February 6, 2025 • 42 mins
This week, we are diving into a personal favorite case: the story of Dorothea Puente! This murderous granny lived a wild life before turning her petty crimes up many notches, all the way to serial murder. From humble beginnings in Redlands, CA, all the way to dancing with the Governor and rubbing elbows with California's politically elite, and all the way back down to life in a jail cell, Dorothea Puente's life was anything but boring. It was also immensely evil, tragic, and just plain sad, and we'll be sure to talk all about all those things in this two part case!
Fear not, we will be posting both parts back to back, so no waiting! Part one will outline her life before her murder spree began, while part two jumps right in to the killing, as well as her ridiciulous near escape, and the obvoius conclusion to the story - life in prison!
Join us on instagram: True Crime California
Email case suggestions to: truecrimecaliforniapod@gmail.com
A proud member of the Darkcast Networki
Sources:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/she-nicknamed-death-house-landlady-112800788.html
https://archive.org/details/bonegardensacram00wood_1/page/210/mode/2up
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/03/25/Accused-mass-killer-got-drugs-from-therapist/1593606805200/
https://casetext.com/case/puente-v-mitchell-2
Fear not, we will be posting both parts back to back, so no waiting! Part one will outline her life before her murder spree began, while part two jumps right in to the killing, as well as her ridiciulous near escape, and the obvoius conclusion to the story - life in prison!
Join us on instagram: True Crime California
Email case suggestions to: truecrimecaliforniapod@gmail.com
A proud member of the Darkcast Networki
Sources:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/she-nicknamed-death-house-landlady-112800788.html
https://archive.org/details/bonegardensacram00wood_1/page/210/mode/2up
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/03/25/Accused-mass-killer-got-drugs-from-therapist/1593606805200/
https://casetext.com/case/puente-v-mitchell-2
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Autumns Oddities is a strange and unusual podcast made by
the strange and unusual me Autumn Groovy. Each week, I'll
be taking you through some of the creepiest cases true
crime has to offer. It won't only be true crime.
I'll also be covering cryptids, haunted places, haunted things, and
(00:51):
the true stories that inspired horror movies. Listen every Monday
and Friday for new episodes, and remember, if it's creepy
and weird, you'll find it here.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Dark Cast Network.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Out of the shadows come the best indie podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Hey everyone, welcome to True Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy,
and I'm glad you're here. Hey everybody, welcome back to
(02:06):
yet another episode of True Crime California. This week, I've
decided to take on another whopper of a case. Next week,
I think I'm gonna do something a little more chill.
I keep saying that maybe I'm just a big, fat liar.
I don't know, but this week I decided to do
another classic case, another really big case. I'm hoping I
(02:27):
can talk quickly enough to do this in one episode,
but if not, I have a place where I'm gonna
break it. Up, So we're just gonna kind of go
and see what happens, and we'll decide when when they
get there. So again, if you like two episodes you're
like having to wait a week to finish a story,
you're gonna love this. Maybe if you like it all
at once, you're gonna love this. Maybe we'll find out together.
(02:49):
The case that I'm doing this week is that of
Dora thea Plente, And this case is really special to
me in a really twisted way because when I was
a little girl, I lived in Davis. I grew up
in Davis, California, And I mentioned that when I did
the Sweetheart murders, Well, Davis is right next to Sacramento,
and all of this happened while I was alive, and
(03:12):
while I was living in Davis. So shortly, like very
shortly after Dorothea was arrested, my dad took me to
the home where most of this story takes place. He
drove by, he explained to me, you know, in terms
that like a six or seven year old could understand
(03:33):
what was going on. So in all honesty like this,
this was my first sort of foray into true crime.
Now I don't remember it as well as I remember
like the oj Simpson trial, which really felt like my
first kind of dip into true crime. But I remember
it enough to as an adult now that I kind
of understand what that means, to really kind of appreciate
(03:54):
that that happened, and that my dad was just inappropriate
enough to take me to the house of a serial
kill and explain to me what had happened very shortly
after it happened. So if that gives you any idea
as to when it happened, this is like the late
eighties that we're mostly going to be talking about, although
we're going to go way back and talk about Dorothea's
life because she is a wild one and honestly, if
(04:19):
I mean, if she wasn't a murderer, we wouldn't be
talking about her. And she's a horrible person and you know,
doesn't deserve any praise, but her life is wild, and
I feel like if there were like a PG version
of it, it would be a really interesting story and
something that I think people would really enjoy hearing about. Again, unfortunately,
she's like a super horrible murderer, but regardless, I think
(04:44):
the story leading up to everything is very interesting, and
so I really want to kind of talk about it,
so I think we just get into it. I didn't
know a lot about her until I read about her.
And again, it's so wild. So we'll see if we
split this into two. But let's jump in. Dorothea Plante
was born Dorothea Gray in Redlands, California, on January ninth,
(05:08):
nineteen twenty nine. Her parents, Trudy and Jesse James Gray,
were violent alcoholics who did not want children, but for
some reason went on to have seven of them. Dorotheo
was the second youngest, and by the time she was
three years old, she was already having to do manual
labor like picking vegetables in fields to help the family
(05:29):
make ends meet. She was also mostly raised by her
older siblings, as her parents were always drunk, sick, or
in jail. Her father had fought in World War One
and had been severely injured by mustard gas, and as
a result, after the war he developed tuberculosis. He was
in and out of the hospital and unable to work
(05:50):
even when he wasn't acutely sick, which led to the
child labor situation. Also, while Jesse James was in the hospital,
her mother would turn to sex work to make ends meet,
and she would often have biker gangs over to her house.
She would also leave with them for weekends and you know,
a couple of days at a time, and because Dorothea
(06:11):
was so young, she would lock her and a younger
sibling in a closet for days on end. When she
would come home, she would make messes. She would be wasted,
she'd vomit everywhere, and the kids were expected to clean
up after her. So pretty terrible beginnings. In nineteen thirty five,
the family moved to Los Angeles so dorothy was about
(06:33):
six at this time, to be closer to the Veterans
Hospital as her father's health was rapidly declining. In nineteen
thirty seven, when Dorothea was only eight years old, he died.
This left her mother, Trudy, alone and in charge of
many children, and she did try for a short time
to make it work before eventually losing custody of all
of her remaining kids due to severe neglect. Dorothea's teachers
(06:58):
had finally reported the abuse to the authorities after it
was clear that Dorothea and her siblings were not being washed, fed,
or cared for in any way. At age nine, Dorothea
ended up in Ontario, California, in an orphanage. Now this
is not far from where she lived, and it's kind
of in the Greater Los Angeles area. There's like an
(07:18):
airport there. Dorothea was very smart, and her caretakers noticed
that she had a penchant for telling tall tales about
her life, like she would lie about things to make
her life seem better than it was because she was smart,
and as I noted with Larry Bittaker, she was able
to figure out what was going on around her very easily.
(07:41):
But also, like Larry and like many intelligent little kids,
when you're living in a horrible you know your young
life is terrible and you're smart enough to understand it,
it can really mess you up because you don't have
the mental or emotional capacity to know how to cope
with these things that you see going on around you.
Many children like Dorothea turned a problematic behavior, including lying,
(08:04):
in order to shield themselves from the horrible reality of
their lives. And with Dorothea, it's interesting because it's like,
you know, she's telling all these tales, but if any
of them were true, she would not be in the orphanage.
So she's young enough to think that she's like pulling
the wool over people's eyes, but in reality, it's just
a very sad thing that her caretakers took note of
(08:27):
to add more trauma to young Dorothy's life. About a
year after she was given up to the orphanage, her mother, Trudy,
was killed in any motorcycle accident, which basically meant that
Dorothea was now truly alone. Both of her parents were dead,
She's barely ten years old. From here, she was passed
around by relatives and siblings, so never had anything of
(08:48):
a stable life. The only stability she actually ever found
was in the brief time that she lived with both
of her parents in Los Angeles. Now, it was definitely
not because of her parents, who were alcoholics and would
scream and fight with each other every single night. It
was actually with the neighborhood and the community around her.
These almost exclusively Latino families had taken Dorothea in, fed her,
(09:12):
taught her Spanish, and cared for her in ways that
nobody ever had or ever would again, and this stuck
with her. She felt a kinship to the Latino communities
where she lived and to people in Mexico, and it
also led to her later lying about her family because
she is Dorothea Puente, saying that she had family in Mexico,
alluding to actually being Mexican. None of this is true,
(09:37):
and it's just really interesting when somebody is this messed
up that they're going to take something like one of
the only good things in their lives and they just
turn it into this. So anyway, to be clear, she
didn't know a single person in Mexico. So as I
bring this up throughout the story, just bear in mind
that that is just a lie. Now, by nineteen forty five,
(09:57):
Dorothea had run away to Washington, and it only age sixteen,
started working both as a waitress and also in sex work.
