Disturbed Ground (24 page)

"She could pass for anyone she wanted to be by the way she acted," in McFaul's recollection. "Riscile? That was a name she made up, I think. I don't know where she'd come up with this shit, out of the clear blue sky."

The couple set up house in Gardnerville, Nevada. McFaul took a job as a bartender at the Golden Bubble Club. And his new bride "used to tell everybody that she was my nurse in the war in the Philippines."

Their first daughter, named Dianne Lorraine, was born September 6, 1946, shortly before their first anniversary
.
A second daughter, Melody Jean, arrived less than a year later, on August 4, 1947. But motherhood and domesticity didn't hold much interest for this young wife: After the birth of her second daughter, she took off for Los Angeles, leaving her babies and husband behind.

Weeks later, when she just as suddenly reappeared, McFaul's elation quickly faded to disenchantment when he learned that his darling wife had come back pregnant.
She miscarried. He left her anyway.

Having experienced little parenting herself, Dorothea Helen Gray treated her daughters much as she had been treated: They were separated, placed in the care of others, and abandoned. One was raised by McFaul's mother, the other was adopted.

With arid Nevada, her inconvenient husband, and the dissatisfactions of their three-year marriage behind her, the shimmering blacktop carried Dorothea back to the familiar landscapes of Southern California, where she launched her career in crime.

In the spring of 1948, Dorothea earned her diploma from the school of hard knocks. The first entry on her criminal record came from a larcenous shopping spree in Southern California that yielded a hat, shoes, a purse, hose, and an arrest. She pleaded guilty to two counts of forgery, one of writing a fictitious check, and served four months in jail.

The doctor who interviewed her in jail at the time believed that her crimes were brought on by "a compelling need to buy clothes and re-establish her own self-esteem." The doctor determined that she was not a "true criminal," but rather a "situational offender." This being her first offense, Dorothea was given three years' probation.

Six months later, she skipped cleanly out of Riverside, leaving her probation officer with only a phony forwarding address.

The defense and the prosecution were grinding away at opposite ends of the time line. While the defense started with Puente's roots and worked forward, the prosecution started with her arrest and worked backward. The defense had the benefit of extensive personal interviews. But the prosecution relied on records, and the records, like Dorothea herself, lied. They were like a dog chasing its own tail.

They were particularly interested in the details of Dorothea’s 1982 plea bargain, when she pled guilty to four felonies: one count of forgery, two of grand theft, and one of administering a stupefying substance for the purpose of committing a felony.

While awaiting sentencing, Dorothea had penciled that letter in her schoolgirl scrawl to Superior Court Judge Roger K.
Warren, claiming that her siblings in Mexico depended on her for support. Giving the judge a bit of personal history, Dorothea wrote: "I finally married when I was 18. He died after a few days. After working and marrying again I stayed married for 18 years, unable to have children who lived."

Dorothea also told her probation officer that, after losing
both parents by the age of five, she'd lived with a grandmother in Fresno, then went to Mexico to stay with an older brother. The probation officer
wrote that she "returned to California at age 15½, and soon thereafter married Fred McFall
[sic].
Her husband reportedly passed away two years later as a result of a heart attack."

In Dorothea's revisions of her personal history, inconvenient characters simply died.

But her probation officer, Tony Ruiz, wasn't taken in by Puente's piteous act. He noticed that, brash and confident on her own, Puente turned vulnerable and repentant only after being apprehended. In his report to Judge Warren, he wrote, "In this officer's opinion, her expression of remorse was diluted by her attempt to manipulate the interview."

At one point, Puente had interrupted him to point out that she was of Hispanic descent, too. And though she'd "appeared distraught and tearful," it became obvious to Ruiz that she was reading his notes upside down from across the table.

She was sentenced to five years in prison.

About some things, the records were clear: Puente—or Montalvo, as she was then known—was sent to California's overcrowded maximum security unit at the Correctional Institute for Women (CIW) in Frontera. There, she proved to be such a quiet, obedient prisoner that she served only three of her five years' sentence and was released on parole in the fall of 1985.

Upon her release, a Department of Corrections psychological evaluation described her as "disturbed" and "dangerous" and recommended that "her living environment and/or employment should be closely monitored."

She'd had a few run-ins with the law and was even called an ideal prisoner, but the Department of Corrections could not correct what was wrong with Dorothea Puente.

CHAPTER26

After tirelessly huddling together in the public defender’s office, trying to make sense of Dorothea's baffling past, Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin thought they'd finally discovered an essential truth. "This is the key," Clymo said, grinning. "She's a multiple!"

It just made sense. All her fantastic personalities, fluxing like colorful chips in a kaleidoscope, were just bits of a fractured psyche. She was beyond schizophrenic, she was a multiple personality.

As a defense, this could be golden. Complicated, yes… but so was Dorothea.

They placed a call to one of the most respected psychiatrists in this narrow field of specialization and explored their options. If she were a true multiple, it would take time for him to establish trust and get Dorothea to open up. Ultimately, they would need videotapes of her slipping from one personality to the next so that they could convince a jury
.
All agreed it was a theory well worth testing. So arrangements were made for the psychiatrist to go to the jail and get to know the woman called Dorothea.

Flitting from group to group, changing names and stories as she went along, Dorothea had slid unobtrusively into adulthood. A fiery temper, a passionate streak, and an unbridled talent for fabrication marked her trail. Marriages, divorces, and a few arrests chronicled her progress.

