Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, Crime House community. It's Vanessa Richardson. Exciting news. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is leveling up. Starting the week of January 12th, you'll be getting two episodes every week. Wednesdays, we unravel the conspiracy or the cult. And on Fridays, we look at a corresponding crime. Every week has a theme. Tech, bioterror, power, paranoia, you name it.
Follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes now on your podcast app. because you're about to dive deeper, get weirder, and go darker than ever before. We've all been misled by someone we trusted. Maybe it was our own misguided notions, or maybe they tricked us. Either way, we can usually dust ourselves off and learn from the mistake.
But when it comes to someone as cold and calculated as Dorothea Puente, the deceit can leave scars that last a lifetime. Dorothea spent decades perfecting her innocent act. She convinced everyone around her that she was a respectable, charitable woman. Some people even viewed her as a savior. But Dorothea was the opposite.
And when she finally crossed paths with someone she couldn't trick, the world learned she was nothing more than a cold-hearted killer. The human mind is powerful. It shapes how we think, feel, love, and hate. But sometimes it drives people to commit the unthinkable. This is Killer Minds, a Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson.
And I'm Dr. Tristan Engels. Every Monday and Thursday, we uncover the darkest minds in history, analyzing what makes a killer.
Crime House is made possible by you. Follow Killer Minds and subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts for ad-free early access to each two-part series. Before we get started, you should know this episode contains descriptions of child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and murder.
Today we conclude our deep dive on Dorothea Puente, a scammer turned serial killer who posed as a caretaker to gain people's trust and bleed them dry. Dorothea hid her crimes in plain sight, but eventually people caught on to the woman known as the Death House Landlady, and the true extent of her heartless crimes was revealed.
As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how some criminals are able to garner blind trust from those around them, even as they're actively carrying out violent crimes, how some offenders exploit known flaws in the system to manipulate and maintain control over others, and why even the most ruthless killers sometimes can't own up to their own actions.
And as always, we'll be asking the question, what makes a killer? By 1982, 53-year-old Dorothea Puente had drugged and killed one of her boarding house tenants, a woman in her 60s named Ruth Monroe. Shortly afterward, Dorothea drugged and robbed a man in his 70s named Malcolm McKenzie after meeting him at a bar. Dorothea thought she was getting away with her escalating crimes.
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Chapter 2: What manipulative tactics did Dorothea Puente use to gain trust?
But she wanted even more, and she knew she could make it happen. She just had to make sure to keep a steady rotation of tenants. Dorothea also pretended to be much older than she was. She wore large framed glasses and colored her hair white so that she'd appear elderly. This helped her trick people into thinking she was frail and harmless. Dorothea's mind games didn't end there.
She also started encouraging some of her tenants to go out and enjoy local bars. She chose people who she knew had struggled with alcohol addiction in the past, and she even gave them cash. Then, after a couple hours when Dorothea figured they were nice and liquored up, she'd call the police and report a drunk in public, which they'd be arrested for.
They'd usually end up behind bars for 30 days, which was enough time for Dorothea to move someone else into their room and kill them before the original tenant came back.
So it's incredibly hypocritical when you look at how much admiration she received, even from social workers who knew she was breaking the rules. On one hand, I understand why they praised her. Resources for vulnerable populations are scarce, and someone opening their home can appear heroic, but also it's useful for them.
But that praise gets dangerous when the person providing the help is also violating the law. Once someone is willing to cross legal and ethical boundaries for a good cause, you have to ask, where does that boundary stop? They should have asked those questions of Dorothea, but instead of doing that, they looked at her like she looked at her victims.
They saw her usefulness only and filtered out the rest. And that's exactly why her tactics worked. Dorothea weaponized that contradiction. The image of the benevolent caregiver paired with the reality of predatory behavior. Psychologically, this tells us who she really is. She's someone who is a skilled manipulator and a chameleon, even to the professionals who should be able to see that.
That is just utterly cold-hearted. Do you think she views life as a game of survival of the fittest, and so she doesn't feel any kind of sympathy toward others?
I think, sadly, this is a predictable outcome of a lifetime shaped by danger and deprivation, emotional disconnection, and her personality structure. People who grow up in environments like hers sometimes learn to view the world through a stark binary lens, like I survive or I don't.
And Dorothea learned early that people were either sources of threat or sources of utility, and there was no middle ground. So by the time she was running her boarding home, she wasn't seeing human beings. She was scanning for the needs that she could exploit, vulnerabilities she could capitalize on, and opportunities to maintain absolute control.
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Chapter 3: How did Dorothea's past influence her criminal behavior?
That's when we judge someone based on how well they match our internal template of a quote, good person. Most of us are taught to see a maternal woman who, for example, keeps a tidy home, tends a garden, bakes cookies, and cares for vulnerable people as safe and trustworthy. We are also influenced by a confirmation bias.
Once we decide someone is kind or trustworthy, we unconsciously filter out information that contradicts it. Any small red flag gets reframed as a misunderstanding or some kind of like quirk or someone else's problem. Social workers did this. Neighbors did this. Even the tenants did this. There's also the halo effect.
When a person appears warm or helpful in one domain, we assume goodness and generalize that to all other domains. Dorothea presented herself as altruistic, so people extended that trait to everything she did. Put all those biases together and you get a psychological blind spot big enough for someone like her to operate in plain sight undetected for as long as she did.
And when a predator looks nothing like our mental image of a predator, we're less likely to notice warning signs, even when they're right in front of us.
Dorothea's role as caregiver was her greatest disguise, so great that she not only duped everyone, but she also came to believe it herself. She monitored tenants closely to make sure they were taking their medications, prepared home-cooked meals, and made sure everyone's laundry was pressed and their rooms were tidy.
