Disturbed Ground (14 page)

But as reporters badgered him for details, Enloe's excuses fell like blasted skeet. It could hardly have looked worse: Their primary suspect had been escorted past police lines in broad daylight,
despite
growing suspicions that her well-tended backyard was a well-planted
graveyard,
despite
her criminal record, and
despite
the fact that she was in obvious violation of parole. Clearly, it was best to keep these encounters with the media brief.

Officers meanwhile searched Sacramento's airport, bus and train stations, where they spotted many little old ladies… but not a single snowy-white hair of Dorothea Puente's head.

She was elsewhere.

At 9:45 that morning, Dorothea Puente called a cab, which took her and John McCauley to Tiny's, a bar in West Sacramento. While McCauley sipped a lone beer, Dorothea thirsted for more potent fortification: She downed three screwdrivers in a row.

By 11:00, courage bolstered, she was ready. Correctly figuring that she was by now being sought at Sacramento's transportation centers, she called a cab and asked to be driven to the nearby town of Stockton. A fifty-mile drive, a sixty-dollar fare plus a generous ten-dollar tip, and she was clear of Sacramento's tightening net of law enforcement.

The taxi driver deposited her at Stockton's Greyhound bus terminal, where she bought a ticket and boarded a bus. Sitting back and making herself comfortable for the long, anonymous ride to Los Angeles, she could breathe a little easier now. She'd escaped as cleanly as she had back at the age of nineteen….

Dorothea stared out the window at the familiar streets of Stockton as the bus turned onto the freeway on-ramp and gathered speed, leaving behind a trail of exhaust and a cloud of confusion.

Few people anywhere, in Sacramento, Stockton, or deeper in her past, could say they truly knew the white-haired passenger staring boozily out at the fleeting landscape. Johansson, Montalvo, Puente— they were all just temporary tags on a slippery identity. Enmeshed as she was in so much deception, Dorothea seemed to have lost herself somewhere along the way. The thread of truth had gotten tangled with lies long ago, before she'd become the landlady on F Street, even before her four failed marriages…. But this was no time to try to sort it all out.

She knew from where Cabrera had been digging that at least two of the bodies had been found by now, and worried about whether they would find them all
.
Still, even if they missed one or two, it made no difference. No one was going to understand. No matter what the numbers, it added up to the same thing: She was running for her life.

Dorothea must have secretly scolded herself for not having been smarter about this. Things had been going along pretty smoothly, but then she'd made some bad judgments, some mistakes, and that Judy Moise woman had gone and called the cops. She should have seen that coming. She'd had a feeling that Judy was going to be trouble, the way she was sniffing around all the time. Just like Mildred Ballenger back in 1982. Nosy, trouble-making social workers, both of 'em!  

In 1982, she hadn't acted fast enough. If she'd only been quicker, she could have used that ticket to Mexico. That time, she'd dawdled, and the cops had picked her up.

But not this time.

While the police were struggling with their investigation, the press was busy with its own, and by the next morning those who love the Sunday papers were being treated to hefty doses of this sensational case. Big, colorful, front-page photos of the scene on F Street grabbed attention, and Dorothea Montalvo Puente, the primary suspect, was given a liberal share of the paper's column inches.

Many in the Mexican-American community practically spat out their
coffee when they read that
la doctora
was suspected of murder! And those who had known Dorothea Puente as a kindly, seventy-year-old grandmother were shocked that she was really a fifty-nine-year-old ex-con, a woman with a nefarious past and an elusive identity. She had glided through aliases like a fun seeker at Mardi Gras, her personal history shifting with each turn of her identity, details blurring and contradicting each other.

The hard facts of Dorothea's history could be found, mostly, in court documents. Criminal charges, dates of arrest, terms of parole—these sorts of things made up the loose weave of her past. Highlights from her criminal record were there in black and white: Toward the end of 1978 she'd been caught and convicted of illegally cashing thirty-four federal checks, filching benefit checks intended for her tenants. But apparently these thefts hadn't impressed the judge as especially serious—her sentence had been light: five years' probation.

She emerged as a woman with a weakness for grand lies. She'd lied about being a survivor of the Bataan Death March in 1942, about having cancer, about making movies with Rita Hayworth, about being the ex-lover of this or that star. And she'd lied
about being a doctor, or nurse, or health care worker—whatever she could get away with.

One of her past victims, Malcolm McKenzie, described Dorothea Puente as a slick con artist. "She was a sharp dresser, sharp in her ways," he recalled. "She knew what she was doing. She could have fooled you or anybody."

One afternoon in January 1982, she'd walked into a midtown bar called the Zebra Club, shed her coat, and slid into conversation with a group of oldsters who were meeting over drinks. In particular, she'd befriended the seventy-four-year-old McKenzie, a retiree and a regular at the bar.

McKenzie recalled for the press how he'd become ill after just a couple of drinks. Dorothea had offered to escort the old gent home, then had rifled through his belongings. Stricken by some sort of temporary paralysis, he'd watched helplessly as she stole checks, cash, even a ring which she brazenly slipped off his limp finger. "She could have killed me," he reflected.

When McKenzie recovered, it seemed obvious to him that Dorothea had slipped a Mickey into his drink, and that's just what he told the police later on. A detective looked into the matter, and even interviewed "Miss Montalvo," but she apparently worked her charm, denying everything, claiming that McKenzie was just a drunken old fool.

