All language subtitles for Episode 03 Dorothea Puenta

-On November the 11th, 1988,
police searching

for missing
51-year-old Bert Montoya

paid a visit
to the boarding house

where he'd been living
in Sacramento, California.

Rumors of suspicious
activity in the garden

led detectives to begin
digging up the area.

-I'm sitting in this hole,
and I'm hanging on

to what looks like
a human femur bone.

-Over the next 3 days,

seven bodies would be
discovered under the ground

at 1426 F Street.

The landlady
and number-one suspect

was a 59-year-old woman
named Dorothea Puente.

-When you look at this person,
you don't automatically assume

or even think
that this is a serial killer.

She looks like
everybody's grandma.

-Puente had been stealing from
the tenants who trusted her.

The easiest way to keep them
quiet was to murder them.

-She was a survivalist,
killing these people

when necessary
to survive, period.

They had to go.

-Dorothea Puente had
been unmasked

as one of the world's
most evil killers.

It is one of the most
infamous homes in the USA,

1426 F Street in downtown
Sacramento, California

became the makeshift
burial site of seven people.

Their landlady and murderer
was 59-year-old Dorothea Puente.

Eventually charged
with nine murders in 1988,

she had poisoned her tenants
in order to steal from them.

Puente died in 2011 at the age
of 82, but the house lives on.

Now under the ownership of
Tom Williams and Barbara Holmes,

it's become
a macabre monument to her.

-It was built in 1895,

and it's gone through
a lot of iterations,

lot of people have been
in and out of it.

It can't be torn down.

It's considered
a historic house in Sacramento,

and they would not let anybody
tear it down, so here it sits.

-Detective John Cabrera helped
bring Puente to justice

when he uncovered human remains
in the yard of 1426 F Street

in November, 1988.

-As far as the interior of this
house, it's still the same.

The floors in which
the victims walked on,

the floor in
the sleeping bedroom

is where the victims lied.

It's still the original floors
in here, everything.

-The Victorian house has become
a tourist attraction,

and Tom and Barbara

have embraced
the gruesome history of it.

-We love it.

We have no problem
whatsoever with any of it.

So this is just our house,
and we made it home,

and we're pretty happy with it.

You still get people
walking by asking, you know,

how could we be crazy enough
to buy this house and stuff,

but, between the two of us,

we've made it into a home,
don't you think?

-Yeah, and, you know, we tried
to make it more comfortable

and tried to defuse
the whole mystique around it,

and, yeah, we're doing our best.

-She was a hardened criminal
in the body

of a little old lady, yeah.

She was a hard, hard person.

-Pure evil.
-Despite the renovations,

John still remembers the home
as the boarding house

where nine people
lost their lives.

-This is what I would
call the death room.

This is where Dorothea
would bring her victims

after giving them the drug
and alcohol combination,

and then bringing them in here
and leaving them on the floor

until she could prepare
them at a later time.

And when I pulled
the carpet back,

the odor was so overwhelming,

it was unbelievable, but I knew
and recognized that smell,

and it was the smell
of putrefied body fluid

that had seeped through the
wooden floor from her victims

who had laid there for anywhere
from 2 to 4 weeks probably.

-The day after finding
the first body,

Saturday,
November the 12th, 1988,

John vividly recalls the moment

he realized the little old lady
living at 1426 F Street

was not what she seemed.

-I looked up at one point
onto that balcony,

and Dorothea was standing
there looking right

straight down at me,

knowing that probably
within minutes,

I was going to uncover
that second body,

and sidetracked me
from digging in order

to walk her over to the motel,

and it's there
she made her escape.

-Puente would remain a wanted
fugitive for 5 days,

but her story begins
over 85 years ago.

She was born Dorothea Gray
in San Bernardino County,

California on
January the 9th, 1929.

-She was one
of several children.

She lost both of her parents
quite early on.

She spent time in an orphanage.

She was kind of passed
from pillar to post quite a lot,

so she didn't form those stable,

secure attachments with her
caregivers that many of us do,

and I think that went on
to shape the person

that she became.

-Dorothea, you know, lived a
very difficult early childhood.

She was deprived
in substantial ways.

She didn't have loving parents.

She had to scavenge for food.

-By the mid 1960s,

Dorothea had been
married three times

and taken on the name
of her third husband, Puente.

She had already served time
in prison for forging checks

and had found a new way
to earn money.

