Dorothea Puente - Background

Background

She was born on January 9, 1929 as Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California to Trudy Mae Yates and Jesse James Gray. Her parents worked as cotton pickers. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was eight years old, in 1937. Her mother died in a motorcycle accident in 1938. She was sent to an orphanage until relatives from Fresno, California, took her in. In later life, she lied about her childhood, saying that she was one of three children who all were born and raised in Mexico.

In 1945, she was married for the first time, at the age of 16, to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific Theater. Dorothea had two daughters between 1946 and 1948, but she sent one to relatives in Sacramento, and gave the other up for adoption.

Dorothea became pregnant again in 1948, but suffered a miscarriage. In late 1948, McFaul left her. Humiliated at being abandoned, Dorothea would lie about this marriage and claim that her husband died of a heart attack within days of their union. She tried to forge checks, but she was eventually caught and sentenced to a year in jail; she was paroled after six months. Soon after her release, she was impregnated by a man she barely knew and gave birth to a daughter, whom she gave up for adoption. In 1952, she married a Swede named Axel Johanson, and had a turbulent 14-year marriage.

In 1960, she was arrested for owning and managing a brothel and was sentenced to 90 days in the Sacramento County Jail. After her release, she was arrested again, this time for vagrancy, and sentenced to another 90 days in jail. Following that, she began a criminal career that over time became more serious. She found work as a nurse's aide, caring for disabled and elderly people in private homes. In a short time, she started to manage boarding houses.

She divorced Johansen in 1966 and married Roberto Puente, a man 19 years her junior, in Mexico City. The marriage only lasted two years. Shortly after it ended, Dorothea Puente took over a three-story, 16-bedroom care home at 2100 F Street in Sacramento, California. Puente got married for the fourth time in 1976 to Pedro Montalvo, who was a violent alcoholic. The marriage only lasted a few months, and Puente started to spend time in local bars looking for older men who were receiving benefits. She forged their signatures to steal their money, but she eventually was caught and charged with 34 counts of treasury fraud. While on probation, she continued to commit the same fraud. According to California Court of Appeal records, in 1981 Puente began renting an upstairs apartment at 1426 F Street in downtown Sacramento. The nine murders with which she was charged in 1988 (she was convicted in 1993 of three) were associated with this upstairs apartment and not her previous 16-room boarding house.