreams, she searched this recurring image for meaning, but conclusions eluded her.
She commiserated with Bill Johnson about the disappearance of their friend. They gingerly explored "should haves" and "if onlys," then gloomily discussed how these very public events had touched their private lives. "I told my five-year-old daughter that maybe Bert has died," Johnson said sadly. "She cried."
Judy's everyday life took on a surreal quality. Whenever she chanced by 1426 F Street, the house seemed shrouded in a sepulchral darkness, as if its once cheery blue paint had been tainted by the black events of the past days. And her job, long a source of pride and
inspiration, now seemed sapped of meaning. She was only going through the motions, sleepwalking through the working day, tossing sleeplessly through the night.
Then the police called again to ask about Bert's description, needling her about his height and weight and hair color. She was baffled by the conversation's edge of confusion. What was wrong? Had they identified him or not? And if they hadn't, where could he be?
She pictured Bert again—his tousled salt-and-pepper hair, his nearly toothless grin—and this rekindled the illusion of Bert smiling, laughing, walking toward her….
CHAPTER 19
A chorus of voices demanded to know whether Bert Montoya’s body had been retrieved from Puente's yard. But relatively little outcry followed the news that the coroner's office was trying to match the seven remains with as many as twenty-five former tenants. Except for a few murmurings of concern, there was an uncanny silence regarding the identities of most of the others, as if no families remained behind to miss them, to wail in remorse, to demand answers. They seemed to have died in a void.
Who were these seven souls? Why had they died?
The coroner's office proceeded with their grim inquiry, autopsies filling the air with a putrid odor as they moved closer to identifying the victims—and, they hoped, to nailing the killer. In shifts, the two forensic pathologists cut, weighed, and observed, sprinkling their reports with a sort of morbid poetry.
Fragments of a jacket's metal zipper clung to "materials unraveled so badly so as to look like a necklace," according to Dr. Robert Anthony, who performed the autopsy on the first corpse unearthed from Puente's yard. Its disintegrating clothes suggested that it was female, the tattered shirt buttoning right over left. The bones of its feet shared the insides of its oxford-style shoes with insect larva, but the laces were still tied in bows.
Dr. Anthony found the corpse so mummified that it "resembled a large, parchment-like mass of beef jerky
."
With such advanced decomposition, he couldn't find much soft tissue. The internal organs, individually unidentifiable, were removed as a solid mass. The shrunken brain was "quite dried and had a putty-like consistency," yet he managed to send tissue samples of the brain upstairs for the crucial toxicology tests.
The other autopsies followed in rapid succession. While Dorothea Puente was being arraigned on November 17, Dr. Gary Stuart was conducting an autopsy on the second body found in her yard, #88-8874. The body was wrapped inside several layers of fabric, then plastic. Duct tape was strangely wrapped around the left wrist, binding the arm to the body, and twine was knotted around the legs. This adult female, markedly decomposed, was dressed in a long-sleeved blouse, beige slip, bra, stockings, panties, but there was no purse, wallet, or other ID. The body's toothless mouth said nothing about who this woman was, but the psoriasis of her liver spoke of alcoholism.
That afternoon, Dr. Anthony autopsied #88-3882: a white male adult wrapped in sheets of plastic, again sealed with duct tape. Clad in dark, short pants, boxer shorts and dark socks, he had been about five-feet-eight-inches tall, forty to sixty years old, with brown hair, brown eyes, a mustache, and no teeth. Most telling were his four tattoos: a swastika on his left shoulder, "PSI" above his right knee, a dagger piercing a heart on his left elbow, and a small cross on his left forearm.
Criminalists live by the edict that criminals always leave behind a calling card—a rapist's pubic hair; a gunner's bullet; a burglar's footprint. During the slow, meticulous work on the autopsy table, a signature emerged. Each of these bodies had been wrapped and buried in essentially the same fashion. The materials differed somewhat, but the manner of burial—the knots, the duct tape, the twine—left little question that all were the handiwork of the same person.
For example, the fifth body found was wrapped in layers of fabric secured with red string; the sixth, wrapped in fabric and paper, was tied with twine
.
One was an adult male, the other female, and in life they may not have even known each other, but in death their fates
were identical. Both were already beginning to skeletonize by the time they fell under the pathologist's knife. Dr. Stuart managed to identify major organs despite their extreme decomposition, and sent tissue exemplars up to the lab. Their burial clothes—including a woman's wristwatch that was still running—were individually tagged and added to the growing inventory of bagged evidence.
The seventh and last of the corpses found in Puente's yard, #88-8895, was autopsied by Dr. Anthony on November 22. Clad in a sleeveless flowered nightgown, this female was also markedly decomposed, and yielded a particularly ghastly surprise: Her head, hands and feet were missing. (When this particular gem hit the papers, those subscribing to theories of Satanism shuddered with gleeful horror.)
The three men and four women who had been uprooted from Puente's yard shared a macabre kinship in the means of their disposal. Wrapped in makeshift burial shrouds of plastic and cloth, each had been rotting in sad anonymity for a long period—estimated from weeks to months, even years.
But there were few clues to whatever had brought about the demise of these individuals. None showed any evidence of hemorrhaging, wounds, or trauma. No signs of violence. In every case, the cause of death remained "undetermined."