She was very beautiful, obviously very young, and a great liar,
so she did really well for herself during this time.
And also during this time she started using fake names
aliases and at this point she was going under the
(10:19):
name Sherry. Now. Also around this time, when she's sixteen,
she met twenty two year old soldier Fred McFall, who
fell in love with her at first sight. McFall mcfell, sorry,
I had to. He did not care what she did
for work and In fact, he respected her for being
scrappy and doing whatever it took to survive. So when
(10:42):
they married, she put on the marriage certificate that she
was thirty, which Fred knew was a lie, but at
this point he enjoyed her little lies in her trickery,
saying that he liked that she could fool anyone at
any time, and that if she needed to make a
buck she knew. How despite his love and respect for her,
things did not go well during the marriage. The couple
(11:04):
fought constantly, and Dorothea started drinking, following very closely in
her mother's footsteps. So she gets married young, she starts drinking,
and then the couple have two children. Much like her mother,
Dorothea was not maternal in the slightest and after a
short time, she gave away their first baby to some
(11:26):
of her family in Sacramento. Now this was without Fred's
knowledge or approval, but he went along with it after
the fact. I think she just was like, I can't
do this. However, Dorothea then put their second baby up
for adoption, also without Fred's approval, and this time he
tried to get the little girl back, only to find
that Dorothea had signed their rights away, so he could
(11:49):
not even talk to his own daughter or ever see
I mean, at that point you wouldn't be talking to her,
but he had no rights to ever have her back. This,
as you can imagine, led to more fighting, and eventually
Dorothea left their Nevada home to go to Los Angeles
for a little while just to get away. She worked
as a sex worker while there and became pregnant. When
(12:11):
she realized she was pregnant, she quickly came home to Fred,
I think, trying to pass it off as his and
very sadly miscarried Fred. No fool knew exactly what had happened,
and in nineteen forty eight he left Dorothea. They later divorced.
She would later lie about Fred, saying her first husband
had died very shortly after they were married. Sometimes she'd
(12:34):
say as soon as like two days after, because her
pride couldn't handle the truth. So we're going back to
her needing to lie about her life to make it
more grand than it was, because she couldn't deal with
the truth of how shitty it was. Nineteen forty eight
was also the first time Dorothea was arrested. She had
(12:55):
befriended a woman only to steal her checkbook and try
to buy items with it. They're nervous while doing this
in the store, and a store manager caught on, refusing
the check and calling the police. Now, Dorothea fled, but
somehow was quickly picked up again in Ontario, California. At
this point, she was using her married alias of sherry'all receial.
(13:17):
That was her name, Sherry all Receal, but her true
identity was pretty quickly discovered and she was given a
year in prison for forgery and using stolen checks. However,
because she's so charming, she was out in only four
months for good behavior. Now, during her time in jail,
Dorothea learned a lot about the system and how to
(13:41):
work it. She was also seen by a doctor who
called her a situational offender, meaning she only broke the
law if the opportunity presented itself, which isn't really any
better than any other kind offender when you really think
about it. But I think the point he was trying
to make was that she didn't break the law for
some sort of compulsive enjoyment. In breaking the law itself,
(14:02):
she was doing it as a means to an end.
So basically, if she needed something, she didn't mind breaking
the law to get it. But she wasn't going around
breaking the law like just for funzies. So anyway, beyond
being seen by this doctor, what she learned in jail
was that she could likely disappear and break her probation
and not be punished because this was like a nonviolent crime.
It was her first time. So after she got out,
(14:25):
that's exactly what she did. She fled to northern California again,
essentially disappearing from Ontario forever, at least legally speaking. Now
it's unclear what she did between nineteen fifty and nineteen
fifty two, but pretty much considered that, you know, she
just did sex work and laid low in the Sacramento area.
In nineteen fifty two, probably through her sex work, she
(14:47):
met and married a man named Axel Johansson. Now he
I think was like ten years older than her, something
like that, and just like Fred, he loved her little
lies and then came to hate them, just as Fred had.
He also at first loved how elegant she always looked,
but came to resent her spending on lavish clothing and
(15:08):
makeup when they didn't really have the money for it.
The two stayed together in Sacramento, but Dorothea would run away,
often going back to La to do her thing. Fred
was also or not Fred I'm sorry, Axel. I think
was like away at sea a lot. He was like
a longshoreman. I don't really know exactly what he did,
but he was gone a lot. So Dorothea was sort
of left to her own devices, but still they thought
(15:31):
she still drank. Things were not ideal. Around nineteen sixty,
maybe a bit before, Dorothea opened a store front a
bookkeeping service. But when I say storefront, I mean heavy
on the front. In reality, it was a brothel and
she had a group of women and girls working for
her here. Now, apparently at this time Dorothea herself had
(15:54):
put on a little bit of weight and so was
having trouble finding sex work. So instead she took what
money she had, probably likely stole it from Axel, and
opened shop. After a while, the landlord figured out what
was happening and called the cops. They set up a
sting to bust Dorothea, and the way they did it
was absolutely fucking hilarious. Now Dorothia had a bookkeeping service
(16:18):
with a main phone number, but then she also had
a secret number where you could call to ask for services,
like you basically call and book an appointment. So the
police called this second phone number and asked for the special,
which was a seven dollars and fifty cent blow job,
which back in those days feels like a lot of money,
but that was like their running special, So the cops
(16:41):
set this up. They then go to the brothel, and
before they went in this is like something out of
like a like a comic book, they put fluorescent powder
on their hands and on the money that they were
paying with, so when it was put under a black light,
or anybody they touched was put under a black light,
they'd be able to prove that they touched them and
(17:02):
where they touched them. They then came in for the
promised blowjobs, and after feeling Dorothea up for free, because
of course they had to keep with the story, so
they had to feel her up when she offered, they
arrested her and another woman for prostitution. The way that
they proved it was they shined this black light on
Dorothea's boobs and on her butt and on this other
(17:22):
woman's body. Lo and behold, they're their handprints. So there
it was, that's their proof. During her arrest and trial,
it was found that she had been using several fake
names to open the business, like she used so she
used names to open it, she used names to run it.
She used names like as a sex worker, so she
(17:45):
was constantly like changing her identity, and this all kind
of came out at her trial. However, despite all of this,
despite being a madam and having all these fake aliases
and probably fake ideas, she was given only ninety days
upon her Of course, she goes right back to Axel,
right back to fighting. But she did get real jobs
for a while, including as a cook. Apparently she was
(18:08):
like an amazing cook, so that was something she could
do and she went legit for a minute. She also
did continue to overspend their money on clothing and makeup,
and eventually, in nineteen sixty six, Axel got sick of
her and he left Dorothea just like Fred had. Alone again,
out of money and not wanting to go back to prison,
(18:31):
Dorothea decided it was time to take her scheming up
a notch. She wanted to do something that was not
an honest day's work. This woman was not gonna go
legit forever. I think she thought it was for suckers.
But she didn't want to go back to jail either,
so she decided to find a way to sort of
toe the line. Not toe the line, bridge the gap,
(18:51):
that's what we'll say. She's bridging the gap between legitimate
and illegitimate work and running a boarding house for alcoholics. Now,
she started this in nineteen sixty eight, and the house
was on F Street in Sacramento. Now this is not
the infamous F Street. If anybody knows this story, they
know that most of it takes place at a house
on F Street. This is not that house. This was
(19:15):
twenty first in f and was a two story house
with a basement. Dorothya rented this house and filled it
with borders, all of whom had government checks of one
kind or another, disability, social security, whatever it was. Dorothea
took these checks, forded the signatures on them, and kept
the money. The borders received only room and board and
(19:36):
nothing more. They lived in relative squalor while Dorothea bought
herself more lavish items like designer clothing, perfume, all the
things she wanted. Later, she also started getting plastic surgery
like facelifts, so she was really stacking up other people's
chips and spending them however she wanted. And to be sure,
(19:58):
this was a running theme throughout doors Thea's life. She
always needed more clothing, more makeup. She needed to be
the prettiest and the most fashionable and to present herself
as this well bred, high class woman. And the need
for this is a really self loathing thing, obviously, you know,
and stems from her childhood. So I want to call
(20:20):
out that is very interesting but also really sad that
her main motivation is just her optics, like how people
view her. So anyway, to be clear, the boarding house
always looked neat and tidy, and when social workers would
come to check in, they were always impressed with how
things were being run. They were also really grateful to
Dorothea for being willing to take in these troubled borders,
(20:43):
as apparently it was very difficult to find housing for alcoholics.