-She starts to get
involved in sex work,

selling her body

to basically put clothes
on her back and feed herself.

So she's living this quite
kind of feral existence.

Now, here's an individual
for whom violence and abuse

was just normal for her

if we look back at her
childhood experiences.

They're certainly not normal
and warm and loving.

They are quite brutal
and quite cold,

so this is the only thing
that she knows.

It's those basic emotions
and those basic instincts.

-And then, after becoming
a prostitute,

she discovered this occupation
of being a caregiver,

which requires
minimal qualifications,

and, all of a sudden,
a world was opened up to her.

-In 1981, Puente began renting
an apartment at 1426 F Street

in downtown Sacramento.

She took on the role of
caretaker for the other tenants

in the Victorian boarding house.

Soon after, Puente met
61-year-old Ruth Monroe.

Ruth's son, Bill Clausen
remembers his mother fondly.

-She was great.
I mean, she was my mom.

I'm going to say she was great.

But she was.

She brought up five kids
after my father passed away,

and I thought
she did a good job.

We met Dorothea
through a gentleman

that my mom met
while she was working,

and he kept asking her out,

and she finally
went out with him,

and then they started
seeing each other,

and he introduced
her to Dorothea.

During their friendship,

Dorothea decided she wanted
to open a restaurant,

and my mom wasn't
working anymore,

and my mom had
a little bit of money,

so she ended up opening
the little café

at the Round Corner Bar.

-Ruth ended up marrying Harold,

the man who'd introduced
her to Puente.

But soon, he was diagnosed
with cancer

and living full-time
in a hospital.

Ruth didn't want to live alone,
and Puente had an idea.

She could live with her
at 1426 F Street.

It turned out to be
a fatal decision.

-We moved her in there
on Easter Sunday, 1982,

and she died April 26th,
2 weeks later.

I saw my mom every day from
the time I moved her in there.

I stopped by there
on my way home from work,

and the last 3 days of her life,

she seemed like
she was getting sick,

and when I went there,

I'd noticed that she had
a drink in her hand,

and my mom didn't drink.

So I asked her, I said,
"What's that?"

And she said it was a drink

that Dorothea fixed
to calm her nerves.

I said fine, and I didn't
think anything of it

because I knew they were
friends, and, okay, fine.

-But Ruth deteriorated so badly
over the next few days

that the next time
Bill went to visit her,

she was almost catatonic.

-Mom was laying there.

I sat next to her
and touched her and told her,

I said, "Dorothea is taking
care of you. You'll be fine."

And she had a tear coming out
of her eye, and that was it.

She didn't say anything.

She just laid there.

The next time morning,
I got a call from my brother

telling me that mom was dead.

Went over there, she had
already been taken away

by the coroner's wagon,

and Dorothea had said
that she committed suicide.

-The news stunned Bill.
-Totally out of character.

She had everything to live for.

She had grandchildren.
She was happy.

It's not easy, not easy.

You still have the pain
in your heart.

-By August 1982,

Dorothea was back in trouble
with the authorities.

She had been abusing
her position as caretaker

for her fellow tenants.

-Dorothea had pled
guilty to fraud.

She was forging signature
on the back of Social Security

checks of her victims
and then cashing them.

She received a prison sentence
and was sent

to the women's prison
down in Chowchilla.

Well, in 1985, she was paroled,
and when she paroled,

she came back to Sacramento,

and she came back
to 1426 F Street.

-The caretaker was back
in business.

The next time police arrived
on Dorothea Puente's doorstep,

they would be armed
with shovels,

searching for a missing man,

and what they would unearth
in the yard of 1426 F Street

would shock the world.

In September 1985, 56-year-old

Dorothea Puente
was out of prison

after serving 3 years for fraud

and back living
at 1426 F Street,

the boarding house
where she acted as landlady

for her ne'er-do-well tenants.

Despite being on parole,

Puente continued to exploit
the other residents

by collecting their
Social Security checks

and keeping most
of the money for herself.

-She knows that
vulnerable people

aren't really looked after,

that the people
are forgotten about,

that people don't care
about them,

and she goes,
and she targets them.

So she's a predator
who's not just picking up

on individual vulnerabilities,

but she's picking up
on social ones, as well.

-For 3 years,
Puente went undetected.

Tenants at the Sacramento
boarding house

came and went until
November, 1988,

when a local social worker,
Judy Moise,

filed a missing-persons
report after losing touch

with a 51-year-old
called Bert Montoya.

