This essay is written in somber memory of Leona Carpenter, Dorothy Miller, James Gallop, Betty Palmer, Ben Fink, Vera Martin, Bert Gonzales Montoya, Ruth Monroe, and Everson Gilmouth. While not all of their stories are detailed here, that does not detract from the fact that all of them matter, as did their presence in this life.
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Mere blocks away from the state capitol building in Sacramento is an old house, narrowly designed, with a long, wooden staircase leading up the front door. Beneath it is the ground-level basement. In the back, a balcony overlooks a modest yard. A local said that at one point it had large, prosperous tomato plants.
Thanks to one woman, though, it is known for very different and less-auspicious reasons. Following a turbulent divorce a decade-or-so prior, she began inviting boarders to live the basement level. She threw herself into community affairs and quickly grew a philanthropic reputation. See, for her, image was everything. Everything she did had a purpose, even her continued use of her husband’s surname in order to fortify her claim to the Sacramento Latine community.
Indeed, her surname had changed four times due to multiple marriages over the course of her life which all ended either mysteriously or violently. Her first name, however, was always the same: Dorothea.
Both Predator and Preyed Upon
I first learned about Dorothea Puente through my research into growing popularity around “ghost-hunting.” In 2016, the astronomically-successful Travel Channel staple Ghost Adventures investigated it due to reports of unexplained activity. For as much as I thought I knew about Puente after watching the show, there was so much that the show either glossed over, or omitted altogether.
As you have likely surmised, Dorothea Puente was not who she claimed to be. After a deeply traumatic childhood which included emotional and sexual abuse, being orphaned, and a hasty marriage at the age of 16, Puente was taught from the get-go about just how cruel life could be. There were points in her life where she depended on sex work and/or unstable marriages to keep herself afloat. I include these aspects of her story not to condone what she ended up doing to so many innocent people, or even to illicit sympathy. I think context is important for these kinds of stories. All-too-often violence is ascribed to some kind of innate evilness or villainy within people. Instead, I want to think about what it means to (re)produce human beings within vectors of violence and neglect, and how we/they internalize those harms in ways that then become participatory in violences towards others whose vulnerabilities we/they are capable of exploiting.
Puente is a case study in what it means to live precariously and also predatorily. Before the came to life on F. Street, she spent years honing her skills as a con artist and assailant. She repeatedly drugged people and stole from them while they watched, semi-conscious but otherwise incapacitated. According to Detective John Cabrera, she even impersonated a doctor, paying house-visits to elderly women where she would drug them in order to steal their valuables.
Almost always parallel to her insidious actions was a public performance which completely contrasted it: starting in the 1960s, Puente began crafting a public reputation of herself as a generous, hospitable, even maternal woman. She took in women escaping domestic abuse, began donating substantially to local politicians, and regularly donated clothes and goods to local shelters. She also led AA meetings, became active in assisting local houseless populations, and even helped them to sign up to Social Security benefits. She made herself a familiar and friendly face to thos most in need of that sort of contact. Underneath it all, though, Puente’s sincere intention was to actively cultivate people into being her ideal victims.
Recently, the Netflix docu-series Worst Roommate Ever recounted Puente’s time at 1426 F. Street. It is the infamous framing of her story: how she began attracting roommates only to have them grow suspiciously ill and die, as in the case of Ruth Monroe in the early 1980s. The episode also covers how she was imprisoned between 1982-1985 for what else, but stealing money from her tenet’s social security checks.
Once released from prison Puente was barred from opening and running a boarding house under any circumstances. Despite that, she found a way to manipulate the inconsistent oversight of both her parole officers and visiting government officials into believing her lies and sweet demeanor. In other words: she was back open for business.
Worse Roommate Ever
If I could, I would dedicate another dissertation to how Puente’s victims’ stories demonstrate how social security, poverty, eugenics, and capitalist “philanthropy” are ultimately a deadly nexus. I can’t, because one dissertation is (more than) enough, but just now it’s on the table here.
