Landlady’s Mystery Grows as 6th, 7th Bodies Found

Homicide investigators digging in the garden of a Victorian boarding house that sheltered elderly renters unearthed the sixth and seventh bodies Monday, as authorities sought an eccentric landlady as the suspected mass murderer.

Using backhoes and steel rods to probe the rain-soaked yard, detectives found one body buried under a metal utility shed and a few hours later, a second in the meticulously maintained front yard under a shrine of St. Francis of Assisi.

“We are still digging. We will continue to dig. We won’t stop until we’ve dug up every square inch of this yard,” Police Sgt. Bob Burns said.

Police speculated that the landlady, Dorothea Montalvo Puente, 59, killed her boarders for their Social Security and other benefit checks. An arrest warrant was issued Monday for Puente, who walked away from her boarding house Saturday dressed in purple spike heels, pink dress and a red overcoat shortly after being questioned by police. Officers said they did not have enough evidence to hold her at the time, although they had discovered one of the bodies by then.

Fourth Day

Burns said police--in their fourth day of digging--were also investigating a neighbor’s report that the suspect used to garden at odd hours in a once-vacant adjacent lot and left “6-foot-long” depressions in the ground. Additionally, detectives were interviewing neighbors at a second boarding home a few blocks away that the suspect is believed to have managed a decade ago.

Puente was variously described by friends and acquaintences as a charming, grandmotherly person and as a “cold-blooded” crook who drugged her victims and was given to apparent fantasies.

At a shabby neighborhood bar on the corner near her boarding house, she was still spoken of in near-reverent tones Monday as the woman who regularly tipped bartenders $10 each month and bought Giorgio perfume and makeup for her favorite waitress.

“She was a classy lady--Elizabeth Taylor with white hair,” recalled one of the bartenders. Down the street, however, at an upscale hotel where she went to drink once a month, the recollections were less generous.

“She’s crazy. She’s nuts,” said a bartender who asked that she not be identified.

She said Puente told tales of having been a prisoner of war during World War II and tried to pass herself off as a wealthy surgeon who owned homes in Lake Tahoe and Mexico. Puente told the bartender that a book about her war experiences was soon to be published. More recently, she confided that she had been diagnosed as having cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy.

“She was like a person living in a fantasy world--always impressing people with money,” the bartender said.

Puente had criminal convictions in 1978, when she was placed on five years’ probation for forging a U.S. Treasury check, and in 1982, when she slipped “knock-out” drugs into the drinks of elderly men she met at bars and subsequently robbed them. She served 2 1/2 years of a five-year term in that case and was paroled and returned to Sacramento.

William P. Wood, a former deputy district attorney who prosecuted Puente in the 1982 case, described her as “quite coldblooded” but added, “She looks kind of like a Mrs. Butterworth,” the homey figure on the pancake syrup bottle.

Wood said that before her trial, Puente, who speaks Spanish, tried to flee the country but was arrested with an airline ticket to Mexico City in her handbag.

Wrapped Like Mummies

Police said none of the murder victims appear to have met violent deaths, prompting speculation that they may have been poisoned. All but one were wrapped “like mummies” in what appeared to be bed sheets and most were in a fetal position. Detectives began unearthing the remains Friday.

Police said Puente consented to a search of the grounds, after a social worker reported that a client living in the eight-bedroom house had disappeared inexplicably.

None of the victims, including a petite elderly woman who was not wrapped, have been identified. Police said some of the bodies were decomposed and identification may be difficult because the victims were believed to be drifters without extensive dental records.

One tenant, John McCauley, 59, who was described as a close friend of the twice-divorced Puente, was arrested Sunday and charged with being an accessory to homicide. Police said he lied under questioning, although they do not believe he participated in the killings.

A caseworker for Catholic Social Services, Vera Smith, arrived at the digging site Monday in search of John Sharp, a homeless man she had placed in Puente’s care last January. She last visited him in August, when he seemed to be fine. Smith told reporters that she had admired the garden at the time.

“I noticed they had wonderful tomato plants with huge tomatoes,” Smith said. “The tomatoes were doing beautifully. I was tempted to pick one.”

Another social worker, Peggy Nickerson, said she had referred up to 13 people to Puente’s rooming house because the matronly appearing woman accepted people who were the hardest to place: drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill and those whose behavior made them unsuitable for shelter at government-run facilities.

“She was the best the system had to offer. She said she was a widow with a big house, and she said it was her time to give back to other people,” Nickerson recalled. “That was her story, and I didn’t have any reason to doubt her.”

Puente charged from $300 to $350 a month for a room and two meals a day, Nickerson told reporters. But she never again saw the people she sent to Puente, the social worker added.

Nickerson said when she tried to visit one of her clients, Puente would say that the person was not home.

“There was always a reason, and it did fit,” Nickerson said, explaining that the clients “are transient. They are noted for just picking up and going away. You just wouldn’t question their leaving.”

Nickerson said she finally stopped referring clients to the home late in the summer because she believed Puente was verbally abusing some residents.

Puente does not own the Victorian house but rents from a man who works as a gardener at a nearby hotel. The landlord, Ricardo Ordorica, told a reporter that Puente has been renting from him since about 1979, when she moved into the top floor and he and his family lived in the bottom one. After her imprisonment, she returned to the apartment and began taking in boarders. When the family moved to a new home in 1987, she asked to rent the full house.

“We grew to love her,” Ordorica said. “She loves my kids like we were nieces and nephews, and we love her.”

He said Puente often talked of being acquainted with famous people and showed him letters from the King of Jordan, the Shah of Iran and the Pope. He said Puente told him that the Shah had once proposed marriage but she turned him down because she believed he needed to marry someone who could give him an heir.

Ordorica, who used the $600-a-month rent from the house to help pay the mortgage on his new home, now worries what he will do without the income.

“That house in my mind was to be for my children. Now I don’t know,” he said.

For Linda Bloom, a 41-year-old South Pasadena woman, the unfolding case in Sacramento has been especially horrifying. Bloom, through happenstance, discovered two years ago that Puente was her natural mother.

Bloom had been adopted in infancy and raised in Southern California, enjoying what she described as “a great home life,” and now has a family of her own.

Two years ago, she was contacted by a woman who turned out to be her natural cousin. The woman was developing a family tree and wanted to know what information Bloom could provide about Puente, who was the caller’s aunt. It was only then that Bloom learned the identity of her natural mother.

She debated about whether to contact Puente, but before she could decide, Puente contacted her, saying that she had been told Bloom was trying to locate her. Over the past two years, they developed a relationship Bloom described Monday as “very distant.” It consisted mainly of telephone conversations every few months. Puente would also send birthday and holiday cards.

Bloom met Puente only once, dropping by the Sacramento house with her family for a two-hour visit. She said Puente mentioned to her then that she kept boarders downstairs, and Bloom got the impression that was how Puente made her living.

In their telephone conversations, Bloom got the sense that Puente was not always being factual.

“I got the impression that for whatever reasons . . . most of the things she said about her life were not true, and I never tried to look beyond that.”

Bloom does not profess to know Puente well and in fact describes herself as “an innocent bystander” in the escalating case. She said Puente never told her that she was on parole for the 1982 conviction and said she really had no insight into whether Puente might have taken part in the grisly crimes described by detectives.

“All I know,” Bloom said, “is that she said to me on many occasions that she did not have a happy childhood.”

Puente never told her the name of her natural father, saying only that he was dead.

What she did talk about freely was “her garden, how much she enjoyed gardening.”

Times staff writers Virginia Ellis, Douglas Shuit and Paul Jacobs in Sacramento and Peter H. King in Los Angeles contributed to this story.