Disturbed Ground (17 page)

Deputy DA Frawley asserted that the police were only trying to preserve the legality of their search. He pointed out that the second body was discovered less than an hour after Puente walked. "That was her window of opportunity, and she made her getaway…. It was a confusing situation and I can understand how it happened the way it did."

Still, he conceded that Puente had "conned [police] into thinking she wasn't going anywhere. The detective on the scene felt he had a good rapport with her and he wanted to preserve that. He didn't want to back her into a corner where she might invoke her Miranda rights."

Despite Frawley's legalistic protestations, it sounded as if the police had failed to arrest Puente simply because she was being so nice. They hadn't wanted to hurt her feelings.

Through this whole ordeal, relations between the news media and the police department sunk in a downward spiral of accusations and hostilities. No matter how hard they back-pedaled, the police couldn't slacken criticisms stemming from their gaffe of having let Puente walk.

In a trenchant moment, Police Sergeant Bums, standing out in the middle of F Street, found himself surrounded by reporters demanding to know why the police had let Puente go. Burns finally turned tight-lipped. "I've already answered that," he said, staring at the ground.

One reporter sniped, "Have the police made
any
mistakes at all?" and Burns turned away, asking, "Any other questions?"

Just before darkness fell Tuesday evening, the police called the digging on F Street to a halt. "There are no more bodies at this site," Police Sergeant Jim Jorgensen announced.

For now, the body count would hold at seven.

CHAPTER 16

With so much attention focused on the search for Puente, the bodies plucked from her yard slipped out of the media's limelight toward another sort of scrutiny. One by one, whisked from the curious gaze of onlookers and loaded into the waiting van, they were sped through Sacramento's shady streets to the Sacramento County Coroner's Office where they were logged in and parked in the "cold room." Unlike the TV image of a morgue—a room with a wall of sterile, stainless-steel drawers—this was rather like a still and frigid hospital room: people covered with sheets waiting on parked gurneys. But here they waited not with IVs, not for surgery, but with toe tags, for a turn on the autopsy table.

After a particularly luckless weekend, the number of dead here might range up to two dozen or more. Now the seven from Puente's yard dominated this room, just as the pungent odor of decay would dominate any competing smells in the building for several days. (Fresh death has a lighter smell; burned flesh has a distinctively sweet stink; but decomposed bodies reek so intensely that one's olfactory glands almost ache.)

These withered corpses weighed little, indicating that each one had probably been dead for some time. Identifying such decomposed remains might take months, might even be impossible if the forensic team is working blind. But social workers had compiled a list of some twenty-five individuals who had roomed with Dorothea Puente and then gone missing, and if any were among the hapless individuals extracted from her garden, the body had a good chance of being identified. Police were scrambling to obtain any relevant records. Once the autopsies were completed and broad characteristics such as sex, age, race, and size had been determined, identification could be expedited by matching teeth with dental records, bones with X-rays, remaining tissue with known physical traits.

Two forensic pathologists working for the coroner's office, Dr. Robert Anthony and Dr. Gary Stuart, would perform the autopsies on the seven corpses. These men, who seemed unaffected by the room's powerful odors, were charged with not only determining
who
these remains might be, but
how
their deaths had occurred.
When
was another question. "It's very difficult to determine time of death, despite popular misconceptions," according to the tall, slim Dr. Stuart.

The first body to be examined was the third unearthed, #88-8381, the one found in a quiet spot at the base of a newly planted tree. It was chosen because its size seemed to most closely resemble the description of Bert Montoya.

The gurney was rolled out to a nearby room where the remains were entrusted to Dr. Russel A. McFall, a man with long experience as a forensic radiologist. McFall expertly positioned and repeatedly X-rayed the wrapped corpse. Once the film was developed, he began comparisons with X-rays of former tenants of Puente's boardinghouse, noting first the gross anatomical structures, then the more minute features, such as joints and calcification.

If there was a match to be found, he was confident he could make a positive identification—he had done so, when necessary, with just a single bone. "No two bones are alike," he asserted, their patterns being "as distinct as fingerprints."

With the first set of X-rays complete, the bundled remains were sent to the autopsy room. Dr. Stuart put on his protective goggles and began the first physical autopsy at 1:00
p.m.
on Wednesday, November 16. Start to finish, it would take eight hours. Of the select team assembled in the room, one member was forensic anthropologist
Rodger Heglar, Ph.D. He was no stranger to this lifeless bundle, having overseen its excavation from the property on F Street. Dr. Stuart had also been at the site during the body's removal, and now these two started in with their examination of the remains.

There was no great hurry. No blood spattered the floor as the wrappings were slowly, carefully cut away and tagged with identifying numbers: a green-colored blanket; several layers of clear plastic secured with duct tape; some blue, tarp-like fabric secured with more duct tape; more plastic and a quilt. Beneath this, Dr. Stuart found some "white material, lime or lye." The obvious conclusion: The body had been dusted with this corrosive substance before being wrapped.

And the lime had done its work. An adult male stared back at them, ghastly in its decay.

Next, the rotting clothes were cut off. A light-colored T-shirt with "CANON" in orange print. Dark trousers. White socks. No identification, keys, or change in the pockets.

