Latest / True Crime California / TCC #10 Dorothea Puente Part 1

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TCC #10 Dorothea Puente Part 1 · True Crime California

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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to True Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy,
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and I'm glad you're here. Hey everybody, welcome back to
2:06
yet another episode of True Crime California. This week, I've
2:10
decided to take on another whopper of a case. Next week,
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I think I'm gonna do something a little more chill.
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I keep saying that maybe I'm just a big, fat liar.
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I don't know, but this week I decided to do
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another classic case, another really big case. I'm hoping I
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can talk quickly enough to do this in one episode,
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but if not, I have a place where I'm gonna
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break it. Up, So we're just gonna kind of go
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and see what happens, and we'll decide when when they
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get there. So again, if you like two episodes you're
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like having to wait a week to finish a story,
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you're gonna love this. Maybe if you like it all
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at once, you're gonna love this. Maybe we'll find out together.
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The case that I'm doing this week is that of
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Dora thea Plente, And this case is really special to
2:57
me in a really twisted way because when I was
3:00
a little girl, I lived in Davis. I grew up
3:03
in Davis, California, And I mentioned that when I did
3:05
the Sweetheart murders, Well, Davis is right next to Sacramento,
3:09
and all of this happened while I was alive, and
3:12
while I was living in Davis. So shortly, like very
3:17
shortly after Dorothea was arrested, my dad took me to
3:23
the home where most of this story takes place. He
3:26
drove by, he explained to me, you know, in terms
3:30
that like a six or seven year old could understand
3:33
what was going on. So in all honesty like this,
3:37
this was my first sort of foray into true crime.
3:40
Now I don't remember it as well as I remember
3:43
like the oj Simpson trial, which really felt like my
3:45
first kind of dip into true crime. But I remember
3:48
it enough to as an adult now that I kind
3:51
of understand what that means, to really kind of appreciate
3:54
that that happened, and that my dad was just inappropriate
3:57
enough to take me to the house of a serial
3:59
kill and explain to me what had happened very shortly
4:03
after it happened. So if that gives you any idea
4:06
as to when it happened, this is like the late
4:08
eighties that we're mostly going to be talking about, although
4:11
we're going to go way back and talk about Dorothea's
4:13
life because she is a wild one and honestly, if
4:19
I mean, if she wasn't a murderer, we wouldn't be
4:21
talking about her. And she's a horrible person and you know,
4:24
doesn't deserve any praise, but her life is wild, and
4:28
I feel like if there were like a PG version
4:31
of it, it would be a really interesting story and
4:34
something that I think people would really enjoy hearing about. Again, unfortunately,
4:39
she's like a super horrible murderer, but regardless, I think
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the story leading up to everything is very interesting, and
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so I really want to kind of talk about it,
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so I think we just get into it. I didn't
4:53
know a lot about her until I read about her.
4:55
And again, it's so wild. So we'll see if we
4:58
split this into two. But let's jump in. Dorothea Plante
5:03
was born Dorothea Gray in Redlands, California, on January ninth,
5:08
nineteen twenty nine. Her parents, Trudy and Jesse James Gray,
5:14
were violent alcoholics who did not want children, but for
5:17
some reason went on to have seven of them. Dorotheo
5:21
was the second youngest, and by the time she was
5:23
three years old, she was already having to do manual
5:26
labor like picking vegetables in fields to help the family
5:29
make ends meet. She was also mostly raised by her
5:33
older siblings, as her parents were always drunk, sick, or
5:36
in jail. Her father had fought in World War One
5:40
and had been severely injured by mustard gas, and as
5:43
a result, after the war he developed tuberculosis. He was
5:48
in and out of the hospital and unable to work
5:50
even when he wasn't acutely sick, which led to the
5:53
child labor situation. Also, while Jesse James was in the hospital,
5:59
her mother would turn to sex work to make ends meet,
6:03
and she would often have biker gangs over to her house.
6:06
She would also leave with them for weekends and you know,
6:09
a couple of days at a time, and because Dorothea
6:11
was so young, she would lock her and a younger
6:14
sibling in a closet for days on end. When she
6:18
would come home, she would make messes. She would be wasted,
6:21
she'd vomit everywhere, and the kids were expected to clean
6:25
up after her. So pretty terrible beginnings. In nineteen thirty five,
6:30
the family moved to Los Angeles so dorothy was about
6:33
six at this time, to be closer to the Veterans
6:35
Hospital as her father's health was rapidly declining. In nineteen
6:40
thirty seven, when Dorothea was only eight years old, he died.
