The idyllic home at 1426 F Street seemed just like any other in the quiet neighbourhood of Sacramento, California. Owned by an older woman who diligently maintained its flower-filled lawn, the Victorian bungalow operated as a boarding house in the 1980s for Sacramento’s most vulnerable.
Landlady Dorothea Puente’s caregiving was highly praised by social workers, who were desperate to find their clients a safe and reliable home. Then the tenants began to disappear.
The eventual discovery of seven bodies in Puente’s backyard threw everything into question – was this innocuous-looking lady really responsible for their deaths?
It soon emerged that Puente had indeed murdered her tenants as a way to cash in their social security cheques.
The discovery of Puente’s crimes came in November 1988, after one of her tenants hadn’t checked in with his social worker. When police first asked Puente about the disappearance of 51-year-old Alvaro Montoya, she said she hadn’t seen him. But officers soon spotted a disturbed patch of soil.
Puente reportedly shrugged off any questioning from police. She told them, “Dig in my yard. I don’t know what’s out there.”
Within minutes, officers found a decomposing body. Then, they came across six others.
Amid a sea of forensic specialists who had descended on the property, Puente slipped out the gate and began running. A widespread search was launched, with Puente later apprehended.
Despite being linked to the seven bodies in her garden – as well as two other deaths, including that of her former boyfriend – Puente was only convicted of three murders. She was sentenced to life in prison in 1993.
A local social worker later told The Examiner, “I’ve done placement with homeless people, helped them get their money and stabilise their lives. Now I wonder if they would have been better off if they’d stayed homeless.”
Puente’s level of deceit continued in jail, using her “grandma image” to manipulate other inmates. She also wrote a cookbook titled Cooking with a Serial Killer.
“Other inmates saw her as this warm maternal figure. I believe some called her ‘mum’ and ‘grandma’,” author Genie Ortiz told Mamamia’s True Crime Conversations podcast.
“She really wanted to create this image of herself as someone that can be admired, and this did not stop in prison … even though there was nothing monetarily to gain from it.”
Puente died in prison in 2011 aged 82. She was described in her Los Angeles Times obituary as being “one of the most ‘cold, calculating’ female serial killers the country had ever seen”.
Former Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness also said Puente served as “a living illustration of the notion that one cannot judge a book by its cover”.
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