Disturbed Ground (37 page)

This was a glimpse at their counterargument. Feeding a houseful of people over a period of three years would not be cheap. Was $58,000 an unreasonable sum? The defense didn't think so.

Their roles had reversed: While Clymo talked, O'Mara sat with pen in hand, plotting every turn of logic.

"We heard that the people at the house were ‘shadow people.' They were people that, for the most part, were down and out. They were derelict They were disabled. They were drunkards, the dregs of society, so to speak. They were people that didn't fit."

Emphasizing the services that Dorothea Puente had provided, and the stresses placed upon her, he continued, "Drinkers are the most belligerent. They are the most self-neglecting. They are people that don't take care of business, and they are the most difficult to place."

But Dorothea Puente would take people in, Clymo said, "when they didn't have anyplace else, when nobody would take them."

None of this Mother Teresa bit struck O'Mara as surprising.

Clymo moved to a more delicate area. "Someone said that Dorothea Puente has a touch of larceny in her heart. It may be true. I'm not going to stand here and tell you that she's a thief. But I'm not going to jump up and down and protest a whole lot about evidence that may suggest she had a touch of larceny in her heart. It doesn't make her a killer," he said, raising his eyebrows and adding in a mocking tone, "it doesn't make her an
evil
serial killer."

Now Clymo was saying, "She went to prison," and O'Mara listened closely. How much of Puente's record would Clymo reveal?

"I'm not going to hide that from you," Clymo went on. "I’ll tell you from the get-go, she went to prison in 1982 after being convicted upon her plea of guilty to theft charges, writing and forging checks." Phrasing this carefully, he added, "She was also accused of administering a stupefying drug to an individual and liberating that individual of his property."

Clymo was giving this to him—and O'Mara would take it, he'd work it in whenever he could—but it was no error. It was a legal paradox in this tangled case that the prosecution would use it to establish guilt, while Clymo introduced it to fight for her innocence.

Clymo cast derision on circumstantial evidence, declaring, "Of nearly two hundred witnesses, not a single one will testify to having seen Dorothea Puente kill anyone! And not a single one will testify to having seen her bury anyone!"

O'Mara had expected this "failure of proof" defense.

But now Clymo made a surprising, if vague, concession: "After all you hear about this case, you will infer that Dorothea Montalvo Puente was connected with, somehow associated with, maybe even responsible for causing people to be buried in her yard. That's seven people in the yard. I'm sure you've already had that thought."

The jurors regarded him quizzically as he paused to remind them again of the presumption of innocence.

Then he held up a photo of the religious figurine standing over Betty Palmer's grave in front of the house. "Dorothea Montalvo Puente was the person who not only took care of these people, but remembered them in her own way. She took care of them when they were alive"—he glanced at the photo—"it looks like she took care of them after they were dead, too."

The reporters were loving it. This was something they could use! Spooky stuff! It made good copy.

But
what did it say about Puente's defense? This was a strange way to argue for death by natural causes.

Moving on, Clymo's suggested that it was the oppressive onslaught of the media, the crush of onlookers, and the constant noise of the news vans that had compelled Puente to "rabbit" for Los Angeles. After all, she wasn't under arrest, so she hadn't really ‘escaped.’ "The only way to be unmolested by the media was to get the hell out of there. And she did," he said simply. "She did."

He pointed out that she had had over three thousand dollars in her purse and spoke Spanish. "She had the ability to duck into Mexico"—he opened his palms and shrugged—"she didn't do it."

And, just as the prosecution had humanized the victims, the defense humanized the accused. Clymo showed photographs of a younger Dorothea Puente holding a small child in her lap, standing in her immaculate house, and cradling her cat in her arms. The picture of innocence.

With those images in the jurors' minds, Clymo reminded them again that with no cause of death, there was "no criminal agency." In other words, "If
you can’t say how they died, then you can never establish unlawful killing."

The evidence would show, he said, that tissues from Everson Gillmouth's body were saved and tested. Yet the toxicology exams showed nothing—no trace of Dalmane, or of any other drug. "The pathologist wasn't able to determine a cause of death, but it certainly wasn't due to a drug overdose."

That put a knot in the pattern.

Next, Clymo moved to that troublesome Ruth Munroe count. Of the nine, Munroe was the only one for whom there had been an immediate autopsy. Clearly, she had died from an overdose of codeine and   Tylenol.   Munroe's   children  had  insisted   that   their   mother
wouldn't commit suicide, and that she was allergic to codeine. Now, with huge blowups of medical records, Clymo pointed out that Ruth Munroe, who was actually allergic to penicillin, was
prescribed codeine
by her own doctor!

In sympathetic tones, Clymo conceded that Munroe's children had been understandably confused and upset when their mother died. "They didn't want to believe she'd committed suicide." He paused. "But she wasn't murdered."

Looking into the jurors' faces, he asked softly, "That case wasn't prosecutable in 1982. Why now?"

This had to leave them wondering.

Further, Clymo went on, Dorothea Puente was the person who had called police when Ruth Munroe died. Yet she hadn't notified police when Everson Gillmouth died. Why not? What was different?

Some jurors leaned forward.