Bert suffered
from mental disabilities

and was a diagnosed
schizophrenic.

His last known address
was 1426 F Street.

-I got a copy of the report,

and what I started doing then
was running a background check

on the missing person
who was Bert Montoya

and trying to get a little bit
of background on him

and also running a check
on the caretaker

who was in charge
of this particular individual,

and Bert was a disabled adult,

and the caretaker,
Dorothea Puente,

was apparently in charge
of him living here.

-On November the 11th, 1988,
John Cabrera, his partner,

Terry Brown, and Puente's
parole officer, Jim Wilson,

decided to pay a visit
to 1426 F Street

to search for some clues

into the disappearance
of Bert Montoya.

-Prior to leaving on that day,
we were starting to leave,

and Judy Moise turned
to me and said,

"You guys better
take some shovels."

And I went, "Well, what for?"

And she said, "Because
I've driven by in the past,

and I've seen mounds
of dirt out there,

and it kind of looked
like a burial ground."

-Armed with shovels, John,

Terry, and Jim arrived
at Puente's boarding house.

-Well, we come
to the front door,

knock on the door, the three
of us, and she answered.

And she's dressed very nicely.

She looked at me and said,
"I was expecting you guys."

You know, it kind of
caught me off guard.

And I said, "Okay."

Well, I said,
"You know why we're here.

We're here to see, you know,

about Bert,
what happened to him."

And she said, "Yeah."

And I asked if we could come in.

-John's first task was to find

out more
about the mysterious house.

-What is this place,
1426 F Street?

What is it here
that you're running?

What is this place?

What are you doing here?

And, at that time,
she looked at me.

She looked at her
parole officer,

and she just said, you know,

"Jim, I'm in violation
of my parole."

-Puente had been ordered
not to run a boarding house

after her release
from prison in 1985.

She'd got away with it
for 3 years

due to her seemingly
charming persona.

-Dorothea Puente played
this role.

She crafted this incredibly
skilled performance

as a harmless little old lady,

so she would often
take her teeth out.

She would tell people
she was 10 or 15 years older

than she actually was.

She wanted to present herself
as innocent and kindly

when she was anything but.

-While Jim and Terry chatted
with Puente in the kitchen,

John began his search
of 1426 F Street.

It appeared that Bert Montoya

had simply vanished
into thin air.

-After I completely looked
through the rooms,

didn't find anything,
I came back,

and, bearing in mind
what Judy had talked about

as far as the mounds of dirt,
I asked Dorothea, I said, "Look,

I'm going to be able to tell the
social worker that we looked,

and we didn't find anything."

And she was somewhat
agreeable with that,

"Okay, you know, that's good."

And then I said, "I have
one more question for you.

Can I dig in your yard?"

And she says,
"Why don't we do this?"

You guys go back to the office.

I know you have a lot better
work to do than to be over here,

and then I'll make a phone call.

I'll call some people,
they'll come over here,

and they'll do
the digging for you,

and then you can come back.

I thanked her, and I said,
you know, "We're here.

We have the shovels.

We'll just go ahead
and dig around.

If there's anything
we put out of place,

we'll do our best
to get it back,

you know, the way it was."

And so she says, "Okay."

And that's when we went
outside to dig around.

-The three men
only had two shovels,

so John borrowed on from Puente.

-So we had three shovels.

Three of us were digging,
and then one of the holes

is what we started finding
something similar to cloth,

and it just seemed
out of place in the ground.

And then I dig
a little bit further,

and I was down to about 3 feet,

and that's when I thought
I struck a tree root.

So I took the shovel,
and I started banging on it,

and I started trying to dislodge
this root or sever it

so I could continue to dig down,
and I couldn't do it.

It just wouldn't break,
so I got down in the hole,

and, with both of my hands
and bracing my feet,

I just kept pulling on this
what I thought to be a root.

And I pulled on it
and pulled on it, and, finally,

it dislodged itself.

And I'm sitting in this hole,

and I'm hanging onto what looks
like a human femur bone.

And, at that time,
"Get out of the hole,"

and I realized something's up.

We've just come across
human remains.

-The three men were completely
stunned, as was Puente.

-She looked down into the hole,

and she could see the bone,
and she grabs her mouth,

and she's, "Oh, is that
what I think it is?"

"Yeah. What can you
tell me about this?"

She says, "I don't know,

but there's been other people
that's been living here.