6:44
This left her mother, Trudy, alone and in charge of
6:47
many children, and she did try for a short time
6:49
to make it work before eventually losing custody of all
6:52
of her remaining kids due to severe neglect. Dorothea's teachers
6:58
had finally reported the abuse to the authorities after it
7:01
was clear that Dorothea and her siblings were not being washed, fed,
7:05
or cared for in any way. At age nine, Dorothea
7:09
ended up in Ontario, California, in an orphanage. Now this
7:12
is not far from where she lived, and it's kind
7:14
of in the Greater Los Angeles area. There's like an
7:18
airport there. Dorothea was very smart, and her caretakers noticed
7:24
that she had a penchant for telling tall tales about
7:27
her life, like she would lie about things to make
7:30
her life seem better than it was because she was smart,
7:34
and as I noted with Larry Bittaker, she was able
7:37
to figure out what was going on around her very easily.
7:41
But also, like Larry and like many intelligent little kids,
7:44
when you're living in a horrible you know your young
7:47
life is terrible and you're smart enough to understand it,
7:51
it can really mess you up because you don't have
7:53
the mental or emotional capacity to know how to cope
7:56
with these things that you see going on around you.
8:00
Many children like Dorothea turned a problematic behavior, including lying,
8:04
in order to shield themselves from the horrible reality of
8:08
their lives. And with Dorothea, it's interesting because it's like,
8:11
you know, she's telling all these tales, but if any
8:14
of them were true, she would not be in the orphanage.
8:17
So she's young enough to think that she's like pulling
8:19
the wool over people's eyes, but in reality, it's just
8:23
a very sad thing that her caretakers took note of
8:27
to add more trauma to young Dorothy's life. About a
8:30
year after she was given up to the orphanage, her mother, Trudy,
8:34
was killed in any motorcycle accident, which basically meant that
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Dorothea was now truly alone. Both of her parents were dead,
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She's barely ten years old. From here, she was passed
8:45
around by relatives and siblings, so never had anything of
8:48
a stable life. The only stability she actually ever found
8:52
was in the brief time that she lived with both
8:54
of her parents in Los Angeles. Now, it was definitely
8:57
not because of her parents, who were alcoholics and would
9:00
scream and fight with each other every single night. It
9:03
was actually with the neighborhood and the community around her.
9:07
These almost exclusively Latino families had taken Dorothea in, fed her,
9:12
taught her Spanish, and cared for her in ways that
9:15
nobody ever had or ever would again, and this stuck
9:19
with her. She felt a kinship to the Latino communities
9:22
where she lived and to people in Mexico, and it
9:25
also led to her later lying about her family because
9:28
she is Dorothea Puente, saying that she had family in Mexico,
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alluding to actually being Mexican. None of this is true,
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and it's just really interesting when somebody is this messed
9:40
up that they're going to take something like one of
9:42
the only good things in their lives and they just
9:44
turn it into this. So anyway, to be clear, she
9:48
didn't know a single person in Mexico. So as I
9:50
bring this up throughout the story, just bear in mind
9:53
that that is just a lie. Now, by nineteen forty five,
9:57
Dorothea had run away to Washington, and it only age sixteen,
10:01
started working both as a waitress and also in sex work.
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She was very beautiful, obviously very young, and a great liar,
10:09
so she did really well for herself during this time.
10:13
And also during this time she started using fake names
10:17
aliases and at this point she was going under the
10:19
name Sherry. Now. Also around this time, when she's sixteen,
10:24
she met twenty two year old soldier Fred McFall, who
10:28
fell in love with her at first sight. McFall mcfell, sorry,
10:32
I had to. He did not care what she did
10:35
for work and In fact, he respected her for being
10:38
scrappy and doing whatever it took to survive. So when
10:42
they married, she put on the marriage certificate that she
10:45
was thirty, which Fred knew was a lie, but at
10:49
this point he enjoyed her little lies in her trickery,
10:52
saying that he liked that she could fool anyone at
10:55
any time, and that if she needed to make a
10:57
buck she knew. How despite his love and respect for her,
11:01
things did not go well during the marriage. The couple
11:04
fought constantly, and Dorothea started drinking, following very closely in
11:09
her mother's footsteps. So she gets married young, she starts drinking,
11:13
and then the couple have two children. Much like her mother,
11:19
Dorothea was not maternal in the slightest and after a
11:23
short time, she gave away their first baby to some
11:26
of her family in Sacramento. Now this was without Fred's
11:29
knowledge or approval, but he went along with it after
11:32
the fact. I think she just was like, I can't
11:34
do this. However, Dorothea then put their second baby up
11:39
for adoption, also without Fred's approval, and this time he
11:43
tried to get the little girl back, only to find
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that Dorothea had signed their rights away, so he could
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not even talk to his own daughter or ever see
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I mean, at that point you wouldn't be talking to her,
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but he had no rights to ever have her back. This,
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as you can imagine, led to more fighting, and eventually
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Dorothea left their Nevada home to go to Los Angeles
12:03
for a little while just to get away. She worked
12:07
as a sex worker while there and became pregnant. When
12:11
she realized she was pregnant, she quickly came home to Fred,
12:14
I think, trying to pass it off as his and
12:17
very sadly miscarried Fred. No fool knew exactly what had happened,
12:22
and in nineteen forty eight he left Dorothea. They later divorced.
