Latest / True Crime California / TCC #10 Dorothea Puente Part 2

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TCC #10 Dorothea Puente Part 2 · True Crime California

0:04
Speaker 1: Dark Cast Network. Out of the shadows come the best
0:07
indie podcasts. Hey everyone, welcome to True Crime California. I'm
0:17
your host, Cindy, and I'm glad you're here. Hey guys,
0:32
we're back with part two of the Tale of Dorothea Plente.
0:38
I have a little vocal fry and I'm really, like,
0:43
I don't know, paranoid about it because I hear all
0:46
of these reviews of podcasts or people talking about them
0:49
like I can't stand their vocal fry, and I'm like,
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I don't think people realize how much vocal fry you
0:55
get when you're talking this much like you can drink water,
0:58
you can like do whatever you want to do, like
1:00
try to project, and like you just have it. It
1:04
just happens sometimes, and I get really paranoid about it. Also,
1:08
I'm getting a little sick. My son has had the
1:10
flu for like five days, which is unheard of for him,
1:13
and he's passing it on to me, which I'm really
1:15
excited about because tomorrow's my birthday and I think I'm
1:18
gonna wake up with a fever, so that's gonna be
1:20
really cool. Anyway, my dogs are in the bed with me,
1:26
being loud and crazy and making this very difficult, as
1:29
they do every time I record, which is just so fun. Anyway,
1:32
I guess this is maybe like my little energy surge
1:35
before I go down with the flu. So this is
1:39
part two of Dorothya Pente. I actually recorded some of
1:42
it when I was doing part one before I realized like, hey,
1:45
this is gonna have to be two episodes, so I'm
1:49
gonna sort of just like pop it in. And as
1:51
a reminder, Dorothea had just been released on her own
1:55
recognizance from jail, meaning she couldn't afford to pay the bail,
2:00
but the judge just let her out, assuming she would
2:02
show up for the court date. This was for the
2:04
poisoning of an eighty two year old woman and then
2:07
the man Malcolm Mackenzie, who she robbed him of his
2:12
pinky ring while he was staring at her, immobilized because
2:15
she had poisoned him. So she is going to go
2:18
to trial for those things, but she is out and
2:21
able to sort of live her life before she goes
2:24
in front of a judge. And while she is out
2:27
and free, she plans and executes the first murder for
2:32
profit that she she's gonna do a lot of these,
2:36
and this is like the first one now I know,
2:38
with Esther Bugsby. In the previous episode. Esther did die
2:43
about a year after Dorotheas stopped poisoning her, and it
2:46
is thought that potentially part of why she died was
2:48
because of the poisonings, but that is not really attributed
2:51
to her as like an actual murder. So we're gonna
2:54
talk about her first murder while she is out on bail.
3:00
While out on bail, Dorothea wasted no time trying to
3:03
find her next victim, and while at a bar, you'll
3:07
never believe she met another man. However, this man, Harold Monroe,
3:12
was actually married and was also dying of terminal cancer.
3:17
He was also a crazy alcoholic before he got too sick.
3:22
He introduced Dorothea to his wife, Ruth Monroe. Ruth and
3:27
Dorothea got along very well and quickly decided to go
3:30
into business together. Dorothea was working as a cook at
3:34
the bar. Again like trying to be on the straight
3:36
and narrow for a minute, and they decided to start
3:39
a catering business together. I guess Ruth had experience on
3:43
the business side, so they figured they could work together
3:46
and make some money. Now, The first thing that Dorothea
3:48
did was she convinced Ruth to open a joint bank
3:51
account and to move all of her savings into this
3:54
joint account to help open the business. And this was
3:57
like some thousands of dollars. She also had Ruth move
4:03
into the house at fourteen twenty six f Street since
4:06
her husband was now in hospice at the VA Hospital.
4:09
Ruth had a lot of friends in the area, as
4:11
well as four grown children with whom she spent nearly
4:14
every Sunday. But for whatever reason, you know, I think
4:18
Dorothea charmed her. She did that thing, and she got
4:20
her in her web. One Sunday, a few months after
4:25
she'd moved in, on April twenty fourth, nineteen eighty two,
4:29
while at the beauty parlor, Ruth saw one of her
4:32
many friends and told her that she was so sick
4:35
she thought she might die. She said she couldn't go
4:39
to the doctor because she couldn't even remember eating dinner
4:41
or going to bed. The friend later said she appeared dazed,
4:46
scared and had no idea what was going on. Ruth
4:51
rushed out of the parlor, saying she was going to
4:53
go get into bed. Prior to this, Ruth had always
4:57
been a happy, vibrant person, full life, full of love,
5:01
so this was really scary for her friend, and it
5:04
was really scary for her kids, who would come to
5:06
visit her at F Street and started to notice that,
5:10
even though Ruth never really drank before, they would find
5:12
her drinking a green liquid which she said was cremmedamnth
5:17
and that Dorothea was giving it to her to calm
5:19
her nerves over the state of her husband and her marriage. Now,
5:23
on the night of April twenty fourth, which was the
5:26
same day that her friend saw her at the beauty parlor,
5:28
Ruth's son came over to F Street to check on
5:31
his mother and found her in quite a state. Dorothea
5:35
quickly rushed him out of the house, saying that she
5:37
would care for Ruth. The next two days. Her kids
5:40
came by or would call, but were constantly turned away
5:44
by Dorothea, saying Ruth was being seen by doctors and
5:47
that she had just been given a shot to help
5:49
her sleep so she couldn't be disturbed. Then, around five
5:54
thirty am on April twenty eighth, Ruth's daughter Rosie got
5:58
a call from Dorothea saying to hurry over and that
6:01
she had called the paramedics as Ruth wasn't responding. When
6:05
Rosie got to the house, Dorothea was in tears and
6:07
told her her mother had died. Dorothea told the paramedics
6:11
that Ruth had a heart condition, but nobody knew about that.
6:15
She also kind of hinted that she may have overdosed,
6:19
which is weird because like, wouldn't she have called, wouldn't
6:22
she have said that when she called nine one one.
