Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: Dorothea Puente Pt. 1

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

Through the 1980s, a landlady named Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. Her tenants were the people nobody else would take: the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the newly homeless. Social workers who visited described her as warm and unusually attentive, the rare operator who cooked real meals. Puente also collected their mail and cashed their Social Security checks, and she was on parole, under orders to stay away from elderly people and stop handling government money. In November 1988, a social worker reported a tenant missing: Alvaro Montoya, a gentle man with intellectual disabilities who everyone called Bert. Days later, detectives started digging in the garden. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces Dorothea Puente and the record of fraud and violence behind her, the boarding house she ran on other people's benefit checks, and the missing tenant whose social worker refused to accept the story she was given.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hey everyone, Carter here. I am hosting a new show called What the Fact with my co-host, Connor Tomlinson, who you might know and love from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. Every week we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Connor brings the tangents and an infectious energy that will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube. at What the Fact Pod. This is Crime House. If you disappeared tomorrow, chances are, somebody would come looking for you.

A sister who calls on Sundays and gets no answer. A neighbor who notices the mail stacking up on your porch. A friend who starts asking questions when you've been quiet for a week. Most of us never think about that because we've never had to. The net is there. And it holds. But every city has people the net doesn't reach. Their families moved away or gave up years ago.

They'd burn through the last friend who would pick up the phone. They live on a disability check in a rented room where nobody knows their last name. When someone like that disappears, nothing stops. The world closes over the space where they were and keeps going. In the 1980s, on a tree-lined block of downtown Sacramento, a woman named Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house that took those people in. She cooked for them. She did their laundry and picked up their mail.

Social workers called her a godsend because she said yes to the clients, everybody else said no to. That's exactly why nobody came looking. And by the time anybody did. nine people were already dead. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on.

Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come at every two. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community. Please rate, review, and follow the show.

And for early, add free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content to join. Go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. And this is the first of two episodes on the Sacramento boarding house murders. Between 1982 and 1988, nine people who trusted a landlady named Dorothea Puente ended up dead. Today, I'll introduce you to the people who showed up at Dorothea's house looking for help. Almost all of them were living on government assistance and had handed over the paperwork to their landlady. They ranged in age from 51 to 78.

We probably wouldn't know what happened to any of them if it wasn't for one dedicated social worker who refused to take no for an answer. Next time, I'll walk you through what police finally found at that house. The four days Dorothea Puente spent on the run in one of the longest jury deliberations in California history. I'll explain why. only three of the nine victims ever got a verdict, and why the other six never will.

All that and more coming up. If you were a Sacramento caseworker in the late 1970s and you had a client, nobody would house, there was a good chance a colleague would tell you to go see Dorothea. She ran a boarding house at 21st and F Street, the sprawling three-story Victorian with room for more than a dozen tenants. She took in alcoholics and addicts, and the people whose files had gotten too complicated for anybody else. Her kitchen ran all day, her rooms were clean, and her door stayed open. In a city that had almost nowhere to put these people, that made her an essential part of the community.

Although she was in her early 50s, most people thought she was older. She had white hair and wore these huge round glasses and high collars. her dresses, and the whole thing added another 15 years. But it wasn't just the way she looked. She had a reputation, and she'd built most of it herself. She spoke decent Spanish and gave away food and clothing to Mexican families downtown. She gave money to political campaigns and charity drives, and she kept the photographs. Dorothea standing beside Governor George Duke Magian, Dorothea with Jerry Brown, the governor before him, who danced with her once at a fundraising ball.

Anyone who walked into her home saw those pictures on the wall, so no one questioned her. And nobody ever checked the rest. She told people she had worked as a nurse during World War II. She also said she'd been born in Mexico. Neither was true. But she looked after her borders when they got sick, and soon. the neighbors were also coming by. A local Spanish language paper even started calling her La Doctora, the doctor.

Another time, she told the Sacramento Bee she had survived the Bata-on-death march, the forced march of American and Filipino prisoners across the Philippines in 1942. Dorothea was 13 that year and living in California. The paper ran the story anyway. So a lot of what Sacramento knew about her was wrong. Started with her name. She was born Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California in January 1929, the sixth of seven children. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was eight.

Her mother was killed in a motorcycle wreck a year after that. Dorothea was an orphan before she turned 10, and she spent the rest of her childhood being passed between relatives and foster homes until she left for Washington at 16. In the next few decades were just as chaotic. She married four times. Her third husband was a Mexican immigrant named Robert Quente. She married him in 1968 when she was 39 and he was 23. The marriage lasted about a year, but the surname lasted the rest of her life and it did a lot of work for her.

