Dorothea Puente Boarding House Murders

Dorothea Helen Puente (née Gray, January 9, 1929 – March 27, 2011) operated a boarding house near 15th and F Streets in Sacramento, California, where she took in elderly, homeless, and mentally disabled tenants. According to the Wikipedia account of her case, beginning in 1982 she killed a number of these tenants, typically through drug overdoses, buried their bodies on the property, and continued to fraudulently cash their Social Security benefit checks after their deaths.

Before the killings came to light, Puente already had a criminal record involving fraud: in 1978 she was convicted of illegally cashing 34 state and federal checks belonging to tenants, and in 1982 she was convicted of grand theft against a tenant, Dorothy Osborne, resulting in a prison sentence. During her incarceration she corresponded with Everson Theodore Gillmouth, whose body was later found in a box along the Sacramento River in January 1986 but not identified until December 1988. Investigators documented a pattern in which tenants — including Ruth Munroe, Betty Mae Palmer, Leona Carpenter, James Gallop, Vera Faye Martin, Dorothy Miller, Alvaro "Bert" Gonzales Montoya, and Benjamin Fink — died or disappeared while in Puente's care, with toxicology on recovered remains showing various sedatives and antidepressants. Puente forged signatures and continued collecting victims' government benefit payments after their deaths.

The case became public in November 1988 after a former resident, John Sharp, indicated to police he had been told to lie about the disappearance of Montoya. A detective digging in Puente's yard with her permission found the first human remains on November 11, 1988. Puente fled but was located and arrested at a Los Angeles motel on November 16, 1988, after a former acquaintance recognized her from television coverage and alerted authorities.

Puente was charged with nine counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances, making the case eligible for the death penalty. Her trial, which began February 9, 1993, in Monterey County, involved 156 witnesses and more than 3,100 exhibits. After extended deliberations, the jury convicted her on August 26, 1993, of three counts of murder — those of Benjamin Fink, Leona Carpenter, and Dorothy Miller — while remaining deadlocked on the other six counts. During the penalty phase, jurors again deadlocked, and Puente was spared a death sentence. On December 10, 1993, she was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Puente's convictions were affirmed on appeal in 1997, and allegations of juror misconduct were rejected following a hearing in 1998. She died in prison at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California, on March 27, 2011, at age 82, from natural causes.