Disturbed Ground (18 page)

Whatever insights he had into the handling of the Puente case and the failings of his staff, Kearns could hardly have predicted that within the next twenty-four hours his police officers were going to commit yet another humiliating gaffe.

While the finger pointing and hand wringing continued in Sacramento, Dorothea Puente was preparing to leave her motel room in Los Angeles, about seven hundred miles south
.
After her smooth escape on Saturday, she'd checked into the Royal Viking Motel, a cheap, nondescript place, registering under the name Dorothea Johanson (a version of a former
husband's last name), paying seventy-four dollars cash up front.

For the next three days, Dorothea Puente clung to her privacy in room 31. She was a paragon of inactivity, slowing to a torpid pace, dwelling within her dull, cramped little motel room. She wouldn't let the maid in to clean, only sticking her head out to ask for towels.

Perhaps she thought all the fuss in the media would eventually blow over if she just kept her head down, and then she could assume a new identity and vanish into this huge metropolis. She went out only for meals, walking to a nearby restaurant, the T&G Express, where she ordered everything from pancakes to chop-suey, usually with beer, leaving generous tips.

But on Wednesday, Dorothea Puente became restless. That afternoon, she drew on her makeup, dabbed on perfume, and dressed to go out.

Once outside she hailed a cab and bluntly told the driver that she needed a drink. When he started to pull over at a beer tavern, she objected, "No, I have to have some hard liquor, not beer, because I couldn't sleep all night."

No problem. The taxi shortly pulled up in front of the Monte Carlo 1, a seedy neighborhood bar on Third Street, less than two miles from the motel.

She seated herself right in the middle of the bar, next to one of the regular patrons, Charles Willgues. The thin, balding man could hardly help noticing this well-dressed, unaccompanied woman next to him. With a blond rinse on her hair and fine clothes, she appeared out of place in this dive.

The lady ordered a screwdriver, then sighed and dejectedly regarded the purple pumps she'd been wearing since skipping out of Sacramento. The heels had worn off, she complained. Looking at him, she shrugged and remarked, "I've been walking a lot, looking for a place to live."

Chuck Willgues to the rescue. He knew a place just across the street. "If you're willing to slip your shoes off, I'll take 'em over and get 'em fixed for you."

It was too kind an offer to pass up. She pulled off her pumps and handed them over.

"Enjoy your drink," he told her, popping out of his seat. "I’ll be right back."

She sat dangling her stocking feet from her barstool while he carried her pumps to a nearby repair shop.

When Willgues returned with her shoes as good as new, Puente introduced herself as Donna Johanson, bought him a beer, and started concocting lies. She was recently widowed, she said with a sigh, and she'd just arrived from San Francisco two days ago.

Chuck Willgues, a widower himself, warmed to this good-looking, younger woman (she claimed she was fifty-five). She had style. And here she was a stranger, alone, in a town he knew well.

"Donna" took him into her confidence. She was trying to get over the death of her husband, so she'd decided to take a chance on L.A. Now she'd had all of her luggage stolen by an unscrupulous cabdriver, and she didn't know what to do. She had no choice but to stay in a cheap motel, and she was running short of cash.

Willgues wondered if there might be something he could do to help. "Why don't we move down to the end of the bar so we can talk
privately?" she suggested.

Sipping another vodka and orange juice, the charming widow bought Chuck another beer. She seemed to be curious about each of the patrons, and Chuck knew them all
.

Then "Donna" turned the conversation to her new gentleman friend. Flattered, the retired handyman shared a few details of his situation: no family nearby; a few medical problems; a quiet lifestyle on a fixed income. "Donna" seemed to take a genuine interest in the pensioner’s problems. She even suggested that she could help him increase his Social Security benefits, somehow seeming to know exactly how much disability he should receive for his back problems, tuberculosis, ulcer, and hernia. It made him momentarily uncomfortable.

But then she changed the subject. "I'm all alone too," she told him. No family. No friends. She was hoping for a fresh start in a new place and was looking for a job. If she could save enough, she thought she might eventually start a board-and-care business.

Willgues volunteered that he knew of a job at a nearby sandwich shop.

After ordering her third drink, "Donna" flashed him a smile and suggested, "Since you're alone and I'm alone, let's get together and I can cook Thanksgiving dinner."

Things were moving a bit fast for Chuck. He was even more surprised when she said she might even consider sharing an apartment with him. "Wait a minute," he said. "We’ll talk about that later." But he was captivated.

Still, there was something about her, something he couldn't put his finger on. She was familiar, somehow….

They talked on and on, and by the time their conversation came to an end, Chuck Willgues was quite smitten. Before putting her in a cab back to her motel, he made a date to pick her up and take her shopping the next morning.

But while he was walking home, the glow of their chat began to fade, replaced by "an ill feeling." Something just wasn't right.

Back at his apartment, he fixed himself dinner, but couldn't eat. He ran back through their conversation, trying to pinpoint the trouble, and suddenly realized he was pacing the floor. He chided himself out loud, "Chuck, what the hell's wrong with you?"

He decided to watch some TV, but as soon as he touched the television set, it hit him: "Damn, that's the woman I saw on TV this morning!"

Or was it?