A woman named Puente who spoke Spanish and said she came from Mexico didn't get asked many follow-up questions. Her career as a landlady started in those same years. In 1968, she opened a halfway house for alcoholics and called it the Samaritans, but that was short-lived too. She eventually had around $10,000 in debt and had to close it down. Not long after, she took a room in that big Victorian at 21st and F. Over the next few years, she worked her way up to running the place. It's also where she met her fourth husband. In 1976, Dorothea married one of her own tenants, a man named Pedro Montalvo.

The marriage lasted a few months before he walked out. Years later, he told reporters she wanted a new pair of pantyhoes every day, and spent like somebody with money to burn. Pedro got out, but the people who worked with her couldn't leave, and one of them was starting to notice a pattern. A social worker named Mildred Ballinger had been dealing with Dorothea since the late 1970s,

and in all that time, she kept hearing the same story. Dorothea was dying of cancer. She told her clients, She told her caseworkers, and every time the cancer had moved. One visit, it was in her brain, the next her breast, then her liver. After a while, Mildred stopped believing any of it and started wondering what else Dorothea was making up.

But Mildred was in the minority. Most of Sacramento still saw the woman in the photographs with the governors, and in late 1981, Dorothea added another business to her portfolio. A friend of her as 61-year-old Ruth Monroe had spent years building up a small catering operation that she ran herself and she wanted to expand. So when she got the chance to lease and run the restaurant's side of a midtown bar called the Round Corner Tavern, she took it. Dorothea came in as her partner.

It should have been a good year for Ruth. Instead, her husband got sick. It was terminal and moving fast. Before long, he was living in a VA hospital. Even then, Ruth kept the restaurant running and drove across town to visit him. But she couldn't stand being in the house without him. And that's the part her family always comes back to. Ruth didn't want to sleep alone in her home while her husband was dying.

somewhere else. And her business partner had a big place downtown with a spare room and an offer on the table. So on Easter Sunday of 1982, Ruth packed a bag and moved in with Dorothea. Within two weeks, she was sick. The way it came on was kind of odd. Ruth wasn't coughing or running a fever or anything like that, she was fading like a light on a dimmer. Within a few days, a woman who had been running a restaurant on her own needed help getting out of a chair. Her son, William Claussen, came by to check on her, and what he found stopped him cold. His mother was pale and shrunken and could barely hold herself upright, and she was drinking a creme de bonth cocktail, which made no sense at all because Ruth almost never drank.

William asked about it. His mother told him Dorothea had given it to her to settle her nerves. On April 27th, William came back and this time his mother couldn't move or speak at all. He sat with her for a while. He told her she was going to be all right that Dorothea would look after her until she got her strength back. The next morning, the phone rang. Ruth was dead. She had been living with Dorothea for about three. three weeks. The Sacramento County Corners office ran some tests and found a huge amount of codeine in her system along with acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. In that quantity, the combination can be fatal. So there's never any real question about what killed Ruth Monroe. The only question was how it got into her body. Dorothea had an answer ready

before anyone asked. She told investigators that Ruth had been coming apart over her husband's illness. She said Ruth was hopeless and talked like a woman with nothing left. Coming from the person who had been at Ruth's bedside around the clock, that carried weight. So the coroner's office ruled Ruth's death a suicide. Her family didn't believe a word of it. They knew Ruth. She was upbeat and busy and doing three things at once, running a restaurant, visiting her husband and holding a family together. Grief-stricken, absolutely. Suicidal? No.

Then there was the money. After the funeral, William and his siblings looked at the joint business account their mother had opened with Dorothea and noticed that thousands of dollars were gone. At that point, they went to the authorities and said it outright. They believed Dorothea Poente had killed their mother. It was a serious accusation, and it came from people who had no reason to invent one, but it went nowhere. There were no witnesses besides Dorothea, and she said she knew what happened. So Ruth's file stayed closed, but it wasn't the only case the Sacramento police had that led back to Dorothea Quente. About three months before Ruth Monroe moved in,

a 74-year-old man named Malcolm McKenzie spent the evening drinking on his own at a midtown spot called The Zebra Club. At some point, he started chatting with a woman there. She was nice, well-dressed, and easy to talk to. When the bar started emptying out, She suggested they keep the night going back at his place. Malcolm agreed. They went over there and she poured them both a drink.