By 1987, when Dorothea was 58 years old, no one had any idea that she'd killed about six people. Everything was going smoothly for her until one of her tenants, 77-year-old Betty Palmer, started to give her trouble. Betty started openly questioning why Dorothea was cashing everyone's checks for them.
She even told her bank not to let anyone else cash her checks, which meant Dorothea no longer had access to Betty's money. And without her money, Dorothea had no use for Betty. So she used her usual methods to take Betty's life. However, Dorothea took extra measures when it came to burying her. Dorothea contacted a man who went by the name Chief, who she occasionally hired for odd jobs.
He was big and strong, the perfect person for the manual labor she needed done. And he was also an unhoused ex-convict who likely wouldn't go to the police. She brought him up to Betty's room, where her body was, and asked Chief to dismember her. Chief did as Dorothea asked. Then they buried Betty's remains in the backyard.
And that apparently wasn't the end of Dorothea's plan, because soon after, Chief went missing. And since he was a bit of a drifter, there were no official records of him, which meant the authorities had no way to find him.
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Chapter 4: What methods did Dorothea use to kill her tenants?
This was her domain, a world she had engineered and managed without interference, and I believe that led her to miscalculate the risk of this and overestimate her cleverness. It's as if she believed she could manage the investigators the same way she managed all of her tenants and everyone else.
If Dorothea was panicked at all, she didn't show it. She stood calmly and looked on as the officers started with what seemed to be the newest patch of turned soil. They dug around and found some pieces of cloth and plastic. Then they pulled on something that seemed to be a root, but it wouldn't relent. They kept digging around it until they could finally tug it free.
And that's when they saw what it really was. A human shinbone. When the officers looked back at the hole they'd just dug, they also spotted a shoe with a severed foot inside of it. The policemen froze. They turned to face Dorothea, who wore a look of shock and horror. However, Detective Cabrera wasn't immediately suspicious.
He'd seen dead bodies before, and he could tell these remains had been here much longer than Bert had been missing. Cabrera knew something terrible had happened here, but he still didn't think Dorothea was guilty of anything. So he told his team to pack up and made plans to return the next day with a full forensic team.
This allowed him to obtain a full search warrant of the property in the meantime. When they returned the next day, Dorothea welcomed them onto her property again, but instead of lingering in the backyard, she went upstairs to her bedroom. As she watched them from her window, reality started to dawn on her. They were going to find the bodies, some of which may still be recognizable.
She had to get out of there. Dorothea stuffed $4,000 in cash into her purse and walked out to the garden. She asked Detective Cabrera if she was under arrest, and he reassured her she wasn't. Then she asked him if she could go to a nearby hotel to grab a cup of coffee to calm her nerves. Cabrera offered to drive her himself.
When he dropped her off, he told her to call him when she was ready to be picked up. Dorothea thanked him, and as soon as he drove away, she booked it to the airport. She bought a ticket to Los Angeles, but she knew that detectives would discover this, so instead of getting on the plane, Dorothea took a bus to LA instead.
No one had any idea she was on the run, and over the course of the next several hours, investigators dug up seven more bodies in her backyard. One of the bodies, which belonged to a woman, was wearing a wristwatch that was still ticking. Unlike a lot of the other remains, the detectives realized that she hadn't been dead for very long.
In fact, she seemed to have died during the time that Dorothea lived at the house. Detective Cabrera realized he'd made a huge mistake by letting Dorothea go. He immediately launched a search for her and enlisted the help of the FBI. Meanwhile, Dorothea had arrived in LA, and her first stop was a bar where she sought out a man she could potentially rob.
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Chapter 5: How did Dorothea evade suspicion from social workers?
Or is she unwilling to admit that she's becoming just as bad of a person as those who once hurt her, if not worse?
So it's not uncommon for offenders like Dorothea to admit to partial truths. In fact, partial admission is a classic strategy among individuals with antisocial traits. It allows them to appear cooperative without actually surrendering control of the narrative.
By confessing to a lesser offense like theft, Dorothea signals just enough compliance to seem reasonable while still distancing herself from the more damning accusations. So in that sense, it most certainly is a strategy to mitigate consequences. But as I mentioned earlier,
There's really a deeper layer here, too, with regard to outrunning the truth of who she really is and how, like, to the core, how she is potentially just as bad or worse than the people who harmed her.
Dorothea's lies had brought her this far, but it was the end of the road. She was initially charged with one count of murder. However, investigators soon identified all seven bodies. The victims were Alvaro Burt Montoya, Betty Palmer, and Ruth Monroe, as well as Benjamin Fink, Dorothy Miller, Leona Carpenter, Vera Faye Martin, and James Gallop.
In addition, Everson Gilmuth's body was soon identified. This brought Dorothea's murder charges up to nine counts. Now, Ruth's family finally learned the truth about her death, and Judy and Peggy learned the truth of what happened to Bert. And while all the families now had closure for their missing loved ones, the reality was nonetheless devastating.
All of Dorothea's victims had entered her home in search of peace and stability. Instead, they were robbed and murdered. After a series of delays, Dorothea's trial began on February 9th, 1993, when she was 64 years old. The proceedings ended up being the longest trial in California history at the time.
The prosecution had decided to drop the fraud charges against her because they didn't want to confuse the jury. So they focused exclusively on the murder charges. However, there were still more than 150 witnesses and thousands of pages of documents to present to the court.
Dorothea's lawyers tried to rely on character witnesses who reiterated the goodwill Dorothea had built in the community and the number of people she had helped. The jury ultimately deadlocked on most counts, but convicted Dorothea on three. For much of the jury, the circumstantial evidence and the heavily decomposed remains made them hesitant to draw certain conclusions.
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