Dorothea on the outside, took good care of these people,
like she was really good at making it seem like
she was doing good and she would even have a
doctor come over every single week to check on the
tenants to make sure they were healthy, that they were
(21:03):
coming along in their sobriety, or even if they weren't,
that they were like doing okay. And this is the
point at which Dorothea decided to start calling herself a
doctor as well. She actually thought she was convincing people
that she was a medical doctor. She would tell people like, oh, yeah,
(21:24):
I went to medical school, I was a nurse, then
I was a doctor, which also like, that's not really
how that works. And while workers knew that this was
all a fabrication, like social workers the doctors, they kind
of allowed her to spin her tall tales because she
was otherwise seemingly so loving and great with all of
the people in her home that they just kind of
(21:45):
let it go. Now. Unfortunately, in reality, behind closed doors,
Dorothea would drink heavily at night and get into fights,
often physical fights, with many of the borders. She was
am in other ways as well, including putting the borders
with less money into the basement and partitioning sleeping quarters
(22:07):
for them using only like sheets, so they didn't even
have rooms. They were all just like shoved in the
basement and kind of like on top of each other
with no privacy and no facilities. It was just like
really really gross. Anyway, the workers clearly just wanted to
place these people, so they turned a blind eye to
(22:28):
Dorothea's wild tales and apparently a lot of other concerning things.
And Dorothea when as far as putting fake medical degrees
on the wall and calling herself La Doctra and treating
people with vitamin shots from her home so people would
come over and she would inject them with things as
a doctor. And she did this with the Latin community
mostly like La Doctra is like a female doctor. So
(22:50):
she's fucking fooling these people and injecting them with god
knows what. And I did want to call out that.
On top of like taking her tenants checks and sting
their money, she also stole their medication. She was taking
a lot of these people had like antipsychotics, they had
like anti anxiety medications, and back then they were way
more hardcore, like they've outlawed or made it very difficult
(23:12):
to obtain a lot of the medications that were available
back then. She was just like stockpiling this shit, like
she was taking it and then using it for whatever
she wanted, which which we'll get to now. It gets
even crazier from here because Dorothea used the stolen money
from her tenants to start giving to charities for migrant
workers and other Latino organizations in the area. She had
(23:37):
grown up with migrant workers, like I said, in Mexican families,
so she felt a connection to them and decided she
wanted to give back to the community in Sacramento via
money and volunteer work. This was all self serving, of course,
as Dorothea really loved the attention. I mean, she'd been
lying her whole life about being this person, and now
she'd found a dishonest way to make it happen. She
(23:58):
held gala's for organizations, She gave money to various political parties,
getting herself invited to parties and events with like the
California elite. At one of them, she even danced with
former California Governor Jerry Brown. And this is like before
he was governor or. While he was governor, it was
like in his heyday, He's ballroom dancing with Dorothea Puente,
(24:21):
which is absolutely insane. So you know, she's very well known,
very well connected, but obviously it's all a lie, and
she does get caught in this lie, but not yet.
First she wilds out even more. She had to go
in for a surgery, like for her thyroid, I believe,
because she was gaining a lot of weight and she
(24:43):
couldn't keep it under control. So in nineteen seventy seven,
she went in for this surgery. Now, being Dorothea, she
couldn't leave well enough alone. She had to turn it
into a bigger thing. She had to turn it into
a lie. She was a pathological liar. She could not
help herself. So instead of being like, yeah, I'm getting
too much weight, there's something wrong with my thyroid, She's like, hey, listen, everybody,
(25:04):
I'm dying of cancer. I'm having a major surgery. You'll
probably never see me again, which like what, like why
would you do that? That's so insane, Like everything is
an exaggeration or a lie, even when it really really
doesn't need to be. Like that was enough. So for
the past few years, up to nineteen seventy seven, on
top of everything else, Dorothy had started Dorothy Dorothea had
(25:25):
started taking in a number of young wayward girls, calling
them her stepdaughters, her adopted daughters, basically claiming them as
her own, even though again like they weren't. Now for
whatever reason, Dorothea really loved these girls. It really seemed
like a lot of this was just out of the
goodness of her heart. She took them in, she let
(25:48):
them live with her, And I think that it is
a lot of it's because of the way she grew up.
She saw her younger self and these girls, and you know,
she wanted to give them the chances she never had.
And I think it may have also been a way
of making up for giving up her own daughters years earlier.
So it was a lot of guilt, and it was
also very much like I could give them the chance
(26:11):
that I never had. So she taught these girls to
be ladylike. She fed and clothed them, She was basically
their mother. Now later on, like much later on, like
when we get to the end here, I won't bring
this up again, but I'll just say that many of
them came forward and said that she saved them from
a life of crime, from ending up in the streets,
from ending up in prison. So it's a really weird
(26:32):
and contradictory kind of part of her. It's very different
from everything else she did in her life. But the
thing that makes it similar is that ultimately it was
self serving, especially if it was guilt from abandoning her
own daughters. Anyway, she's telling everybody she's dying, and she
wrote up this will and left everything to these girls.
(26:52):
But even this was a lie. She didn't have the
things that she left to them, so it's just more fantasy,
like to make herself look good or to make the
girls think she really loved them, like she knew she
wasn't gonna die. I mean, I guess she could have
on the table, but she wasn't expecting to die, and
she didn't have the stuff to leave the girls, so
it was more just to get like praise. I guess,
(27:13):
I don't know. Anyway, she returns, Sorry, I hit my mic.
She returns to the house on f Street, and pretty
soon since she's you know, living on a house of cards,
you know, it's all lies, everything falls apart. Now before
we get to that, though, I wanted to mention that
during this time of milk and honey in Dorothea's life,
(27:34):
she married twice, once to a twenty one year old
man with the last name Plente, hence her name she's
best known for, and again to a man about ten
years her junior named Montalvo. Now, both of these men
were much younger than she was when she married the
twenty one year old, and I think she was thirty nine.
And then just a few years later, in her like
(27:54):
early forties, she married Montalvo, who was like in his
early thirties. Now, both of these men married her for
her perceived money, and both marriages lasted less than a year.
And in both marriages, Dorothea made up tall tales about
how long they were married, why it didn't work out,
even going as far as to claim one of them
was gay, just basically like doing her normal thing to
(28:17):
sort of deflect the shame of having more failed marriages,
admitting she had been used, admitting you know, she had
made bad decisions. But all of this is to say
that she pulled the wool over everyone's eyes well enough
that young men were trying to take advantage of her,
thinking that she was like some rich heiress or you know, socialite,
and then once they saw behind the facade, they left
(28:40):
her because they're like, oh, you're a poor, sad, heavily
drinking thief of a woman. Now, of course, when you
build your life on a web of lies, like I said,
Eventually everything unravels. In nineteen seventy eight, this happened to
Dorothea when a former border of hers landed himself in prison.
(29:00):
While he was there, he noticed he wasn't getting his
Social Security checks, so he called the administration and found
that his checks were in fact being cashed by none
other than Dorothy Aplente. When confronted with this information, Dorothea said, oh,
I'd taken the checks to him. He signed them for cash,
like he was giving them to me. She said that
the guards at the jail watched her do this. This
(29:24):
is such a crazy lie because it's super easy to disprove.
She's like, yeah, the guards will lie for me. It's
like you're just throwing a hail Mary, thinking like the
guards are gonna be like, oh, yeah, that did happen,
Like they're gonna misremember because she said so. It's a
very Dorothea thing to do to just like I'm just
gonna tell this crazy lie and they're gonna believe me
and everything's gonna be cool. So this didn't work obviously,
(29:47):
they quickly disprove it, and then the Treasury Department gets
involved because the government does not like when people steal
their money. She was arrested after they did a brief
investigation where they found more than four thousand dollars in
forged checks from many of her tenants. Now, the four
thousand dollar mark was where they needed to get to
(30:08):
charge her with a felony, which they did. However, because
of her age and her demeanor, she was not sent
to prison and instead was given parole, but she was
also forced to see a psychiatrist. She moved out of
Sacramento to nearby Stockton to avoid the shame of her
social decline and did menial jobs to stay afloat, again
(30:30):
being like a cook. She was diagnosed by her psychiatrist
as having schizophrenia, which at the time I think he
was kind of using as a blanket term just to
mean that she was super fucked up. Now, this guy
continued to be a psychiatrist for many years, and at
one point later on during her trial, he was accused
of providing her with whatever drugs she wanted, which she
(30:53):
potentially used against her victims. But in the end it
kind of came out that that wasn't actually the case
and he was falsely accused. So I didn't want to
sort of just talk about that, but this is like
kind of the guy that she's with until she, you know,
goes to prison, which she does spoiler alert. One thing
about Dorothea is she was never one to stay down.