6:25
Ruth's body was taken for aptopsy and some weird stuff
6:27
was found, which I think is what Dorothea was trying
6:30
to set them up for, like, oh, maybe she odeed,
6:32
you know, trying to get ahead of it. First, it
6:35
looked as though she hadn't eaten in days. The only
6:38
thing in her stomach was creme demnth. Second, her liver
6:43
was enlarged and had fatty damage to it, like she
6:45
had a fatty liver, meaning either alcoholism or poisoning. Now, Ruth,
6:51
as I said, rarely drank, to the point that her
6:54
kids were surprised to see her with the creme de menth,
6:56
so it definitely was not alcoholism. Samples were for testing
7:00
and came back with lethal amounts of codeine in Ruth's
7:04
system now also thilan all because it's like a tylan
7:06
old codeine is how they used to prescribe it. But
7:09
it was the codeine that did it, even though there
7:11
was enough tilan all in her system to also kill her.
7:14
It was a pretty gnarly combo. Her death was ruled
7:18
undetermined because suicide wasn't ruled out, and shockingly, she didn't
7:22
have the codine prescribed to her. I bet we all
7:25
know who did. Though, the family got together and finally
7:29
someone said, hey, I suspect Dorothea killed Ruth. And the
7:32
family was split on this, but the ones who agreed
7:34
with that went to police without evidence, though Dorothea again
7:39
escaped any punishment for her crimes. In fact, because the
7:44
police said there was no proof, some of the kids
7:46
went back to believing their mother had killed herself, citing
7:49
the failure of her marriage, her husband's illness, and her
7:52
hatred of aging. Immediately after Ruth's death, Dorothea emptied their
7:58
joint bank account and bought a plane ticket to Mexico
8:01
because she knew the heat was on. She knew the
8:03
kids were on to her, and she thought it was
8:06
a good time to get out of Dodge before leaving
8:09
for Mexico, though, she did something so stupid that it
8:13
makes me wonder if she actually wanted to be caught.
8:18
Dorothea decided to call her friend who she'd known for
8:21
about a year, a woman named Dorothy who lived nearby,
8:25
and asked to come over. Dorothea was drunk and upset
8:29
about Ruth and talked about how she was being accused
8:32
by the family and how the cops were bothering her,
8:35
and Dorothy just kind of sat there and listened and
8:37
was like, this is kind of fucking crazy. She then
8:40
mixed Dorothy a drink, after which Dorothy passed out. When
8:46
she woke up, some of her checks were gone, and
8:48
she found an empty pill bottle and some red liquid
8:51
in the blender that Dorothea had used to mix her drink. Now,
8:56
she had only mixed Dorothy a drink, and when Dorothy said,
8:59
aren't you go to drink with me, Dorothea replied, I'm
9:02
only drinking vodka, So she was like drinking straight vodka,
9:06
but of course had time to mix a drink for
9:08
her friend. Now, Dorothy took this liquid scooped it into
9:13
the prescription bottle and called the police. She knew who
9:17
Dorothea was and gave them her name, and Dorothea had
9:21
also told her her plan to flee to Mexico. She
9:24
was like, she drugged me, she robbed me. She lives
9:26
at you know, fourteen twenty six f Street. She's trying
9:29
to go to Mexico. Dorothea was arrested on May nineteenth
9:33
and had Dorothy's checks on her when she was taken
9:36
into custody. She ended up for this getting five years
9:41
in prison as part of a plea deal that she
9:44
first declined before she realized that the DA had information
9:48
on esther Busby. After the DA brought that up, she
9:52
quickly agreed to five years and went to do her time.
9:57
While in prison, the family of ruthman Ro called the
10:00
DA and said, hey, we think that she maybe killed
10:04
our mother. Seeing her go to prison for drugging and
10:07
robbing people was all it took to bring the family
10:09
together on that subject. But unfortunately at this time there
10:12
wasn't much to be done about it due to lack
10:15
of evidence. But we will come back to this later.
10:20
Dorothea did her time in prison and was released early,
10:23
once again for good behavior and work credits in nineteen
10:26
eighty five, and I want to say that good behavior
10:29
and work credits are absolutely not an indicator of your
10:32
chances for reoffending. Obviously, while in prison, she started a
10:37
penpower relationship with seventy seven year old Everson Gilmouth, who
10:40
went by Gil and he lived in Oregon and got
10:43
about seven hundred dollars a month in social Security and
10:46
pension money combined. He also owned an airstream in which
10:50
he lived, and he lived on his sister's property in Oregon,
10:53
and he also had a really nice new red Ford
10:57
pickup truck. The two entered into relationship while Dorothea was
11:01
still in prison, and on her release in August nineteen
11:04
eighty five, ever, since I guess I should call him,
11:07
Gil was there waiting for her in his nice red truck.
11:12
Gil had been widowed, and was is that the word
11:16
for it, widowed? He's a widower and had been looking
11:19
to get remarried ever since his wife died. I have
11:22
no idea why, but he chose to write to multiple
11:25
women in prison to try to find his next wife.
11:29
I'm not really sure what that's about, but that's how
11:31
he went about finding his next wife and that's how
11:34
he met Dorothea. Now that you had already agreed to
11:37
live together in the upstairs unit at fourteen twenty six
11:40
f Street, which she had kept up rent payments on.
11:42
By allowing Ricardo to cast her social Security checks while
11:46
she was locked up, she also fooled Ricardo and Gil
11:50
into thinking her crimes were far less serious than they were,
11:53
which again is sort of herm and as long as
11:55
it works, she's going to keep lying. Ever since, sister
12:00
was actually able to read up on Dorothea, because remember,
12:02
at one point she was like a socialite that went
12:04
to prison and then she goes in for five years again.
12:08
So she's very worried about about Gil going to live
12:11
with Dorothea, and she even went as far as calling
12:14
the Sacramento Police when she hadn't heard from him for
12:16
a few days, which I'm going to say right now
12:19
was a very very smart move. Unfortunately, the timing was off,
12:24
so in this instance, he was still alive and well,
12:27
and he was really upset with his sister for doing
12:30
this and basically called her and told her to fuck off.
