Dorothea Puente: the Boarding House of Death

Dorothea Puente was an American serial killer. She ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, where she drugged and murdered her elderly and mentally disabled boarders, then cashed their Social Security checks. She was convicted of three murders in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison.

Puente was born Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California, on January 3, 1929. Her father, James William Gray, was an abusive alcoholic who abandoned the family when she was two years old. Her mother, Mae Cresswell Gray, struggled to support Puente and her two sisters. Mae Gray died when Puente was 16 years old. Puente dropped out of high school and married at 17; the marriage lasted only a few months.

Puente moved to Sacramento in the early 1950s. She worked as a nurse's aide and later as a Licensed Vocational Nurse (LVN). In the 1960s, she began operating boarding houses for elderly and mentally disabled people.

Puente's first known murder victim was Everson Gillmouth, an 82-year-old boarder at her house on F Street. He died of an overdose of morphine in May 1982. Puente cashed his Social Security checks after his death.

Over the next seven years, Puente killed at least nine more people. Her victims were all elderly or mentally disabled boarders at her houses on F Street and Stockton Boulevard. Puente drugged her victims with morphine or other drugs, then suffocated them or drowned them in bathtubs. She buried their bodies in the yards of her houses.

Police dug Dorothea's backyard and found seven bodies. Photo: AP

Puente was finally caught in November 1988, when a social worker came to check on one of her missing boarders. The social worker called the police, who found two dead bodies buried in Puente's yard. Puente was arrested and charged with murder.

Dorothea was arrested on November 17, 1988. Photo: Sacramento Bee

At her trial in 1993, Puente was convicted of three murders: those of Gillmouth, Dorothy Miller, and Leona Carpenter. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Puente died of natural causes at the age of 82 on March 27, 2011, at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California.