(31:16):
So even though all of this went down in nineteen
seventy eight and she moved to Stockton, by nineteen seventy
nine she was back in Sacramento trying her luck at
being a nurse for the sick and elderly in their homes,
which is crazy because she had no medical training. She
just lied and said she did, and everybody believed her,
which I mean, to be fair, some of her lies
(31:37):
seemed so outrageous and so ridiculous, but people keep believing
her or at least giving her a pass, so like,
of course she's going to keep at it right anyway.
So she'd actually done a little bit of this elderly
care while she was running the boarding house, but mostly
stole from those clients and didn't really offer much in
the way of care. But I think this is where
(31:57):
she got the idea and decided to try her again
at being illegitimately legitimate in her job. So now we're
going to talk about Ricardo ud Rica. Somebody who would
play a major role in the bulk of the murderous
part of this story, which we're not quite there, but
we're getting there. He and his wife came to Sacramento
from Mexico, I think in the eighties, and worked their
(32:19):
butts off at a local hotel, the Clarion, to save
enough money to buy a rundown two story house at
fourteen twenty six F Street in downtown Sacramento, and that
is the f Street house that we all know and
love if we know this story. He never took vacations.
Ricardo never spent money, only saved to buy and then
(32:40):
rehab this home. The one thing that he would do
is occasionally visit a nearby bar called Joe's Corner to
grab a drink. And this was like two doors down
from his house. This is where he met Dorothea Montalvo
as she was going by at that point out trolling
for her next roube. She told him, I heard your
(33:02):
second floor is for rent. He told her, well, you know,
it hasn't really been updated. It's a mess, and Dorothea
was like, that's perfect. I want to live there. I
will help clean it up. I'm just like ready to go.
So Ricardo takes her home to his family. He's enamored
by her grace and her high class upbringing. Once again,
she's you know, pulling it off. She met his family
(33:25):
and charmed his wife and two young daughters, telling them
that she had family in Mexico, which again something she
told a lot of people that's a total lie, and
that she had been very rich, but her ex husband
Montalvo had stolen all of her money. She had the
money for the rent. Of course, she got this from
her nursing clients because she was stealing from them, but
(33:46):
that's what she used. And the family was like, great,
she has the money, she's elegantly dressed, she's very charming.
Let's let her stay with us. And she did, and
she ended up staying here for a very long time.
But this first stint for about two to three years,
and during this time, she babysat the girls, fixed up
the upstairs, she paid rent on time every month. The
(34:08):
family loved her and it's terrifying to think that she
was taking care of these two young little girls. Knowing
what we know. She was also still working as an
elderly care nurse for a bonded company, meaning they straight
up vouched for her without doing any sort of background
check on her, which is wild, but I think was
much more common back then than it is now, thank
(34:29):
goodness now. During this time, she took care of a
woman named Esther Busby. Esther was elderly but in generally
good health when Dorothea Montalvo started caring for her. Oddly though,
she would have these fits of illness that bordered on death,
and when these would happen, she would have to be
rushed to the hospital time and time again. Each time
(34:53):
Dorothea would go with her, worried that she might not recover.
I think we all know that she was worried she
would recover, but that's what she said. She was so
worried about her. She didn't know what was going on.
She just wanted to make sure she was okay. Finally, finally,
after some months, social workers involved in the case realized
what was going on, as did the hospital. They noticed
(35:16):
that whenever Esther would come in have her life saved
and recover, she would then go home to be cared
for by Dorothea, only to return shortly thereafter. She would
also suffer bouts of this like life threatening illness while
in the hospital, but only directly after being visited by
and fed by Dorothea. When Dorothea caught wind of their suspicions,
(35:42):
she did not stop poisoning Esther. Rather, she had her
taken to a different hospital, the UC Davis Hospital, as
they had no record and therefore no suspicions about what
was going on. The people who originally suspected Dorothea found
this out and finally got in touch with Esther's family
to let them know what was going on. And what
(36:05):
Esther's family told them was that Dorothea had been calling
them saying that Esther was dying of cancer and needed
more and more money for her care. So she was
fleecing these people for money while poisoning their family member.
So these you know. When the social workers and doctor
that were involved in this found out, they went straight
(36:25):
to Esther and just flat out told her what was
going on. Esther believed them, and she fired Dorothea. But
for some reason, none of these people bothered to report
this to her place of work or the police, that
is until she did it again with another patient. But
at this point, even after she did it to another patient,
(36:46):
they went and told her job and the police and
neither did a thing about it because there wasn't enough
evidence according to them. However, I will tell you that
these social workers and this doctor did keep digging and
waiting to catch Dorothea in the act, and finally, in
nineteen eighty two they did. Also, I wanted to correct myself.
(37:08):
I believe that Ricardo came in the seventies, not the eighties,
so he bought the house on f Street sometime in
the mid to late seventies. Dorothea moved in I believe
in nineteen eighty. Anyway, we're in nineteen eighty two and
at Dorothea's about to get caught for some shit. First,
Dorothea met a man named Malcolm McKenzie at a local
bar in Sacramento. Shocking right. She bought him a drink
(37:31):
and showered him with compliments, then suggesting they go back
to his apartment. Upon his arrival, he began to feel faint,
and by the time they were inside, he was entirely paralyzed,
though completely conscious. He was laid out on the couch
as he watched Dorothea toss his apartment for anything of value.
(37:55):
After stealing money from around the house, as well as
a rare penny collection. This monster Dorothea walked up to
this man while he's laying there completely paralyzed, and steals
a pinky ring right off of his finger. This woman
is bold, if nothing else, she's also very, very stupid.
(38:19):
As with this man, she used her real first name, Dorothea,
and as soon as he was able to move again,
which I'm sure was a terrifyingly long wait for him,
he called the police. They found her really quickly, trying
to cash two checks from his checkbook. She said, oh no,
he gave these to me. I didn't steal them. She
(38:40):
also claimed she was seventy two, I think, to get pity,
and that she didn't want to go steady with him,
which is why he was angry and called the police
on her. So she plays this innocent old granny. He
gave me this money, and then he got mad when
I wouldn't sleep with him, And that worked at least
in the moment, because they let her go. Immediately thereafter,
(39:02):
she drugged and robbed an eighty two year old woman
she was supposed to be caring for as a nurse.
The two had met at their hairdresser and Dorothea introduced
herself as Betty Peterson. She drugged this woman and stole
a diamond ring and about two hundred dowmain, which is
a I think it's a heavy sedative. I've read that
it's not, but like it knocks me out. I've used
(39:25):
it to fly and it's great. But they say it's
just like a sleeping pill. But anyway, it puts you
to sleep, so we can kind of understand why she
wants this right. The woman called police but had no
real information on her. Luckily, again, Dorothea is an idiot
or just too fucking bold, and went back to that
(39:45):
same beauty parlor where this woman saw her and told
them to call the police. She tells the place, call
the cops. There's the woman that drugged me and robbed me.
Dorothea ran away, but the hairdressers knew her real name
and she was finally a tested for these crimes. Now,
as the trial went on, McKenzie Malcolm mackenzie testified against
(40:06):
her the man, and she was given felony charges and
sent to jail to a wait trial. Sadly, her lawyer
was able to get her out on her own recognizance
because she couldn't afford bail, but he appealed to a
judge like, oh, she's just a little old lady, and
unfortunately this worked. She was out and back at fourteen
twenty six f Street, where she planned and carried out
(40:27):
her first murder for profit, which she would not have
been able to do if they had left her in jail.
And I think this is where I'm going to leave
it for part one. It's a bit longer than I anticipated.
I actually recorded beyond this and I realized that it's
going to go like an hour and a half or more.
I realized this first half is mostly set up and
(40:50):
I have everything already done, so I'm just going to
post these in the same week. So I'm going to
post this on a regular day and I'll post part
two the following day. I personally hate waiting a week
for the second half, so I'm not gonna do that
to you guys, especially since it's ready to go. But
we're gonna get into the bulk of the actual murders
starting with part two. This is all just sort of
(41:11):
set up so we know what a wild and crazy
gal Dorothea is, and we're starting to see her ramp
up and really just be willing to do whatever it
takes to sort of keep her lifestyle going. I'm sure
you just heard my dog growling at my other dog
over a toy. In any case, so this is really
the lead up to the craziness. The craziness will be
(41:33):
coming out in part two, and I will get that
out tomorrow, so there's not a lot of wit time.
