Disturbed Ground (56 page)

One young woman wept continuously as she recalled how Dorothy Johansson had taken her and her sisters under her wing. She told a touching story of impoverished kids dazzled by the kindhearted gestures of a heavy but "beautiful" neighbor. Dorothy had made sure that charity food baskets and clothes were delivered to her family. She'd taught them how to dress, even taking them to restaurants and teaching them manners. At eleven, this little girl had seen her first Santa Claus. "We didn't know Christmas until we knew Dorothy," she sobbed.

And Dorothea Puente, the cold-blooded killer, wept too. Several now-adult women spoke lovingly of a kind but lonely woman who had made a difference in their lives. Still, it was hard to keep all of Dorothea Puente's identities straight. One well-dressed young woman, describing her own chaotic upbringing and how Dorothea had stepped in to offer guidance and "sanctuary," declared, "I hate to think where I'd be today if it weren't for Sharon Johansson."

Others spoke just as passionately of “
la doctora”
Dorothea Puente.
An entourage from Sacramento's Mexican-American community marched
through the courtroom to recount the good works of
la doctora—
scholarships, sponsorships, donations—and to declare their enduring affection for the woman they knew as generous and kind.

Ricardo Ordorica's brother-in-law recalled how they'd sat on her front porch while she taught him English. A radio announcer who owed his first job to Dorothea admitted he still kept a picture of her on his wall. And a Sacramento TV reporter, Rosie Gaytan, recalled a charity dance when Governor Jerry Brown had crossed the room to kiss Puente's cheek, then danced with each of them.

At about this same time, Puente was dating Mr. Avila, of the attorney general's office, and writing up a generous will to bequeath all kinds of things that she did not own. Her attorney, Don Dorfman, recalled that she would bring in young women (usually "adopted daughters") in need of legal services, and she would pay the fees.

Many who knew
la doctora
during this period could not accept that she'd been convicted of multiple murder. One Mexican-American man hotly declared outside court, "We know the real story. We know the real Dorothea."

Perhaps. But more likely, they knew just one version, a public persona subsidized by secrets.

What had happened? What had made this maven of good works turn from the light to the shadows?

Answers flowed from a forensic psychiatrist with sterling credentials, a graduate of Harvard Law School and University of Southern California Medical School, Dr. William Vicary. Having studied Puente's massive file, having administered psychological tests, having scanned for brain damage, Dr. Vicary concluded that Dorothea Puente was a woman of normal IQ, with normal brain function, who suffered from "antisocial personality disorder."

In less polite terms, she was a sociopath.

Speaking compassionately of Mrs. Puente's predicament, Dr. Vicary said, "She's in a very bad situation here. She's a very sick lady. She's got one foot on a banana peel and the other in the gas chamber."

Citing some of her more outrageous stories—that she was a doctor of psychiatry, had a villa in Mexico, was on a committee formed by Governor Brown—Dr. Vicary called her lies "symptoms" of a "sad person that has a lot of pain inside. They make up a reality in which they're special. They invent a wonderful, dreamlike world, and others are fascinated.”

In Dr. Vicary's view, Dorothea's problems were rooted in a childhood that was nasty, brutish, and short.

He interpreted her nurturing of little girls as an attempt not only to right the wrong in her own upbringing, but as an expression of remorse over having given up her own daughters. Further, he said, it was no accident that she'd ended up taking care of alcoholics, just as
she'd taken care of her own parents. These were the types of people she was accustomed to, the types she'd cleaned up after, even the types she'd married.

Anyone remotely familiar with psychology could spot Dorothea Puente's repetitive attempts to resolve the problems within her own past. But she wasn't just another adult child of alcoholics in need of a twelve-step program. The psychiatrist observed, "Over time, she seems to be getting worse, not better."

Defense attorney Vlautin asked the pivotal question, "How can someone like Dorothea Puente do so much good, yet stand convicted of these crimes?"

"In a way, her greatest strength turned out to be her greatest weakness," Dr. Vicary replied. "She had some empathy, some positive feelings, [a talent for] taking people quite broken and trying to fix them. She had a need to help. On the other side of that, there's a lot of pain, resentment, hostility, even hatred."

In Dr. Vicary's view, the tenants at 1426 F Street were a step down from the boarders at 2100 F Street. And dealing with these skid-row alcoholics put her in such a stressful situation that she "unraveled." As he put it, "Who are the people who are missing? Very difficult, exasperating people. And inside this woman is a lot of anger and pain against these people—just like the people who abused and neglected her."

He continued, his voice dramatically low, "Inside, there's this thing that's eating her. It festered, and festered, and finally erupted. It had to come out somewhere. It came out with all these missing people. That is the bridge between her traumatic past and these horrible crimes."

John O'Mara had declined the opportunity to cross-examine most of the witnesses—there was nothing to be gained by arguing over Puente's childhood or belittling her good deeds—but Dr. Vicary had voiced opinions on her criminal nature, and this, in O'Mara's view, demanded some response.

In a trial, psychiatrists are the ultimate spin doctors. Now, under questioning by O'Mara, the jury would get a slightly different spin on Puente's past.

For instance, while all of her husbands had been painted as abusive drunks who took advantage of kindhearted Dorothea, the jury now
learned that Pedro Montalvo, her fourth husband, had come through for her when she was arrested for forgery in 1978. He'd posted a bond to get his former wife out of jail. And a hefty portion of the more than four thousand dollars she was ordered to pay in restitution came from a thousand-dollar Social Security check made out to him.