Before long, he started to feel strange. He couldn't stand up. He couldn't reach for anything. But he was awake the entire time. And all he could do was watch in horror as she worked her way through his home. She took his coin collection. she took cash and checks and watches, and on her way out, she slid a diamond ring off his finger that had belonged to his mother.

Luckily, Malcolm survived. He went to the police and told them everything he could remember about the woman who had sat down beside him at that bar. He wasn't the first person. This had happened to. But it would take another seven months for anyone to put the pieces together. and by then Ruth Monroe was already dead. Amid the chaos of a medieval battlefield, one man raises the crown.

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Nobody listened. Three months before that, Dorothea had drugged and robbed a 74-year-old man she met at a midtown bar, and he had gone straight to the police. but Malcolm McKenzie wasn't the only one sounding the alarm. By then, a Sacramento social worker named Mildred Ballinger had noticed that something concerning was happening to the people in Dorothea's care. At that point, Dorothea was working as an in-home caregiver going into the houses of elderly clients across Sacramento.

Two of the women she was looking after kept getting, mysteriously ill. Doctors couldn't explain it, so they ran tests. They came back showing drugs in their systems that nobody had prescribed. Not only that, but one of those women later realized checks and jewelry were missing from her house. When Mildred found out, she started telling every caseworker she could reach to stay away from Dorothea Puente. None of it. slowed Dorothea down. On May 16, 1982, she stopped by to see a 49-year-old named Dorothy Osborne and poured her a drink

the same way she had poured one for Malcolm McKenzie four months earlier. Eight hours later, Osborne's checks and credit cards were gone. She went to the authorities. That was the complaint that finally did it. Two victims, four months apart, same woman, same method. This time somebody put the report side by side. Police arrested Dorothea later that summer. When they picked her up, she was carrying a plane ticket to Mexico.

And when they pulled her file, there was a lot in it. Her first conviction went back to 1948 when she was 19 and passed a bad check under a made-up name in Riverside. She spent four months in jail, then skipped out on her probation and left Riverside County altogether. Twelve years later, in 1960, Sacramento Police raided a house on Fulton Avenue that was running as a brothel behind a fake bookkeeping business. And Dorothea was inside when officers came through the door.

She spent 90 days in county jail, though she continued to insist she'd only been visiting a friend. And then came 1978. By then, Dorothea was very much. running the boarding house at 21st and F. It turned out the whole time she was running it, she was going through her tenants' mail. She took their benefit checks, forged their signatures, and signed the money over to herself. She was convicted on 34 counts of forgery, got five years of federal probation, and was ordered to pay $4,000 back to her victims.

Not long after, she moved a few blocks down F Street and rented the upstairs of a blue Victorian from a man named Ricardo Orta Rica. That's why she'd been working in people's homes when Mildred sounded the alarm. The 1978 conviction was supposed to keep her away from vulnerable people, but all it did was stop them from coming to her,

so she started going to them. Ruth Monroe never knew any of it. She moved into a friend's spare room, and she died in it. Four months later, Dorothea was standing in a courtroom. She was convicted of theft and of drugging her victims in order to rob them and sentenced to five years at the California Institution for Women in Corona. William Clausen and his siblings read about it in the Sacrament. to be. There it was in the paper. The woman who had been mixing their mother's drinks had spent

those exact months drugging other elderly people and emptying their homes. They went back to the authorities and asked them to look at Ruth's death one more time. Investigators took another pass and came back with the same answer, suicide. It wasn't the answer Ruth's children wanted. Still, at least the woman they blamed was behind bars, but it turned out even that wasn't enough to stop, Dorothea Poente. While Dorothea was serving that sentence, she signed up for the prison's pen pal program. That's how a man in Oregon named Everson Gilmouth started writing to her.

The people called him Gil. He was 77, retired, and living on his own. He was also a woodcarver and a serious one. There's a photograph of him from around then. He's standing next to one of his carvings, a big man with white hair and heavy glasses, grinning like he can't quite believe he made it himself. He also had a decent pension, a truck, a trailer, and the freedom to go wherever he wanted. Eventually, the letters between him and Dorothea got longer and more frequent.

and before long he was putting money into her prison account. She told him she was inside over some financial trouble, a woman on her own in a tight spot who had made a mistake. Gil believed her. By late summer in 1985, the two of them were planning a life together. Dorothy, who was getting out early, she had served three years of a five-year sentence,

and the state took two off for good behavior. But before they let her go, a prison psychologist sat down and evaluated her. His report said she showed no sign of remorse for what she had done and that she should be considered dangerous. It said whoever she lived with and whatever work she took needed to be watched closely. They let her out anyway. On September 9, 1985, Dorothea Poente walked through the gate. Gill had already hitched up his trailer and driven down from Oregon to wait for her.