12:33
It was actually the last time they ever spoke, which
12:35
is really really sad. From there, his sister did keep
12:38
trying to get in touch, but with no luck, probably
12:42
because her calling the cops pissed off and spooked Dorothea,
12:47
who moved up the timeline on her plan. Now. Eventually,
12:51
his sister, whose name was Reba, received a letter from
12:55
Gil saying he and Dorothea were to be married, and
12:58
then shortly after this letter, Dorothea wrote her a letter
13:02
saying something similar and that Gil was going to Palm
13:05
Springs to sell his woodworkings. Shortly after that, she got
13:10
a mail gram from Gil, supposedly Gil, saying he was
13:14
leaving Dorothea and moving south. She received another one saying
13:18
he was marrying another woman. Altogether, this terrified her because
13:23
a mail gram is typed, so there's no way to
13:26
prove who sent the letter because there's no handwriting. But
13:29
she'd already checked on Gill once it didn't go over well,
13:32
so while she was worried about her brother, she basically
13:35
left it alone. And I want to call out that
13:37
during these following months, she would receive these mail grams
13:40
occasionally from a woman named Irene, who said that she
13:44
was Gil's new wife to be and would give intermittent
13:48
updates on Gil. But she never actually talked to Gil again,
13:51
and she never even got another mail gram from him.
13:54
She also said that it seemed like all of these
13:57
mailgrams were being written by the same person. In the
14:00
they matched the first letter sent to her by Dorothea,
14:04
which makes sense. Meanwhile, back at f Street, Ricardo Rica
14:12
is still living in the downstairs part of the house
14:15
and he really grew to like Gil, who putted around
14:18
carving wood and enjoying his days while Dorothea seemingly doted
14:22
over him. Ricardo had planned to go to Mexico to
14:24
see his family around Christmas nineteen eighty five, and before
14:27
he did, he noticed that Gil's health was starting to decline,
14:30
ever so slightly. Nothing major. He's older, you know, he's
14:34
seventy seven or seventy eight, but he seemed to start
14:36
having heart issues that sometimes bothered him. Nothing out of
14:42
the ordinary, we'll say, so Ricardo kind of keeps this
14:45
in mind, and then he leaves for Mexico for the holiday,
14:48
and upon his return in January nineteen eighty six, he
14:51
found that there was no Gill anywhere. Dorothea just basically said, oh,
14:57
it didn't work out. He went back to Oregon and
15:00
Ricardo was like, Oh, that's a bummer, and that was
15:03
kind of it. Now, a few months prior, in September,
15:06
she had hired a man to help around the house.
15:09
This man, Ismail Flores, was now driving Gil's truck in January,
15:14
and according to Dorothy Dorothy Dorothea, this is because Gil
15:20
had sold it to him before leaving. She said, he
15:22
also sold off his airstream and that was kind of
15:25
the end of that as far as Ricardo was concerned,
15:27
because again he trusts and believes Dorothea. Now, as for Ismail,
15:33
he had met Dorothea It's going to shock you wear
15:36
in a bar, which her favorite place to meet people.
15:39
She offered him a job doing handyman work around the
15:42
house and he did things like painting, gardening, and building
15:45
things for her from time to time. Now, at one
15:48
point in mid December, she asked him to build her
15:52
a box about six feet high by two to three
15:56
feet wide, you know, like a coffin. She said she
16:00
needed it for storage for books and random items she
16:03
wanted to hold onto, but also wanted to get out
16:05
of the house. And of course she can't just go,
16:08
you know, buy some cardboard boxes at like a moving
16:12
supply place, like she's got to have him build her
16:15
a fucking coffin. So Ismail he just did as he
16:19
was asked. He built her this box. Then once she
16:22
had filled it with books I e. Gil, Ismail loaded
16:26
it into the red Ford truck he now owned because
16:29
she'd already sold it to him, and she actually gave
16:31
it to him for a discounted price in return for
16:33
his work, which is so messed up, and had him
16:37
drive her to take it to storage. On the way,
16:40
Dorothea was like, you know what, I actually just want
16:43
to get rid of this stuff. Can you just dump
16:45
it on the side of the road by the river.
16:47
So he did. He was just like sure, I'll go
16:50
push it down on the river bank, and I think
16:53
Dorothea's hope was that the water would rise and take
16:55
the box away. Later on, Ismail went to sell the truck,
16:59
but he didn't have a bill of sal so he
17:00
took it to Dorothea, who forged Gil's signature saying it's mine.
17:04
He gave it to me, and Ismail was kind of like,
17:07
uh okay, and so's he's just a trusting man. I
17:12
don't really know. On New Year's Day, ever since Gilmouth's
17:15
body was found in the box in the river by
17:18
a man fishing. Sadly, the body was too decomposed to
17:22
determine a cause of death or even figure out who
17:25
it was, so it was filed as a John Doe
17:27
in Sutter County, which is near Sacramento County. And that
17:31
was it for a while for poor gil who also
17:33
was found with a bunch of garbage in the box.
17:35
So that's the kind of person Dorothea is. Meanwhile, Dorothea
17:40
is definitely still caching his pension and social Security checks,
17:44
but Gil is no more from here. Dorothea again opened
17:49
a boarding house, despite her parole specifically forbidding this. Ricardo
17:53
didn't mind and eventually even moved out of the house,
17:56
allowing Dorothea to take it over entirely and rent out
17:59
the rooms under the radar of the government or her
18:02
parole officer, because again, like she's not allowed to be
18:06
doing this, they have no idea what she's doing. According
18:09
to her parole officer, she's just renting a room, but
18:12
in fact she's turning this into another boarding house, which
18:16
I'm going to tell you right now becomes a house
18:19
of horrors. Again, she took in many alcoholics and elderly,
18:23
but did not provide care in the way she had previously. Instead,
18:28
all she did was basically feed them and do their laundry,
18:30
but otherwise mostly left them to their own devices. With
18:33
one very unsurprising caveat. They were not allowed to open
18:38
their own mail. Dorothea had control over that and would
18:41
open all their checks and cash them and give each
18:45
one a very small allowance. Now, Dorothya had quite a
18:49
few people coming in and out of the house, and
18:51
at one point she linked up with someone who helped
18:53
place unwanted people and who obviously didn't know who she was.
