Friendly Woman in Bar Sure Looked Familiar, Then He Remembered Why

When the gray-haired woman sidled up next to him at his favorite bar near downtown Los Angeles and eventually asked him about his disability checks, Charles Willgues didn’t suspect a thing.

She called herself Donna and seemed pleasant enough, he thought. Intelligent too. And as they got to know each other over drinks, she persuaded him to take her shopping Thursday and offered to cook him Thanksgiving dinner next week.

When he figured out later who she was--suspected mass murderer Dorothea Montalvo Puente--Willgues was thankful he didn’t take up her offer.

The 59-year-old carpenter was credited Thursday with leading authorities to Puente, also 59, a boardinghouse manager from Sacramento suspected of killing her tenants for their Social Security checks and then burying them in her yard.

After realizing that the woman he met in the bar resembled a photograph he had seen on television, Willgues called KCBS-TV Channel 2. The station contacted police and Puente was arrested at her motel room within hours.

“I’m just very thankful that the relationship didn’t go any further,” said Willgues, who lives alone and has business cards that identify him as “Chuck the Handyman.”

Willgues said that after visiting a hardware store to buy a glass cutter, he decided to have a beer Wednesday afternoon at the Monte Carlo tavern, a few blocks from his apartment in the 3400 block of West 2nd Street.

He was nursing his first beer when a woman wearing a red pleated skirt and high heels came in around 2 p.m. and sat down at the end of the bar.

“The heat from the refrigerator motor comes out right there where you’re sitting,” Willgues said he warned her politely.

She thanked him for his concern and took the stool next to his.

She ordered a screwdriver--vodka and orange juice--and introduced herself as Donna Johansson, he said. Her husband, she told Willgues, had died a month ago and she had left her home near Sacramento on Monday, hoping to build a new life and rid herself of the grief she felt over his death.

But her luck was no better in Los Angeles, she told Willgues. The cab driver who took her from the bus station to the $25-a-night Royal Viking Motel at 3rd and Alvarado streets, where she was staying, had driven off with four of her suitcases and an overnight bag. And on top of it all, Donna lamented, the heels of her red pumps--the only shoes she had left--had worn down from all the walking she had done while searching for a decent place to stay.

Willgues was empathic.

“I’m a friendly person,” he admitted, “so I offered to take her shoes across the street and have them repaired.”

The woman accepted his offer and gave him $3 for the necessary repairs.

“I was very relaxed with her,” Willgues said, “She seemed very thoughtful and intelligent, a typical grandmother-type person.”

The conversation eventually turned to money. She asked Willgues how he supported himself. Willgues, who has emphysema, arthritis and has had two mild strokes, told her that he receives $576 each month from Social Security.

“She told me that you can get up to $680 in Social Security,” Willgues said of the woman, who has been accused of killing tenants for their Social Security checks and who spent time in prison for drugging and then robbing older people she met in bars.

Willgues said he did not find her inquiry about his finances suspicious at the time.

Then Donna had an idea: “She said, ‘You’re alone; I’m alone. Thanksgiving is coming up and I’m a great cook. How about I cook you Thanksgiving dinner at your apartment?’ ”

If Willgues was taken aback by Donna’s proposal, he was even more surprised by the one that followed:

“She said, ‘Maybe we can share an apartment.’ I told her I got all I can handle right now. I told her I’d think about it.”

They agreed to meet Thursday morning and go shopping for clothes to replace the ones that had disappeared, along with Donna’s suitcases. Donna wrote her name, address and telephone number on one of Willgues’ business cards and handed it back to him.

He called her a cab, but not before buying her two chicken dinners at a nearby fast-food restaurant.

“She gave me $20 and told me to get anything but the wings,” Willgues remembers. “She said she wanted two dinners so she wouldn’t have to go out later. She said she didn’t like going out after 5 o’clock because it was dangerous.”

When he got back to his own apartment that afternoon, he could not get Donna’s face out of his mind. No longer clouded in dim bar light, a troubling image began to grow.

“I knew I had seen this woman before,” he said, “but I couldn’t place it right away.”

And then in a flash, it occurred to him where he might have seen her: on the television news. She looked a lot like the rooming house landlady they were looking for in Sacramento, the one that they said had buried all those people in her back yard.

Willgues watched the 5 p.m. news on Channel 2, hoping KCBS would show the suspect’s photograph again. When no photograph was aired, Willgues called the station.

“I didn’t want to call the police, because I didn’t want to get an innocent person involved in something that I wasn’t sure of,” he explained. “And when you call the police to complain about all the drugs and gangs, it takes them two hours to get here.”

KCBS assignment editor Gene Silver drove to Willgues’ apartment immediately and showed him a Los Angeles Times clipping of the suspect’s photograph.

“It could be her,” Willgues said he told Silver.

It was, as it turned out. Silver notified the Los Angeles Police Department, and Puente was arrested without incident Wednesday night.

On Thursday, as reporters and cameramen scurried in and out of his tiny apartment, Chuck the Handyman questioned whether Puente committed the crimes of which was she has been accused.

“With her small size and all, she does not look like the type of person who could have buried these people,” Willgues said. “But you never know.”