He was there in his red 1980 Ford pickup, along with her former landlord Ricardo Puerto Rico. The three of them drove back into the city. They were headed to Ricardo's house at 1426F Street. in one of the oldest neighborhoods in downtown Sacramento, less than a mile from the state capital. It had two stories in a covered porch and was painted a pale blue that people kept describing as gingerbread. Ricardo lived on the ground floor with his family.

Dorothy had been renting the upstairs before she was sent to jail. Now she was moving back in with Gill and she didn't waste any time making it feel like home. She planted roses out front and grew a vegetable garden. She passed the extras over the fence and made tamales for the neighbors. It looked like a woman settling into a quiet retirement. But that's not what was going on. Dorothea had been out of prison for about a month,

and there were two things her parole said she could not do. She couldn't work with the elderly, and she couldn't handle anybody else's. government checks. And yet, within weeks, she and Gill had opened a joint checking account. He signed for it. She took over his mail, and his pension and social security started landing in an account she controlled. It was the same scheme she'd gone to prison for, except this time the man signing the checks thought he was marrying her. In October, she wrote to Gil, sister Reba with the date November 2nd.

That wedding never happened. What Reba got on the second was a telegram, signed with her brother's name. He was leaving for Palm Springs at 11.30 that morning. He tried to call, but the line was busy. He knew she'd only tried to talk him out of it. She shouldn't worry. Sometime in late November or early December of November. In 1985, Everson Gilmouth died in that house.

While same month, Dorothea hired a handyman named Ismael Flores to put wood paneling up in her apartment. When the work was done, she made an unusual offer. Instead of just paying him in cash, she gave him $800 and a red 1980 Ford pickup. She told him the truck belonged to her boy. boyfriend who was down in Los Angeles and had no use for it anymore. Then she asked him for one more thing. She wanted a wooden box with a lid, six feet long, three feet wide, two feet deep. She said she needed somewhere to keep books and a few other belongings.

Flores built it. When he came back a day or so later, the lid had been nailed shut and the box had gotten heavy enough that moving it took both of them. Dorothea asked him to help her haul it out to a storage place north of town. They loaded it into the pickup and started driving, but somewhere along the way she changed her mind. She said there was just junk inside, so they didn't need to go all the way to the storage facility. Instead, they pulled off onto the Garden Highway in Sutter County at a stretch of riverbank

where people had been dumping their garbage illegally for years and left the box sitting there on the ground. On December 22, 1985, one of Gil's friends got a letter from someone named Irene. It said that she and Gil had gotten married in early December and were very happy. They were staying with an old friend until the 29th, then heading to family in Tulsa.

She mentioned her three grown children and said Gil would write once they got settled. In reality, there was no Irene. Dorothea made her up, along with a wedding, the friend, the trip, and the children. Ten days later, on New Year's Day, 1986, the fishermen working that stretch of the Sacramento River, spotted the box on the bank and called the police. Sutter County deputies pried the lid off

and found the body of an elderly man inside. wrapped in sheeting and plastic and sealed up with duct tape. He had been dead for months. There was no wallet and no identification. He was buried as a John Doe. Reba hadn't heard from her brother since the telegram, so she called the Sacramento police and asked them to go check on him. In April, she got a letter from Gill's wife, not from Dorothea, though,

from someone calling themselves Irene, the same person who, had contacted Gil's friend. Irene said she knew all about the police call. She wrote that she and Gil had come back through Sacramento for the rest of his things and heard Reba had been worried. She explained that he'd had a small stroke in January. It couldn't drive anymore. So they'd sold the trailer and the truck and bought a new car. They were going to Canada in August and would stop in on the way. Irene wrote that he'd lost about 15 pounds and was feeling much better. She also said that they went to church every week. That was enough for Reba.

She stopped worrying and she stopped calling the police. She had no idea that by the time she read that letter, her brother had been in the ground in Sutter County for three months in a grave with no name on it. True Scary Story is a podcast where people share their own terrifying encounters. It was actually chosen as a podcast of the month on Apple Podcasts Darkside Collection. And also is the top-ranking show on Spotify. Ghost stories, retelling of long-lost memories and nightmares that seem a little too real. Come find us by searching for True Scary Story on your podcast app or tell us your own encounter over on TruescarryStory.com.

