Landlady in Boardinghouse Deaths Pleads Innocent to 1 Murder Count

Dorothea Montalvo Puente, the landlady of a boardinghouse where seven bodies were found buried last November, pleaded not guilty Friday to one count of murder.

Meanwhile, a 50-page draft report by the Sacramento County Office of Patients’ Rights suggests that two more deaths may be linked to Puente. The report, obtained Thursday by the Sacramento Bee, described the cases of two people whose deaths were ruled suicides by the Sacramento County coroner’s office after interviews with Puente.

Puente, 59, is charged with murdering Alvaro (Bert) Montoya, 52, whose disappearance prompted the police search that discovered the corpses in the yard of the boardinghouse.

She also is suspected in the deaths of seven other people, including a former tenant whose body was found in a box along the Sacramento River on Jan. 1, 1986.

The frail, white-haired woman entered her plea in Municipal Court after Judge John Stroud declared that she had had enough time to consider the charge.

The county report said the other possible victims were Ruth Monroe, 61, who died of an overdose of codeine and another drug in 1982, and Eugene Gamel, 58, who overdosed on amitriptyline and ethanol in July, 1987.

Monroe was a “roommate” of Puente, and Gamel was a tenant at the boardinghouse where the bodies of other tenants were discovered.

Michael Coonan, the author of the report titled “Sins of Omission,” said a woman who claimed to be Monroe’s friend said Monroe would not voluntarily take codeine because she was allergic to it.

Puente served terms for drugging people and forging Social Security checks. Police investigators in the boardinghouse case suspect her tenants may have been killed for their Social Security checks.

“The common denominator among the victims at Dorothea Puente’s boardinghouse is their Social Security income,” Coonan’s report said. “As of this writing, we have been told that Dorothea Puente was in control of at least 11 Social Security checks.”

The report also said police were prodded to investigate the boardinghouse only after social workers began to fear for their own lives and threatened to contact Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Sacramento).

Police Capt. Sam Sommers said Chief John Kearns will respond to the report next week. He said officers had “some fairly significant differences regarding what it says about the Police Department.”