Macabre Trail to House on F Street : Of Many Clues, the Smell Finally Told a Horrid Tale

SACRAMENTO — Rank, overly sweet, unforgettable, the smell rose up from Dorothea Montalvo Puente’s garden like a tule fog and lingered in her boardinghouse like a ghost. She tried to steam it out. She tried to bleach it out. She attacked it with gallons of water and sacks of lime, with cans of lemon-scented aerosol and even with fish emulsion.

Nothing seemed to work, and last summer neighbors began to complain.

“It was so bad,” said Willard McIntyre, who lives next door to Puente’s house, “that no one in our building could use the air conditioning. It was drawing in that smell.”

Puente told a friend that dead rats were decaying beneath the old two-story house. She told her boarders that backed-up sewers were to blame. When McIntyre summoned health inspectors, he heard her explain that the odor must be coming from a corpse transients had dismembered at a vacant house nearby; finding no such corpse, he said, “they threw up their hands and left.”

Last week, after seven bodies had been excavated from Puente’s well-tended gardens, after the throngs had thinned from in front of the pastel blue Victorian, the people who knew Dorothea Montalvo Puente would offer the foul stench as but one of several clues that had been there all along--signposts on a macabre trail of death.

And yet until this month, indications that something was amiss at 1426 F St. had been misread or written off as harmless eccentricities, a fact that speaks to the sheer audacity of Puente’s alleged undertakings, to the social anonymity of its luckless victims and, perhaps most of all, to the enigma presented by the suspect herself--a well-dressed, soft-spoken woman with the demeanor of a grandmother and the rap sheet of a felon.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Puente told a television news crew last week after her arrest. She said it sweetly, evenly, peering straight into the camera.

Puente had friends, and one of them was Patty Casey. A 54-year-old cab driver, Casey has known Puente for more than a year, first as a steady, good-tipping customer and then as a mutual confidant, a woman whom she came to consider almost a second mother.

Casey would drive Puente on errands two or three times a week--to buy cement, plants, gardening tools, fertilizer, fresh carpets. Often she would drop her off at one of several downtown bars.

Puente would invite Casey to her house and share secrets, about her true age (71 and not, as the records indicate, 59), about her face lift (recent), about her past marriages (four). Much of what Puente would tell about herself--conversational tidbits about surviving Hiroshima and dating the Shah--her friends dismissed as the benign fictions of a colorful old character.

Signs of Kindness

They focused on her generosity, her extravagant tips, her purchase of a three-wheeled bicycle for one boarder and a color television for another. They noticed how lovingly she tended her vegetable garden and her joyful distribution of tamales each year through the neighborhood. She dressed with flair and, with the exception of an occasional cursing rant, conversed in a rational manner.

“I thought she was a very nice person,” Casey said last week. “I really looked up to her and admired her. I felt I could learn a few things from her. I thought she was very savvy.”

On occasion Puente would complain about the boardinghouse. She rented the upstairs flat of the two-story house for herself and took in boarders downstairs. There was, for instance, the strong, gagging odor that Puente blamed on rats.

“She used to pour bleach along the walls, a home remedy or something,” Casey recalled.

Also, there was the “cursed” room. Casey said Puente told her that an upstairs bedroom in the house had “a real bloody history.” People who stayed there would end up excreting blood in various ways, making it necessary for Puente to replace the carpet often.

Patterns Detected

Casey can now see patterns in her conversations with Puente about boarders:

Three or four times, for instance, Puente informed her that a certain tenant had “not been feeling well. She would say, ‘I took them upstairs and made them better’ and then people wouldn’t seem to be around.”

Or Puente would begin to complain about a boarder’s behavior. “She would say, ‘They are always telling me how to run my house and I am not going to allow that.’ ”

“The next time I saw her she would say, ‘Well, I don’t have that problem any more. I got rid of them. I packed up their stuff in cardboard boxes last night and threw them out on the street.’ ”

And that boarder would not be seen again.

What Homer Myers reflects on now is all the digging he did in his two years at Puente’s place. He also wonders how close he came to winding up in a hole himself.

“I was just wondering how lucky I am,” the 74-year-old pensioner said happily the other night. “Especially if persons did come and go the way they (the police) say they did.”

The stocky old man was standing in the lobby of a downtown hotel near the bus station. He rocked on the heels of his tired loafers as he talked. His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of his green work pants, jingling change.

Time to Get Out

Myers had moved out of Puente’s house about a week before the corpses were discovered. He said Puente became furious with him for failing to pick up Christmas decorations, and he took that as his cue.

