Vanessa Richardson

The situation with the nurse had set Dorothea off.

She couldn't accept Bert trying to criticize her like that again.

So that evening, back at the house, Dorothea poisoned Bert with enough pills to kill him.

She kept his body in her bedroom overnight, and the next morning, the peach tree that Bert had dug the hole for arrived.

Dorothea buried Bert's body in the hole and planted the tree on top.

Then in front of the other tenants, she pretended to be inconsolable after learning that Bert had left in the middle of the night to go live with his sister without saying goodbye.

However, over the next few months, Dorothea told Judy, as well as another social worker, Peggy Nickerson, inconsistent stories about where Bert was.

Sometimes she said he was visiting family in Utah, other times Mexico.

But Judy and Peggy knew that Burt didn't have any family in Mexico.

Continuing to build her web of lies, Dorothea then said that Burt wanted to stay with his sister and her husband and live with them permanently in Utah.

She was racking her brain for ways to keep them off this case.

Despite Dorothea's efforts, Peggy then insisted that she needed to talk to Bert's family.

In response, Dorothea called in a favor with yet another former convict she was acquainted with.

She asked the man to pretend to be a member of Bert's family when Peggy called.

He agreed, and Dorothea gave Peggy the man's phone number.

Still, the call only raised more questions.

Peggy had a hunch something was wrong when she heard the man on the line.

First, the man referred to Alvaro as Bert, but he had no reason to call him by his relatively new nickname.

To make matters worse, the man used his own name instead of the one Dorothea told him to give.

Now Peggy was fed up with Dorothea's games.