Thanks everybody for listening. I hope this first half was captivating.
I definitely found it very interesting. Dorothea is a wild,
wild lady. But Part two is gonna be a lot
more hardcore, a lot of sad, a lot of bummer.
(41:53):
There's a lot of people she takes advantage of, so yeah,
we'll get into that, but until then, thanks for listening.
Please like, rate, review, send me an email with case suggestions,
True crime californiapod at gmail dot com, follow me on Instagram,
Like and rate on all of your favorite listening places.
I don't know what are they called, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
(42:15):
Wherever you listen, give us a rating, us being me
the Royal Wey and thanks again, and until I guess tomorrow,
stay safe,
Autumns Oddities is a strange and unusual podcast made by
the strange and unusual me Autumn Groovy. Each week, I'll
be taking you through some of the creepiest cases true
crime has to offer. It won't only be true crime.
I'll also be covering cryptids, haunted places, haunted things, and
(00:51):
the true stories that inspired horror movies. Listen every Monday
and Friday for new episodes, and remember, if it's creepy
and weird, you'll find it here.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
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Out of the shadows come the best indie podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Hey everyone, welcome to True Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy,
and I'm glad you're here. Hey everybody, welcome back to
(02:06):
yet another episode of True Crime California. This week, I've
decided to take on another whopper of a case. Next week,
I think I'm gonna do something a little more chill.
I keep saying that maybe I'm just a big, fat liar.
I don't know, but this week I decided to do
another classic case, another really big case. I'm hoping I
(02:27):
can talk quickly enough to do this in one episode,
but if not, I have a place where I'm gonna
break it. Up, So we're just gonna kind of go
and see what happens, and we'll decide when when they
get there. So again, if you like two episodes you're
like having to wait a week to finish a story,
you're gonna love this. Maybe if you like it all
at once, you're gonna love this. Maybe we'll find out together.
(02:49):
The case that I'm doing this week is that of
Dora thea Plente, And this case is really special to
me in a really twisted way because when I was
a little girl, I lived in Davis. I grew up
in Davis, California, And I mentioned that when I did
the Sweetheart murders, Well, Davis is right next to Sacramento,
and all of this happened while I was alive, and
(03:12):
while I was living in Davis. So shortly, like very
shortly after Dorothea was arrested, my dad took me to
the home where most of this story takes place. He
drove by, he explained to me, you know, in terms
that like a six or seven year old could understand
(03:33):
what was going on. So in all honesty like this,
this was my first sort of foray into true crime.
Now I don't remember it as well as I remember
like the oj Simpson trial, which really felt like my
first kind of dip into true crime. But I remember
it enough to as an adult now that I kind
of understand what that means, to really kind of appreciate
(03:54):
that that happened, and that my dad was just inappropriate
enough to take me to the house of a serial
kill and explain to me what had happened very shortly
after it happened. So if that gives you any idea
as to when it happened, this is like the late
eighties that we're mostly going to be talking about, although
we're going to go way back and talk about Dorothea's
life because she is a wild one and honestly, if
(04:19):
I mean, if she wasn't a murderer, we wouldn't be
talking about her. And she's a horrible person and you know,
doesn't deserve any praise, but her life is wild, and
I feel like if there were like a PG version
of it, it would be a really interesting story and
something that I think people would really enjoy hearing about. Again, unfortunately,
she's like a super horrible murderer, but regardless, I think
(04:44):
the story leading up to everything is very interesting, and
so I really want to kind of talk about it,
so I think we just get into it. I didn't
know a lot about her until I read about her.
And again, it's so wild. So we'll see if we
split this into two. But let's jump in. Dorothea Plante
was born Dorothea Gray in Redlands, California, on January ninth,
(05:08):
nineteen twenty nine. Her parents, Trudy and Jesse James Gray,
were violent alcoholics who did not want children, but for
some reason went on to have seven of them. Dorotheo
was the second youngest, and by the time she was
three years old, she was already having to do manual
labor like picking vegetables in fields to help the family
(05:29):
make ends meet. She was also mostly raised by her
older siblings, as her parents were always drunk, sick, or
in jail. Her father had fought in World War One
and had been severely injured by mustard gas, and as
a result, after the war he developed tuberculosis. He was
in and out of the hospital and unable to work
(05:50):
even when he wasn't acutely sick, which led to the
child labor situation. Also, while Jesse James was in the hospital,
her mother would turn to sex work to make ends meet,
and she would often have biker gangs over to her house.
She would also leave with them for weekends and you know,
a couple of days at a time, and because Dorothea
(06:11):
was so young, she would lock her and a younger
sibling in a closet for days on end. When she
would come home, she would make messes. She would be wasted,
she'd vomit everywhere, and the kids were expected to clean
up after her. So pretty terrible beginnings. In nineteen thirty five,
the family moved to Los Angeles so dorothy was about
(06:33):
six at this time, to be closer to the Veterans
Hospital as her father's health was rapidly declining. In nineteen
thirty seven, when Dorothea was only eight years old, he died.
This left her mother, Trudy, alone and in charge of
many children, and she did try for a short time
to make it work before eventually losing custody of all
of her remaining kids due to severe neglect. Dorothea's teachers
(06:58):
had finally reported the abuse to the authorities after it
was clear that Dorothea and her siblings were not being washed, fed,
or cared for in any way. At age nine, Dorothea
ended up in Ontario, California, in an orphanage. Now this
is not far from where she lived, and it's kind
of in the Greater Los Angeles area. There's like an
(07:18):
airport there. Dorothea was very smart, and her caretakers noticed
that she had a penchant for telling tall tales about
her life, like she would lie about things to make
her life seem better than it was because she was smart,
and as I noted with Larry Bittaker, she was able
to figure out what was going on around her very easily.
(07:41):
But also, like Larry and like many intelligent little kids,
when you're living in a horrible you know your young
life is terrible and you're smart enough to understand it,
it can really mess you up because you don't have
the mental or emotional capacity to know how to cope
with these things that you see going on around you.
Many children like Dorothea turned a problematic behavior, including lying,
(08:04):
in order to shield themselves from the horrible reality of
their lives. And with Dorothea, it's interesting because it's like,
you know, she's telling all these tales, but if any
of them were true, she would not be in the orphanage.
So she's young enough to think that she's like pulling
the wool over people's eyes, but in reality, it's just
a very sad thing that her caretakers took note of
(08:27):
to add more trauma to young Dorothy's life. About a
year after she was given up to the orphanage, her mother, Trudy,
was killed in any motorcycle accident, which basically meant that
Dorothea was now truly alone. Both of her parents were dead,
She's barely ten years old. From here, she was passed
around by relatives and siblings, so never had anything of
(08:48):
a stable life. The only stability she actually ever found
was in the brief time that she lived with both
of her parents in Los Angeles. Now, it was definitely
not because of her parents, who were alcoholics and would
scream and fight with each other every single night. It
was actually with the neighborhood and the community around her.
These almost exclusively Latino families had taken Dorothea in, fed her,
(09:12):
taught her Spanish, and cared for her in ways that
nobody ever had or ever would again, and this stuck
with her. She felt a kinship to the Latino communities
where she lived and to people in Mexico, and it
also led to her later lying about her family because
she is Dorothea Puente, saying that she had family in Mexico,
alluding to actually being Mexican. None of this is true,
(09:37):
and it's just really interesting when somebody is this messed
up that they're going to take something like one of
the only good things in their lives and they just
turn it into this. So anyway, to be clear, she
didn't know a single person in Mexico. So as I
bring this up throughout the story, just bear in mind
that that is just a lie. Now, by nineteen forty five,
(09:57):
Dorothea had run away to Washington, and it only age sixteen,
started working both as a waitress and also in sex work.
She was very beautiful, obviously very young, and a great liar,
so she did really well for herself during this time.