At each step the remains were photographed by a hovering police photographer, with knots in the covering fabrics given particular scrutiny. Observations were logged, and the clothing and wrappings were tagged and bagged for closer examination at the crime lab. Such are the grisly minutia that become evidence.

Dr. Stuart could only estimate the time of death at perhaps weeks or months prior. (No studies have been conducted on how quickly lime will eat through a human corpse wrapped in cloth and plastic and buried underground.) He saw no obvious evidence of trauma. No knife or gunshot wounds.

His provisional determination was that "the deceased was a Caucasian male, 50 to 60 years old, 64 to 65 inches in height. Hair color was possibly light brown or blond." The remains weighed 128 pounds.

Next, Dr. Stuart sliced open the body with a Y-shaped incision, cutting from each shoulder to the base of the chest bone, or sternum, then down past the navel. The rib cage was examined, and then using ordinary shears, Dr. Stuart cut through and removed several ribs, which Dr. Heglar inspected with interest.

Dr. Stuart found the viscera of the abdominal cavity, while markedly decomposed, still individually identifiable. He focused his attention on the major organs, which often chart the course of death's final
pains. Heart, lungs, stomach, liver, spleen, kidneys—all were removed, probed, weighed, and studied in turn. There was some moderate hardening of the arteries and some enlargement of the liver, but no clues to the cause of death.

The doctor then examined the outside of the skull, noting some roughening of the nose bone, which suggested that it had once been broken. The brain would be of more interest. Using a Stryker saw—-the same fine-toothed saw with which casts are removed—Dr. Stuart circumnavigated the crown of the head. He removed the protective bone and tissue like a cap, revealing the decomposed brain. It was carefully cut out, weighed, and inspected, the doctor noting that it was "small, soft, and discolored."

A portion of the brain was then sliced off with a dissecting blade and placed in a labeled jar of formaldehyde. Along with other specimens taken from the corpse, this was put into a refrigerated locker and preserved for microscopic examination. (James Beede, a toxicologist, would later take the specimens to the toxicology lab, where he would record their mute testimony.)

At length, Stuart and Heglar concluded their examination. The organs were returned to the abdominal cavity, the brain placed back into the skull. The examination complete, Dr. Stuart removed his surgical gloves, then scrubbed from his hands the sweat-soaked talcum powder that had kept the gloves from sticking.

The unnamed body was again covered with a sheet and left in the cold room, where it awaited the next step toward identification.
The cause of death for case #88-8881 remained "undetermined."

The next day Robert W. Wood, a registered nurse and a respected member of the forensic team, approached the sheeted body. He examined the hands, noting that the outer layers of the fingertips had deteriorated to the point that the coroner's lab wasn't equipped to identify the fingerprints. Selecting the least decomposed fingertips, he snipped off the digits at the first joint. These were sealed in small, individual jars of formaldehyde, then sent to the Department of Justice, where experts could examine the fingertips' deeper layers.

Joe Sydnicki, the DOJ's latent print examiner, shortly took possession of the jars. He unsealed the containers, removed the digits, then carefully cleaned and dried them. Finally, he injected them with fluid to rehydrate the tissue, dusted them with a black powder, and lifted the prints by making rolled impressions on a card.

Using a magnifying glass, Sydnicki would later compare the characteristic swirls and ridges of the prints on the card with the known prints of missing souls who had once roomed with Dorothea Puente…  including those taken about a year earlier from Bert Montoya at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

CHAPTER 17

Camera lights glinted off the wire-rimmed glasses and steel-gray hair of Police Chief John P. Kearns as he fielded questions at a press conference on Wednesday, November 16. Looking every bit the flinty old cop despite his business suit, Kearns publicly acknowledged for the first time that Sacramento police had erred in their handling of the Puente case. For those who'd been following the case, a gratifying—if belated—admission.

First noting that he had been in L.A. at a California Police Chiefs Association conference on Saturday—the day Puente had walked—the police chief finally confirmed what most of the city had known all along: "The Sacramento Police Department made an error, and as a result of that we lost a suspect."

Still, Kearns hedged any public criticism of his force. He maintained that "there was not a weight of probable cause to make an arrest" the morning that Puente had strolled away in her purple pumps. "Of course, with a crystal ball of Monday-morning quarterbacking, the probable cause possibly could have been stretched, and there may have been an arrest made," he said.

After all, Puente had been extremely cooperative, he reiterated. "She'd been talked to by detectives and established a dialogue, and I feel that what occurred was that we possibly became too familiar with the suspect and too trusting," Kearns said. "Sometimes in law enforcement we find ourselves bending over a little bit too far to protect the rights of the suspects or individuals in criminal cases, and I feel that's what occurred here." He even went so far as to state she was "a prime suspect in a homicide case, and there isn't any excuse, as far as I'm concerned, why the suspect was not kept under surveil
lance.”
(For those who could read between the lines, this heralded some unexpected "reassignments" within the police force.)

Raising an ugly accusation, reporters asked why the police hadn't acted when they'd reportedly received a tip
last January
that Dorothea Puente was burying bodies in her yard. Kearns turned to Sergeant Bob Burns and, after a whispered exchange, swept this charge aside, explaining that there had been no real evidence. And besides, he said lamely, that case was "completely unrelated."