Disturbed Ground (49 page)

He reminded them that the body of Everson Gillmouth, the Oregon man who'd hoped to marry Dorothea Puente when she was released from prison in September 1985, was found beside the river in a makeshift coffin on January 1, 1986. "This is a man that she was going to
marry.
This is a man that supposedly she had some feeling or affection for," he said with amazement. "What happened to Mr. Gillmouth? He was unceremoniously dumped beside the Sacramento River! Most of you even treat your pets better than that! You don't just abandon them behind the highway, you don't just drive off and leave them."

The jurors were rapt. How many remembered burying a pet?

O'Mara was just warming up. He stopped pacing and announced, "The most compelling fact which demonstrates the cold, calculating nature of Dorothea Puente is what happened to Betty Palmer."

Everyone recalled the dismembered corpse of Betty Mae Palmer, found beneath a religious shrine in Puente's front yard.

O'Mara drew a distinction between Palmer's mutilation and the unpleasant task of a hunter. "We're not talking about taking off a duck's head, or gutting an animal. We're talking about cutting a human head off! We're talking about cutting the arms off somebody! And we're talking about cutting the bottom parts of their legs off!" Slicing with his hands, O'Mara had unleashed a dramatic streak they'd never seen.

"I don't care whether a person has been dead five minutes or five years," he declared, "that kind of an act is a very
cold, cold
thing to do."

He scoffed at the defense's contention that Puente had quietly buried her tenants because she didn't want to get caught running a boardinghouse in violation of her parole. "That head, those legs, those arms have never been found," he cried. "She's worried about going back to prison on a technical parole violation? What do you think the cops are going to say if they see you walking down the street with a garbage bag with a human head, a pair of arms, and a pair of legs?"

He let this powerful image hang.

Then, holding up a picture ID card—with Betty Palmer's name and
Dorothea Puente's own smiling photograph—O'Mara pointed out that Puente had used this card to cash Palmer's checks. "You wouldn't take the chance to get a card like this in someone else's name, and cash their checks, if they were still in existence."

How, then, to explain a discrepancy: The card was dated October 14, 1986, yet a witness had described a woman called "Betty" lying on the couch, "moaning and groaning" and begging for pain pills
four months later,
in February 1987. O'Mara had wrestled with this for many nights before the simple answer had finally dawned him. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he announced, "that was not Betty Palmer. That was Leona Carpenter!"

Jurors blinked.

In O'Mara's startling scenario, Betty Palmer, the first tenant buried in the yard, had caused Dorothea Puente such extreme anxiety that she'd gone to elaborate ends to conceal her disappearance. Palmer's mutilation—to hide her identity—showed just how paranoid Puente felt.

When Leona Carpenter moved in, Puente came up with some "Hollywood idea" of a cover-up, and told other tenants that Leona's name was "Betty." The woman was so ill that she never left the couch, couldn't converse, and would never contradict this. No one heard anything but moans from "Betty" until the day she disappeared, and there was suddenly silence.

But Dorothea got away with murdering both Betty
and
Leona, and decided her troublesome precautions were unnecessary. Decapitation was rejected. She would simply bury them.

Clymo and Vlautin furiously scrawled notes while O'Mara raced ahead.

Characterizing this as "the mother of all circumstantial evidence cases," O'Mara implored the jury not to harbor prejudice against the term
circumstantial.
Though no one had seen Puente burying bodies, he urged them to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions. "Our common sense, our reason, our logic tells us there's a lot going on here."

He propped up a placard quoting Henry David Thoreau: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."

Quizzical looks passed through the jury box. It was a peculiar phrase, but…didn't it convey an obvious truth? Trout in the milk, bodies in the yard, circumstances too bizarre to overlook.

Behind O'Mara's back, Peter Vlautin smiled to himself and jotted a note.

O'Mara turned to points of law, presenting boldly titled definitions, laboriously explaining each one. But the more he explained, the more convoluted the laws sounded, and as the afternoon wore on, he seemed to wilt inside his nice suit. The hair at the nape of his neck grew wet.

Admitting fatigue, he decided to wheel out the television and let the VCR do his talking for him. He popped in the November 11, 1988, videotape of Detective John Cabrera's questioning of Dorothea Puente. It had been a long time since the jury had watched this back in March. Now that they knew the case, O’Mara hoped every lie jumped out at them.

When it was over, O'Mara resumed his pacing and explaining. He pointed out subtle contradictions they may have missed, saying, "She lies from her very first words."

Puente had even supplied her motive for getting rid of Ben Fink, he said, when she told Cabrera that she'd kicked him out of the house. "I couldn't take his drinking anymore, he was always falling-down drunk," O'Mara quoted. "That's the only honest thing she said in the whole tape!"

Puente wanted people who had a steady income but no family, who did what they were told, who were, in O'Mara's words "easy keepers." But Ben Fink was not an easy keeper.

He reminded the jury that Puente said she would take care of Ben, taking him upstairs to make him feel better. "Mother Teresa over there took care of him, all right," he said scornfully. "She planted him out in the side yard!

The defense teamed frowned and added ammunition to their notes.

The next morning, O'Mara intoned that "the most troubling of all the cases" was the 1982 death of Ruth Munroe. "That's the system's fault," he said, shaking his head. "The system did a terrible job of investigating this case eleven years ago."