And also during this time she started using fake names
aliases and at this point she was going under the
(10:19):
name Sherry. Now. Also around this time, when she's sixteen,
she met twenty two year old soldier Fred McFall, who
fell in love with her at first sight. McFall mcfell, sorry,
I had to. He did not care what she did
for work and In fact, he respected her for being
scrappy and doing whatever it took to survive. So when
(10:42):
they married, she put on the marriage certificate that she
was thirty, which Fred knew was a lie, but at
this point he enjoyed her little lies in her trickery,
saying that he liked that she could fool anyone at
any time, and that if she needed to make a
buck she knew. How despite his love and respect for her,
things did not go well during the marriage. The couple
(11:04):
fought constantly, and Dorothea started drinking, following very closely in
her mother's footsteps. So she gets married young, she starts drinking,
and then the couple have two children. Much like her mother,
Dorothea was not maternal in the slightest and after a
short time, she gave away their first baby to some
(11:26):
of her family in Sacramento. Now this was without Fred's
knowledge or approval, but he went along with it after
the fact. I think she just was like, I can't
do this. However, Dorothea then put their second baby up
for adoption, also without Fred's approval, and this time he
tried to get the little girl back, only to find
that Dorothea had signed their rights away, so he could
(11:49):
not even talk to his own daughter or ever see
I mean, at that point you wouldn't be talking to her,
but he had no rights to ever have her back. This,
as you can imagine, led to more fighting, and eventually
Dorothea left their Nevada home to go to Los Angeles
for a little while just to get away. She worked
as a sex worker while there and became pregnant. When
(12:11):
she realized she was pregnant, she quickly came home to Fred,
I think, trying to pass it off as his and
very sadly miscarried Fred. No fool knew exactly what had happened,
and in nineteen forty eight he left Dorothea. They later divorced.
She would later lie about Fred, saying her first husband
had died very shortly after they were married. Sometimes she'd
(12:34):
say as soon as like two days after, because her
pride couldn't handle the truth. So we're going back to
her needing to lie about her life to make it
more grand than it was, because she couldn't deal with
the truth of how shitty it was. Nineteen forty eight
was also the first time Dorothea was arrested. She had
(12:55):
befriended a woman only to steal her checkbook and try
to buy items with it. They're nervous while doing this
in the store, and a store manager caught on, refusing
the check and calling the police. Now, Dorothea fled, but
somehow was quickly picked up again in Ontario, California. At
this point, she was using her married alias of sherry'all receial.
(13:17):
That was her name, Sherry all Receal, but her true
identity was pretty quickly discovered and she was given a
year in prison for forgery and using stolen checks. However,
because she's so charming, she was out in only four
months for good behavior. Now, during her time in jail,
Dorothea learned a lot about the system and how to
(13:41):
work it. She was also seen by a doctor who
called her a situational offender, meaning she only broke the
law if the opportunity presented itself, which isn't really any
better than any other kind offender when you really think
about it. But I think the point he was trying
to make was that she didn't break the law for
some sort of compulsive enjoyment. In breaking the law itself,
(14:02):
she was doing it as a means to an end.
So basically, if she needed something, she didn't mind breaking
the law to get it. But she wasn't going around
breaking the law like just for funzies. So anyway, beyond
being seen by this doctor, what she learned in jail
was that she could likely disappear and break her probation
and not be punished because this was like a nonviolent crime.
It was her first time. So after she got out,
(14:25):
that's exactly what she did. She fled to northern California again,
essentially disappearing from Ontario forever, at least legally speaking. Now
it's unclear what she did between nineteen fifty and nineteen
fifty two, but pretty much considered that, you know, she
just did sex work and laid low in the Sacramento area.
In nineteen fifty two, probably through her sex work, she
(14:47):
met and married a man named Axel Johansson. Now he
I think was like ten years older than her, something
like that, and just like Fred, he loved her little
lies and then came to hate them, just as Fred had.
He also at first loved how elegant she always looked,
but came to resent her spending on lavish clothing and
(15:08):
makeup when they didn't really have the money for it.
The two stayed together in Sacramento, but Dorothea would run away,
often going back to La to do her thing. Fred
was also or not Fred I'm sorry, Axel. I think
was like away at sea a lot. He was like
a longshoreman. I don't really know exactly what he did,
but he was gone a lot. So Dorothea was sort
of left to her own devices, but still they thought
(15:31):
she still drank. Things were not ideal. Around nineteen sixty,
maybe a bit before, Dorothea opened a store front a
bookkeeping service. But when I say storefront, I mean heavy
on the front. In reality, it was a brothel and
she had a group of women and girls working for
her here. Now, apparently at this time Dorothea herself had
(15:54):
put on a little bit of weight and so was
having trouble finding sex work. So instead she took what
money she had, probably likely stole it from Axel, and
opened shop. After a while, the landlord figured out what
was happening and called the cops. They set up a
sting to bust Dorothea, and the way they did it
was absolutely fucking hilarious. Now Dorothia had a bookkeeping service
(16:18):
with a main phone number, but then she also had
a secret number where you could call to ask for services,
like you basically call and book an appointment. So the
police called this second phone number and asked for the special,
which was a seven dollars and fifty cent blow job,
which back in those days feels like a lot of money,
but that was like their running special, So the cops
(16:41):
set this up. They then go to the brothel, and
before they went in this is like something out of
like a like a comic book, they put fluorescent powder
on their hands and on the money that they were
paying with, so when it was put under a black light,
or anybody they touched was put under a black light,
they'd be able to prove that they touched them and
(17:02):
where they touched them. They then came in for the
promised blowjobs, and after feeling Dorothea up for free, because
of course they had to keep with the story, so
they had to feel her up when she offered, they
arrested her and another woman for prostitution. The way that
they proved it was they shined this black light on
Dorothea's boobs and on her butt and on this other
(17:22):
woman's body. Lo and behold, they're their handprints. So there
it was, that's their proof. During her arrest and trial,
it was found that she had been using several fake
names to open the business, like she used so she
used names to open it, she used names to run it.
She used names like as a sex worker, so she
(17:45):
was constantly like changing her identity, and this all kind
of came out at her trial. However, despite all of this,
despite being a madam and having all these fake aliases
and probably fake ideas, she was given only ninety days
upon her Of course, she goes right back to Axel,
right back to fighting. But she did get real jobs
for a while, including as a cook. Apparently she was
(18:08):
like an amazing cook, so that was something she could
do and she went legit for a minute. She also
did continue to overspend their money on clothing and makeup,
and eventually, in nineteen sixty six, Axel got sick of
her and he left Dorothea just like Fred had. Alone again,
out of money and not wanting to go back to prison,
(18:31):
Dorothea decided it was time to take her scheming up
a notch. She wanted to do something that was not
an honest day's work. This woman was not gonna go
legit forever. I think she thought it was for suckers.
But she didn't want to go back to jail either,
so she decided to find a way to sort of
toe the line. Not toe the line, bridge the gap,
(18:51):
that's what we'll say. She's bridging the gap between legitimate
and illegitimate work and running a boarding house for alcoholics. Now,
she started this in nineteen sixty eight, and the house
was on F Street in Sacramento. Now this is not
the infamous F Street. If anybody knows this story, they
know that most of it takes place at a house
on F Street. This is not that house. This was
(19:15):
twenty first in f and was a two story house
with a basement. Dorothya rented this house and filled it
with borders, all of whom had government checks of one
kind or another, disability, social security, whatever it was. Dorothea
took these checks, forded the signatures on them, and kept
the money. The borders received only room and board and
(19:36):
nothing more. They lived in relative squalor while Dorothea bought
herself more lavish items like designer clothing, perfume, all the
things she wanted. Later, she also started getting plastic surgery
like facelifts, so she was really stacking up other people's
chips and spending them however she wanted. And to be sure,
(19:58):
this was a running theme throughout doors Thea's life. She
always needed more clothing, more makeup. She needed to be
the prettiest and the most fashionable and to present herself
as this well bred, high class woman. And the need
for this is a really self loathing thing, obviously, you know,
and stems from her childhood. So I want to call
(20:20):
out that is very interesting but also really sad that
her main motivation is just her optics, like how people
view her. So anyway, to be clear, the boarding house
always looked neat and tidy, and when social workers would
come to check in, they were always impressed with how
things were being run. They were also really grateful to
Dorothea for being willing to take in these troubled borders,
(20:43):
as apparently it was very difficult to find housing for alcoholics.
Dorothea on the outside, took good care of these people,
like she was really good at making it seem like
she was doing good and she would even have a
doctor come over every single week to check on the
tenants to make sure they were healthy, that they were
(21:03):
coming along in their sobriety, or even if they weren't,
that they were like doing okay. And this is the
point at which Dorothea decided to start calling herself a
doctor as well. She actually thought she was convincing people
that she was a medical doctor. She would tell people like, oh, yeah,
(21:24):
I went to medical school, I was a nurse, then
I was a doctor, which also like, that's not really
how that works. And while workers knew that this was
all a fabrication, like social workers the doctors, they kind
of allowed her to spin her tall tales because she
was otherwise seemingly so loving and great with all of
the people in her home that they just kind of
(21:45):
let it go. Now. Unfortunately, in reality, behind closed doors,
Dorothea would drink heavily at night and get into fights,
often physical fights, with many of the borders. She was
am in other ways as well, including putting the borders
with less money into the basement and partitioning sleeping quarters
(22:07):
for them using only like sheets, so they didn't even
have rooms. They were all just like shoved in the
basement and kind of like on top of each other
with no privacy and no facilities. It was just like
really really gross. Anyway, the workers clearly just wanted to
place these people, so they turned a blind eye to
(22:28):
Dorothea's wild tales and apparently a lot of other concerning things.