Willgues again paced his tiny apartment. He could call the police, but what if he were wrong? "Donna" surely wouldn't want anything to do with him once he'd humiliated her with a visit from the boys in blue. But what if she really was Dorothea Puente? He could come right out and ask… But if he'd made a mistake, she'd be insulted. And if he was right, she damn sure wasn't going to tell him. Wasn't there some other way to find out?

At length, he decided to contact not the police, but the L.A. bureau of CBS news. He placed a call, which was routed through to the assignment editor, Gene Silver.

At first, it sounded to Silver like "a typical viewer call," with Willgues
asking a few questions about the Puente case. Then he asked if the TV station had a picture of the woman. Silver found a
Los Angeles Times
photo, got back on the phone, and described the photo to Willgues.

Willgues wasn't sure. He thought that he'd met Puente, but he said he needed to see a picture to help him decide.

Having already spent about twenty minutes with this strange caller, Silver was thinking:
If he's a kook, he'll go away. If not, this could be big.
By then it was nearly 8:00
p.m.,
so he suggested that Willgues wait for the upcoming newscast, adding, "Do you mind staying on the phone?"

Willgues held on, and the two men, separated by miles, watched the broadcast together. Indeed, there was a long story about Dorothea Puente, with some video footage of Sacramento, but not a single frame of Puente herself.

By now Silver was thinking that this could be the biggest scoop of his career. "I’ll tell you what," he told Willgues, "I can bring the picture over and then you can decide for yourself whether this is really the woman you met." Silver jotted down the address and hung up.

When Silver pulled up in front of Willgues's dilapidated apartment building, some kids were doing crack in a doorway. Old Chuck was living in a pretty rough neighborhood, he thought.

Willgues was just hanging up the phone when Silver arrived. He and
"Donna" had just firmed up arrangements to meet the next day, he said.

When Silver showed him the newspaper clipping, Willgues stared at Puente's photograph, transfixed, but said nothing. The newsman asked questions, prodding him, but Willgues wouldn't say whether or not this was the woman he'd met in the bar.

Clearly, Chuck Willgues, a lonely man who'd seen better days, didn't want to believe that the enchanting woman he'd met that afternoon was Dorothea Puente. Finally, he said, “Well, you know, it looks a lot like her, but it's not the same dress…. I'd have to see a color picture."

Well, Silver suggested, how about watching the nine o'clock news? So the two men switched on the TV and settled down to watch, only to find that Lady Luck was being cagey: The newscast showed the same photograph—but in color.

Willgues leaned far forward and studied the image "like it was a test." When the screen flickered to other news, he sighed and dodged, "I just can't tell 'cause I can't see the rest of the dress."

Gene Silver could have strangled him. The guy had met the woman's twin in a bar, she'd told him some story about a taxi driver stealing her luggage, and then she'd asked about his disability checks! What difference did it make what dress she was wearing?

But Chuck Willgues was clearly reluctant to face the idea that he'd spent the afternoon with an accused murderess. Enraptured by the woman with "fire in her eyes," he didn't want to endanger this exciting
new relationship. He tried explaining, "It's very important to realize that
I'm going to pick her up tomorrow morning."

By now Silver was convinced that "Donna" was Dorothea. He continued quizzing Willgues, prodding and cajoling, assuring him that it would be handled very professionally by the police. If Chuck would give him the name of the place where she was staying, the police would simply go to her motel and ask for her ID. It would be painless.

The two lapsed into a long silence, Willgues thinking, Silver hoping. "Well, all right," Chuck said at last, "but just please don't go telling her that it was me who gave it to you."

A man with priorities, Gene Silver returned to his office and rallied a camera crew, then notified the police.

Detectives arrived shortly at Chuck Willgues's apartment. He told them what he knew, yet still seemed unable to believe that his charming, "very ladylike" friend could be as bad as they said. He even asked that they delay their arrest of Dorothea Puente for just one day. He'd made a date with her, after all, and he wanted to keep it.

But at 10:20
p.m.,
the police arrived at the Royal Viking Motel, knocked on the door of room 81, and waited.

Dorothea Puente had no hope of shimmying out a window. Slick as she'd been in the past, she just opened the door and walked straight into the arms of the law.

Seeing the officers and the camera crew, Puente stalled, identifying herself as Donna Johanson. But when the police asked for proper identification, a driver's license in her handbag revealed the name Dorothea Montalvo and her address, 1426 F Street. Bingo!

Wearing handcuffs and the same pink dress and red coat she'd worn in her flight from Sacramento, Puente was led out to the patrol car.

The waiting camera crew got it all
.

CHAPTER 18

At about 3:30 Thursday morning, just before loading a tired and frail-looking Dorothea Montalvo Puente into the waiting plane at Hollywood-Burbank Airport, Sacramento Police Sergeant Jim Jorgensen turned to reporters and observed, "In twenty-three years of law enforcement, [I've found that] nothing is beyond the realm of believability when you're dealing with human beings."

After Jorgensen read Puente her Miranda rights, they stepped aboard neither a police aircraft nor a commercial plane, but a Lear jet. Sitting next to Detective John Cabrera, handcuffed, her arms chained to her waist, Puente was not only in police custody, she was confined in the company of a Channel 3 reporter, a cameraman, and a newspaper photographer.