12:27
She would later lie about Fred, saying her first husband
12:30
had died very shortly after they were married. Sometimes she'd
12:34
say as soon as like two days after, because her
12:37
pride couldn't handle the truth. So we're going back to
12:39
her needing to lie about her life to make it
12:42
more grand than it was, because she couldn't deal with
12:46
the truth of how shitty it was. Nineteen forty eight
12:52
was also the first time Dorothea was arrested. She had
12:55
befriended a woman only to steal her checkbook and try
12:58
to buy items with it. They're nervous while doing this
13:01
in the store, and a store manager caught on, refusing
13:04
the check and calling the police. Now, Dorothea fled, but
13:08
somehow was quickly picked up again in Ontario, California. At
13:12
this point, she was using her married alias of sherry'all receial.
13:17
That was her name, Sherry all Receal, but her true
13:20
identity was pretty quickly discovered and she was given a
13:24
year in prison for forgery and using stolen checks. However,
13:28
because she's so charming, she was out in only four
13:32
months for good behavior. Now, during her time in jail,
13:36
Dorothea learned a lot about the system and how to
13:41
work it. She was also seen by a doctor who
13:44
called her a situational offender, meaning she only broke the
13:47
law if the opportunity presented itself, which isn't really any
13:51
better than any other kind offender when you really think
13:53
about it. But I think the point he was trying
13:56
to make was that she didn't break the law for
13:58
some sort of compulsive enjoyment. In breaking the law itself,
14:02
she was doing it as a means to an end.
14:05
So basically, if she needed something, she didn't mind breaking
14:08
the law to get it. But she wasn't going around
14:10
breaking the law like just for funzies. So anyway, beyond
14:14
being seen by this doctor, what she learned in jail
14:16
was that she could likely disappear and break her probation
14:19
and not be punished because this was like a nonviolent crime.
14:22
It was her first time. So after she got out,
14:25
that's exactly what she did. She fled to northern California again,
14:28
essentially disappearing from Ontario forever, at least legally speaking. Now
14:33
it's unclear what she did between nineteen fifty and nineteen
14:36
fifty two, but pretty much considered that, you know, she
14:39
just did sex work and laid low in the Sacramento area.
14:43
In nineteen fifty two, probably through her sex work, she
14:47
met and married a man named Axel Johansson. Now he
14:51
I think was like ten years older than her, something
14:55
like that, and just like Fred, he loved her little
14:58
lies and then came to hate them, just as Fred had.
15:03
He also at first loved how elegant she always looked,
15:05
but came to resent her spending on lavish clothing and
15:08
makeup when they didn't really have the money for it.
15:11
The two stayed together in Sacramento, but Dorothea would run away,
15:15
often going back to La to do her thing. Fred
15:18
was also or not Fred I'm sorry, Axel. I think
15:21
was like away at sea a lot. He was like
15:23
a longshoreman. I don't really know exactly what he did,
15:25
but he was gone a lot. So Dorothea was sort
15:28
of left to her own devices, but still they thought
15:31
she still drank. Things were not ideal. Around nineteen sixty,
15:36
maybe a bit before, Dorothea opened a store front a
15:40
bookkeeping service. But when I say storefront, I mean heavy
15:44
on the front. In reality, it was a brothel and
15:48
she had a group of women and girls working for
15:51
her here. Now, apparently at this time Dorothea herself had
15:54
put on a little bit of weight and so was
15:57
having trouble finding sex work. So instead she took what
16:00
money she had, probably likely stole it from Axel, and
16:04
opened shop. After a while, the landlord figured out what
16:08
was happening and called the cops. They set up a
16:11
sting to bust Dorothea, and the way they did it
16:13
was absolutely fucking hilarious. Now Dorothia had a bookkeeping service
16:18
with a main phone number, but then she also had
16:20
a secret number where you could call to ask for services,
16:24
like you basically call and book an appointment. So the
16:27
police called this second phone number and asked for the special,
16:31
which was a seven dollars and fifty cent blow job,
16:35
which back in those days feels like a lot of money,
16:38
but that was like their running special, So the cops
16:41
set this up. They then go to the brothel, and
16:44
before they went in this is like something out of
16:46
like a like a comic book, they put fluorescent powder
16:51
on their hands and on the money that they were
16:54
paying with, so when it was put under a black light,
16:57
or anybody they touched was put under a black light,
17:00
they'd be able to prove that they touched them and
17:02
where they touched them. They then came in for the
17:04
promised blowjobs, and after feeling Dorothea up for free, because
17:09
of course they had to keep with the story, so
17:10
they had to feel her up when she offered, they
17:12
arrested her and another woman for prostitution. The way that
17:17
they proved it was they shined this black light on
17:20
Dorothea's boobs and on her butt and on this other
17:22
woman's body. Lo and behold, they're their handprints. So there
17:28
it was, that's their proof. During her arrest and trial,
17:32
it was found that she had been using several fake
17:34
names to open the business, like she used so she
17:40
used names to open it, she used names to run it.