I'll see you there. Everson Gilmouth drove to Sacramento in the fall of 1985 to marry Dorothea Puente. A few months later, a man with no name was buried in Sutter County, and Gil's sister was getting letters from a woman who didn't exist. Meanwhile, Dorothea was still renting the upstairs of Ricardo, Ordo Rica's place on F Street. There was room for about eight tenants, and Dorothea didn't need all that space, so she told the caseworkers she'd worked with previously that she had beds again. From what we can tell, nobody ever asked Ricardo what he thought was going on up there,

not to mention that running a boarding house broke the terms of Dorothea's release. She did it anyway. Federal probation officers came by again and again over the next two years. Every time, they found a spotless home and a place. polite older woman who explained that the people upstairs were friends and houseguests. And finding tenants wasn't a problem for Dorothea. Sacramento still had nowhere to put people who were old and sick and broke. So the house filled up the same way her old place had, one referral at a time. Leona Carpenter was 78, a widow, and one of the oldest of the

group. By the end, she couldn't get across a room without help. She knew what was coming, and she'd already made her own funeral arrangements. Dorothy Miller was 64 and a veteran, and she'd been drinking hard for a long time. Benjamin Fink was 55 and a former sailor. By all accounts, he was the funniest person in that house. He was also a heavy drinker and had away with women. James Gallup was 62 and had a brain tumor. He pitched in around the place when he was able to. Vera Faye Martin was 64 and Betty Palmer was 78. There's almost nothing left in the record about either woman beyond a name, an age, and a photograph. Every one of them was living on some kind of government money,

whether that was a pension, social security, disability, or veterans benefits, and every one of them had handed the paperwork over to their landlady because she was good at it and because that was the arrangement. Dorothea brought in the mail herself and managed the accounts. She handed each tenant a small allowance out of their own check and kept the rest for room, board, and what she called expenses. Investigators later determined that she was bringing in around $5,000 a month with the con and Gil's pension was still part of it. His checks were still arriving at 1426F Street with his name on them. And that's the thing about the arrangement. Once Dorothea had the paperwork, the money didn't depend on the tenant at all. The checks came whether the person they belonged to

was upstairs or not, which mattered because people left that house all the time. Boardinghouse tenants move on. So nobody said much when Leona Carpenter stopped coming down for meals, or when James Gallup wasn't around to help out anymore, or when Betty Palmer's room went quiet. In October, 1987, Dorothy Miller, the veteran, was seen at that house for the last time. Nobody reported any of them missing. But outside the house, one person can't.

kept pushing. Her name was Brenda Trujillo, and she'd shared a cell with Dorothea years earlier, then stayed at 1426 F Street for a stretch after that. By 1987, Brenda was back in jail and telling anyone who would listen that Dorothea Plente was drugging her tenants and taking their money. On November 29th of that year, she put it in writing to the Social Security Administration. She told them that even though she was in jail, Dorothea was still cashing her checks. She gave them the address.

She gave them the amounts. A first check for $3,000 and then $500 a month after that, none of which she'd ever seen. And she spelled out the part that should have stopped everything cold. The woman collecting that money was already on federal parole for doing exactly this. But Brenda was a heroin user with a long record in the history of sex work and she was writing from custody. Nothing happened. That January Dorothea wrote her own letter to Brenda, not to argue with her, to keep managing her. She said she'd gone down to Social Security on Brenda's behalf that week, that she wasn't sure the power of attorney would hold up,

and that she'd tell them Brenda was sick. Then she told her not to breathe a word of it to anyone, not her mother, not anyone. A few weeks after that, on February 3rd, 1988, a man named Elvaro Montoya moved into the boarding house. Everyone called him Bert. He was 51 and originally from Costa Rica. He had schizophrenia, and it had never been treated

in a meaningful way, so he spent most of his life somewhere where the rest of us couldn't follow. He heard voices and he argued with them out loud, usually in Spanish. He talked to trees. He knew a little English but not much, and most of the time he didn't speak at all. People who saw him shuffling around downtown and dirty clothes assumed he was another drunk. He wasn't. Burt didn't drink. He'd been sleeping in a shed on Front Street where volunteers of America,

