Further reading for Dorothea Puente

Cooking with a Serial Killer Recipes From Dorothea Puente

The Bone Garden: The Chilling True Story of a Female Serial Killer

Info:

Dorothea Puente had sad and traumatic youth, both parents were alcoholics her mother was a sex worker and her father at one point tried to commit suicide in front of her. When she was around 8 years old her father then died of tuberculosis and a year later her mother died in a car accident. After this she was sent to an orphanage where abuse continued.

Dorothea married early, at the age of 16 and had two daughters. However giving her troubled childhood it seems she did not have the parenting gene and sent her children away, one to live with relatives the other she put up for adoption. Soon after she became pregnant again but had a miscarriage, after this her husband left. Dorothea was married twice more, once to a violent Swede named Axel Johanson and lastly to a man 19 years her jr, Roberto Puente.

Dorothea spent much of her life as a carrier criminal in and out of jail charges stemming from owning and managing a brothel and vagrancy. She would find work as a nurses aide caring for disabled and elderly people in their own homes.

Not long after her 3rd marriage ended she procured a 3 story 16 bedroom home that she would rent out to the elderly or people who needed care. Soon she was being accused of drugging and stealing both by the people she cared for and men that she would meet in bars whom she would have drinks with take back to their home, drug them and proceed to take whatever she saw fit down to the jewelry off their drugged bodies.

Puente later hired a handyman to install paneling in her apartment and requested that he make a 6x3x2 foot box for her to store “books and other items” in. She asked him to help her transport this filled box to a storage site but on the way requested they stop and dump the box on the river bank. About a year later this box was found by a man fishing and inside was a badly decomposed unidentifiable elderly mans remans.

Puente continued to thrive and was popular with social workers as her tenants tended to be the “tough cases” including those with mental health issues and drug addiction. She would collect the tenants monthly pension checks, cash them and give the tenants a stipend while pocketed the rest of the money. Suspicions were aroused when a local homeless alcoholic was taken in by Puente to become her new “handyman” she had him digging the basement floor up carting away soil and rubbish and layering the floor with a concrete slab.

Soon more elderly people from her boarding house were being reported missing and people began noticing lots of yard work happening around the property….soon after 7 bodies were found buried throughout.

Keeping with her sweet grandmotherly image Dorothea did release a cookbook.