Even back in 1982, it took Sacramento police a while to put two and two together. Not until April, when Dorothea Montalvo was in court for a preliminary hearing for having drugged and robbed Malcolm McKenzie in January, was she arrested on a forgery warrant for having robbed someone back in 1981.

Frail and ailing, seventy-nine-year-old Esther Busby had needed a live-in health care attendant. An energetic and caring woman named Dorothea Montalvo had seemed perfect for the job. But soon after hiring her, Busby had become repeatedly and mysteriously ill.

At the hospital, Dorothea had dazzled all onlookers with her solicitous ways. She was so kind and attentive that even nurses had been impressed. But eventually, Busby's doctor got suspicious. He guessed that Dorothea Montalvo was over-medicating, perhaps even poisoning his elderly patient. And he told her social worker, Mildred Ballenger, that he suspected Montalvo was "ripping Mrs. Busby off."

Alarmed, Ballenger had checked and discovered that Busby's latest Social Security check had indeed been cashed, the signature forged.

Ballenger had itched to hand Dorothea Montalvo over to police. But luckily for Dorothea, Esther Busby simply wasn't up to pressing criminal charges; instead, she'd merely fired her.

Like Busby, eighty-three-year-old Dorothy Gosling was also old and ill. And like Busby, Gosling hired Dorothea Montalvo as a night nurse, then ended up at Sutter General Hospital suffering repeated bouts of inexplicable illness. But Gosling had a healthy skepticism and plenty of fight left in her. When her case attracted the attention of Mildred Ballenger, she acted on the social worker's recommendations. She checked her belongings, then reported to police that Dorothea Montalvo had stolen her jewelry, a rare gold coin, and some blank checks (later forged and made payable to—no surprise—Dorothea Montalvo).

On November 18, 1981, Sacramento police dutifully recorded Gosling’s complaint. But it wasn't until 1982, after Malcolm McKenzie's charges, that Dorothea's illegal activities finally attracted some heat.

Still
,
she wasn't jailed, and Teflon criminal that she was, Dorothea slid right back into action. She pulled off two robberies in quick succession.

Just a month after the McKenzie preliminary hearing, Dorothea slipped into a secured apartment complex and knocked at the door of eighty-two-year-old Irene Gregory. Introducing herself as Betty Peterson of the Sacramento Medical Association, Dorothea talked her way into Gregory's apartment, saying she'd been sent to check on the elderly woman's medications. Gregory obediently showed the "nurse" to her medicine cabinet, then was handed two pills and instructed to lie down and close her eyes.

The "nurse" said she was going to take Gregory's blood pressure, but when Gregory awakened, she found that the "nurse" had instead taken two valuable rings and a bottle of sleeping pills. Only after she received a bill for $730 would she discover that a credit card was missing too.

Even then, Dorothea had time to escape. But apparently she needed just a little more money.

So, late one morning, Dorothea unexpectedly dropped in on a neighbor, eighty-three-year-old Dorothy Osborne. She came bearing gifts—a bottle of brandy and a bottle of vodka—and prepared a concoction for her friend. Osborne hardly sipped the foul-tasting drink, but didn't awaken until about eight that evening. Only later did she realize that some keys, her Visa card, a checkbook, an unemployment check, an ID card, and some rolled coins had been stolen.

Two days later, Dorothea Montalvo Puente was arrested, charged with assorted crimes, and ordered held without bail. Police confiscated the ticket to Mexico in her purse.

By the time readers had finished the back page of Sunday's paper, many were wondering how police could have let this disreputable woman slip through their fingers.

Part III: THE SPECTACLE

You always have questions about whether a placement is the best…. But we have to put them somewhere. We have to take what society provides us, and it's not always the best.

—
Peggy Nickerson

The focus in this tragedy has been on the spectacle of mass murder. I work constantly, however, with people who live in the continuing jeopardy of homelessness, poverty, and mental illness. I think we should all focus even more intently on these people whose daily lives are a tragic exercise in futility and abandonment. We have a national tragedy ongoing that we must deal with.

—
Judy Moise

CHAPTER 13

At about the same time Dorothea Puente was catching her taxi to Stockton, a forensic anthropologist was applying his craft in the back corner of her yard. With a practiced eye, Dr. Heglar had identified areas where slight changes in the color and texture of the soil indicated recent digging. Plants had been uprooted, and here and there topsoil had been removed. There had been a momentary stir over some suspicious discoveries, but they turned out to be only trash.

Now he was scooping dirt away from a dubious patch of fabric. Crouched at the base of a newly planted tree, he next used a metal probe, testing the surrounding area for resistance. Then, with meticulous care, he began flicking soil away with his brush.

Heglar enlisted the help of a coroner's investigator and others, and this spot became the focus of a controlled commotion. Shovels scooped a broad ring of earth away from the bundle, then small hand trowels were employed. It became obvious that this was yet another body. Dr. Heglar and the coroner's investigator stood knee-deep in the hole, whisking away dirt from the encircled form, watching as the
cloth took  on  human  dimensions.   Like the others,  it had been wrapped in layers of material before burial.

The body would not be tampered with here at the site. In accordance with protocol, it was tagged, photographed, sealed in a white plastic body bag, and removed to the morgue to await the necessary indignities of autopsy. For now, it would be known only by the impersonal designation, coroner's case #88-8381.