“I just said the hell with it and moved out,” he said.

Nonetheless, Myers had rather enjoyed his stay at the house, even though a lot of spade work had been required in the garden. There had been the hole for an apricot tree, and Myers now recalls wondering at the time why it needed to be four feet deep. There had been trenches to replace a stopped sewer line, or at least that was how the awful smell had been explained to him. And holes for rubbish that the garbage men supposedly would not take away.

Myers said he just dug the holes, sometimes with help from young ex-cons hired from a halfway house. Never saw what went in them. Never asked questions. Never suspected a thing. It wasn’t his nature to be inquisitive, he said.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “I was surprised there was even one body.”

Myers had met Puente in a downtown bar: “I walked in, sat beside her and she recommended herself.”

He paid Puente $350 a month for a private downstairs bedroom and two hot meals a day, breakfast and an early dinner. The boarders would eat around a small Formica table in the upstairs kitchen. Other than that they were welcome upstairs by invitation only.

One Allowed Upstairs

Except for Mervin John McCauley, the handyman who was arrested last week as a potential accomplice and then released. McCauley slept upstairs in a bedroom near the back staircase.

Another house rule was that no one but Puente was permitted to pick up the morning mail. Also, no liquor was allowed, although Puente herself kept a well-stocked bar.

Until the fight over Christmas decorations, Myers said the only friction between himself and Puente occurred when she would pressure him to sign papers empowering her to cash his Social Security checks.

“I just never signed them,” he said. “I just passed it off.”

Looking back now, he wonders about what happened to some of his fellow boarders. Like the fellow who “was supposed to have thrown up blood. We took the carpet up and put another down. He was supposed to have gone to the hospital and I never saw him again.” And the sickly woman who “was supposed to have gone to a nursing home.” And the man they called Bert.

Bert was “supposed” to have been taken to Mexico, Myers said. “He might have been one of them that got dug up.”

Puente did not come as a stranger last Thursday when she entered a Sacramento courtroom to be accused formally of murdering Alvaro Montoya, also known as Bert.

Her past encounters with the law were well-documented--a 1948 conviction for forgery, a 1960 conviction for residing in a brothel. In 1978 she was convicted for crimes described in a subsequent parole report: “For approximately three years, the defendant, while operating a board-and-care facility in Sacramento, secured U.S. Treasury checks from her residents and cashed them.”

She was placed on probation for five years and ordered to receive psychiatric treatment. A psychiatrist diagnosed her as a chronic schizophrenic, “a very disturbed woman.”

Records of Arrests

The records show that in 1979 she was accused by doctors of non-fatally poisoning a roommate. Puente complied with her parole officer’s suggestion and moved out. In 1982 she was convicted of a series of robberies in which she doped her elderly victims.

“Each of the four victims . . . were vulnerable, particularly vulnerable,” the judge said as he sentenced Puente to five years in state prison. “Three of the victims were respectfully 74, 82 and 83 years of age.”

She served three years. Paroled, she was instructed not to work with elderly or “handle government checks of any kind issued to others.”

A short time later Puente rented a room at the house at 1426 F St., a block where old, quaintly restored Victorians and decaying flophouses stand side by side. This is typical of downtown Sacramento; in a striking cohabitation, its leafy streets and wide sidewalks seem to be shared equally by thriving tribes of besuited government players and wobbly-kneed vagrants.

The owner eventually moved out of the house and Puente took control, subletting the downstairs rooms. Before long, social workers were sending homeless men and women to stay there. It seemed she kept the place up and took good care of downtrodden people the system could not accommodate.

Man Reported Missing

The paper trail jumped forward to Nov. 4 and a missing persons report lodged with police by a social worker. A client named Alvaro Montoya--described as a mentally disabled man whom Puente boarded--had not been seen for three months. Puente had acted as payee for his Social Security checks. Efforts to contact him produced only alibis: Bert was sick; he was headed for Utah; he was in Mexico.

A few days later, a patrolman made inquiries among the boarders. One, John Sharp, confided that he was under instructions from Puente to lie about Bert’s whereabouts. A secret discussion ensued at a prearranged corner, and later was recorded in the officer’s hand-written report . It concluded:

Sharp also advised that susp. has had some large holes dug in the back yard over the past three months because of “sewer problems.” The holes have been filled in since and concrete poured over some of them, according to Sharp. I contacted Det. Cabrera in homicide and advised him of the information. He was familiar with the susp. and has had similar reports about her in the past.

The digging began Friday, Nov. 11. After three hours the first remains had been found. Puente could be seen peering into the hole herself.