17:42
She used names like as a sex worker, so she
17:45
was constantly like changing her identity, and this all kind
17:48
of came out at her trial. However, despite all of this,
17:51
despite being a madam and having all these fake aliases
17:54
and probably fake ideas, she was given only ninety days
17:59
upon her Of course, she goes right back to Axel,
18:02
right back to fighting. But she did get real jobs
18:05
for a while, including as a cook. Apparently she was
18:08
like an amazing cook, so that was something she could
18:11
do and she went legit for a minute. She also
18:14
did continue to overspend their money on clothing and makeup,
18:17
and eventually, in nineteen sixty six, Axel got sick of
18:20
her and he left Dorothea just like Fred had. Alone again,
18:27
out of money and not wanting to go back to prison,
18:31
Dorothea decided it was time to take her scheming up
18:34
a notch. She wanted to do something that was not
18:37
an honest day's work. This woman was not gonna go
18:40
legit forever. I think she thought it was for suckers.
18:43
But she didn't want to go back to jail either,
18:45
so she decided to find a way to sort of
18:49
toe the line. Not toe the line, bridge the gap,
18:51
that's what we'll say. She's bridging the gap between legitimate
18:54
and illegitimate work and running a boarding house for alcoholics. Now,
18:59
she started this in nineteen sixty eight, and the house
19:03
was on F Street in Sacramento. Now this is not
19:06
the infamous F Street. If anybody knows this story, they
19:09
know that most of it takes place at a house
19:11
on F Street. This is not that house. This was
19:15
twenty first in f and was a two story house
19:17
with a basement. Dorothya rented this house and filled it
19:21
with borders, all of whom had government checks of one
19:24
kind or another, disability, social security, whatever it was. Dorothea
19:29
took these checks, forded the signatures on them, and kept
19:32
the money. The borders received only room and board and
19:36
nothing more. They lived in relative squalor while Dorothea bought
19:40
herself more lavish items like designer clothing, perfume, all the
19:45
things she wanted. Later, she also started getting plastic surgery
19:48
like facelifts, so she was really stacking up other people's
19:52
chips and spending them however she wanted. And to be sure,
19:58
this was a running theme throughout doors Thea's life. She
20:01
always needed more clothing, more makeup. She needed to be
20:05
the prettiest and the most fashionable and to present herself
20:08
as this well bred, high class woman. And the need
20:14
for this is a really self loathing thing, obviously, you know,
20:17
and stems from her childhood. So I want to call
20:20
out that is very interesting but also really sad that
20:23
her main motivation is just her optics, like how people
20:26
view her. So anyway, to be clear, the boarding house
20:31
always looked neat and tidy, and when social workers would
20:34
come to check in, they were always impressed with how
20:36
things were being run. They were also really grateful to
20:40
Dorothea for being willing to take in these troubled borders,
20:43
as apparently it was very difficult to find housing for alcoholics.
20:48
Dorothea on the outside, took good care of these people,
20:52
like she was really good at making it seem like
20:54
she was doing good and she would even have a
20:57
doctor come over every single week to check on the
21:01
tenants to make sure they were healthy, that they were
21:03
coming along in their sobriety, or even if they weren't,
21:06
that they were like doing okay. And this is the
21:10
point at which Dorothea decided to start calling herself a
21:14
doctor as well. She actually thought she was convincing people
21:20
that she was a medical doctor. She would tell people like, oh, yeah,
21:24
I went to medical school, I was a nurse, then
21:27
I was a doctor, which also like, that's not really
21:29
how that works. And while workers knew that this was
21:32
all a fabrication, like social workers the doctors, they kind
21:35
of allowed her to spin her tall tales because she
21:37
was otherwise seemingly so loving and great with all of
21:41
the people in her home that they just kind of
21:45
let it go. Now. Unfortunately, in reality, behind closed doors,
21:51
Dorothea would drink heavily at night and get into fights,
21:54
often physical fights, with many of the borders. She was
21:59
am in other ways as well, including putting the borders
22:02
with less money into the basement and partitioning sleeping quarters
22:07
for them using only like sheets, so they didn't even
22:10
have rooms. They were all just like shoved in the
22:13
basement and kind of like on top of each other
22:16
with no privacy and no facilities. It was just like
22:20
really really gross. Anyway, the workers clearly just wanted to
22:25
place these people, so they turned a blind eye to
22:28
Dorothea's wild tales and apparently a lot of other concerning things.
