Inheritance Through Poison and Patience

Echoes in the Dark Investigating Unseen Crime · Nov 4, 2025 · 9m

The case of Dorothea Puente, who operated a boarding house in Sacramento while systematically poisoning elderly and disabled residents for their social security checks, remained undetected for years despite multiple disappearances. Her victims were society's most vulnerable—individuals with cognitive impairments, addiction issues, and minimal social connections—making their deaths easy to overlook or attribute to natural causes. This episode examines how targeting the socially invisible enables serial crimes to persist, the role of institutional neglect in enabling predators, and how forensic…