Dorothea Puente

Suspicion was aroused when neighbors noticed the odd activities of a homeless alcoholic known only as "Chief," whom Puente stated she had "adopted" and made her personal 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 took down a garage in the backyard and installed a fresh concrete slab there as well. Soon afterward, Chief mysteriously disappeared.

Puente got married for the fourth time in 1976 to Pedro Montalvo, who was a violent alcoholic. The marriage only lasted a few months, and Puente started to spend time in local bars looking for older men who were receiving benefits. She forged their signatures to steal their money, but she eventually was caught and charged with 34 counts of treasury fraud. While on probation, she continued to commit the same fraud.

According to California Court of Appeal records, in 1981 Puente began renting an upstairs apartment at 1426 F Street in downtown Sacramento. The nine murders with which she was charged in 1988 (she was convicted in 1993 of three of them) were associated with this upstairs apartment and not her previous 16-room boarding house.

In April 1982, 61-year-old Ruth Monroe began living with Puente in her upstairs apartment at 1426 F Street, but soon died from an overdose of Codeine and Tylenol. Puente told police that the woman was very depressed because her husband was terminally ill. They believed her and judged the incident a suicide.

A few weeks later, the police were back after a 74-year-old pensioner named Malcolm McKenzie accused Puente of drugging and stealing from him. She was convicted of three charges of theft on August 18, 1982, and sentenced to five years in jail. While in jail, she started to correspond with a 77-year-old retiree living in Oregon, named Everson Gillmouth. A pen-pal friendship developed, and when Puente was released in 1985 after serving just three years of her sentence, he was waiting for her in a red 1980 Ford pickup. Their relationship developed quickly, and the couple was soon making wedding plans. They opened a joint bank account and paid $600-a-month rent for the upstairs apartment at 1426 F Street in Sacramento.

In November 1985, Puente hired Ismael Florez to install some wood paneling in her apartment. For his labor and an additional $800, Puente gave him a red 1980 Ford pickup in good condition, which she stated belonged to her boyfriend in Los Angeles who no longer needed it. Dorothea Puente then asked Florez to do one more thing: build a box 6 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet to store "books and other items." She then asked Florez to transport the filled and nailed-shut box to a storage depot. Florez agreed, and Puente joined him. On the way, however, she told him to stop while they were on Garden Highway in Sutter County and dump the box on the river bank in an unofficial household dumping site. Puente told him that the contents of the box were just junk.

On January 1, 1986, a fisherman spotted the box sitting about three feet from the bank of the river and informed police. Investigators found a badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man inside. Meanwhile, Puente continued to collect Everson Gillmouth's pension and wrote letters to his family, explaining that the reason he had not contacted them was because he was ill. She also maintained a "room and board" business, taking in 40 new tenants (most of whom were alcoholics and drug addicts). Although she was making a good profit doing this, she wanted more money and therefore started to frequent bars looking for new customers.

Every month, Puente collected all the tenants' mail before they saw it and gave them only a small amount of their money, pocketing the rest
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