22:32
And Dorothea when as far as putting fake medical degrees
22:35
on the wall and calling herself La Doctra and treating
22:39
people with vitamin shots from her home so people would
22:42
come over and she would inject them with things as
22:44
a doctor. And she did this with the Latin community
22:47
mostly like La Doctra is like a female doctor. So
22:50
she's fucking fooling these people and injecting them with god
22:54
knows what. And I did want to call out that.
22:56
On top of like taking her tenants checks and sting
23:00
their money, she also stole their medication. She was taking
23:04
a lot of these people had like antipsychotics, they had
23:06
like anti anxiety medications, and back then they were way
23:10
more hardcore, like they've outlawed or made it very difficult
23:12
to obtain a lot of the medications that were available
23:15
back then. She was just like stockpiling this shit, like
23:18
she was taking it and then using it for whatever
23:21
she wanted, which which we'll get to now. It gets
23:24
even crazier from here because Dorothea used the stolen money
23:29
from her tenants to start giving to charities for migrant
23:32
workers and other Latino organizations in the area. She had
23:37
grown up with migrant workers, like I said, in Mexican families,
23:40
so she felt a connection to them and decided she
23:42
wanted to give back to the community in Sacramento via
23:45
money and volunteer work. This was all self serving, of course,
23:49
as Dorothea really loved the attention. I mean, she'd been
23:52
lying her whole life about being this person, and now
23:55
she'd found a dishonest way to make it happen. She
23:58
held gala's for organizations, She gave money to various political parties,
24:03
getting herself invited to parties and events with like the
24:06
California elite. At one of them, she even danced with
24:10
former California Governor Jerry Brown. And this is like before
24:13
he was governor or. While he was governor, it was
24:15
like in his heyday, He's ballroom dancing with Dorothea Puente,
24:21
which is absolutely insane. So you know, she's very well known,
24:25
very well connected, but obviously it's all a lie, and
24:29
she does get caught in this lie, but not yet.
24:32
First she wilds out even more. She had to go
24:36
in for a surgery, like for her thyroid, I believe,
24:40
because she was gaining a lot of weight and she
24:43
couldn't keep it under control. So in nineteen seventy seven,
24:46
she went in for this surgery. Now, being Dorothea, she
24:51
couldn't leave well enough alone. She had to turn it
24:53
into a bigger thing. She had to turn it into
24:55
a lie. She was a pathological liar. She could not
24:58
help herself. So instead of being like, yeah, I'm getting
25:01
too much weight, there's something wrong with my thyroid, She's like, hey, listen, everybody,
25:04
I'm dying of cancer. I'm having a major surgery. You'll
25:07
probably never see me again, which like what, like why
25:11
would you do that? That's so insane, Like everything is
25:14
an exaggeration or a lie, even when it really really
25:16
doesn't need to be. Like that was enough. So for
25:19
the past few years, up to nineteen seventy seven, on
25:22
top of everything else, Dorothy had started Dorothy Dorothea had
25:25
started taking in a number of young wayward girls, calling
25:29
them her stepdaughters, her adopted daughters, basically claiming them as
25:34
her own, even though again like they weren't. Now for
25:38
whatever reason, Dorothea really loved these girls. It really seemed
25:43
like a lot of this was just out of the
25:45
goodness of her heart. She took them in, she let
25:48
them live with her, And I think that it is
25:51
a lot of it's because of the way she grew up.
25:53
She saw her younger self and these girls, and you know,
25:56
she wanted to give them the chances she never had.
26:00
And I think it may have also been a way
26:01
of making up for giving up her own daughters years earlier.
26:05
So it was a lot of guilt, and it was
26:06
also very much like I could give them the chance
26:11
that I never had. So she taught these girls to
26:13
be ladylike. She fed and clothed them, She was basically
26:17
their mother. Now later on, like much later on, like
26:20
when we get to the end here, I won't bring
26:22
this up again, but I'll just say that many of
26:24
them came forward and said that she saved them from
26:26
a life of crime, from ending up in the streets,
26:29
from ending up in prison. So it's a really weird
26:32
and contradictory kind of part of her. It's very different
26:35
from everything else she did in her life. But the
26:38
thing that makes it similar is that ultimately it was
26:41
self serving, especially if it was guilt from abandoning her
26:45
own daughters. Anyway, she's telling everybody she's dying, and she
26:49
wrote up this will and left everything to these girls.
26:52
But even this was a lie. She didn't have the
26:56
things that she left to them, so it's just more fantasy,
27:00
like to make herself look good or to make the
27:01
girls think she really loved them, like she knew she
27:03
wasn't gonna die. I mean, I guess she could have
27:05
on the table, but she wasn't expecting to die, and
27:08
she didn't have the stuff to leave the girls, so
27:10
it was more just to get like praise. I guess,
27:13
I don't know. Anyway, she returns, Sorry, I hit my mic.