Dr. Vicary had suggested that the tenants at 1426 F Street were so unruly that they'd somehow ignited Puente's smoldering hatred, but O'Mara pointed out that this paradigm didn't hold true for either her friend and business partner Ruth Munroe, or for her fiancé Everson Gillmouth.

O'Mara asked about his euphemistic use of the term
missing,
and Dr. Vicary made a surprising admission: "I guess that's one way of saying people were being murdered. I assume—with all due respect to the jury—that all the people that were missing were murdered."

(The defense cringed at this bit of candor from their expert. "Their faces fell like cakes in an oven," a juror later noted.)

The psychiatrist also admitted that Dorothea Puente was conscious of her actions and knew the difference between right and wrong. She did not kill in a blind, murderous rage; she did not hear voices; she was not psychotic. Dorothea Puente was in control.

Finally, Dr. Vicary had virtually guaranteed Puente a mouthpiece in the courtroom, having told her that everything she told him would be funneled into court; there was no confidentiality, no doctor/patient privilege. So, asked about each of the nine victims, she'd claimed to have known this one since the seventies, that one since the sixties
…
She claimed they were all longtime friends, yet she hadn't the faintest idea how these dear old friends, about whom she cared so deeply, had ended up buried in her yard. Of course, they had plenty of health problems, she told him, which she ticked off one by one, including Ruth Monroe's "fatty liver." She'd clearly been paying attention to testimony.

Dorothea had also hastened to point out that she'd
always
had trouble sleeping. She rarely slept more than four hours a night, even after swallowing a double dose of Dalmane. That's
two
thirty-milligram tablets, she noted, in case the doctor might miss it.

Dr. Vicary dutifully testified to each transparent embellishment, each classic bit of Puente fabrication. To the end, she just didn't understand that she couldn't lie her way out of this one, that in trying to shield herself, she only revealed herself.

It seemed unlikely that Dorothea Puente would get the death penalty. Not in the state of California. After all, there was no pain; whether with pills or pillows, she was killing them softly.

But prosecutor John O'Mara had other criteria for the death penalty. By his moral standards, Puente had earned the highest possible sentence. So, on October 6, 1993, he stood—bearded now, and angry— with righteousness blasting through him. Paraphrasing Robert Louis Stevenson, he said, "Eventually, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences," then paused, letting his theme sink in.

Either sentence—life without parole or the death penalty—would protect society, he pointed out, so this was a "nonissue." But, he asked, "is that the end of the inquiry? Isn't there some measure of justice? Isn't there some question of accountability, some responsibility that lies at the foot of this woman?"

Voice rising, he went on, "That's what this trial is all about. She killed three people! Some of you think she killed seven people, some of you think she killed all nine of them!
How high does the body count have to be?”

His question boomed through the room.

O'Mara brushed aside Puente's traumatic past. "She's not twenty years old, still suffering the ravages of an abused childhood. She wasn't some teenager; she was on the advent of her sixth decade! This woman was fifty-eight years old when she killed Leona. She was fifty-nine years old when she killed Mr. Fink."

Returning to his theme, he demanded, "Does anyone ever become responsible for their conduct in this world? Shall we dismiss this person because she had an abused childhood?" Dr. Vicary had said, "Sick people make sick choices." But, O'Mara asked, "Isn't that a way to minimize her culpability?"

He found Dr. Vicaiy's explanation of Dorothea Puente's festering anger and exploding rage simply fatuous. "Is she symbolically killing her mother? Is she symbolically killing her father? That would be convenient," he scoffed.

"If she had a thing about abusive drunks, why didn't she kill John McCauley? He was the most abusive of them all! If this is inevitable, why didn't she kill Pat Kelley? Was she able to control that rage?"

And if she'd been so emotionally brittle, so angry inside, why had she been able to make so many friends over the years? Why had so many people come to testify for her? And why hadn't her friends—or
even her psychiatrist, Dr. Doody—observed that she was on the brink? How had she been able to conceal her uncontrollable acts? "If this was an explosion that occurred over time, how was it that she was so lucky that she could commit three, seven, nine murders,
and nobody saw or heard anything?''

In O'Mara's view, Puente hadn't been irrepressibly compelled, but rather, had coldly
elected
to kill these people. She'd had three years in prison to ruminate on the fact that those who had lived had filed charges against her in 1982, while Ruth Munroe lay silent in her grave.

Clearly, the dead caused fewer problems.

"Antisocial personality disorder," he said, waving the
American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
the "Bible" of psychiatry, "is characterized by lying, cheating, stealing. No conscience. What is the ultimate antisocial act?
Murder!”

O'Mara was indignant, his voice rising in emotional cadences. "They were human beings! They had a right to live! What did they have? They didn't have cars—they had their little Social Security checks and their lives. She took their checks away, she took their lives, and then they didn't have anything!"

He recalled that, in a juror's questionnaire filled out nearly a year ago, one of them had written, "The punishment should fit the crime." Now it was time, he declared, for Dorothea Puente to "sit down to the banquet." Scoffing at the defense's appeal for mercy, he declared. "She should be afforded the same mercy she showed to Leona Carpenter, Dorothy Miller, and Ben Fink!"