And Dorothea when as far as putting fake medical degrees
on the wall and calling herself La Doctra and treating
people with vitamin shots from her home so people would
come over and she would inject them with things as
a doctor. And she did this with the Latin community
mostly like La Doctra is like a female doctor. So
(22:50):
she's fucking fooling these people and injecting them with god
knows what. And I did want to call out that.
On top of like taking her tenants checks and sting
their money, she also stole their medication. She was taking
a lot of these people had like antipsychotics, they had
like anti anxiety medications, and back then they were way
more hardcore, like they've outlawed or made it very difficult
(23:12):
to obtain a lot of the medications that were available
back then. She was just like stockpiling this shit, like
she was taking it and then using it for whatever
she wanted, which which we'll get to now. It gets
even crazier from here because Dorothea used the stolen money
from her tenants to start giving to charities for migrant
workers and other Latino organizations in the area. She had
(23:37):
grown up with migrant workers, like I said, in Mexican families,
so she felt a connection to them and decided she
wanted to give back to the community in Sacramento via
money and volunteer work. This was all self serving, of course,
as Dorothea really loved the attention. I mean, she'd been
lying her whole life about being this person, and now
she'd found a dishonest way to make it happen. She
(23:58):
held gala's for organizations, She gave money to various political parties,
getting herself invited to parties and events with like the
California elite. At one of them, she even danced with
former California Governor Jerry Brown. And this is like before
he was governor or. While he was governor, it was
like in his heyday, He's ballroom dancing with Dorothea Puente,
(24:21):
which is absolutely insane. So you know, she's very well known,
very well connected, but obviously it's all a lie, and
she does get caught in this lie, but not yet.
First she wilds out even more. She had to go
in for a surgery, like for her thyroid, I believe,
because she was gaining a lot of weight and she
(24:43):
couldn't keep it under control. So in nineteen seventy seven,
she went in for this surgery. Now, being Dorothea, she
couldn't leave well enough alone. She had to turn it
into a bigger thing. She had to turn it into
a lie. She was a pathological liar. She could not
help herself. So instead of being like, yeah, I'm getting
too much weight, there's something wrong with my thyroid, She's like, hey, listen, everybody,
(25:04):
I'm dying of cancer. I'm having a major surgery. You'll
probably never see me again, which like what, like why
would you do that? That's so insane, Like everything is
an exaggeration or a lie, even when it really really
doesn't need to be. Like that was enough. So for
the past few years, up to nineteen seventy seven, on
top of everything else, Dorothy had started Dorothy Dorothea had
(25:25):
started taking in a number of young wayward girls, calling
them her stepdaughters, her adopted daughters, basically claiming them as
her own, even though again like they weren't. Now for
whatever reason, Dorothea really loved these girls. It really seemed
like a lot of this was just out of the
goodness of her heart. She took them in, she let
(25:48):
them live with her, And I think that it is
a lot of it's because of the way she grew up.
She saw her younger self and these girls, and you know,
she wanted to give them the chances she never had.
And I think it may have also been a way
of making up for giving up her own daughters years earlier.
So it was a lot of guilt, and it was
also very much like I could give them the chance
(26:11):
that I never had. So she taught these girls to
be ladylike. She fed and clothed them, She was basically
their mother. Now later on, like much later on, like
when we get to the end here, I won't bring
this up again, but I'll just say that many of
them came forward and said that she saved them from
a life of crime, from ending up in the streets,
from ending up in prison. So it's a really weird
(26:32):
and contradictory kind of part of her. It's very different
from everything else she did in her life. But the
thing that makes it similar is that ultimately it was
self serving, especially if it was guilt from abandoning her
own daughters. Anyway, she's telling everybody she's dying, and she
wrote up this will and left everything to these girls.
(26:52):
But even this was a lie. She didn't have the
things that she left to them, so it's just more fantasy,
like to make herself look good or to make the
girls think she really loved them, like she knew she
wasn't gonna die. I mean, I guess she could have
on the table, but she wasn't expecting to die, and
she didn't have the stuff to leave the girls, so
it was more just to get like praise. I guess,
(27:13):
I don't know. Anyway, she returns, Sorry, I hit my mic.
She returns to the house on f Street, and pretty
soon since she's you know, living on a house of cards,
you know, it's all lies, everything falls apart. Now before
we get to that, though, I wanted to mention that
during this time of milk and honey in Dorothea's life,
(27:34):
she married twice, once to a twenty one year old
man with the last name Plente, hence her name she's
best known for, and again to a man about ten
years her junior named Montalvo. Now, both of these men
were much younger than she was when she married the
twenty one year old, and I think she was thirty nine.
And then just a few years later, in her like
(27:54):
early forties, she married Montalvo, who was like in his
early thirties. Now, both of these men married her for
her perceived money, and both marriages lasted less than a year.
And in both marriages, Dorothea made up tall tales about
how long they were married, why it didn't work out,
even going as far as to claim one of them
was gay, just basically like doing her normal thing to
(28:17):
sort of deflect the shame of having more failed marriages,
admitting she had been used, admitting you know, she had
made bad decisions. But all of this is to say
that she pulled the wool over everyone's eyes well enough
that young men were trying to take advantage of her,
thinking that she was like some rich heiress or you know, socialite,
and then once they saw behind the facade, they left
(28:40):
her because they're like, oh, you're a poor, sad, heavily
drinking thief of a woman. Now, of course, when you
build your life on a web of lies, like I said,
Eventually everything unravels. In nineteen seventy eight, this happened to
Dorothea when a former border of hers landed himself in prison.
(29:00):
While he was there, he noticed he wasn't getting his
Social Security checks, so he called the administration and found
that his checks were in fact being cashed by none
other than Dorothy Aplente. When confronted with this information, Dorothea said, oh,
I'd taken the checks to him. He signed them for cash,
like he was giving them to me. She said that
the guards at the jail watched her do this. This
(29:24):
is such a crazy lie because it's super easy to disprove.
She's like, yeah, the guards will lie for me. It's
like you're just throwing a hail Mary, thinking like the
guards are gonna be like, oh, yeah, that did happen,
Like they're gonna misremember because she said so. It's a
very Dorothea thing to do to just like I'm just
gonna tell this crazy lie and they're gonna believe me
and everything's gonna be cool. So this didn't work obviously,
(29:47):
they quickly disprove it, and then the Treasury Department gets
involved because the government does not like when people steal
their money. She was arrested after they did a brief
investigation where they found more than four thousand dollars in
forged checks from many of her tenants. Now, the four
thousand dollar mark was where they needed to get to
(30:08):
charge her with a felony, which they did. However, because
of her age and her demeanor, she was not sent
to prison and instead was given parole, but she was
also forced to see a psychiatrist. She moved out of
Sacramento to nearby Stockton to avoid the shame of her
social decline and did menial jobs to stay afloat, again
(30:30):
being like a cook. She was diagnosed by her psychiatrist
as having schizophrenia, which at the time I think he
was kind of using as a blanket term just to
mean that she was super fucked up. Now, this guy
continued to be a psychiatrist for many years, and at
one point later on during her trial, he was accused
of providing her with whatever drugs she wanted, which she
(30:53):
potentially used against her victims. But in the end it
kind of came out that that wasn't actually the case
and he was falsely accused. So I didn't want to
sort of just talk about that, but this is like
kind of the guy that she's with until she, you know,
goes to prison, which she does spoiler alert. One thing
about Dorothea is she was never one to stay down.
(31:16):
So even though all of this went down in nineteen
seventy eight and she moved to Stockton, by nineteen seventy
nine she was back in Sacramento trying her luck at
being a nurse for the sick and elderly in their homes,
which is crazy because she had no medical training. She
just lied and said she did, and everybody believed her,
which I mean, to be fair, some of her lies
(31:37):
seemed so outrageous and so ridiculous, but people keep believing
her or at least giving her a pass, so like,
of course she's going to keep at it right anyway.