18:56
So she was giving her alcoholics, people with mental health
18:59
isish shoose, people that were just difficult to place and
19:03
who were needing in need of care. And this woman
19:06
sent Dorothea three or four people over the months between
19:09
nineteen eighty seven and nineteen eighty eight, and we will
19:13
talk about all of them, but right now I want
19:14
to focus on the one who I think was brought
19:18
into her from two social workers, and this is kind
19:21
of the start of Dorothea's downfall. This man's name was
19:25
Alvaro bert Montoya. He was fifty one and had lived
19:29
the last five years in a detoc center, but was
19:32
not able to stay sober. He was kind of sent
19:35
to Dorothea as a way of minimizing harm to himself.
19:38
They were like, Okay, he's not going to stop drinking.
19:40
We can't keep in control of him. We'll give him
19:43
to her, and you know, she seems to have away
19:46
with people, so we'll just let him live there now.
19:50
Bert was a mentally ill but also very sweet and
19:53
very harmless man. The danger he posed was only to
19:56
himself due to suicidal thoughts, sorry hearing voices, and not
20:01
being able to care for himself. He said that he
20:03
would often hear his father, who had died, telling him
20:06
to kill himself so that they could be together. So
20:09
he's definitely very very mentally ill, but he's not wanting
20:13
to hurt anyone else, and he was very well liked
20:15
by everybody that knew him. The two social workers who
20:20
brought him to Dorothea were at first really happy with
20:22
how things were going. Bert had gained some weight, he
20:25
was clean and showered, he had nice clothing, and he
20:28
seemed to be taking his meds. So Dorothea was definitely
20:31
giving him a higher level of care and She even
20:34
allowed him to drink a little bit and had set
20:36
a tab up at the nearby bar so that he
20:38
could go have a few beers and eat a burrito
20:41
every week, like once or twice a week. Basically, he
20:44
led a simple life and seemed to thrive under Dorothea's care,
20:48
at least at first. After just a few months of
20:52
being with Dorothea, in April nineteen eighty eight, Bert came
20:56
back to the Detok Center and said that Dorothea had
20:58
been drugging him. He stayed the night and said he
21:01
didn't want to go back because she made him do
21:03
all sorts of work and was not nice to him,
21:05
but because he was mentally ill and because they didn't
21:08
have good resources, the social workers convinced him to go
21:12
back to Dorothea, which he did the next day. And
21:15
I want to say that this is a big problem
21:18
for you know, in the mental health field. People will
21:20
say things like this and if they have you know,
21:24
schizophrenia or kind of a history of making things up,
21:28
they're not going to be taken seriously. And the problem
21:31
with that is in this instance is a great, you know,
21:34
example of when they need to be taken seriously. But
21:37
it's very difficult to know what is real and what isn't,
21:40
and so I think, especially when in situations like this,
21:43
they just did the best they could, and they're like,
21:45
go back, we see that you're fine. There's no reason
21:48
for you to not be there. So he goes back
21:50
to Dorothea, and she's pissed. Obviously this is a close call,
21:55
especially considering her barely hidden past, so she's got to
21:58
lock him down. Bert remained with her for a few
22:02
more months, with Dorothea cashing his checks giving him this
22:05
small allowance, and he started to kind of get a
22:09
little more out of control, I think, because he wasn't
22:12
happy there. At one point in July nineteen eighty eight,
22:15
Bert got ahold of some extra money by recycling some
22:17
cans and got himself real, real drunk. This again really
22:23
pissed Dorothea off, as she hated drunks despite being one herself.
22:27
This is another part of her self loathing psychology, which
22:30
is super weird. Then, in August nineteen eighty eight, Bert
22:34
went to the bar, had a beer and a burrito,
22:37
and then collapsed on the ground. He was carried back
22:40
to f Street, where Dorothea was very worried about him. Yeah, right,
22:45
And then on August twenty fourth, Dorothea caught him drinking
22:48
in the street. So at this point she's getting sick
22:51
of him, obviously, his drinking one beer and collapsing, she's
22:55
starting to poison him, and after the twenty fourth of
22:59
August she was done with him. He was never seen
23:03
again after that. Luckily, this man, unlike many of her difficult,
23:07
wayward lost soul tenants, as I mentioned, was very well
23:11
liked and looked after by these two social workers and
23:13
anybody else who knew him really liked him. So when
23:17
he missed a doctor's appointment on August twenty ninth, the
23:20
social workers were notified and came to find out what
23:22
was going on. Dorothea told them that Bert had gone
23:26
to Mexico to see her family, which she does not have.
23:32
So this is just a crazy fucking lie. Like I said,
23:35
during this time, she was catching all her tenants checks
23:38
and even posing as them to get her hands on
23:40
their prescriptions, which included sedatives of course, antipsychotics, and other
23:45
hardcore pharmaceuticals. Anyway, so the social workers keep trying to
23:49
get a hold of Bert, and Dorothea kept saying he's
23:51
in Mexico. He'll be back soon. Finally, one of them said,
23:55
just before November. We need to see him by the
23:58
first or he's going to lose all of his benefits,
24:01
which obviously is going to be a problem for Dorothea
24:04
because she wants the money to keep coming in. Dorothea
24:07
promised he'd be back by then, but of course he wasn't.
24:11
She said his brother took him to Utah or somewhere
24:14
before she could have him check in with them. Finally,
24:18
the social workers are like, fuck this. They call the
24:20
cops and they asked them to check it out, and shockingly,
24:24
the cops did come and check it out. It's mid
24:30
November at this point, and the cops go to fourteen
24:32
twenty six f Street and they asked Dorothea if they
24:35
can speak with Bert. Dorothea said, oh, he's with his
24:38
brother or brother in law. And one of her tenants
24:41
who was interviewed, said the same thing. Now, when this
24:45
tenant was done talking to police, he was like, oh,
24:47
hold on a second, and he handed them a piece
24:50
of paper. Now, the cops go downstairs and they read this,
24:54
and on this piece of paper it said, she's making
24:56
me lie to you. So the cops then find out
25:00
way to meet up with this tenant, and he met
25:02
them down the street and told them he hadn't seen
25:04
Bert in months now. Also around this time, Dorothea had
25:09
employed a number of prisoners from a minimum security sort
25:12
of halfway house to come do work for her in
25:14
her yard. This included digging a lot of holes in
25:17
trenches and sometimes filling them up with concrete like the
25:21
following day kind of thing. She would pay them hourly
25:24
for their work and gave them extra money to keep
25:26
their mouths closed about exactly what they were doing in
25:29
the yard. None of them knew why, but they all agreed,
25:32
because why wouldn't they. Before the cops were called, one
25:35
of the social workers received a call from a man
25:37
claiming to be Bert's brother in law, saying he'd taken
25:41
him to Shreveport, Utah, which very much is not a place.