America put homeless men, and by all accounts, he was the gentlest person in that building. It was almost childlike. His outreach counselor, a woman named Judy Moise, was fond of him in a way that went past the job. She could see the street grinding him down, and she wanted him somewhere with a door that locked and a person on the other side of it who would notice him. She'd heard good things about Dorothea Puente, so she went to. to meet her in person before placing Bert in her care. She liked what she saw. Bert moved in, and a couple of days later, another room in that house opened up. Dorothea said Vera Faye Martin

had moved on. For a while, it looked like the best call Judy ever made. Dorothea took Bert to get his hair cut. She bought him clothes that fit. She fed him three meals a day and gave him small jobs around the house, so his week had a shape to it. When Judy stopped in to check on him, he was clean and steady and talking more than she'd ever heard him talk, both in Spanish and in English. What Judy didn't know was that Dorothea had already walked Bert down to the Social Security office and had herself listed as his cousin, so his benefits would come to her. Then that April, about two months after Bert arrived, Ben Fink came off a heavy stretch of drinking. Dorothea told another tenant that she was going to, quote, take Ben upstairs and make him feel better.

That was the last time anybody saw him. Inside that house, nobody asked a single question about where Ben Fink had gone. But outside it, the neighbors had started to notice something. There was a smell. It had been coming and going around the house for a while. By the middle of 1988, it was bad enough that people on the block sat in the heat with their windows shut, rather than run the air conditioning and pull it indoors. When the neighbors asked her about it, Dorothea said the sewer had backed up. Another time, she blamed the fish fertilizer she used in the garden. She spread lime and bleach across the yard and sprayed air freshener through the house whenever company was coming. None of it made a difference. And then there was the digging? She kept

hiring men to dig holes out back, mostly parolees from the local halfway house. One of them was a 74-year-old former tenant named Homer Myers, who dug a hole he was told would hold an apricot tree. Dorothy said she'd checked with a nursery, and they told her it needed to be four feet by four feet and five feet deep. Dorothea was still digging in that yard at the end of the summer, which is right around the time Bert Montoya stopped showing up for his doctor's appointments. Judy called the house. Dorothea told her Bert had gone to Mexico to visit relatives and would be back in a few. days. Weeks went by. Judy called again that fall and told Dorothy as she was thinking about going to the police. A day or two later, her phone rang. A man on the line said he was a relative of Bert's,

that Bert was staying with him in Utah and that everything was fine. He introduced himself as Don Anthony. Then a beat later, he gave a different name. None of it made sense to Judy. Burt had no family in Mexico because he wasn't from Mexico. He had no relatives in Utah that she'd ever heard of, and he couldn't have gotten himself to Utah if you'd handed him a ticket and driven him to the station. After talking to Dawn, she called Dorothea about it, but she just confirmed the whole story and added a detail.

A relative had come by on a Sunday while she was at church, collected Bert and left a note behind. Judy wasn't convinced. On November 7, 1988, she filed a missing person report with the Sacramento Police Department. An officer named Richard Ewing took it, drove over to 1426 F Street. Before he went, Judy told him there was one tenant in that house worth talking to. She'd been in and out of the place for months checking on Burt, and she knew who was reliable. John Sharp was a 64-year-old retired cook who'd been living there for about 11 months.

He wasn't drinking, wasn't using, and wasn't confused. If anybody in that building could give an officer a straight account, it was him. Ewing stood in the front room and asked his questions with Dorothea and John both standing there. Dorothea told the story about the relative and the Sunday and the note, standing right beside her, John backed her up. Ewing thanked them both and headed out. He hadn't gotten far down the street when John Sharp caught up with him and put a piece of paper in his hand. It was seven words.

She wants me to lie to you. John asked if they could talk somewhere away from the house. Once they sat down, all of it came out. He said Dorothea had coached the whole house on what to tell the police about Bert. He said she'd been paying men from the halfway house to dig holes in the yard and that some of those holes had been covered over with concrete. He said that on the night Ben Fink supposedly moved out, he'd heard something heavy being dragged.

And he told Ewing there was a smell coming from one of the rooms upstairs. Within a day, a file landed on the death. of a Sacramento homicide detective named John Cabrera. On the morning of Friday, November 11, 1988, Cabrera drove over to F Street with two other men and a couple of shovels. Dorothea met them at the door. She said they were welcome to look anywhere they liked. Then she stood on the porch and watched them start digging.

Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on Dorothea Puente and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crimehouse original, powered by Dave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference.

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Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Paige Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Bertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa, Mara de la Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Russell Mash. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening, everyone. Before you go, I am hosting a new show with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. It's called What the Fact. Every week we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them.

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