I was in prison,"

and there was a lot more people
living here before her.

-John halted the dig.

A full forensic search
of the yard

would have to begin
the next day.

-At that time, I decided
I was going to take Dorothea

back down
to the Hall of Justice,

and I was going to now
question her in full.

I questioned her
about what I found,

and I questioned her
about where Bert was.

I'd even told her as part of
my technique in my interview,

I said,
"I bet, if I dig anymore,

I'm going to find more bodies,"

and she just looked
right at me and said,

"Well, if you do,
I didn't put them there."

-As news spread of
the discovery of human remains,

the press were in attendance at
1426 F Street the very next day,

Saturday, November
the 12th, 1988.

Deputy coroner Laura Santos
was in charge of the excavation.

-I think there's a mode
you go into

when you're an investigator
that you just know

you have a job to focus on,
and you just focus on that,

and there were
a lot of distractions

because there were reporters
from all over the world,

and there were crowds of people
lining the streets,

and people would shout at me
and tell me things like,

"Turn towards the camera
when you're digging."

And, you know, I just had to
ignore it and shut it all out

because I just felt
I had a job to do,

and I knew it was
a really important job

in that a lot of what
happened in the future

was going to hinge
on what I did as far

as whether she was
prosecuted or not.

-Despite having a body
unearthed in her yard,

59-year-old Dorothea Puente

had not been charged
with any offense.

There was no reason to suspect
she may be responsible.

As John Cabrera
continued his dig,

Puente called him
into the house.

-And she says,
"Am I under arrest?"

And I just thought, "How odd?

What was it that gave her
the impression

that she was under arrest?"

Immediately, I said, "No."

And I said, "Why do you ask?"

And she said, "Well, all of this
is making me nervous."

And she goes, "I would like
to get a cup of coffee,

and I'd like to go over
to where my nephew

is around the corner
at the hotel."

And I said, "Okay.

Get what you need, and then
I'll walk you over there."

She comes walking out,
has a little red coat,

has her purse, walked down
the stairs, walk out.

But what I told her
was that I would escort her

because there were a lot
of people starting to gather,

and I thought,

"I don't want anyone walking up
to her or bothering her,

so I used that ruse
to walk her down to the corner.

-A photographer
captured the moment

John escorted Puente
out of the house.

No one yet knew it,

but Dorothea Puente would never
return to 1426 F Street.

-I watched her go
all the way down

and then go up into the hotel,

and that was the last
I saw of her at that time.

So I run back,
and I continue digging again.

Short time later,
I hit something,

and I'm fiddling around
with my shovel.

I'm trying to get it up,
figuring, "What's down here?"

And I keep trying to bring it up
and bring it up, and I do,

and in my shovel is a human leg.

So, immediately, I stop.

I yell to my commander,
"We have another one."

And he runs over,
and the first thing he asks is,

"Where's Dorothea?"

-It was a good question.

Where was Dorothea Puente?

A second body had been found
buried in her yard,

and she was nowhere to be seen.

She wasn't at the hotel
having a coffee.

It had all been a ruse so that
she could make an escape.

Dorothea Puente was on the run.

On Saturday, November the 12th,
1988, a police forensic team

were digging up the yard
of a boarding house

in Sacramento, California.

They had just unearthed
a second body.

Dorothea Puente, the 59-year-old
landlady of 1426 F Street

had left the house

and headed to a nearby hotel
to have a coffee,

but detectives were now
very keen to speak with her.

-I said I took her and watched
her go to the coffee shop.

She's supposedly over there
at the hotel.

So then another detective
came and found out,

by speaking with the person
at the counter in there,

that, in fact, Dorothea
had come into the hotel,

walked through the lobby,

went to a pay phone,
picked up the pay phone

and apparently called a taxi cab

because a cab arrived
and took off.

-Puente had absconded,

and detectives had no idea
where she was headed.

-And so, at that time,
we called in the FBI

and, you know,

enlisted the help of other
resources and outside agencies

in trying to locate her

because that is what
was key right now

is to try to find her
as fast as we could.

-Back at 1426 F Street,

one of the many people who had
gathered to watch the dig

had given some
important information

to deputy coroner Laura Santos.

-He told the story that he had
dug holes in this yard

for Dorothea,
and she had paid him cash,

and she just told him
she was burying trash,

so he came in and pointed out
where he had dug holes.

-Over the next 3 days,

the excavation
of the yard continued.

