100 Murder Cases

Unexpected Brutal Murderers: Dorothea Puente

How could that cute little grandmother harm so much as a fly? By giving it a fatal drug overdose, apparently.

Dorothea Puenta , a Sacramento landlady known as the Boardinghouse Killer, already had a checkered past when she took over the management of the F Street Boardinghouse. She had been arrested multiple times, once for running a brothel, once for vagrancy, and twice for forging checks.

She killed her roommate first, a friend named Ruth Monroe who was staying with her, and police bought her story: Ruth, she said, was depressed and had clearly overdosed on her pain medication.

But her next poisoning sent her to jail: the resident she went after realized he'd been drugged and robbed, and he pointed the police straight toward his landlady.

In jail, Puente began corresponding with an elderly pensioner. Their friendship turned to romance when they met after her release from prison — but it was tragically one-sided. Puente murdered him, dumped his body, and collected his pension checks for years before his corpse was identified.

It was the beginning of a pattern. Puente would identify social outcasts like the elderly, the mentally disabled, and the alcoholic. Then, after murdering them, she would cash their government checks.

The original news report chronicling the shocking discovery of bodies at the F Street Boardinghouse.

Puente made over $87,000 this way — and used the money to buy herself, among other things, a facelift — before being arrested in 1988. Authorities, searching for a tenant a social worker had reported missing, noticed that it looked like something had been recently buried on Puente's property.

They found seven bodies in Puente's tiny yard, and she was found guilty on nine counts of murder. She served 18 years in prison before dying in 2011.