27:17
She returns to the house on f Street, and pretty
27:19
soon since she's you know, living on a house of cards,
27:24
you know, it's all lies, everything falls apart. Now before
27:28
we get to that, though, I wanted to mention that
27:30
during this time of milk and honey in Dorothea's life,
27:34
she married twice, once to a twenty one year old
27:37
man with the last name Plente, hence her name she's
27:40
best known for, and again to a man about ten
27:43
years her junior named Montalvo. Now, both of these men
27:47
were much younger than she was when she married the
27:49
twenty one year old, and I think she was thirty nine.
27:51
And then just a few years later, in her like
27:54
early forties, she married Montalvo, who was like in his
27:57
early thirties. Now, both of these men married her for
28:00
her perceived money, and both marriages lasted less than a year.
28:05
And in both marriages, Dorothea made up tall tales about
28:09
how long they were married, why it didn't work out,
28:11
even going as far as to claim one of them
28:13
was gay, just basically like doing her normal thing to
28:17
sort of deflect the shame of having more failed marriages,
28:21
admitting she had been used, admitting you know, she had
28:24
made bad decisions. But all of this is to say
28:27
that she pulled the wool over everyone's eyes well enough
28:29
that young men were trying to take advantage of her,
28:32
thinking that she was like some rich heiress or you know, socialite,
28:37
and then once they saw behind the facade, they left
28:40
her because they're like, oh, you're a poor, sad, heavily
28:43
drinking thief of a woman. Now, of course, when you
28:47
build your life on a web of lies, like I said,
28:49
Eventually everything unravels. In nineteen seventy eight, this happened to
28:54
Dorothea when a former border of hers landed himself in prison.
29:00
While he was there, he noticed he wasn't getting his
29:02
Social Security checks, so he called the administration and found
29:05
that his checks were in fact being cashed by none
29:08
other than Dorothy Aplente. When confronted with this information, Dorothea said, oh,
29:14
I'd taken the checks to him. He signed them for cash,
29:17
like he was giving them to me. She said that
29:20
the guards at the jail watched her do this. This
29:24
is such a crazy lie because it's super easy to disprove.
29:27
She's like, yeah, the guards will lie for me. It's
29:29
like you're just throwing a hail Mary, thinking like the
29:32
guards are gonna be like, oh, yeah, that did happen,
29:34
Like they're gonna misremember because she said so. It's a
29:37
very Dorothea thing to do to just like I'm just
29:40
gonna tell this crazy lie and they're gonna believe me
29:43
and everything's gonna be cool. So this didn't work obviously,
29:47
they quickly disprove it, and then the Treasury Department gets
29:50
involved because the government does not like when people steal
29:54
their money. She was arrested after they did a brief
29:58
investigation where they found more than four thousand dollars in
30:02
forged checks from many of her tenants. Now, the four
30:06
thousand dollar mark was where they needed to get to
30:08
charge her with a felony, which they did. However, because
30:12
of her age and her demeanor, she was not sent
30:15
to prison and instead was given parole, but she was
30:18
also forced to see a psychiatrist. She moved out of
30:23
Sacramento to nearby Stockton to avoid the shame of her
30:26
social decline and did menial jobs to stay afloat, again
30:30
being like a cook. She was diagnosed by her psychiatrist
30:34
as having schizophrenia, which at the time I think he
30:37
was kind of using as a blanket term just to
30:39
mean that she was super fucked up. Now, this guy
30:42
continued to be a psychiatrist for many years, and at
30:45
one point later on during her trial, he was accused
30:48
of providing her with whatever drugs she wanted, which she
30:53
potentially used against her victims. But in the end it
30:57
kind of came out that that wasn't actually the case
31:00
and he was falsely accused. So I didn't want to
31:02
sort of just talk about that, but this is like
31:04
kind of the guy that she's with until she, you know,
31:08
goes to prison, which she does spoiler alert. One thing
31:13
about Dorothea is she was never one to stay down.
31:16
So even though all of this went down in nineteen
31:18
seventy eight and she moved to Stockton, by nineteen seventy
31:22
nine she was back in Sacramento trying her luck at
31:24
being a nurse for the sick and elderly in their homes,
31:28
which is crazy because she had no medical training. She
31:31
just lied and said she did, and everybody believed her,
31:34
which I mean, to be fair, some of her lies
31:37
seemed so outrageous and so ridiculous, but people keep believing
31:41
her or at least giving her a pass, so like,
31:44
of course she's going to keep at it right anyway.
31:47
So she'd actually done a little bit of this elderly
31:50
care while she was running the boarding house, but mostly
31:53
stole from those clients and didn't really offer much in
31:55
the way of care. But I think this is where
31:57
she got the idea and decided to try her again
32:00
at being illegitimately legitimate in her job. So now we're
32:05
going to talk about Ricardo ud Rica. Somebody who would
32:09
play a major role in the bulk of the murderous
32:11
part of this story, which we're not quite there, but
32:13
we're getting there. He and his wife came to Sacramento
32:16
from Mexico, I think in the eighties, and worked their
32:19
butts off at a local hotel, the Clarion, to save
32:23
enough money to buy a rundown two story house at
32:26
fourteen twenty six F Street in downtown Sacramento, and that
32:30
is the f Street house that we all know and
32:33
love if we know this story. He never took vacations.