-Just as we kept digging,

we kept finding bodies
and more bodies,

and it just seemed endless.

Whatever we took down,
whatever we moved,

wherever we were digging,
we'd find a body.

It was just unbelievable.

She put seven people
in this small yard,

and there wasn't even a witness
to any of these burials,

not one.

-The seventh and final body
was found on Monday,

the 14th of November.

It was buried right in front
of the house,

just feet from the sidewalk.

-Well, she was kind of
bundled up in almost like

a scrunched up seated position,

but she was missing her
head, hands, and feet.

I went through every flowerpot

and emptied them out
to make sure

that we weren't
missing anything,

but those appendages
were never found.

-To this day, we've never
recovered the head,

hands, or feet.

Their whereabouts,
it's anybody's guess.

If the walls in this home
could talk,

we would probably be horrified.

-Three days after the discovery
of the seventh body,

Thursday, the 17th of November,

Dorothea Puente
was finally found.

She had been spotted
by a man in a bar

almost 400 miles
from Sacramento in Los Angeles.

-He goes home,
and, while he's watching TV,

he sees her on TV
as being wanted on the news,

so he calls LAPD,
gives the information,

"I was just having drinks
with this person."

-The man told the police which
hotel Puente was staying in,

and she was promptly arrested.

John Cabrera immediately
flew down to John Wayne Airport

in nearby Santa Ana.

-We landed.

LAPD pulled up
out on the tarmac.

We got out of the plane,
and there she was.

They had her in cuffs.

You know, we ceremoniously
walked over,

and they transferred her to me.

I asked her, you know,
"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I'm okay."

And then, out of nowhere,
she just says,

"Mr. Cabrera, I'm sorry."

-John had many questions to ask
about the seven bodies

buried in Puente's yard,

but there was still no proof
that they had been murdered,

and the 59-year-old fugitive
wasn't planning on a confession.

-We got back here
to Sacramento.

I took her down
to the Hall of Justice.

At that time, I asked her
if she wanted to give me

any kind of a statement
and she declined,

and so we just booked her
into Sacramento County Jail,

and that would be the last time
that I'd ever speak with her.

She would never
speak to me again.

-With Puente safely
locked away,

the task of identifying
the seven bodies had begun.

-Most of them
didn't have teeth,

or they had one or two teeth.

In the case of the one body
in the front yard,

she didn't have any hands,
so we couldn't do fingerprints.

So we started
gathering information.

-Most of the tenants
at 1426 F Street

were either homeless or
estranged from their families,

which made identifying them
even more difficult.

-In the beginning,
there were people saying,

"Oh, you're never going
to be able to do this."

And so I was pretty happy that I
was able to identify everybody,

and they all had some kind
of disposition, you know,

as far as most of them had
some family members somewhere,

and so they are all buried.

-Among the seven names
was Bert Montoya,

the man whose disappearance had
initiated the dig on F Street.

-Bert would be the third
body that I found.

He was buried under a concrete
basin in the backyard.

He was number three,
and that puzzle was now solved.

-Bert Montoya
had wandered away.

He had some type
of mental deficiency,

and his parents had
always taken care of him.

About 13 years before he died,

he disappeared from their home
in New Orleans, Louisiana,

and they had no idea
what had happened to him,

and it turned out
that his 92-year-old

mother was still alive,

and she had been searching
for him her whole life,

or, you know, even since
he'd been missing,

and so they were really,
really grateful to know,

even though it was such a sad
ending, they were very thankful

that they were able
to have him come home.

-As well as
identifying the victims,

Laura needed to find out
the cause of their deaths.

Toxicology reports showed
that each of the seven bodies

had traces of the same
prescription sleeping pill.

-We did find traces of Dalmane,
the drug in the bodies,

and that was another thing
that I was able to determine

by gathering all these
medical records on everyone,

none of the victims had
ever been prescribed Dalmane.

Only Dorothea Puente
had been prescribed Dalmane.

-This particular drug,
when coupled with alcohol,

could be deadly.

It just simply
put you in a catatonic state

and, with the alcohol, overwhelm
the body and stop the heart.

-Poisoning is one of the ways

we've seen female
serial killers operate

because it's a way
that doesn't require

a lot of physical strength,

and so you don't have to
overcome your victim physically

because that's more
difficult for a female,

particularly, in this case,
an elderly female,

to overcome the victim
physically.

-As detectives delved
into Puente's past,

they found even more evidence

that exposed her
as a callous killer.