25:47
Shreveport is in Louisiana, and when the social worker asked
25:51
to speak with Bert, this man refused. This turned out
25:54
to be one of those inmates. Which is so bold
25:58
of Dorothea to do that and not expect to get caught,
26:00
Like what is she thinking? So anyway, she has these
26:04
inmates doing all this like unscrupulous work for her just bold.
26:09
She's so bold if nothing else. So the cops show
26:12
up and they're like, Okay, Bert's not here. We have
26:15
this tenant saying that she paid him to lie to us.
26:19
We need to get to the bottom of this. So
26:21
they show back up and they ask her, hey, can
26:23
we look around and can we dig in your yard?
26:26
And again this request didn't come from nowhere. They had
26:29
been watching Dorothea and waiting for her to slip up
26:32
since Ruth and Rose death. Like remember, the family went
26:35
to the police and said, we think she killed our mom,
26:39
and the police strongly agreed with this, but again they
26:42
had no proof. So now they've got this call about her,
26:46
about Bert, and they're like, all right, we're gonna take this,
26:50
you know it. And they didn't downplay or ignore the
26:52
call because they had so many other things on her.
26:55
So her cute little lady act is no longer working now.
27:00
While they're at the house and before they start digging
27:02
in the yard, they did mention to her like, hey,
27:04
you're going to go back to jail for running this
27:06
boarding house because this is a parole violation. And they
27:09
said that she was like really calm about that and
27:11
was like, okay, no problem, totally understand. They then asked,
27:15
you know, can we dig in the yard, and she
27:16
straight up said yes. She was like, yeah, go ahead.
27:20
Her defense later included, this is so silly. If I
27:23
killed someone and buried them in my yard, why would
27:26
I tell you to go ahead and dig there. So
27:28
it's sort of like, again, she's trying to get ahead
27:30
of it, but she's so fucking dumb, and she does
27:32
dumb things really often, And the problem I think is
27:36
that she got away with doing dumb things a lot
27:38
and making dumb lies and people just like either ignored
27:42
it or believed her. So this emboldened her to keep
27:45
doing this kind of shit. So now the cops are
27:48
looking through a house. They find not only a number
27:50
of pill bottles of people no longer living with Dorothea
27:53
and with unknown whereabouts, they also find in her yard
27:57
a number of bones. Now, at first they're unsure of
28:01
what kind of bones, maybe animal, And it wasn't until
28:05
they found a shoe with a foot inside that they
28:07
felt confident that they were finding human bodies. Now, Remember,
28:13
as far as they know, they're only looking for Bert Montoya,
28:16
and the shoe, foot and body that went with it
28:19
were too decomposed to be Bert's, so that was very
28:22
concerning for them. Dorothea was then detained and the grounds
28:26
were secured. She was interviewed for hours and told so
28:29
many lies, Like I actually watched one of these. You
28:31
can go to archive dot org and watch her interviews
28:35
and it's a forty minute interrogation and the lies she
28:37
told were endless. She once again said she had family
28:41
in Mexico, that Ricardo was her cousin or nephew, yet
28:45
she had no idea what the bodies were doing there,
28:48
and of course her amazing defense of why would I
28:50
incriminate myself like that? Now, after she was interviewed, she
28:53
was allowed to go back home since the body was
28:55
not that of Bert, and there was no proof that
28:57
Dorothea had actually put that body there, So I mean,
29:01
they know, but they can't prove it. So they're like,
29:03
all right, lady, go home. You can't really go anywhere.
29:06
We're securing the you know, the location, we're going to
29:09
start digging. So the police kind of stay there overnight
29:12
and they resumed their digging the first thing the next morning. Meanwhile, upstairs,
29:17
Dorothea and one of her tenants she didn't seem to
29:20
want to kill, Mervin John McCauley, were getting ready to
29:23
leave the premises. Dorothea told him she needed to get
29:27
away and asked that he accompanied her to the hotel
29:30
down the street where Ricardo worked. He agreed, helping her
29:33
pack up the money and items that she might need,
29:35
just kind of basically wait, know, she's going to make
29:38
her escape. I want to note that while he dug
29:41
holes and did chores for her, this man didn't seem
29:43
to have any idea of what she was up to,
29:45
and she wasn't at this point under arrest, So he
29:47
didn't really do anything wrong in this situation, at least
29:50
not like legally speaking. And I will say that he
29:53
was arrested leader, as was Ismail, the like her house,
29:58
the carpenter guy that she hired around the house. As
30:01
far as I know, neither of them actually saw any
30:03
jail time because they didn't actually do anything. They were
30:06
just kind of idiots. So Dorothea gets dressed and she
30:10
goes downstairs, and she's wearing this like white or white,
30:13
this red coat and this cute dress, and she goes
30:16
downstairs to the detectives and she's like, hey, can I
30:20
just go get a cup of coffee at my nephew's
30:22
hotel where he works down the street. The police didn't
30:26
really want to let her go, but at the same time,
30:28
they hadn't really found any other bodies, They had nothing
30:31
to really hold her, and she's not under arrest, so
30:34
they're like, okay, yeah, you can just go get coffee.
30:36
Just come back, you know, hurry back. And one of
30:38
the detectives even walked her to the curb or to
30:41
her car so she could get to the hotel. I
30:43
think she walked, but there's a photo of him like
30:45
walking her off the premises. It's like a famous photo
30:48
because the cops fucked this up so bad, like how
30:50
did they let her go? And they got absolutely like
30:53
torn apart, you know in the community, and you know,
30:57
the newspapers were like idiot, fucking caught, like what are
31:00
they doing? So anyway, she leaves and she and John
31:04
get to the hotel where Ricardo, her not family member,
31:07
is not working. From there, she calls a cab and
31:11
uses the three thousand dollars she hasn't stolen money to
31:14
get herself out of the city. Going all the way
31:16
down to Los Angeles, and it's a good thing for
31:19
her that she left when she did, because cops found
31:23
another body about ten minutes later and went looking for
31:26
her at the hotel. Of course it was too late.