32:36
Ricardo never spent money, only saved to buy and then
32:40
rehab this home. The one thing that he would do
32:43
is occasionally visit a nearby bar called Joe's Corner to
32:47
grab a drink. And this was like two doors down
32:50
from his house. This is where he met Dorothea Montalvo
32:55
as she was going by at that point out trolling
32:58
for her next roube. She told him, I heard your
33:02
second floor is for rent. He told her, well, you know,
33:05
it hasn't really been updated. It's a mess, and Dorothea
33:08
was like, that's perfect. I want to live there. I
33:11
will help clean it up. I'm just like ready to go.
33:15
So Ricardo takes her home to his family. He's enamored
33:18
by her grace and her high class upbringing. Once again,
33:22
she's you know, pulling it off. She met his family
33:25
and charmed his wife and two young daughters, telling them
33:28
that she had family in Mexico, which again something she
33:31
told a lot of people that's a total lie, and
33:33
that she had been very rich, but her ex husband
33:36
Montalvo had stolen all of her money. She had the
33:40
money for the rent. Of course, she got this from
33:42
her nursing clients because she was stealing from them, but
33:46
that's what she used. And the family was like, great,
33:48
she has the money, she's elegantly dressed, she's very charming.
33:53
Let's let her stay with us. And she did, and
33:56
she ended up staying here for a very long time.
33:58
But this first stint for about two to three years,
34:01
and during this time, she babysat the girls, fixed up
34:05
the upstairs, she paid rent on time every month. The
34:08
family loved her and it's terrifying to think that she
34:11
was taking care of these two young little girls. Knowing
34:14
what we know. She was also still working as an
34:17
elderly care nurse for a bonded company, meaning they straight
34:21
up vouched for her without doing any sort of background
34:23
check on her, which is wild, but I think was
34:26
much more common back then than it is now, thank
34:29
goodness now. During this time, she took care of a
34:32
woman named Esther Busby. Esther was elderly but in generally
34:37
good health when Dorothea Montalvo started caring for her. Oddly though,
34:42
she would have these fits of illness that bordered on death,
34:46
and when these would happen, she would have to be
34:49
rushed to the hospital time and time again. Each time
34:53
Dorothea would go with her, worried that she might not recover.
34:58
I think we all know that she was worried she
35:00
would recover, but that's what she said. She was so
35:02
worried about her. She didn't know what was going on.
35:04
She just wanted to make sure she was okay. Finally, finally,
35:08
after some months, social workers involved in the case realized
35:12
what was going on, as did the hospital. They noticed
35:16
that whenever Esther would come in have her life saved
35:19
and recover, she would then go home to be cared
35:21
for by Dorothea, only to return shortly thereafter. She would
35:26
also suffer bouts of this like life threatening illness while
35:30
in the hospital, but only directly after being visited by
35:35
and fed by Dorothea. When Dorothea caught wind of their suspicions,
35:42
she did not stop poisoning Esther. Rather, she had her
35:47
taken to a different hospital, the UC Davis Hospital, as
35:51
they had no record and therefore no suspicions about what
35:54
was going on. The people who originally suspected Dorothea found
35:59
this out and finally got in touch with Esther's family
36:02
to let them know what was going on. And what
36:05
Esther's family told them was that Dorothea had been calling
36:08
them saying that Esther was dying of cancer and needed
36:12
more and more money for her care. So she was
36:14
fleecing these people for money while poisoning their family member.
36:19
So these you know. When the social workers and doctor
36:23
that were involved in this found out, they went straight
36:25
to Esther and just flat out told her what was
36:28
going on. Esther believed them, and she fired Dorothea. But
36:33
for some reason, none of these people bothered to report
36:36
this to her place of work or the police, that
36:39
is until she did it again with another patient. But
36:43
at this point, even after she did it to another patient,
36:46
they went and told her job and the police and
36:50
neither did a thing about it because there wasn't enough
36:54
evidence according to them. However, I will tell you that
36:58
these social workers and this doctor did keep digging and
37:01
waiting to catch Dorothea in the act, and finally, in
37:05
nineteen eighty two they did. Also, I wanted to correct myself.