-All in all, in the very end
of the investigation,

she would be charged
with nine murders,

seven in the yard
and which we would uncover,

and then they added Ruth Monroe.

-Ruth's death had initially
been ruled a suicide back

in April, 1982.

The new revelation was a shock
for her son, Bill Clausen.

-That kind of just
pulled my stomach,

and that's, like I said,

that's when it brought
everything back to where,

"Okay, now we can go after her."

You know, because all this time,

we know that mom
didn't commit suicide,

especially with the amounts
of the drugs that were in her,

all the undissolved pills
in her stomach.

There's no way that she could
have taken all of that

and lived long enough
to take everything.

-The ninth victim was
a 77-year-old man from Oregon

called Everson Gillmouth.

He had become pen pals
with Puente during her 3 years

in prison for fraud.

-And then,
when she paroled in 1985,

he went and picked her up

and drove her back here
to the boarding house,

and this is where
he would be staying.

-Within months, Everson had
seemingly disappeared

and severed all ties
with his family.

-Every time they would call,
he was always out.

They never got
to speak with him,

and she always had a reason why.

But, in actuality,
he picked her up in late 1985.

He was laying in
a homemade coffin

along the Sacramento River
in early 1986,

and Everson would
remain a John Doe

until this case in 1988 broke,

and that's when his family
contacted our office in saying,

"We're looking for our father."

-Puente remained on remand
for over 4 years.

Her defense lawyers were worried

she wouldn't get
a fair trial in Sacramento

due to her notoriety.

Eventually, it was agreed
that the trial would be held

in Salinas
in nearby Monterey County.

-We got a court date, and what
I wanted to do was get in there,

give my information,
give my testimony

and, for the sake of
the families of these victims,

wanted to make sure
that she would never walk

on the public streets again,

that she wasn't going to do that
or harm anybody anymore.

-But the trial would not be
as straightforward

as investigators hoped.

Puente's refusal to admit
to the murders

meant they would
somehow need to prove

that the sweet little
old lady in the dock was,

in fact, a heartless killer.

After being on remand
for over 4 years,

the trial of Dorothea Puente
finally began

at the Monterey
County Courthouse

on February the 9th, 1993.

The 64-year-old admitted
to burying the bodies

of seven of her tenants

and continuing to claim
their Social Security money,

but maintained she was innocent
of the nine counts of murder

against her.

Bill Clausen testified
during the trial.

His 61-year-old mother,
Ruth Monroe,

was one of the women that Puente
was accused of killing in 1982.

-When I walked to the jury box,
or to where I needed to be,

she just had just a cold
stare, just a cold stare,

and, after I testified,
I walked away.

She just kept staring
straight ahead up by the judge.

It angered me at the time.

When I walked back facing her,
as I was walking back to go back

and sit down, my thoughts
were just to strangle her,

but I have more control
than a lot of people,

and I just walked past
and went back and sat down

and listened to the rest.

-During the 5-month trial,
the jury heard from both sides.

Puente's defense team
admitted that she was a thief

but not a murderer,

while the prosecution argued
that the traces of Dalmane

proved that all the victims
had been poisoned.

On August the 26th, 1993,
after deliberating for 24 days,

the jury found Dorothea Puente
guilty of three murders,

but were deadlocked
on all the other charges.

-I think what disappointed me
as an investigator,

and I think it
disappointed people

that were involved in the case,

that, of all the nine
charges of murder,

seven of them were so similar

there was no doubt
that the seven bodies

that we found in this yard
should have all been guilty.

However, only three
of the seven in the yard

would be charged against her.

Four others would go 11 to one
with one juror saying no.

He didn't believe
that's what happened.

-The juror's refusal
to deliberate meant

that the judge,
Michael Virga, had no choice

but to declare a mistrial
on the other six charges,

one of them being
the murder of Ruth Monroe.

-They were talking about doing
a retrial because of that,

but then they decided not to
because of the cost,

which, I mean, I understand.

It took a lot of money
as it was,

and then the district attorney
kept telling me,

"Well, she's not going
to get any more time.

She's already going to
spend life in prison."

So we just kind of, "Okay,"
we had to accept it.

-On December the 10th, 1993,
Dorothea Puente was sentenced

to life imprisonment
without parole.

She was immediately sent
to the Central California

Women's Facility in Chowchilla.

The 64-year-old landlady
had killed her tenants

for no other reason
than to steal their money.

