Dorothea Puente – Gianna Gullace : Passion Blog

The next serial killer that I will be covering is Dorothea Puente.

Dorothea Puente was born on January 9, 1929, in Redlands, California. Like Aileen Wuornos, Puente grew up in an unstable household. Her mother was an alcoholic who would frequently abuse her children. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was only 8 years old, and her mother died a year later in a motorcycle accident. After both of her parents had passed away, Dorothea and her six siblings were orphaned and split up into different foster homes.

At age 16, Puente left the system and became a prostitute. Later, she met a man named Fred McFaul. They married and had two children within their three-year marriage. Dorothea was not a very involved mother, she gave her first daughter to a relative to take care of, and put the second up for adoption.

McFaul filed for divorce in 1948 and Puente moved to southern California. Her first arrest was for bouncing a check. She served four months in jail and was supposed to face probation, but fled instead. She then moved to San Francisco, where she met her second husband. Their marriage lasted fourteen years. However, she turned to drinking and gambling. Axel Bren Johannsen, her second husband, sent her to a psych ward.

She had two other marriages that did not last long before she thought herself to be a good caretaker. In the 1970s, she opened her boarding house. The only people Dorothea would take in would be what she called, “tough cases.” These would be elderly people, recovering drug and alcohol addicts, and mentally ill people. Her first boarding house ended up being shut down because she was caught writing her name on her tenant’s benefit checks.

She was sent to prison again in 1982 for theft and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. With this diagnosis, she still opened up another boarding house. This time, Dorothea took in people who were homeless and had no close relatives or friends, so no one would notice that they started to disappear. In 1988, Puente made a big mistake. She took in a 52-year-old man named Alvaro Montoya. At the time, Puente did not know that an outreach counselor named Judy Moise was watching him and was very curious when he went missing.

Moise notified the police because she knew that he stayed in Puente’s boarding house. When the police came, an innocent old lady opened the door. She simply told them that Montoya went on vacation and she had another tenant back her up. Little did she know that the tenant slipped the police a note that said she made him lie and that Montoya was not actually on “vacation.” The police searched her house and then dug up her yard, where they found seven bodies. By this time, Puente had already fled.

She went to Los Angeles, California where the police tracked her down. Dorothea Puente made herself out to be a sweet old-lady, grandma-like, but was known as the “Death House Landlady.” She ended up being charged with nine murders. She passed away at age 82 on March 27, 2011, in prison due to natural causes.