Death House Landlady: A Look Back At Unexpected Serial Killer Dorothea Puente

SACRAMENTO, CA — On November 11, 1988, detectives swarmed a Victorian-style home on F Street in Sacramento where guests had a habit of checking in — and then never checking out.

Investigators were initially searching for Alberto Montoya, a developmentally disabled man with schizophrenia whose social worker had reported him missing. After noticing disturbed soil, they instead uncovered the body of 78-year-old Leona Carpenter, another former tenant of the house. Eventually, they would find six more corpses on the property.

The culprit was none other than the seemingly docile gray-haired landlady, Dorothea Puente, who would eventually become known as one of the most shocking serial killers in Sacramento history.

Puente, whom the media nicknamed the "Death House Landlady," would murder her elderly and infirm boarders by poisoning, then would have their remains disposed of as she cashed their Social Security checks.

Puente, who was born Dorothea Helen Gray, had a troubled and traumatic childhood. She had a long criminal history prior to the murders, including arrests for forging checks and owning and managing a brothel. She later found work as a nurse's aide caring for disabled and elderly people in private homes, and from that moved to managing boarding houses.

In 1966, she married Roberto Puente, a man 19 years her junior, in Mexico City — but the marriage only lasted two years. After her marriage failed, Puente took over a three-story, 16-bedroom care home at 2100 F Street in Sacramento, in which she would rent an apartment.

In 1976, she married for a fourth time to Pedro Montalvo, a violent alcoholic — but once, again, the marriage didn't last, terminating in just a few months.

In April 1982, 61-year-old friend and business partner Ruth Monroe began living with Puente in her upstairs apartment, but soon died — apparently from an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen. Police believed Puente's account that Monroe was driven to suicide because of depression. Monroe's death was subsequently ruled a suicide.

Shortly thereafter police were back because of accusations levelled at Puente by a boarder, Malcolm McKenzie, then 74, that she had drugged and stolen from him.

While serving a 5-year sentence for theft she began a correspondence with 77-year-old retiree Everson Gillmouth.

Puente was released in 1985, having only served three years of her sentence, and immediately united with Gillmouth. The couple moved into the upstairs apartment at 1426 F Street.

In November 1985, Puente hired a handyman to install wood paneling in her apartment, and then asked that he build a 6' by 3' by 2' box for storage purposes. She later got the handyman to dump the box on a river bank.

It was on January 1, 1986 that a fisherman spotted the box and reported it to authorities. Inside, investigators found the badly decomposed and unidentifiable body of an elderly man. It would take three years to identify the body of Everson Gillmouth.

During this time, Puente continued to take in regular tenants and was popular with local social workers because she agreed to accept problematic cases like drug addicts and abusive residents.

Neighbors became suspicious when they noticed that an alcoholic known only as "<em>Chief,</em>" who worked as Puente's personal handyman, was performing unusual tasks that included digging in the basement and carting away soil. Soon afterward, "Chief" disappeared.

Shockingly, once her crimes had come to light and investigators had discovered the mass grave in her home, the crafty Puente gave detectives the slip one final time. Investigators allowed her to leave the property to buy a cup of coffee. She apparently bought the coffee, but then escaped to Los Angeles, where she befriended an elderly retiree she met in a bar. Unfortunately for her her new friend recognized her from police reports on television and called police.

Puente's trial began in 1992, and she was charged with a total of nine murders, convicted of three, and sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole. On March 27, 2011, Puente died in prison at the age of 82 from natural causes.

Until her own death Puente had always maintained that her tennants had died of "natural causes."

John Cabrera, one of the original detectives in the Puente case, recently returned to the F Street "house of horrors" in order to lead law enforcement professionals through an advanced homicide class. “She had the perfect crime going on here in this house, and nobody knew about it,” Cabrera told CBS 13. “It was right under the nose of everybody.”

To learn more about Dorothea Puente, watch the "House of Horrors" episode of Investigation Discovery's A Stranger In My Home on ID GO now!

Read more: CBS13, CrimeMuseum.org, History.com