Landlady Hunted in Mass Murders Captured in L.A.

The Sacramento woman suspected of murdering seven of her boarders to collect their Social Security checks was arrested Wednesday night at a motel just west of downtown Los Angeles, police said.

Dorothea Montalvo Puente was arrested without a struggle at about 10:40 p.m. at the Royal Viking Motel at 3rd and Alvarado streets, where she had checked in on Sunday, one day after investigators began uncovering bodies in the back yard of the Victorian-style home she rented near the state Capitol, investigators said.

“We weren’t sure it was her,” said Sgt. Paul von Lutzow. “She used an (alias) Donna Johanson, but her ID checked out. We got a tip from a patron at a nearby bar that this woman looked like the one being sought.”

The gray-haired, bespectacled Puente, wearing a long, red overcoat over her dress, was led from the motel in handcuffs. She held her head down and refused to answer questions shouted at her by reporters as she was led to a patrol car for a trip to nearby Rampart Division station, where she was booked on suspicion of murder and held without bail.

“She was real cool,” Von Lutzow said. “She was real calm. She was not intimidated by police.”

Investigators said a nearby resident met Puente, who called herself Donna Johanson, in a neighborhood bar and made a date to meet her again today. He then called a local television station and said the woman looked like “the lady they were looking for in Sacramento,” Von Lutzow said.

Police Cmdr. William Booth said the man talked to KCBS-TV news assignment editor Gene Silver.

Silver called Booth, the department’s chief spokesman, at home, and Booth notified Rampart Division commanders. Officers took up postions at the motel.

“I knocked on the door and talked briefly to her,” Von Lutzow said. “She didn’t say much. When I asked her for some ID, she went to her purse and got her driver’s license. . . .”

The license identified the woman as Dorothea Puente Montalvo.

“She appeared to know we might be coming,” Von Lutzow said. “She didn’t put up a struggle or curse us or anything. Usually when the police go into someone’s motel room, people get upset. But she showed no emotion, almost like she expected us.”

Nina Chunnachatchawalkn, an employee of T.G. Express, a small restaurant and coffee shop next door to the motel, said she first noticed the suspect on Monday.

“She used to come in two or three times a day,” she said. “She doesn’t talk much. She usually would have a bowl of soup and drink one beer and in the evening she would take out two separate orders for dinner and two beers. She didn’t care, she took any kind of beer.”

Earlier in the day, Sacramento Police Chief John Kearns acknowledged that his officers committed a serious error by allowing Puente to disappear just hours after the first of the seven bodies were dug up in her back yard.

Although detectives Saturday did not have enough evidence to arrest Puente, Kearns said, “she should have been followed.”

“She should have been tailed very closely. She was a prime suspect in a homicide case. There isn’t any excuse as far as I am concerned why the suspect was not kept under surveillance,” Kearns said.

“It was a judgment call. The Sacramento Police Department made an error and as a result of that, we have lost the suspect,” he said.

Kearns, who had been in Los Angeles attending a California Police Chiefs Assn. conference when one of the most sensational murder stories in Sacramento history began unfolding late last week at the Victorian boarding house, defended his department’s decision not to arrest the boarding house proprietress, saying officers might have jeopardized their case if they had acted in haste.

“You’ve got to realize you’re walking on egg shells when talking to a suspect without an arrest warrant or a search warrant. She could have refused to allow the officers to dig in the yard,” he said.

The department has been criticized by local officials and neighbors for allowing the main suspect to slip away from the scene and walk unescorted to a nearby hotel, ostensibly to visit a nephew. The criticism intensified when affidavits filed in the case revealed that police knew the woman had a prison record and a propensity for lying.

Before her arrest in Los Angeles, police had formally appealed to Mexican officials for help in locating Puente.

Citing insufficient evidence, police on Wednesday also released Mervin John McCauley, a tenant in the boarding house who had been arrested as an accessory Sunday.

A warning about Puente’s operation of the downtown rooming house was sounded last June when the Sacramento County Adult Protective Services office complained to the state Department of Social Services that she was running an unlicensed board-and-care facility and that she once had been sent to prison for misuse of client funds.

But Puente apparently was able to lie her way out of suspicion, persuading a state licensing inspector that only a cousin lived in the house and that she occasionally offered free temporary shelter to homeless people, according to a state licensing report. The state inspector concluded that the complaint that Puente was providing care and supervision without a license was unfounded.

At the time of the state inspector’s visit June 30, Alberto Montoya, a severly mentally ill man whom Puente since has been accused of murdering, was a tenant and under her care.

Court records obtained Wednesday show that Puente has a long history of criminal activity, arrests and convictions for a variety of offenses dating back to 1948.

Over time, each of her clashes with the law proved more serious and more violent than the last.

Yet she was able repeatedly to place herself into positions of trust despite her criminal record--working as a nurse’s aide and as a manager of board-and-care homes, with responsibility for elderly, mentally disturbed and physically disabled persons.

She “was known for her generosity and hospitality to those in need,” stated a Sacramento County probation report prepared for the court in 1982 when she was sentenced to five years in prison for doping a series of victims, stealing their cash and jewelry and forging signatures on their checks.

The same report reveals a troubled life and a seriously disturbed personality.

A psychiatrist who was treating her at the time of sentencing described her as a “schizophrenic, chronic undifferentiated type” and “a very disturbed woman.”

In recommending that she serve prison time, probation officials asserted that Puente “has demonstrated that she is a danger to elderly persons.”

Puente was born in California, the youngest of 18 children, she told probation officials who prepared the 1982 report. Both her parents were dead by the time she was 5, she told authorities; she was raised by her grandmother and an aunt in Fresno.

The records indicate that she was married at least four times--the first when she was 17.

By age 19, she was a widow and a convicted felon, found guilty of forging checks in Riverside.

In 1960, she served 90 days in Sacramento County Jail “for residing in a house of ill fame and received 90 days suspended for vagrancy,” the probation report said.

Eighteen years later after at least one other brush with the law, she was convicted in federal court for fraudulently endorsing “approximately 34 checks”--U.S. Treasury payments to residents in a board-and-care facility that Puente operated.

While on federal probation, she was again found guilty of forging checks, this time on state charges.

Boyer reported from Los Angeles; Ellis from Sacramento. Times staff writers Nieson Himmel, Maureen Fan and Tyler Chin in Los Angeles and Jerry Gillam, John Hurst and Paul Jacobs in Sacramento contributed to this article.