In 1982, Dorothea wasn't on parole. From 1985 on, she was. And as a condition of her parole, she was instructed "not to seek employment with elderly or mentally disabled people," or to handle government checks. If she lied about this, she could go back to prison. So, rather than alert the authorities when seventy-seven-year-old Everson Gillmouth died of old age, rather than risk questions, risk going back to prison, she'd quietly disposed of his body. And seven bodies after that.

Very tidy. But O'Mara's thoughts snagged on this neat little web of logic. There was a glaring inconsistency…. But would it be admissible?

The defense had prepared pie charts and graphs showing a kinder, gentler interpretation of the money trail. But since O'Mara had preempted this argument, Clymo kept it short. Given the daily costs of running a standard nursing facility, he asserted, Dorothea Puente didn't clear much profit in providing for her needy boarders.

Before turning the podium over to his co-counsel, Clymo laced together the fingers of his big hands and summed up their case: "We expect the evidence to show that eight of the nine died of natural causes, the ninth of suicide. And Dorothea Montalvo Puente is not guilty of these charges."

The jury was starting to fidget, but when Peter Vlautin began with a few humorous remarks, they chuckled. They were with him, their minds still open.

Vlautin hurried through a few important points of pharmacology. He explained that Dalmane was of the class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, developed in the seventies as a safer alternative to highly addictive barbiturates, such as Valium. "It's almost unheard of to have an overdose of Dalmane."

Flourishing a red marker, Vlautin highlighted data on large blowups of the victims' medical records: histories of drug and alcohol abuse, and Dalmane prescriptions, which would explain the Dalmane in their systems.

With chart after chart, he showed these people to have been on the brink of death.

O'Mara had expected the defense to bring out "specters"—vague people who once threatened the life of this or that person—but he would have to fight something even more ephemeral: the general ill-health of these people.

Vlautin was being careful. He didn't want to alert the prosecutor to too much of their case. But now he declared, "I think the evidence suggests that alcohol and Dalmane played a role in the death of Bert Montoya."

But hadn't it been established at the prelim that Bert, the youngest and healthiest of the nine, was not a drinker? O'Mara scribbled notes on his legal pad.

Vlautin made a few parting shots at the testimonies of some of the ex-cons he expected to testify, and then, suddenly, he was done.

Judge Virga excused the jurors, who quickly spilled past reporters and out into the parking lot.

The paths of their normal lives had just taken a detour. For the next many months, this trial would roll forward, lurching along in fits and starts, carrying them on a life-and-death ride. They would bear witness to the passing of nine strangers who'd slipped away with scarcely a breath of notice.

But was it really possible to sit in a courtroom in 1993 and discern what had happened to nine people so many years ago? Wasn't this just the absurd hubris of our justice system? How close could even the most astute juror come to the truth? And how far could their hearts possibly travel from that sucking black hole of "reasonable
doubt"?

CHAPTER38

Testimony was set to begin after Presidents’ Day weekend, but when Peter Vlautin came in with tears in his eyes—not from emotion, but from an eye injury—Judge Virga issued a delay. And John O'Mara, who had "witnesses stacked up like planes over Chicago," was thrown into a scheduling nightmare.

He put a busload of witnesses on hold and engaged in a logistical juggling act involving egos, employers, transportation, and hotel reservations. Hoping to open strong, he'd slated Judy Moise early, but she had to get back to work in Sacramento, so she repacked her rumpled clothes and headed home, leaving O'Mara to reshuffle his witness list. Vlautin's eye injury had been a cut to the opposition.

O'Mara instead began with five former employees of Lumberjack, a supply store, who testified to delivering gardening supplies and numerous bags of ready-mix concrete to 1426 F Street. Hardly the gripping start that prosecutors covet.

O'Mara soon shifted the focus to Bert Montoya, calling to the stand two of Bert's friends from Detox, J. D. Ridgley, still director of the facility, and soft-spoken, full-bearded Bill Johnson, who'd since left. Both men spoke fondly of Bert, and during their testimonies, Bert seemed almost resurrected in the courtroom: his face, his mannerisms, his love of cigars, and his continual discourse with private spirits.

Despite all his years of Detox, both witnesses insisted, Bert wasn't a drinker. "Tobacco was his drug of choice," Johnson asserted. "He was not a public inebriate. There was no preoccupation with alcohol for Alberto at all."

Johnson stumbled over exact dates—this was nearly five years ago, he apologized—but he related his last encounters with Bert the best he could. He recalled the day that Bert had walked the four miles back to Detox to say that he was "very unhappy" at Dorothea's. They'd talked it over, he said, then Johnson had driven Bert back to the boardinghouse.

He'd asked Mrs. Puente "why she was giving Alberto this medication that he didn't like. She said that was not true, that he woke her up at 4:00
a.m.
and asked her for the medication."

With regret breaking across his face, Johnson recalled how he'd convinced Bert to stay. Then he suddenly blurted, "I was wrong. I gotta live with this for the rest of my life."

Clymo objected instantly, and Judge Virga ordered the witness's statement stricken from the record. But there was no way to strike it from the jurors' minds.

The Sunday before she was to testify, Judy drove back down to Monterey with nervous dread her passenger. It unsettled her that there seemed to be so much uncertainty surrounding the case against Dorothea Puente, that people still asked her, "Do you really think she did it?" She tried to anticipate questions and recall dates, picturing Kevin Clymo looming before her, assailing her with cross-examination. Loathing the idea of having to repeat that whole ordeal, she checked into the inn with dismal expectations.