So she'd actually done a little bit of this elderly
care while she was running the boarding house, but mostly
stole from those clients and didn't really offer much in
the way of care. But I think this is where
(31:57):
she got the idea and decided to try her again
at being illegitimately legitimate in her job. So now we're
going to talk about Ricardo ud Rica. Somebody who would
play a major role in the bulk of the murderous
part of this story, which we're not quite there, but
we're getting there. He and his wife came to Sacramento
from Mexico, I think in the eighties, and worked their
(32:19):
butts off at a local hotel, the Clarion, to save
enough money to buy a rundown two story house at
fourteen twenty six F Street in downtown Sacramento, and that
is the f Street house that we all know and
love if we know this story. He never took vacations.
Ricardo never spent money, only saved to buy and then
(32:40):
rehab this home. The one thing that he would do
is occasionally visit a nearby bar called Joe's Corner to
grab a drink. And this was like two doors down
from his house. This is where he met Dorothea Montalvo
as she was going by at that point out trolling
for her next roube. She told him, I heard your
(33:02):
second floor is for rent. He told her, well, you know,
it hasn't really been updated. It's a mess, and Dorothea
was like, that's perfect. I want to live there. I
will help clean it up. I'm just like ready to go.
So Ricardo takes her home to his family. He's enamored
by her grace and her high class upbringing. Once again,
she's you know, pulling it off. She met his family
(33:25):
and charmed his wife and two young daughters, telling them
that she had family in Mexico, which again something she
told a lot of people that's a total lie, and
that she had been very rich, but her ex husband
Montalvo had stolen all of her money. She had the
money for the rent. Of course, she got this from
her nursing clients because she was stealing from them, but
(33:46):
that's what she used. And the family was like, great,
she has the money, she's elegantly dressed, she's very charming.
Let's let her stay with us. And she did, and
she ended up staying here for a very long time.
But this first stint for about two to three years,
and during this time, she babysat the girls, fixed up
the upstairs, she paid rent on time every month. The
(34:08):
family loved her and it's terrifying to think that she
was taking care of these two young little girls. Knowing
what we know. She was also still working as an
elderly care nurse for a bonded company, meaning they straight
up vouched for her without doing any sort of background
check on her, which is wild, but I think was
much more common back then than it is now, thank
(34:29):
goodness now. During this time, she took care of a
woman named Esther Busby. Esther was elderly but in generally
good health when Dorothea Montalvo started caring for her. Oddly though,
she would have these fits of illness that bordered on death,
and when these would happen, she would have to be
rushed to the hospital time and time again. Each time
(34:53):
Dorothea would go with her, worried that she might not recover.
I think we all know that she was worried she
would recover, but that's what she said. She was so
worried about her. She didn't know what was going on.
She just wanted to make sure she was okay. Finally, finally,
after some months, social workers involved in the case realized
what was going on, as did the hospital. They noticed
(35:16):
that whenever Esther would come in have her life saved
and recover, she would then go home to be cared
for by Dorothea, only to return shortly thereafter. She would
also suffer bouts of this like life threatening illness while
in the hospital, but only directly after being visited by
and fed by Dorothea. When Dorothea caught wind of their suspicions,
(35:42):
she did not stop poisoning Esther. Rather, she had her
taken to a different hospital, the UC Davis Hospital, as
they had no record and therefore no suspicions about what
was going on. The people who originally suspected Dorothea found
this out and finally got in touch with Esther's family
to let them know what was going on. And what
(36:05):
Esther's family told them was that Dorothea had been calling
them saying that Esther was dying of cancer and needed
more and more money for her care. So she was
fleecing these people for money while poisoning their family member.
So these you know. When the social workers and doctor
that were involved in this found out, they went straight
(36:25):
to Esther and just flat out told her what was
going on. Esther believed them, and she fired Dorothea. But
for some reason, none of these people bothered to report
this to her place of work or the police, that
is until she did it again with another patient. But
at this point, even after she did it to another patient,
(36:46):
they went and told her job and the police and
neither did a thing about it because there wasn't enough
evidence according to them. However, I will tell you that
these social workers and this doctor did keep digging and
waiting to catch Dorothea in the act, and finally, in
nineteen eighty two they did. Also, I wanted to correct myself.
(37:08):
I believe that Ricardo came in the seventies, not the eighties,
so he bought the house on f Street sometime in
the mid to late seventies. Dorothea moved in I believe
in nineteen eighty. Anyway, we're in nineteen eighty two and
at Dorothea's about to get caught for some shit. First,
Dorothea met a man named Malcolm McKenzie at a local
bar in Sacramento. Shocking right. She bought him a drink
(37:31):
and showered him with compliments, then suggesting they go back
to his apartment. Upon his arrival, he began to feel faint,
and by the time they were inside, he was entirely paralyzed,
though completely conscious. He was laid out on the couch
as he watched Dorothea toss his apartment for anything of value.
(37:55):
After stealing money from around the house, as well as
a rare penny collection. This monster Dorothea walked up to
this man while he's laying there completely paralyzed, and steals
a pinky ring right off of his finger. This woman
is bold, if nothing else, she's also very, very stupid.
(38:19):
As with this man, she used her real first name, Dorothea,
and as soon as he was able to move again,
which I'm sure was a terrifyingly long wait for him,
he called the police. They found her really quickly, trying
to cash two checks from his checkbook. She said, oh no,
he gave these to me. I didn't steal them. She
(38:40):
also claimed she was seventy two, I think, to get pity,
and that she didn't want to go steady with him,
which is why he was angry and called the police
on her. So she plays this innocent old granny. He
gave me this money, and then he got mad when
I wouldn't sleep with him, And that worked at least
in the moment, because they let her go. Immediately thereafter,
(39:02):
she drugged and robbed an eighty two year old woman
she was supposed to be caring for as a nurse.
The two had met at their hairdresser and Dorothea introduced
herself as Betty Peterson. She drugged this woman and stole
a diamond ring and about two hundred dowmain, which is
a I think it's a heavy sedative. I've read that
it's not, but like it knocks me out. I've used
(39:25):
it to fly and it's great. But they say it's
just like a sleeping pill. But anyway, it puts you
to sleep, so we can kind of understand why she
wants this right. The woman called police but had no
real information on her. Luckily, again, Dorothea is an idiot
or just too fucking bold, and went back to that
(39:45):
same beauty parlor where this woman saw her and told
them to call the police. She tells the place, call
the cops. There's the woman that drugged me and robbed me.
Dorothea ran away, but the hairdressers knew her real name
and she was finally a tested for these crimes. Now,
as the trial went on, McKenzie Malcolm mackenzie testified against
(40:06):
her the man, and she was given felony charges and
sent to jail to a wait trial. Sadly, her lawyer
was able to get her out on her own recognizance
because she couldn't afford bail, but he appealed to a
judge like, oh, she's just a little old lady, and
unfortunately this worked. She was out and back at fourteen
twenty six f Street, where she planned and carried out
(40:27):
her first murder for profit, which she would not have
been able to do if they had left her in jail.
And I think this is where I'm going to leave
it for part one. It's a bit longer than I anticipated.
I actually recorded beyond this and I realized that it's
going to go like an hour and a half or more.
I realized this first half is mostly set up and
(40:50):
I have everything already done, so I'm just going to
post these in the same week. So I'm going to
post this on a regular day and I'll post part
two the following day. I personally hate waiting a week
for the second half, so I'm not gonna do that
to you guys, especially since it's ready to go. But
we're gonna get into the bulk of the actual murders
starting with part two. This is all just sort of
(41:11):
set up so we know what a wild and crazy
gal Dorothea is, and we're starting to see her ramp
up and really just be willing to do whatever it
takes to sort of keep her lifestyle going. I'm sure
you just heard my dog growling at my other dog
over a toy. In any case, so this is really
the lead up to the craziness. The craziness will be
(41:33):
coming out in part two, and I will get that
out tomorrow, so there's not a lot of wit time.
Thanks everybody for listening. I hope this first half was captivating.
I definitely found it very interesting. Dorothea is a wild,
wild lady. But Part two is gonna be a lot
more hardcore, a lot of sad, a lot of bummer.
(41:53):
There's a lot of people she takes advantage of, so yeah,
we'll get into that, but until then, thanks for listening.
Please like, rate, review, send me an email with case suggestions,
True crime californiapod at gmail dot com, follow me on Instagram,
Like and rate on all of your favorite listening places.
I don't know what are they called, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
(42:15):
Wherever you listen, give us a rating, us being me
the Royal Wey and thanks again, and until I guess tomorrow,
stay safe,
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