Disturbed Ground (20 page)

This was bad news for law enforcement. It's hard to prove someone was murdered when there's no evidence of how the person actually died. And without proof of cause of death, could the landlady get away with murder?

The autopsies left many vexing questions, but Coroner Charles Simmons was optimistic that toxicology tests would soon pinpoint the exact reasons for these fatalities. In a week or ten days, he predicted, "we might have some very conclusive ideas on what killed these people."

After all, forensic scientists can work wonders, and that's what the public has come to expect. From a nameless skull, it's possible to reconstruct an individual's face.
From a few strands of hair, scientists even determined—more than 150 years after his death—that Napoleon Bonaparte was repeatedly poisoned with arsenic.

But toxicologist James Beede, who would process the specimens of brain and liver tissue taken from the bodies, knew better than to make bold predictions; he knew the limits of his craft. Whether traces of poison could be found depended on the type. Some poisons lingered, others degenerated. And the extreme decomposition of the bodies made his work harder. The magic of science could be thwarted by the complications of nature, and these bodies had been wrapped up and buried underground, where moisture, bacteria, and insects had long wrought their unseen destruction.

"If a lethal dose of poison was given, our chances are pretty good we'll detect it. But if a dose was given just to sedate," the toxicologist admitted, "we may never detect it."

Then, of course, there was always the problem of simple human error.

Identifying the bodies proved easier than saying how they died: Some still-distinctive patterns of dead fingertips finally yielded a match. The fourth body examined became the first one identified when, on November 21, the coroner's office announced a positive identification: Benjamin Fink.

This unhappy news came as no surprise to Ben's brother. As soon as Robert Fink had heard about the tattoos, it was obvious to him that his older brother was in the morgue. The "PSI" tattooed above Ben's right knee stood for Preston School of Industry, where Ben had served in 1947. But the swastika on his left shoulder wasn't to be taken so literally. "It's kinda strange," Robert Fink conceded to the press. "We were Jewish, and he put that swastika on there like a dare:
You just don't mess with me.
That was his way of saying who he was."

After the long wait and all the worry, Robert Fink responded to the news of his brother's identification more with anger than with relief. "When the police showed up and told me, I just wanted to ask them, what are they going to do with her? What are they going to charge that woman with, now that they know?"

Law enforcement didn't yet have an answer for Mr. Fink.

Dorothea Puente was being held without bail. She wasn't going anywhere, so county prosecutors could afford to wait before filing additional charges. The DA's office wanted comprehensive facts, not just more of the speculation that was blowing about like autumn leaves.

But detectives were having a hard time with this case. Murder investigations can be labyrinthine, with leads both obvious and subtle being
pursued in every direction. This case was worse than most, complicated by both time and numbers: Some two dozen missing people—mostly transient and on fixed incomes—might be among those who'd rented rooms from Dorothea Puente and ended up paying with their lives.

Police detectives met with Social Security officials, tracking down payments made to individuals who were once tenants at 1426 F Street. And they began searching Puente's bank accounts, tracking the money trail.

Meanwhile, video equipment was hefted along in renewed searches of the boardinghouse. Police found an assortment of papers, including information regarding funeral plots, photographs, mail and correspondence that they believed could "aid in identifying the bodies…and in determining motive."

They also confiscated duct tape, a blue tarp, and sections of bloodstained carpet.

While Clint Eastwood was striding down J Street, working on his latest film,
Pink Cadillac,
Sacramento's coroner was pondering the evidence unearthed from F Street. With all the autopsies now completed, it was troubling that none had been identified as Bert Montoya, who seemed a very likely victim, especially since Dorothea Puente had already been charged for his murder.

It was time for a reevaluation. Bert had weighed about two hundred pounds, yet all of the bodies recovered from the boardinghouse yard were believed to be too small to be him. On closer inspection, however, the coroner decided that the third body unearthed, the first autopsied, possibly matched Bert's description after all.

Fingerprints finally confirmed the ID.

An announcement came on Thanksgiving, and the news hit the papers the next day with a front-page headline,
key identification of f street body,
along with a photo of Bert.

Industrious reporters searching for grieving family located Bert's nephew, Henry Montoya, in New Orleans. "I heard that she [Puente] was so kind to my uncle and was good to him. She helped him so much with his self-esteem. For the tables to be turned so abruptly, it just leaves me spellbound," Montoya told the press. With dignity, he added, "I don't feel hatred. I feel the Lord will take judgment."

At the Volunteers of America headquarters, Judy Moise's boss, Leo
MacFarland, told reporters that "hearing the news was a shock." But Judy didn't feel that way. It was more a feeling of being overcome by an awful, undeniable truth. And, at bottom, a feeling of betrayal. Dorothea Puente had fooled her with an elaborate charade. That phony compassion. That little old lady act.

Had she conned them all from the very beginning, only pretending to care about Bert while all along planning to murder him?
Why?
Rumor had it that she'd done it for money—simple, base greed—but Bert was no Rockefeller, he was rock-bottom poor. And no matter how monstrous Dorothea now seemed, Judy just couldn't reconcile Bert's murder with a lingering belief that, at some level, Dorothea had genuinely cared about him. Killing him for his puny benefit checks just seemed inconceivable. There had to be some other reason, something less obvious. What could he have done that could have possibly motivated Dorothea to kill him? Had she begun to see him as some kind of threat? Had he learned something?