31:33
Now let's go ahead and talk about the bodies they found.
31:36
We're going to start with seventy eight year old Betty Palmer.
31:40
She was a reclusive woman who landed at fourteen twenty
31:43
six f Street in the fall of nineteen eighty six.
31:46
She and Dorothea did not get along, as Betty was
31:49
hard headed and secretive and did not like Dorothea telling
31:52
her what to do. Within just a few months of
31:55
her living there, Dorothea had already stolen her identity, getting
31:59
an ID car with Betty's name and Dorothea's photo. She
32:02
also cashed over seven thousand dollars in social Security checks
32:06
of Betty's, mostly after she was killed. Sometime in late
32:10
nineteen eighty six, John McCauley Mervin was asked to dig
32:14
a hole in the front yard by Ricardo ordo Ica,
32:17
which he did. Ricardo also didn't know what was going on,
32:21
but Dorothea had asked him to do it, so he
32:23
asked John McCauley. The next day he was told to
32:26
fill it back in with dirt. This is where Betty's
32:29
body was found, missing her head and hands, which by
32:34
the way, were never found. They had been taken off
32:37
to make it more difficult for her to be identified.
32:40
So this is really fucked up, and she was actually
32:42
Dorothea placed a statue of Saint Francis of ASSISI over her,
32:47
which just feels like adding insult to injury. The next
32:51
victim we're going to talk about was another seventy eight
32:53
year old, Leona Carpenter, who came to stay with Dorothea
32:57
in December of nineteen eighty six. Now, Leona was an
33:01
alcoholic and prescription drug abuser who was an acquaintance of
33:04
Dorothea's from the neighborhood. In October of nineteen eighty six,
33:08
a few months before she came to live with Dorothea,
33:11
Leona ended up in the hospital after an apparent overdose
33:13
on downers. I think it was actually like dalmain, which
33:16
doctors believed may have been intentional, so she was potentially suicidal.
33:22
During this time, Like I said, Leona was not yet
33:24
living with Dorothea, but Dorothea was still able to gain
33:27
power of attorney over Leona while she was in the hospital,
33:31
which is quite a feat and says a lot about
33:33
Dorothea's ability to manipulate. She straight up brought a notary
33:40
to Leona's hospital bed while she was on death's door
33:44
and had Leona give her power of attorney so she
33:46
could start cashing her social Security checks. Leona was in
33:50
the hospital for a couple of months before being released
33:52
in mid December, at which point she went and lived
33:55
with Dorothea. As you can imagine, she ended up back
33:58
in the hospital shortly suffering from yet another overdose. She
34:02
went home again to Dorothea in February and promptly disappeared.
34:07
Her body was found in the corner of the yard,
34:09
and brain tissue samples showed she had overdosed on multiple
34:12
prescription drugs, including codeine. So there's that one again. And
34:18
what's crazy is that Dorothea called a plumber to take
34:21
a look at some pipes right around the time that
34:24
Leona went missing. The plumber had to dig a big
34:27
hole which was left open overnight, and this hole is
34:31
where Leona's body was found, meaning that this very well
34:34
could have been like a crime of opportunity. Obviously, she's
34:38
killing people, and she's probably gonna kill Leona, but the
34:40
timing could have had to do with her being like,
34:42
look at that nice, big hole that I didn't have
34:44
to pay anybody to dig, or that I myself didn't
34:47
have to dig. It would be terrible to put that
34:50
hole to waste, and so she took this as the
34:53
time to murder this poor old woman. The next victim
34:59
was sixty two years James Gallup, who had moved in
35:02
with Dorothea after having surgery, or just before having surgery
35:05
of a benign tumor in his brain. James was an
35:09
alcoholic who smoked two to three packs of cigarettes a
35:11
day and as a result, as you can imagine, was
35:14
not in great health, but not anywhere near death by
35:16
any means. At this point, Dorothea took over medicating him
35:20
and used his prescriptions for Dalmain to over medicate him,
35:23
as well as other tenants. Dorothea and James didn't really
35:27
get along, and at one point they got into a
35:29
heated argument after James told Dorothea she could not be
35:33
the payee on his SSI checks, so she wanted to
35:36
be listed as the payee on his social Security checks,
35:40
and he was like absolutely not, like I'm going to
35:43
control my money. I'll give you what I owe you.
35:45
And we all know how Dorothea feels about that. So,
35:48
as you can imagine, he went missing very shortly after
35:52
this argument. Now it's interesting to see he was actually
35:55
scheduled for another cancer surgery as his doctor had found
35:58
more tumors in his colon, disappeared before he could go in.
36:02
Dorothea told people who had asked that he went to
36:05
Los Angeles or that he simply disappeared, and she even
36:07
told one person that he died and she had him cremated.
36:11
So just a string of lies. Meanwhile, he's buried under
36:15
the gazebo in her yard. And what's interesting is he
36:17
had friends, like he had a friend at the local bar,
36:20
a bartender, who while he was in the hospital for
36:24
his brain surgery, he called her to like check in
36:27
and be like, I haven't been at the bar because
36:28
I've been in the hospital. I don't want you to
36:30
think I would just disappear, you know, without saying goodbye.
36:33
So this friend, when he did disappear without saying goodbye,
36:37
she knew something was fishy, and she actually later testified
36:40
in the trial. Now, the next victim is Vera Fay Martin.
36:47
She came to live with Dorothea in October of nineteen
36:49
eighty seven. She was placed by a worker who didn't
36:52
know that Dorothea shouldn't have borders. I maybe mentioned her previously.
36:56
I've been recording this over several days, so I apologize.
37:00
I also have the flu, so I'm very out of it.