Munroe's death hadn't appeared to be a homicide. The assumption at the time was that the sixty-one-year-old, 179-pound woman had died of a heart attack, so police undertook only the barest investigation.
Two weeks later, toxicology reports showed that Munroe had died
of an overdose of codeine and acetaminophen, probably Tylenol #3. Strangely, she'd also taken a small, therapeutic dose of a mild tranquillizer, meprobamate. Only a single prescription bottle for meprobamate had been found at her bedside. And in retrospect, this seemed ludicrous. "If Ruth Munroe committed suicide, wouldn't we find some Tylenol Number Three pill bottles?"

O'Mara challenged the jury to imagine Munroe gulping down a fatal dose of pills, carefully disposing of evidence of her suicide, then taking a single dose of tranquillizer before going to bed. "Did she decide," he asked caustically, "I’ll take a little meprobamate so I'll be calm before I die?"

Heaping fresh scorn on the suicide theory, he highlighted other suspicious inconsistencies. Puente claimed to have checked on Munroe at 4:00
a.m.,
finding her alive, but authorities arriving on the scene just two hours later found Munroe's body already in full rigor mortis. And the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy estimated Munroe's time of death as midnight, give or take a couple of hours. O'Mara also reminded them that Puente had shooed Munroe's children away on the eve of her death, claiming that a fictitious doctor had just been there, and that Ruth needed to rest.

O'Mara clutched a batch of letters Munroe had written to her husband just a couple of weeks before she died. Reading through them, he noted all the positive aspects. "This is a woman who's in control of her life," he concluded. "This is not a woman who's on the ragged edge of suicide."

He leaned toward them and dropped his voice ominously, "You have two choices, Ladies and Gentlemen. Either she took her own life, or someone took her life."

A massive overdose left no other option.

"Who is the person that spent the most time with her before her death? Right here, Ladies and Gentlemen." He swung around and pointed at Dorothea Puente. "They were together all the time! They got up together! They had breakfast together! They had a business together! This person was with her all the time! The evidence does not suggest that Munroe committed suicide," he declared,
"it proves that she was poisoned!”

Of the nine victims, frail Leona Carpenter had been closest to death's door. O'Mara suggested that, of all the cases, this might fit
into the category of involuntary manslaughter. "But," he alerted the jury, "there's a catch at the end."

O’Mara started quietly. "This is a person who needs a lot of care. She was emaciated, and had a decreased level of mental functioning."

He recounted all the efforts to place Leona in a skilled nursing facility, which Leona had resisted. According to hospital records, Puente had initially declined to take Leona, then finally agreed she would be able to care for her. Leona was released into Puente's care shortly before Christmas, but just three days later she was back in the hospital, where she stayed for more than a month until being released to Puente's care again in February 1987.

"What happened," O'Mara explained, "is that Dorothea Puente got power of attorney" over Leona's funds. Electronic deposits started January 1, 1987. "You don't even have to go to the mailbox to get this one. This is a freebie! You don't even have to go to the bank," he said sarcastically.

"Now, if she had her there just one day and she died, maybe we would have involuntary manslaughter. Maybe she undertook to provide care, and as a result of negligence, Leona died."

But that wasn't the case. Instead, Leona Carpenter stayed at 1426 F Street for two to four weeks. "She was waiting for her to die!" Leona didn't go to another convalescent hospital, as Puente had claimed, "she went out in the side yard! That's not involuntary manslaughter, that's first-degree murder!"

Now came the catch.

"What drugs did we find in her system? Flurazepam and codeine." His eyebrows rose with surprise. "This lady couldn't get up. Carol Durning Westbrook said she never got off the couch the whole time. They had to physically take her to the bathroom! So how did this lady wander around the house and find the Dalmane and codeine that got into her system? Did she have a miraculous recovery one afternoon, go and take those, and then die? How did the drugs get into her system? The only reasonable explanation is that somebody gave them to her. And the only person that took care of this lady was
Dorothea Puente,"
he said, swinging around to accuse the defendant.

"So if this lady got drugs, there's only one person that gave her those drugs. It wasn't Mr. McCauley. It wasn't any of the other people living there. It was that lady over there!"

With all eyes on her and accusations ringing in the air, Dorothea Puente didn't even look up.

The next day, O'Mara narrowed the window of time when each individual had disappeared. He put up chart after chart, citing dates when they were last seen, noting when Puente's forgeries had begun. "Follow the money," O'Mara said. "When you find the money, you'll find Dorothea Puente."

He focused on count two, Everson Gillmouth's death.  Referring to the cards and letters written to Everson's sister, Reba Nicklous, O'Mara asked, "Does anyone think for a moment that Mr. Gillmouth actually left town and went to Palm Springs on November 2, 1985?" He stared at them and announced, "Mr. Gillmouth is dead long before November 2, when he's supposed to get married."

O'Mara knew in his bones that this made perfect sense. He laid out the paper trail, showing how the character of Gillmouth's banking transactions had abruptly changed on October 2. Suddenly, Gillmouth wasn't just paying bills; his checks were being cashed at bars, usually in increments of twenty dollars, sometimes several times a day. And over the next many weeks, Everson Gillmouth's checking account had been steadily exhausted.

"Follow the money," O'Mara said again, "and you'll find Dorothea Puente."