37:08
I believe that Ricardo came in the seventies, not the eighties,
37:11
so he bought the house on f Street sometime in
37:14
the mid to late seventies. Dorothea moved in I believe
37:18
in nineteen eighty. Anyway, we're in nineteen eighty two and
37:21
at Dorothea's about to get caught for some shit. First,
37:24
Dorothea met a man named Malcolm McKenzie at a local
37:27
bar in Sacramento. Shocking right. She bought him a drink
37:31
and showered him with compliments, then suggesting they go back
37:34
to his apartment. Upon his arrival, he began to feel faint,
37:39
and by the time they were inside, he was entirely paralyzed,
37:43
though completely conscious. He was laid out on the couch
37:47
as he watched Dorothea toss his apartment for anything of value.
37:55
After stealing money from around the house, as well as
37:58
a rare penny collection. This monster Dorothea walked up to
38:05
this man while he's laying there completely paralyzed, and steals
38:11
a pinky ring right off of his finger. This woman
38:15
is bold, if nothing else, she's also very, very stupid.
38:19
As with this man, she used her real first name, Dorothea,
38:24
and as soon as he was able to move again,
38:25
which I'm sure was a terrifyingly long wait for him,
38:28
he called the police. They found her really quickly, trying
38:33
to cash two checks from his checkbook. She said, oh no,
38:38
he gave these to me. I didn't steal them. She
38:40
also claimed she was seventy two, I think, to get pity,
38:43
and that she didn't want to go steady with him,
38:45
which is why he was angry and called the police
38:48
on her. So she plays this innocent old granny. He
38:52
gave me this money, and then he got mad when
38:54
I wouldn't sleep with him, And that worked at least
38:57
in the moment, because they let her go. Immediately thereafter,
39:02
she drugged and robbed an eighty two year old woman
39:05
she was supposed to be caring for as a nurse.
39:08
The two had met at their hairdresser and Dorothea introduced
39:12
herself as Betty Peterson. She drugged this woman and stole
39:16
a diamond ring and about two hundred dowmain, which is
39:19
a I think it's a heavy sedative. I've read that
39:22
it's not, but like it knocks me out. I've used
39:25
it to fly and it's great. But they say it's
39:28
just like a sleeping pill. But anyway, it puts you
39:31
to sleep, so we can kind of understand why she
39:34
wants this right. The woman called police but had no
39:37
real information on her. Luckily, again, Dorothea is an idiot
39:43
or just too fucking bold, and went back to that
39:45
same beauty parlor where this woman saw her and told
39:50
them to call the police. She tells the place, call
39:52
the cops. There's the woman that drugged me and robbed me.
39:55
Dorothea ran away, but the hairdressers knew her real name
39:59
and she was finally a tested for these crimes. Now,
40:02
as the trial went on, McKenzie Malcolm mackenzie testified against
40:06
her the man, and she was given felony charges and
40:09
sent to jail to a wait trial. Sadly, her lawyer
40:13
was able to get her out on her own recognizance
40:15
because she couldn't afford bail, but he appealed to a
40:19
judge like, oh, she's just a little old lady, and
40:21
unfortunately this worked. She was out and back at fourteen
40:25
twenty six f Street, where she planned and carried out
40:27
her first murder for profit, which she would not have
40:31
been able to do if they had left her in jail.
40:34
And I think this is where I'm going to leave
40:36
it for part one. It's a bit longer than I anticipated.
40:40
I actually recorded beyond this and I realized that it's
40:44
going to go like an hour and a half or more.
40:47
I realized this first half is mostly set up and
40:50
I have everything already done, so I'm just going to
40:52
post these in the same week. So I'm going to
40:54
post this on a regular day and I'll post part
40:56
two the following day. I personally hate waiting a week
40:59
for the second half, so I'm not gonna do that
41:01
to you guys, especially since it's ready to go. But
41:06
we're gonna get into the bulk of the actual murders
41:09
starting with part two. This is all just sort of
41:11
set up so we know what a wild and crazy
41:14
gal Dorothea is, and we're starting to see her ramp
41:19
up and really just be willing to do whatever it
41:22
takes to sort of keep her lifestyle going. I'm sure
41:25
you just heard my dog growling at my other dog
41:27
over a toy. In any case, so this is really
41:30
the lead up to the craziness. The craziness will be
41:33
coming out in part two, and I will get that
41:36
out tomorrow, so there's not a lot of wit time.
41:39
Thanks everybody for listening. I hope this first half was captivating.
41:43
I definitely found it very interesting. Dorothea is a wild,
41:46
wild lady. But Part two is gonna be a lot
41:50
more hardcore, a lot of sad, a lot of bummer.
41:53
There's a lot of people she takes advantage of, so yeah,
41:57
we'll get into that, but until then, thanks for listening.
41:59
Please like, rate, review, send me an email with case suggestions,
42:03
True crime californiapod at gmail dot com, follow me on Instagram,
42:08
Like and rate on all of your favorite listening places.
42:11
I don't know what are they called, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
42:15
Wherever you listen, give us a rating, us being me
42:17
the Royal Wey and thanks again, and until I guess tomorrow,
42:22
stay safe,