Dorothea Puente: Known Serial Killer

Dorothea Puente “I used to be a very good person, at one time”, pleaded Dorothea Puente (New York Times). Dorothea Puente is a known serial killer in California. In 1993, she was convicted of three counts of murder. She was originally accused of nine murders, but the jury did not get to the other six. Her motive was to collect and cash their government checks (The New York Times). Dorothea had an unforgettable childhood; she was put in an orphanage at a young age because her parents had both died. She was married multiple times throughout her lifetime, and gave up a child for adoption. With her troubled life, Dorothea was in and out of jail from the age of nineteen. Her crimes varied from forgery to murder (Murderpedia). People who did not …show more content…
After Dorothea started working as a nurses aid for the elderly; she started to manage a boarding house for the homeless, elderly, people with disabilities, and mental illnesses (The New York Times). Dorothea drugged her tenants with an overdose of codeine and tylenol (Murderpedia). Codeine is a narcotic, used for mild to severe pain. Tylenol is a pain reliever, used for headaches and muscle pain (Drugs.com). After Dorothea drugged them, she would bring them up to a bedroom; that bedroom was a makeshift morgue Dorothea used to store the bodies, until she could drag them out to her backyard and bury them (The New York Times). If the overdose of the pills was not enough to kill them, they were paralyzed and then buried alive. Dorothea’s victims were called ‘shadow people’; these people were called shadow people because no one knew who they were, so no one would notice if they had gone missing (The New York Times). She would steal their mail to find out who they were. Dorothea also used to steal their money when she went through their mail (Murderpedia). The police started to look into Dorothea when a social worker became concerned about one of her clients that she has not heard from; that client was staying at Dorothea’s boarding house. John Cabrera was the lead detective on the case; he went to Dorothea’s boarding house to investigate, when he found a human’s humerus bone in her backyard. After that, he got permission to dig (The New York Times). The people exhumed from the boarding house back yard, were Leona Carpenter, Dorothy L. Miller, Alvaro Montoya, Benjamin Fink, James Gallop, Vera Faye Martin, and Betty Palmer. Another resident, Ruth F. Munroe, allegedly died from a self-induced overdose. The victims died from 1982 to 1986; they ranged in age from 52 to 80 years old (The New York Times). There was another body found in a handmade box,