The State - News from July 28, 1989

A former police clerk has filed a workers’ compensation claim with the city of Sacramento over stress from handling evidence from seven bodies unearthed at a boardinghouse. Joy Underwood, 34, said she throws up whenever she sees news accounts of Dorothea Montalvo Puente, the landlady who is charged with killing nine tenants, including the seven discovered buried in her yard in November. Underwood said her stress stems from handling sacks of evidence in the case, including body bags and clothes belonging to Puente’s alleged victims. She said she has lost her apartment, faces repossession of her car and has violent nightmares about Puente. “I still have the taste of death in my mouth,” Underwood said. “I can’t eat vegetables grown in the ground because they have dirt around them, like the people dug up in Puente’s yard--and I’m a vegetarian. I’m so stressed out, I cried when I ran out of Cheerios.”