37:02
So if I repeated that, I apologize. But there was
37:05
a worker who didn't know that Dorothea shouldn't have borders tenants,
37:10
and so she was giving her difficult to place people. Vera,
37:14
of course, met with the same fate as the others,
37:16
very sadly, and Dorothea continued to cast her checks while
37:19
she lay buried in the yard. About a month after
37:22
Vera came to live with Dorothea, the same worker placed
37:25
sixty five year old Dorothy Miller in the f Street house.
37:29
Dorothy was a paranoid alcoholic who got in trouble for
37:32
petty theft just after moving in with Dorothea. That being said,
37:37
she was sort of the liaison between Dorothea and the
37:41
tenants who lived downstairs. So Dorothea very much ruled over
37:45
the house sort of like a queen, and she was
37:47
upstairs and her closest, you know, advisors were kind of
37:51
allowed in the upstairs area, and then all of her
37:53
subjects had to stay downstairs, and somehow Dorothy kind of
37:58
was able to work her way into getting invited upstairs.
38:02
She certainly wasn't like up there all the time, although
38:05
I do think at one point before she disappeared, she
38:07
was moved to the upstairs room, But I believe that
38:10
was more so that Dorothea could kill her more easily,
38:14
like medicating her and keeping her out of sight of
38:16
the other tenants. But anyway, I found it interesting that
38:20
she sort of became not a confidant, but she had
38:23
a good enough relationship with Dorothea that she sort of
38:26
was like the representative of the people of the house. However,
38:31
when she disappeared, Dorothea of course used the excuse, oh,
38:35
she got in trouble for stealing. She's back in jail.
38:38
I kicked her out of the house. We'll never see
38:40
her again. Dorothy, of course, was also found in the yard. Now,
38:46
around this time that Dorothy went missing, one of the
38:49
inmates that she hired to do that yard work was
38:51
asked to clean the upstairs room where Dorothy had previously
38:55
been sleeping. He later said he found large, foul smelling
38:59
stain in the room which looked like slime. This was
39:03
almost certainly vomit from Dorothy being poisoned. And I should
39:07
mention at this time that more than one of Dorothea's
39:10
victims were still alive when they were buried, and I
39:15
believe Dorothy was one of them. She actually showed signs
39:19
of trying to dig her way out of the grave,
39:21
which is absolutely fucked up and horrifying. Also, around the
39:27
time she went missing, Dorothea turned up at a hospital
39:30
posing as Dorothy and asking for refills on a bunch
39:33
of heavy sedative medications, all prescribed to Dorothy. So she
39:37
is stealing money and identities. She has no plans to
39:40
stop this craziness. The next victim was fifty five year
39:44
old Benjamin Fink, a severe alcoholic who lived to drink
39:48
is what I read, and had health issues as a result.
39:52
He lived with Dorothea for about two months before he
39:54
went missing. Now, during this time his brother visited him weekly,
39:58
but even so, least at first, his brother wasn't super
40:02
suspicious when he went missing because apparently Benjamin would drink
40:07
heavily and then black out and go and like wander
40:11
away and would like end up in the hospital with
40:14
unknown injuries. So at least at first, Dorotheo sort of
40:18
flew under the radar on this one. But you know,
40:21
when he was found in the yard, that kind of
40:23
put an end to that. So that sums up all
40:26
of the victims. And to be clear, there were a
40:28
lot of other people who lived in the house that
40:30
did not end up getting killed by Dorothea. A lot
40:34
of them had probably been drugged maybe didn't realize it.
40:38
I know, like Mervyn John McCauley, she was drugging him.
40:43
So she definitely was like hurting everyone. But those are
40:48
the people that actually died. Now, Like I said, there
40:51
were a lot of other things happening, poisoning people whatever.
40:54
One of those things included Dorothea stealing her quote unquote
40:58
friends checks after frame her for fraud and getting her
41:01
thrown back in jail. So Dorothea and this woman, Brenda Trujillo,
41:08
had met in prison and became friends, which is like
41:10
a funny word for anybody Dorothea had in her life
41:14
for whatever reason, though Dorothea had confided in this woman
41:17
about some of the murders, and she actually it later
41:20
came out during her trial that she confided in multiple
41:23
other inmates, which is like the worst fucking idea, but
41:26
also I'm glad she did. But she told Brenda, you know,
41:30
I murder them, I drug them, I steal their checks.
41:33
And then after she did this to Brenda, like you know,
41:36
got her and t I think what she did was
41:38
drugged her, and then she ended up feeling a drug
41:40
test because Dorothea drugged her, and then she ended up
41:43
back in jail, and Dorothea kept cashing her checks. So
41:48
she filed a complaint saying, you know, this woman did
41:50
this to me, but it ended up on the back
41:52
burner until Dorothea was arrested. But Brenda did testify in
41:56
her trial. But before we get into the trial, which
41:59
I'm just going to kind of gloss over because I
42:01
find trials boring and I hate to say, it's just
42:04
not really my thing. I'm not that podcast. But before
42:07
we get into that, let's talk about Dorothy's escape, which
42:09
I sort of started I think some of this with
42:13
so I think I left off where she ran away
42:15
from La which is wild and hilariously bold. I mean,
42:19
this woman is pure evil, but I do respect that
42:22
level of boldness that she has to just like go
42:25
for it over and over and it did keep working out,
42:28
so I understand why that made her feel like she
42:29
could just keep running away and doing whatever and making
42:32
it work. So anyway, Dorothea ends up for she's in Hollywood.
42:36
She spends the night there and then she takes a
42:38
Greyhound bus down to an area known as Westlake or
42:42
alternatively MacArthur Park, which is near downtown LA but sort
42:47
of situated between that and Echo Park for anyone who
42:50
sort of knows the area. There's this really big, nice,
42:54
beautiful lake nearby, but it's pretty overrun unfortunately with like
42:59
drug adda and homeless people, and it's just it hasn't
43:02
been taken care of. It's been neglected by the city
43:05
for years. So this has been a really rough area
43:08
for a very long time, including when Dorothea was staying here.
43:12
So the motels are super cheap, nobody cares what your
43:15
name is, so this worked out really well for her.