-She wanted their
Social Security checks.

She wanted that cash,

so she just had to dispose
of them to get to it,

so she saw her victims
as obstacles.

They were barriers that were
getting in the way

of something that she wants,

and she very cool and calm,
and in a very calculated manner,

dispatched them
so she could have their money.

-Although no charges were
brought against any others,

it has long been suspected

that Puente must have
had an accomplice.

-The issue of her
disposing of the bodies

creates one of the big
mysteries of her case

because Dorothea was
not a large person.

Some of these people
were fairly large.

And even to move
a 100-pound sack of potatoes

takes a fair amount of force.

There's reason to believe
that Dorothea actually enlisted

the help of some other tenants

who would prefer to be
her helper in the burial

than her victim being buried.

-It was obvious to us,
given the bodies,

especially Bert,

someone helped her
carry these bodies down.

I have suspicions.

I have my own opinion
who I believe helped her,

but that's just something

that I will always leave
for the investigation.

-During her time in prison,

Puente remained
in the limelight.

She released a book
of recipes called

"Cooking With
A Serial Killer" in 2004.

And in 2008, she agreed to meet
with Sactown Magazine

journalist Martin Kuz
in the prison visitor's hall.

-I waited, and I waited,
and I waited some more,

and as I sat there,
I thought, "I've been duped.

I've fallen for another
Dorothea Puente ruse."

I scanned the room, wondering
if perhaps I had missed her

but knowing that I hadn't,

and that's when the door
clanked open once more,

and in walked Dorothea.

-Martin was keen to speak
to the 79-year-old

who hadn't been seen
or heard for 15 years.

-This was the first time

I had ever interviewed
a serial killer,

so I stood up to greet her.

We shook hands.

Her hand felt small, bony.

She gave me a tight smile,
and we began.

-Puente seemed happy
to make small talk,

but whenever Martin steered the
conversation towards her crimes,

she gave him short shrift.

-I said very explicitly to her
that we were coming up

on the 20th anniversary
of her arrest

and that I was interested in
talking to her about the case.

Before I got very far into that
preamble, she interrupted me,

and, for the first time,
she looked me square in the eye

and said, "I'm not guilty."

-She would never have
admitted to her crimes

because what purpose
would that serve?

I mean, often, when we see
cases of serial killers

who are caught
and sent to prison,

we think that's
the end of the story,

but it's not because
they will continue

to manipulate
people behind bars.

They will continue to
pull people's strings

and get the things
that they want.

-After meeting
with Puente six times,

Martin's visits suddenly stopped
after the killer had asked him

to buy her $115 worth of gifts.

-In our final conversation,
I asked her,

"How does it feel to be
known as a murderer?"

And she looked me square
in the eye and said,

"I don't give a shit
what anyone else thinks."

And that, to me, was as telling
as any comment that she had made

to me in the time
that we had been talking.

This was someone who is,
in effect, revealing that,

no matter what people may think
of her, she didn't care.

-On March the 27th, 2011,
Dorothea Puente died in prison.

She was 82 years old.

She took all her secrets
to the grave.

-When I heard she died, I mean,
it made me feel good.

I had, like, a relief.

If she was still alive, and I
saw her, I couldn't forgive her.

I should because it's
the human thing to do,

but, in my heart, no.

I really wouldn't want to.

There's nothing I can do though.

She's gone.

Mom's gone.
She's gone.

So it's over.

-Dorothea Puente was
a predator.

She didn't look like one.

She was a wolf
in sheep's clothing,

but the way that
she choose her victims,

she would pick people
who others didn't care about,

people who she could prey on.

She's essentially a parasite
who hooks onto people,

gets what she wants out of them

and then coldly disposes
of their bodies.

So she really is an incredibly
dangerous character.

-She was a very evil woman

and a woman that,
when she made her mind up

what she was going to do,

she did it without hesitation,
without remorse.

She set out on a journey,
and that journey ended

November 11, 1988
when we arrived at her doorstep.

-When you look
at 1426 F Street today,

it's difficult to imagine the
horrors that took place inside.

When tenants arrived here,
they would have felt comfortable

meeting
the sweet-looking landlady,

but in Dorothea Puente's eyes,
they were subhuman.

Her only reason for taking them
in was to kill them,

steal their money,
and bury them in her yard.

Puente took any remorse
she may have had

for her victims to the grave.

She will always be remembered

as one of the world's
most evil killers.