Disturbed Ground (16 page)

Reba Nicklous wasn't the only one worrying about a missing brother. Back in California, Robert Fink had been following the news emanating from F Street with the gloomiest of expectations. He'd already spoken with police. Questions had been asked and answered. Reports had been filed. Now there wasn't much to do but wait, fret, and remember.

Benjamin Fink was the black sheep in his family—the one who couldn't quite pull his life together, who made promises he couldn't keep and borrowed money he couldn't repay. From the time he was a teenager, he had a thirst for alcohol he could never quite quench. By the time he was fifty-six, he'd spent plenty of time on the street; hard times had left their imprint on his face and had taken a toll on his body. He'd lost part of his left foot to frostbite, and when he'd staggered out in front of a car from between two trash bins, both legs had been shattered. After that, he'd walked with a cane, drank to senseless inebriation, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and gave up all hopes of changing.

Not that he hadn't tried. "He went to every [treatment facility] he could think of," said Robert, "and as soon as he got out he would walk by a bar, and if he smelled alcohol, that was it, he turned and went."

In March 1988, when Peggy Nickerson introduced Ben to Dorothea Puente's boardinghouse on F Street, Robert had hoped that perhaps this time his ne'er-do-well brother had found a stable home. When he came to visit, Robert noticed the garden full of tomatoes, cucumbers, and cabbages, and the homey atmosphere at the blue-and-white Victorian impressed him. He never actually spoke with the landlady, who lived upstairs, but he sure thought her boardinghouse was a nice place, and he'd been relieved to see his brother settle there.

Still, with Thanksgiving coming up, the Finks expected Ben to join them so they could all share in a traditional family meal. It was only recently that Robert's wife had said, "We ought to be hearing from Ben any day."

Now, while they waited to hear word from the police, it seemed that it had been an extremely long time since they'd last heard from Ben.

Back on F Street, the weather had cleared, the crowd numbered in the hundreds, and the atmosphere was almost festive, with some voyeurs skipping work to watch the grisly spectacle.

Determined to search every square foot of Puente's property, the police pulled down a shed that stood in the middle of the side yard, then shoveled through the moist earth beneath. It seemed almost routine when they discovered a sixth grave just inches below the surface.

A pattern had emerged. Like the others, this body had been wrapped "mummylike," and was lodged in the ground in a fetal position. They were like huge larvae—curled up, spun into cocoons of plastic and cloth, then deposited into the dark soil. Now they were lifted out, zippered into body bags, loaded onto gurneys, and removed to laboratories, where they would be dissected and examined.

One gray-haired woman who watched had more than a passing interest in these discoveries. She was moved to strike up a conversation with the stranger standing next to her. "I had a friend who lived with Dorothea Puente back in 1982," the woman confided, "and she died suddenly."

Sandy Lang, distracted by the commotion around her, turned half her attention toward the woman speaking to her. "Your friend died?"

"Yes. In the spring of 1982. They ruled it a suicide, but I never believed that. They said she'd died of an allergic reaction to codeine, but Ruth—that was her name, Ruth Munroe—she used to work in a pharmacy, so she was familiar with medications, and she wouldn't have knowingly taken that."

"Well, did you go to the police?"

"I did, yes, I sure did. And I told her family they should, too. But nothing was ever done about it, so far as I know."

Later, Sandy Lang wished she'd asked more questions of the woman. She recounted as much of the conversation as she could recall to her boss, Michael Coonan, who was preparing to do what he did best: stir up controversy. As Sacramento's ombudsman for senior care, Coonan had a distinct interest in the discoveries at Puente's boardinghouse, and he was preparing to pen a long, provocative report on the subject. He promptly phoned police and reported the possible connection between Dorothea Puente and Ruth Munroe's death.

But Ruth Munroe's family was way ahead of him.

William Clausen, a no-nonsense family man in cowboy boots, had already been on the phone with his siblings, rehashing the bizarre circumstances of their mother's death, rekindling old suspicions. The police had already been notified. They would check into it, they said… just like they'd said back in 1982.

Later that Monday, the police removed a flower bed and a religious shrine from the small front yard, just to the right of the stairs leading up to Dorothea Puente's entrance. There, eighteen inches below the surface and within just a few feet of the front sidewalk, they discovered another curled, wrapped bundle.

Even given Puente's well-known penchant for predawn gardening, it was hard to imagine how she could have managed to plant seven bodies in her yard without drawing a single neighbor's notice. The neighbors murmured about this among themselves, and when their turns came, they individually assured police that, odd as it seemed, none of them had observed any burials.

As one longtime resident put it, "I don't know how this could have been going on."

CHAPTER 15

The word in certain circles around Sacramento was that if you had to be murdered, it was better that the deed be done outside city limits, because the county sheriff's homicide squad would do a better job of finding your killer than the city cops would. With its handling of the Puente case, the police department did little to dispel this reputation.

Between Friday morning, November 11, and Monday afternoon, November 14, Dorothea Puente had vanished and seven bodies had been dug out of her yard. Though the
"
on-call judge" can issue warrants during the weekend—even during long three-day weekends such as this Veterans Day holiday—Sacramento's police department didn't manage until late Monday to obtain a search warrant. Granted, obtaining a search warrant can be time-consuming. But this delay added to an impression that the police were less afraid evidence might be flushed or tampered with than with the possibility that a corpse or two might get away.