43:18
She set herself up in a motel and got some
43:21
dinner without being recognized. Her name and photo were all
43:25
over the news and everybody was looking for her. But
43:28
she had put herself into a predominantly Latino area, so
43:31
she felt safe that people would basically just mind their
43:33
own business, and for the most part, they did. After
43:36
a couple of days, she decided to venture out, not
43:39
because she felt safe necessarily, but because she needed to
43:42
secure more money. Like she had a very finite amount.
43:45
It was whatever she could shove into her purse that
43:47
she had stolen from her victims. It wasn't like she
43:50
herself was getting any money or could like go cash
43:52
a check under her name. So she decides to go
43:55
out to a bar, the Monte Carlo, which liked the motel,
43:58
which is called the Royal Viking is still there today,
44:02
and the Monte Carlo has some really wild reviews on Yelp. Honestly,
44:06
it's mostly hipster's being angry that it's a real dive
44:09
bar and not like a curated fun one with updated amenities.
44:13
But to me, it looks like just a good, rough
44:16
dive bar. Like all the ones in downtown are gone.
44:19
They've been gentrified. It's weird, but I feel like MacArthur
44:21
Park and Westlake is one of the only areas that
44:24
has like truly stayed out of being gentrified. Somehow, it's
44:28
fought back. It's just not being turned into like a
44:31
fucking Disneyland for like rich La people, and I kind
44:34
of love that, but it's super rough. So anyway, Dorothea
44:39
goes out on November sixteenth, nineteen eighty eight, and she
44:42
is on the prowl. She meets a man at this
44:44
bar named Charles Wilgas and tells him her name is
44:48
Donna Johanson. They get to talking and she finds out
44:52
he's on Social Security and even tells him, oh, I
44:55
can help you get more benefits, like we can work
44:57
the system, like I'm really you know, I know it
45:00
do and clearly she does. So after a while, she
45:03
offers them to go out again, and he accepts. She's like, well,
45:08
you know, let's get together on Thanksgiving. You shouldn't be alone.
45:10
I'll come to your house and cook for you. And
45:13
he's like, yeah, that sounds great, and so she's laying
45:15
it on and she even goes as far as to
45:18
offer moving in together. She's like, why don't we share
45:21
an apartment? Which is fucking crazy. They've been talking for
45:23
like two hours and Charles was not immediately into this,
45:29
but he was open to seeing where things went. So
45:32
they decide, okay, let's meet up this coming Thursday. If
45:34
things go well, we'll keep hanging out, we'll do Thanksgiving,
45:36
we'll see where it goes. She got him to buy
45:39
her dinner to take with her back to her motel,
45:42
and she goes back there to eat and a few
45:45
hours later she gets a call from Charles. Apparently he's
45:48
just checking in with her, and you know, he's like, oh,
45:51
are you staying in for the night. She confirms it. Yes,
45:53
I'm at room thirty one at the Royal Viking Motel.
45:56
I'm not going anywhere tonight, and I'm looking forward to
45:59
seeing you on Thursdayay. So she's feeling really good. She's
46:02
feeling like she's setting this up, She's got her next victim.
46:06
Things are rolling. However, shortly after that phone call, there
46:13
is a knock on Dorothea's door. She gets up and answers,
46:18
and outside, looking straight into her room are the police
46:23
who arrested her without incident. As it turns out, after
46:28
leaving the bar, Charles, who had puzzled over where he
46:30
had seen Donna quote unquote before realized he had seen
46:35
her on the news, or dorothy a plenty rather, and
46:38
that she was wanted for murder and Sacramento after calling
46:41
to confirm she'd be there, he called the police and
46:43
led them right to her. Now, again, like I said,
46:46
I'm not going to get into the details of the trial,
46:49
but I will say that it was a bit of
46:50
a circus with I think one hundred and fifty something witnesses,
46:55
victim's families were involved, thirty one hundred pieces of evidence
46:59
were introduced. I mean, it was crazy. Now, at first,
47:04
Dorothea was charged only with the murder of Bert Montoya,
47:07
because that's kind of what kicked this whole thing off,
47:10
but the list ended up growing to nine people by
47:12
the time she went to trial. Now, the trial started
47:15
in February nineteen ninety three, so almost five years later,
47:20
or just over four, I guess. So it took a
47:23
very long time for like the discovery phase and setting
47:26
up the trial. And even though it started in February
47:29
of nineteen ninety three, it took all the way until
47:31
August twenty sixth of that same year to conclude, which
47:34
is a very long trial. If anybody doesn't know, that's
47:37
a long ass trial, and at the conclusion, Dorothea was
47:40
found guilty of only three murders, the murder of Benjamin Fink,
47:45
the murder of Leona Carpenter, and the murder of Dorothy Miller.
47:50
The jury actually deadlocked on the other six, which I
47:53
find crazy, but again I don't know all of the details. Now.
47:59
Although the death found he was an option, I think
48:01
due to her age and her cute little granny you know,
48:03
the way she presents herself, the jury couldn't come to
48:06
an agreement to put her to death, so instead she
48:09
was given life without parole. She was then moved to
48:13
the Women's Center in Chowchilla, California, where she remained until
48:17
her death at age eighty two. She died of natural causes.
48:23
And that really is that. Finally, this completes the tale
48:28
of the murderous old Lady Dorothea Plente and her House
48:34
of Horrors on f Street in Sacramento. Now I've gone
48:38
on Instagram and posted a picture of the house which
48:41
helps give you an idea of like the upstairs downstairs,
48:44
as well as some pictures of her victims and photos
48:47
of Dorothea as well, both being free. Although I think
48:50
she's in court in the first picture and her mugshot,
48:53
which is particularly fun to look at. This lady was crazy.
48:59
She is such an important part of true crime history
49:02
and California history. She's pure evil and I'm glad I
49:06
covered the case, but I'm also glad to move on
49:08
to something maybe a little less bulky for next week.
49:12
So thanks everybody for listening in. I'm sorry if I'm sniffley,
49:16
or if I sound stuffy, or if I mention anything twice.
49:20
The flu has hit our house hard. I thought I
49:23
had escaped its clutches, but I have not. So it's
49:25
been a lot of time spent in bed, but some
49:28
of that was recording this, So hopefully you know you guys,
49:31
enjoy and I'll be back next week with a whole
49:35
new case. And thanks again everybody for listening, and until
49:39
next week, stay safe.