Judy was jolted by a sudden, hideous thought. For days, she'd been wrestling with the unlikely image of little Dorothea dragging bodies out of her house and into the yard for burial. Now it seemed horribly clear that Dorothea had help.

Bert.

Judy ran it through her mind, looking for flaws, but with closer examination it seemed all the more likely. Bert had adored Dorothea. He would have done nearly anything she'd asked. And Bert was so uncritical, he would have accepted any explanation Dorothea had given him. Maybe she'd told him that she couldn't afford proper funerals for these people, then asked him to bury them in the yard. Or maybe she hadn't even told him what the stinking bundles really were, just saying it was garbage that needed burying. In any case, Bert was so trusting and dim, he probably wouldn't have questioned her.

But suppose he had. Suppose it had bothered him. Suppose it had simply felt wrong. Suppose he'd seen something that scared him.… It seemed instantly clear. That was why he'd suddenly appeared back at Detox, wanting to sleep in his old, familiar mat. He'd wanted to get away from her. He'd slipped back to Detox to escape!

And Dorothea had known it. She'd seen that he was afraid of her and realized that her pet tenant wasn't quite as dumb as she'd hoped. Fearing that he might spill whatever he knew, she'd decided she had to kill him. However she'd done it, whatever quiet method she'd used, she'd planned it out, snuck up on Bert, and coldly murdered him. Then she'd buried him in the yard and cooked up all those lies about Mexico, trying to cover her trail.

It all seemed to fit. Judy didn't want to believe it, but each chilling detail clinked into place. The whole scenario had an eeriness to it that made her shiver. And as this icy notion gripped her, she was frozen by another thought: If Bert had helped Dorothea bury the others,
who had buried Bert?

CHAPTER20

Almost three years had passed since that New Year’s Day when Sergeant Wilbur Terry had skittered down the river embankment to investigate a makeshift coffin. Now he was a lieutenant, sitting with other Sutter County deputies, listening to the morning's briefing.

These days the homicide detectives were intrigued by reports coming out of neighboring Sacramento County about graves found in Dorothea Puente's yard. And today Lieutenant Terry, who had been out of the office for a few days, sat up and listened with interest.

"Whoa! Wait just a minute!" he burst out. "Some of these details are sounding awfully familiar." Lieutenant Terry bolted from the room and retrieved the old case file from his desk.

"Look here. Remember Uncle Harry, the old guy in the box down by the river?" he asked, his deep, smoker's voice filling the room. "Look at the way he was wrapped: bed sheets and plastic. It sounds like the work of the same person. I think we ought to give Sacramento a call."

Soon the Sacramento police and Sutter County deputies were comparing notes. "Things just clicked," in the words of Terry's colleague, Lieutenant Steve Sizelove. "The knots, the wrappings just matched our guy to a T."

Sacramento police supplied a list of missing persons, and the Sutter County Sheriff’s Department set about looking for a match. One name caught their attention: Everson Gillmouth
.
The time of his disappearance and his overall description seemed to fit.

A positive ID would take some effort. Family members had to be contacted, medical records obtained. A frustrating search for existing fingerprints turned up nothing: Gillmouth's military records had been destroyed in a fire, and Oregon's Department of Motor Vehicles, unlike California's, did not register fingerprints.

But they eventually accumulated enough for an absolute identification: X-rays showed that, like their corpse in the box, Everson Gillmouth had lost the tip of his right thumb.

Reba Nicklous, up in Sweet Home, Oregon, now knew for certain that her brother was dead, though he hadn't been unearthed from Puente's yard, as she'd suspected back in November when she'd phoned the Sacramento police. Still, she was now more convinced than ever that her brother had died by Dorothea Puente's hand. She remarked bitterly, "Everson said that Dorothea would take care of him. Well, she did."

Sacramento police ran Everson Gillmouth through their computers, and the DMV files coughed up a lead. Though Gillmouth's body had been found on January 1, 1986, records showed that his red Ford truck had been sold in July 1987. The name on the bill of sale was Ismael Florez.

Two detectives went to question Florez on December 9. Distinctly uncomfortable, Florez nervously ran his fingers through his thick hair and smoothed his black mustache. Yes, he knew Dorothea Puente; he'd once done some paneling at her house. He even admitted he'd bought a Ford truck from her in December 1985, but claimed to know nothing about Everson Gillmouth.

Finally it came out that Puente had once had him build a large wooden box. The next day, the police arrested him on charges of being an accessory to murder.

It was almost a fluke that forty-six-year-old Ismael Florez was apprehended as Dorothea Puente's accomplice. The trail connecting him to Puente was cold and nearly forgotten.
Still, no one was claiming that Florez had helped Puente bury anyone. His involvement fell years shy and miles short of linking him to the seven bodies found in her yard, but it compounded the mystery: The body count had risen to eight.

Reporters and televisions crews swarmed around the courthouse as Florez was arraigned, and the media trumpeted the news that "Puente's assistant" had been arrested. "We have evidence and witnesses who saw the box being taken out of her house and his pickup driving away," Lieutenant Sizelove disclosed to an Oregon reporter. "We think this was probably her very first one; after that, she started burying 'em."

Dorothea Puente stared at the jailhouse television as Ismael Florez was marched across the screen. Perhaps she was lost in rumination… the letters Everson had written to her while she was in prison… their long-distance courtship… meeting him for the first time when he'd picked her up at the halfway house… their short time together… then that long, anxious wait after… Amazingly, no one back then had asked questions or raised suspicions. How was it that now, after all this time, the police had traced Everson back to her?