Disturbed Ground (36 page)

O'Mara looked into their faces. They were with him. "If you were to suddenly drop out of that pattern, it would be very easy to go back and find the last place you'd been, or the last person that had seen you."

Not Dorothea's victims. "These are not people that have established life patterns, that have jobs or immediate family they see on a regular basis. For the most part, their lives went on unnoticed. We can't be sure when they disappeared." O'Mara paused. "I call these people
shadow people.
They are shadow people in the sense that they're always there, but we don't see them."

Peter Vlautin could have groaned aloud. He'd heard this same shtick from O'Mara at the Solomon trial. Still, he couldn't risk tuning him out. He and Clymo listened carefully, intent on catching every nuance of their opponent's case, mentally preparing the counterattack.

Inexplicably, O'Mara veered away from his fine start and launched into a needlessly thorough explanation of Sacramento and of Puente's rough "Alkali Flats" neighborhood. He showed the jurors two amateurish videotapes (apparently done by creatively handicapped cops), one of the streets around Puente's boardinghouse, another of the exhumations.

Next, O'Mara showed them dozens of grisly photographs of the bodies. He marched these up and down in front of the jury box, eyes following him—back and forth, back and forth—in a kind of horrific hypnosis.

By the noon break, O'Mara's plodding pace had most of the media staring glassy-eyed toward their deadlines. No scintillating quotes. No eye-popping exposes. Even the British journalists—who knew this case would seize the imagination of a nation crammed with boardinghouses—were squirming impatiently.

They would have to make do with images of Puente's roses being fertilized by rotting corpses, for John O'Mara wasn't worried about steamy headlines, two-minute stories, or the short attention span of the media. After lunch, he trudged on, intent on educating the jury to the fundamentals of this complex case. Information flooded out of him. He explained the problems the decomposed remains presented to the forensic pathologists, outlined the intricacies of toxicological examinations, and defined the metabolites of Dalmane. Like a professor, he used a pointer with his diagrams, lecturing his class on Murder 101, handing them the tools of study.

A few nodded thoughtfully, several took notes.

Through most of O'Mara's remarks, Dorothea Puente watched impassively. Occasionally, she put a hand to a powdered cheek or gave a small shake of her head. She frequently wrote notes—pages and pages of notes—then passed them to Clymo, who nodded or wrote back.

O'Mara had prepared a placard on each of the nine victims, but by the end of the first day, he'd waded through the information on only one. No matter. The next day, rejuvenated, he plowed through the rest. For the first time, the jurors were being introduced to the seven tenants found buried in her yard—Leona Carpenter, Dorothy Miller, Bert Montoya, Benjamin Fink, James Gallop, Vera Faye Martin, and Betty Palmer—and to Everson Gillmouth, the man found in the box, and Ruth Munroe, who died of an overdose in Puente's home in 1982.

Explaining the medical histories of these nine, O'Mara subtly emphasized that these were not just names, but living, breathing people. Divorced, widowed, or abandoned, most were alone. He'd managed to round up a photograph—a family picture, a doctor's photo, even a mug shot, if necessary—for all but one. Leona Carpenter's placard remained sadly faceless.

O'Mara admitted their foibles. They were, for the most part, perpetual alcoholics; some were heavy smokers; some were mentally ill; most were not very good at following doctors' orders. And for each one, O'Mara recited a litany of ailments, from arterial sclerosis to ulcers, noting that such diseases "can be troublesome, can be debilitating, or certainly can be fatal."

Spectators exchanged looks. Reporters frowned. Why was he putting so much emphasis on the abysmal medical histories of these people? True, the prosecution often defuses the defense's case by admitting its own weaknesses, but wasn't this overkill? O'Mara was making
Clymo's case for him: These were sick, aging folks who just dropped over dead!

But then the prosecutor began sowing the seeds of suspicion: the toxicology reports showing Dalmane in the victims' systems; Puente's copious prescriptions for the drug; the empty gel capsules found in her drawer, in halves, with Dalmane residue still inside.

The defense attorneys hardly stirred. They expected all of this. Dalmane they were ready for.

But now O'Mara was uttering something new:
"Asphyxiation,”
he said, and he could almost feel the defense attorneys staring at his back. There are two types of asphyxiation, he told the jury, strangulation and suffocation. "Even these decomposed bodies probably would have provided evidence of strangulation; none was found. But what about
suffocation?"

Had the defense anticipated this? They should have, O'Mara thought. Williamson hadn't pursued this at the preliminary hearing, but the notion had jumped out at him while staring at those gruesome photographs.

"A pillow placed over the face," he was saying, "even a garbage bag over the head of a drugged, weakened victim, would have left no detectable trace. Did Dorothea sneak in, after her victims had collapsed into unconsciousness, to quietly extinguish them?"

Letting no alarm show on their faces, Clymo and Vlautin listened, immobile. He couldn't prove this, they likely told themselves. He was fishing.

"We're going to see a pattern of behavior," O'Mara continued, "that shows how she tried to cover up her crimes. Time and again, you're going to hear that after they've disappeared, they've gone mysteriously somewhere," he said, gesturing in the empty air. O'Mara recounted Puente's lies: that Bert had gone with his brother-in-law to Shreveport, Utah, "a place that doesn't exist"; that Leona Carpenter had gone "to the hospital to die"; that Ben Fink had gone "up north, to Marysville"; that James Gallop had gone "back to L.A."; and that Everson Gillmouth had gone "back to Oregon."

Such were her euphemisms for death.