“Sir, I have not killed anybody,” she told a detective.

McIntyre, the manager of the next door apartment house, watched it all from his porch. He recalled later that, after the digging had been suspended for the day, Puente came over and asked if he wanted a carpet. He declined, noticing it was stained. He also watched her take down her Halloween jack-o’-lanterns and replace them with a string of outdoor Christmas lights. And the next morning, McIntyre discovered a couple of dozen human teeth in his back yard, all filled with silver or gold.

Attracting a Crowd

When the digging resumed early Saturday, a crowd began to build out front. There were reporters and neighbors and, before it was over, tourists from out-of-town. Boys climbed trees for a better look. Spectators invaded porches seeking good vantage points. The crowd was festive, except when a body was being carried to the coroner’s wagon. Then it would fall silent, seemingly hypnotized by the spectacle.

About an hour before the second corpse was discovered, Puente told officers she wanted to visit a cousin who worked at a hotel a block away. A police detective escorted her and McCauley past the throng to the corner.

“I told her . . . when she decided to come back she could have John come in and summon me if she felt that the news media was going to corner her and ask her questions,” the detective reported.

Four hours later, it was clear that Puente had decided not to come back at all. When McCauley returned alone, police rushed to the hotel and searched unsuccessfully for their prime suspect. McCauley that afternoon did inform the lead detective that Puente had called him on the telephone.

“I advised Mr. McCauley at this particular time,” the detective noted in his report, “that if Dorothea was to call again, please advise me. I needed to talk to her.”

Pieces of the Story

By this time, people who knew Puente had started to come forward with pieces of the bizarre puzzle. One friend told officers about unloading sacks of lime. A boarder said the house had smelled like a mortuary he worked in several decades ago.

Now neighbors remembered how ants had been drawn to Puente’s yard, how she kept summoning rug cleaners to the house, how she poured buckets of fish emulsion on her garden.

Past kindnesses were re-evaluated. Reporters for the National Enquirer asked around about the tamales.

“They wanted to know if the meat tasted funny,” said McIntyre.

Four days and five bodies after she fled, Puente was arrested in Los Angeles. She was caught after a 59-year-old man she met at a bar remembered her face from television reports.

Puente was flown back on a corporate jet chartered by a Sacramento television station. A police detective sat at her side, she denied killing anyone, but admitted “I cashed the checks, yes.”

Police officials said late in the week that they would pursue the possibility that Puente had accomplices. It took as many as four city workers to haul out some of the corpses, and investigators wonder if a slight woman of advancing years could have hefted all seven down the stairs, tossed them in the ground and covered them up all by herself.

It was proving difficult to determine how long the bodies had been in the ground and what had killed them. So far, none of the corpses has been identified; these were not the sort of people to be missed. A coroner’s investigator said that normally investigators receive 60 or 70 calls on a single unidentified murder victim within 24 hours. By Friday, in the case of the seven bodies found on F Street, there had been six.

At dusk Thursday, only a small bunch of whispering, giggling school children, still clad in parochial school uniforms, stood out front of Dorothea Montalvo Puente’s boardinghouse. The children hushed when an old man walked slowly out from the house. He allowed two reporters to come inside, saying he had a question for them.

“Will they stop my Social Security checks?” he wanted to know.

A hammer rested on the kitchen table, and a chair was propped against the back door. He said he was afraid someone might “come back and murdicate me.” But his rent was paid for the month, and he had nowhere else to go.

A Guided Tour

The man did not want his name published. He had lived in the house since March. He chain-smoked cigarettes as he covered the now familiar litany of strange odors, diggings and unexplained absences.

He gave his guests a tour. Punctuating his slow steps with curses, he led the visitors up the back stairway, past McCauley’s room and into the upstairs kitchen.

On a table the police had left a list of what was seized executing a search warrant. Among the items were numerous prescription bottles and pills, a letter addressed to the man called Bert, rolls of duct tape and plastic gloves.

In the living room was Puente’s bar, with big half-empty bottles of whiskey, vodka, gin, Bloody Mary mix. One wall of the parlor was filled with paperbacks, romances, mysteries. A copy of the Book of Mormon rested on the television. The place was a cluttered mess.

The last door the boarder opened led into a middle bedroom. It was the room, he said, where the foul smells came from, and the odor lingered still.

The rug had been removed, revealing a large, dark stain. A jar of candies wrapped in yellow papers filled a glass plate resting on a table. An empty can of Wizard Light Lemon Air Freshener lay on the floor. A painting of the Last Supper hung over the door.

The boarder made a point of staying out in the hallway.