1 of 7 Boardinghouse Bodies Was Mutilated

The last of seven bodies recovered last week from a boardinghouse graveyard was a woman, possibly 60 years old with an artificial hip joint; she was missing her head, hands and feet, the coroner said Tuesday.

The woman’s severed body parts were not recovered from the narrow yard where the bodies of three men and four women were unearthed over four days beginning Nov. 11, said Sacramento County Coroner Charles Simmons.

The headless corpse, the last of the seven bodies to be autopsied by the coroner’s office, was recovered from a shallow grave in the tiny, lavishly landscaped front yard and was the only one that had been mutilated, Simmons said.

He said that it could not be determined if the mutilation occurred before or after death but that there were no other marks of physical violence on the badly decomposed body or any sign of disease.

The manager of the boardinghouse that catered to elderly or disabled tenants, Dorothea Montalvo Puente, 59, was arrested last week at a Los Angeles motel and returned to Sacramento, where she is charged with the murder of missing tenant Alvaro Montoya. She is being held without bail.

But Simmons said none of the seven bodies appears to match the description of Montoya, 52. Montoya, who was mentally disabled, had been receiving Social Security checks that continued to be cashed after his disappearance three months ago.

Coroner’s toxicologist James Beede said an analysis of brain, liver and other tissues and blood for drugs or poisons will be completed within two weeks on all seven bodies in the attempt to establish a cause of death.

“We’re not exactly sure what we’re looking for,” said Beede, who conceded that authorities may “never find out” what caused the deaths.

Only one of the seven bodies has been identified so far: Benjamin Fink, 55, a one-time tenant at the house.

Simmons said the headless corpse, wrapped in a cotton shroud, had been buried for several months. The woman had been about 5-foot-3, at least 50 and possibly 60 years old, he said. A continuing police investigation prevented him from discussing how her hands, feet and head had been severed, Simmons said.

Court documents show that a carpet stained with blood and body fluids was taken from the boardinghouse during a search by investigators, along with “miscellaneous papers pertaining to funeral plots,” a handwritten book and a paperback book titled “The Smell of Evil.”