So it was on Tuesday, November 15, that police officers finally got around to their first thorough search of 1426 F Street. Rumor had it
that by then various people with "legitimate" reasons for being there had rifled through the house. Some even claimed that Puente's friend and landlord, Ricardo Ordorica, had removed boxes full of stuff (including murder mysteries and demonology texts) over the weekend. But others said this seemed unlikely, given the twenty-four-hour surveillance of Puente's boardinghouse.

If evidence had been removed, some extremely interesting items had been overlooked. Police seized several paper bags filled with, among other things, a Folgers coffee can with "Lye" printed on the lid; several bottles of pills; some stained linens; and two books with catchy titles,
The Smell of Evil
and
150 Commonly Prescribed Drugs.

In her dining room, officers found the landlady's cheerful Christmas cards, preprinted from "Dr. Dorothea Puente" and ready for mailing.

Additionally, they seized a plastic floor runner with duct tape at both ends, which prompted speculation that it "may have been used to slide heavy loads down the stairs."

All evidence was channeled into the "chain of custody" pipeline—booked, bagged, marked or tagged—so that police officers could correctly identify it on the witness stand years hence. Some items were sent on to the crime lab at the coroner's office, where certain substances would be analyzed. And, if the integrity of some material had to be maintained, it would be frozen. The bulk was sent on to the great, locked police department property warehouse where most evidence awaits trial.

Also on Tuesday, the FBI was finally put on Puente's rather cold trail. It was an accident of timing that the FBI hadn't been enlisted in the search earlier. If Puente had disappeared during the workweek, a fugitive warrant could have been approved sooner, but since that requires a court hearing by a federal magistrate, little could be done over the weekend. Time had been on her side, and the all-points bulletin (APB) didn't go out over FBI teletypes until late Tuesday.

The popular guess was that Puente had escaped to Mexico. Not only was her Spanish fluent, but court records revealed that she had fourteen siblings in Mexico. In 1986, she'd asked parole agents for permission to travel to Mexico. And she'd had an airline ticket to Mexico in her purse when arrested in 1982.

In the meantime, police were tracking an airline passenger with the name of Puente to Las Vegas. While Las Vegas Metropolitan Police issued an APB of their own, one officer bluntly complained that they'd received conflicting reports from Sacramento: "We got one wire that says she's en route to Mexico, another one says she's en route to here, and another one said she's been spotted in Reno. I didn't look who signed them because I thought they were all bullshit anyway."

He wasn't far wrong. The search for Puente in Las Vegas soon lurched to a halt. Puente, the consummate con, had apparently booked a seat on a USAir flight bound for Vegas, then a "close relative" had tipped the police to Puente's morning flight. But Puente hadn't boarded the plane, and the "relative"—perhaps the lamster herself—never materialized.

While the police claimed that photos of Puente had been circulated at the airport, an investigative reporter spoke with two security guards, a USAir flight attendant, and even two Sacramento County Sheriffs Deputies who stated that no such photos has been provided. This heaped more humiliation on the Sacramento police, amplified the impression they were bungling the case, and increased the heat they were taking from the media.

Meanwhile, the sole person being held in connection with the Puente case was about to be released. John McCauley had been hauled down to police headquarters with great hopes, but their interrogation hadn't yielded the ripe facts they'd hoped for. They'd lamely accused him of such things as lying about when the concrete had been poured and denying that he'd received a phone call from Puente after her escape. But McCauley's main revelation was that Dorothea had decided to "rabbit" because she believed the police were going to go after her "no matter what."

Investigators finally determined they had insufficient evidence to hold McCauley, who came across as such a bumbling drunk that it was hard to believe he'd be capable of anything more diabolical than rude behavior and bad language. Police Lieutenant Joe Enloe gamely explained to the media, "He was a confidant of hers, but we do not believe he was involved in the hands-on work involving the bodies."

Having been arrested on charges of being an accessory to homicide on Saturday, McCauley was set free late Tuesday.

Now they had no one.

McCauley had been suspected of helping Puente bury the bodies, but now Sergeant Burns volunteered a new theory
:
"We have pictures that show at one time she was a very big woman." So they were reconsidering the possibility that Puente had buried the bodies herself.

It seemed indefensible that their primary suspect had been escorted past police lines, past throngs of reporters and spectators, and allowed to escape. Detective John Cabrera didn't help matters with his chagrined confession: "I thought she was a nice, warm, gentle person. She fooled me, too."

During two press conferences on Tuesday, Sergeant Bob Bums, as the designated spokesperson, found himself in the hot seat. "At the time we found the first body, the lady was very cooperative. She stood over the grave as we dug. There was no need at this point to follow her. You can't harass people. We didn't have enough information to arrest her at that time."

Legal experts publicly disagreed, and the finger pointing continued.

In their defense, the police department had tried to follow protocol, consulting closely with the district attorney's office. While Puente was at the police station, they had called Deputy DA Tim Frawley and asked if they needed a search warrant to continue digging. He advised that they did not so long as consent was freely given. According to Frawley, it was "agreed at that point they didn't have probable cause to arrest her…. We were digging on her property pursuant to her consent, and if she was in custody, an argument could be raised later that her consent had been coerced."