O'Mara turned toward the money trail, itemizing the checks that Dorothea had stolen from her tenants, totaling upward of $58,000. (He wondered just how high that figure might go; the rekindled investigation was still turning up evidence.)

Everyone had assumed—with the checks, the lying, the forgery—that the motive here was pure and simple greed. But now O'Mara threw another surprise punch: "You're going to see that she already had access to virtually all their money
before
they were dead. The motive is not getting their money," he declared. "There were a lot of forgeries while the decedents were still alive!"

O’Mara went on: "Well then, what is the motive for murder? Dorothea Puente ran a very nice board-and-care facility. She took in some people that are very difficult. These are not people that the average board-and-care operators want to take. For the most part, they're people that have mental problems, substance abuse problems. They act out. They're not reliable. You can't really depend on them."

The problem with these people, O'Mara said, was that their health deteriorated to the point that they required extraordinary care. Rather than merely providing "a place to stay and a couple of meals," Puente found herself running a skilled nursing facility. "You've got a lot of people that are very, very sick, that require a lot of attention."

What was he saying? That Dorothea killed them because they were too much trouble?

At the next break, Kevin Clymo puffed a cigarette, muttering, "For four years he's been telling the whole world that the motive was money, and now he says she did it because she's evil! I can't understand why he did that."

This threw a kink in their defense. As, of course, O'Mara hoped it would.

But was it enough? O'Mara still had to confront the defendant herself. He'd never had to prosecute a serial killer with such a sweet and vulnerable image.

"As you see her in court today," he said, gesturing toward Mrs. Puente, "the defendant looks somewhat delicate, an elderly woman." He smiled. "But in terms of personality, and in terms of her physical abilities, she is not an old woman. She's not Mary See at See's Candies." [A candy franchise with a white-haired grandma as its trademark.]

He cautioned them, "You're going to hear the defendant described as a very caring person, a person trying to help out unfortunates. And
to some degree"—he shrugged—"that's true. But you're also going to hear a portrait of the defendant that's not nearly as flattering." He then described Dorothea Puente as extremely manipulative, a woman subject to very quick personality changes, who suffered "delusions of grandeur."

Curious jurors glanced over at this pale enigma.

Dorothea Puente listened impassively, her face a mask of a million tiny wrinkles, slight tucks in her cheeks (the apparent result of a 1988 face-lift).

Stepping up to a chart of the F Street house, O'Mara pointed to the upstairs and said quietly, "She describes that as a haunted room."
All eyes went to the "haunted bedroom" off the kitchen.

Painting Dorothea Puente in sinister shades, he explained that "people died on her in there," that she was a deadly caregiver. "I'm going to take care of them," she would say, escorting some unsuspecting soul upstairs to that bedroom.

"Shortly thereafter," O'Mara intoned, "they would disappear. No one would see them again."

On this ominous note, O'Mara closed. He hoped it was enough, for even now he was playing catch-up. He'd found some flaws in his own case, and he'd tried to anticipate counter-arguments, but the defense had had four years to turn each small tear into a giant hole.

At times O'Mara had seemed awash in a sea of details, diagrams, and displays. Had the jurors resented this protracted stream of information? Had O'Mara dragged on so long that they begrudged him for it? Puente's attorneys certainly hoped so.

The next morning, defense attorney Kevin Clymo rose out of his seat to address the jury. "We are kind of at a disadvantage," Clymo began, playing the underdog. "You get used to that when you're a defense lawyer." He smiled at them. "You're not going to hear any of our arguments until mid-spring."

And after that, the prosecution would have a second chance to present evidence. "That's because the prosecution has the
burden of proof,"
Clymo emphasized. The tall, dome-topped defense attorney had a much different style than the prosecutor: slower, more measured, with broad gestures. The jurors shifted gears and listened.

"Now, I'm going to tell you some things that the prosecution didn't tell you. I suppose one of our jobs under our adversary system is to
make sure that you guys, the true judges of the case, get a balanced view of the facts."

Clymo knew that, without a strong opening, they risked months of damning evidence piling up against their client. His imperative was to show that the state's evidence was open to interpretation. Yet, for defense attorneys, opening statements are a walk on a tightrope. Up until now the prosecutor—and the public—could only guess at how they might defend their client. Now, with each word to the jury, he clued the prosecution.

Clymo wheeled over a detailed, three-dimensional model of Puente's house, which looked like the elaborate dollhouse of an extremely spoiled child. He lifted off the roof and the jurors peered at the tiny furniture inside. "If, in fact, there was a 'haunted room,' you can see whether or not one of these rooms match that description," he said, his voice dripping sarcasm.

"I've got to tell you that I was a little bit surprised—for four years I've heard it suggested that Dorothea Puente killed people to steal their money. And what I heard yesterday was that Dorothea Puente killed people because she's a bad person. She's evil! And there is a haunted room in the haunted house! I went home and I scratched my head and I thought, my God, how little progress we've made since the Salem witch trials."

Popping in his own amateurish videotape, Clymo went through a leisurely tour of Puente's home. "This is a normal house," he said. "This is not a wicked witch's haunted house!" Indeed, with bookcases filled with paperbacks, a pantry full of food, lace curtains on the windows, pillows and big knitted comforters on the beds, it looked remarkably ordinary. "All the rooms had televisions," Clymo noted as the camera wandered through the first floor, then upstairs. "That's one of the things that Dorothea Puente did. That's where some of the money went. Televisions, beds, mattresses, linens, food—lots of food."