She surfaced in San Francisco in 1952, at age twenty-three, where she married a twenty-five-year-old Swede named Axel Bernt Johansson. Inventing her most fabulous identity yet, she called herself Teya Singoalla Neyaarda, claiming that her father, Antony Neyaarda, was Egyptian, and her mother, Nazic Friad, was Israeli. And that she was Muslim.

At first, even Johansson believed her.

Johansson was a merchant seaman at the time, and during his long absences Dorothea apparently pleased herself. Sometimes he returned from months at sea to find some new man living with his wife. Sometimes he found expensive merchandise of suspicious acquisition. Sometimes she took his money and gambled it away in Reno.

The neighbors weren't happy with Mrs. Johansson either. When Axel came home, they complained to him that taxis arrived at his doorstep hour after hour, dropping off strange men.

But in his line of work, away months at a time, it was hard to keep a tight rein on someone so untamed as Dorothea.

In April 1960, at thirty-one, she was arrested for "residing in a house of ill fame." Dorothea protested that she'd only been staying with a friend and hadn't realized she was in a brothel, but she was sentenced to ninety days.

In 1961, fed up with her running around, drinking, wild stories, and suicide attempts, Johansson had her briefly committed to DeWitt State Hospital in Stockton. Records there describe her as "very obese" and "infantile." She told them that she could speak Arabic, Greek, Spanish, and Swedish, and doctors there decided that she was a "pathological liar" suffering from an "unstable personality." They gave her prognosis as "guarded."

Despite their many, long separations—or perhaps because of them—the Johanssons were legally married for fourteen years. Later, Dorothea would claim that she and Johansson divorced in 1960. It was really 1966.

For years after they separated, Dorothea continued using her husband's name. Some knew her as Sharon Johansson. A new name, a new personality. Yet there was nothing wildly criminal about Sharon Johansson. Just the opposite. She was a bighearted, heavy woman with her hair up in a French roll, a phone to her ear, and a hot line to the Seventh Day Adventist Church. She knew the needy families in her Broderick neighborhood, and with just a phone call she channeled food baskets and secondhand clothes to their front doors.

During this time, Mrs. Johansson established a reputation as a caregiver. For several young girls, her home was a sanctuary from poverty and abuse. She welcomed hungry children and unwed mothers to her table, dishing out hot meals with plenty of free advice.

She gradually established a domain in Sacramento, and she would live there, at various addresses and using various names, almost without interruption until 1988.

On February 23, 1968, at age thirty-nine, the tempestuous Dorothea married a much younger man, twenty-three-year-old Roberto Jose Puente. Her ill-fated third marriage, commencing in Reno, was hardly an epic romance. Some said that Roberto married this older woman only for her money and American citizenship. (The little girls across the street whispered about "Mr. Gigolo.") But perhaps Dorothea simply couldn't dominate this young buck.

The two made a stab at domestic bliss, even buying an attractive, respectable-looking two-story house on Twenty-Third Street in Sacramento, but had hardly settled in before they were screaming and throwing things. On July 5, 1969, after just sixteen-and-a-half months, they separated.

Charging that young Roberto had treated her with "extreme cruelty" and had "wrongfully inflicted…grievous mental and physical suffering," Dorothea wasted no time in filing for divorce. She wanted their community property: the house on Twenty-Third Street and a 1967 four-door Ford Galaxy. But Roberto took off for his native Mexico, frustrating her attempts to have him served with divorce papers.

Apparently, even finalizing the divorce on March 28, 1973, failed to extinguish their smoldering romance. It seems that Roberto hadn't had enough of his former bride, for in 1974 he was back, again living in her house. Attempts to rekindle the relationship obviously backfired, because in January 1975, when he refused to either leave or pay rent, Dorothea filed a restraining order against him.

The mismatched couple maintained contact into the next decade. In August 1982, Roberto Puente even wrote a letter to Judge Warren on her behalf, stating that he'd "known Dorothea Montalvo for the past many years," and that she'd been "very helpful to the Mexican-American community,” giving "clothes and food to needy families and to people with alcoholic problems." He closed with, "Any consideration given to her well being will be greatly appreciated at this difficult time."

The young Roberto must have pleased Dorothea in some enduring way, for despite everything, she would cling to his surname for more than twenty years.

For a time, Dorothea Puente ran a Sacramento halfway house for alcoholics, but it shortly went bust. Then she shifted her attention to running a huge, elegant, three-story boardinghouse at Twenty-First and F streets, the white "mansion" that she would boast about for years. She furnished the house with donated furniture from the Seventh Day Adventist Church, but she kept it spotless, with the floors always polished and the table always set. Even her tenants—down-and-out alcoholics and homeless mentally ill—were kept clean and tidy.

Everyone considered her a genuine resource to the community. She networked with all the agencies. She held AA meetings in her parlor. She steered the indigent toward Social Security benefits and away from alcohol. In the words of one who knew her at the time, "She knew how to get things done."

And she was always learning, especially when Dr. Carl Drake stopped by once a month to tend to her boarders. Dr. Drake found it convenient to make his diagnoses in her tidy kitchen, writing prescriptions at her table. Dorothea sat close by, watching, then daily placed each tenant's pills in little Dixie cups, which she arranged on a spotless tray.