Anyways. Puente’s crimes are well-chronicled by archived news materials, as well as the subsequent waves of essays, books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries featuring her. Puente welcomed vulnerable people to live in her basement so as to gain access to their social security checks. Once she had signatory authority over the funds, she would drug them and eventually incapacitate them. Her victims would end up buried on her property. Because these people seldom had loved ones who actively checked up on them, many of them were never reported missing. Thus, the social security checks continued to be mailed to her address. Before she was caught and arrested the body count had increased to nine people — seven of whom were found via yard excavation.
Netflix attempted something in the framing of Worst Roommate Ever that could re-center the victims instead of Puente’s wickedness alone. They opened the story with interviews with the head detective on the case, John Cabrera. And then there was Judy. Judy was a member of Volunteers for America (VOA) when she met Albert Gonzales Montoya, who went by “Bert,” living in sober housing. Bert did not have a substance abuse issue, though. He just liked living there. He liked the staff, too, including Judy.
Bert lived life with schizophrenia. In the past he had been forcibly institutionalized where he underwent traumatic shock therapy treatments. After he was released he broke contact with his family and became transient. In Worst Roommate Ever he is shown in footage taken by Judy and her colleagues during her many encounters with him at his lodgings in sober housing. He doesn’t say much, but when he does, his words are poignant and direct.
Judy was convinced that there was accommodations in Sacramento better-suited to Bert's needs. That is how she sought out and eventually found Puente on F Street. In the interview, Judy describes their first meeting as idyllic. It would take months before she would ever notice things turning sour, and Bert becoming harder and harder to contact. One day she called Puente asking for Bert only to be told that he had taken off with another tenet to Mexico. Recognizing instantly how ridiculous that excuse was, Judy threatened to file a police report if Puente could not in some way reconnect her with Bert to prove to her he was alive and safe.
By that point, unfortunately, Bert had already been killed.
In America, where carcerality and healthcare are so deeply intertwined, making choices on behalf of someone else’s welfare all-too-often runs the risk of being potentially disastrous. Many of us try out best to make the best decisions with the information and authority we have. When you raise a population to believe disability and illness as markers for insufficient ability to self-determine, you not only disparage the fullness of disabled humanity, but you forego different possibilities and outcomes to relationships — possibilities which may save someone’s life. However, I understand how easy it is to analyze someone’s actions in retrospect. My intention is not to boil down Judy’s impact on Bert’s life to one of identity or inferences about her “true” nature. She was and is one of many white women in the United States who are committed to doing good in the ways that are legible to them as just that, “good.”
My qualm, then, is not so much with her as a person, but how she makes sense of Bert’s death. Towards the end of the episode, she laments:
“I just feel that it it was [Bert’s] destiny to expose [Dorothea Puente].”
And so the sirens went off in my head. An all-too-familiar trope once again takes hold wherein disabled peoples’ peak productivity is in their betrayal of wrongdoing.
Since the period of industrialization and the disciplinary establishment of Psychiatry as a field, you start seeing this kind of rationale crop up. It’s about ethics. Yes, patients may suffer and be unduly burdened by their role as experimental subject in an ever-changing field, but, their sacrifice yields a better world, right?
Puente is not a Psychiatrist, and Bert was never her patient. Still, in the structuring of relations as landlord and tenet, and also caregiver and boarder, Puente benefitted from the start categorization of her as “able” and Bert as “disabled/unable.” Given her supposed status as an “independently wealthy” elder in her community, implying that she was unfit to do what she did would beg the question, “if not her, who?” because as per the scripts of ableism, certainly not Bert, himself. His destiny did not belong solely to himself or his loved ones. Apparently his destiny belonged to the criminal legal system and the mythos surrounding its villains.
This is just one of the many issues I have with common narratives in the “True Crime” genre as a whole: the value of peoples’ lives should not be ascribed as belonging to their assailants. Puente should never have “needed” the lives of nine people in order to be brought to justice and accountability for her misdeeds. As much as I can respect Judy’s need to process both Bert’s murder and her role in his fate, that does not excuse this lapse. Frankly, it is deeply disturbing how we can be so easily invested in the existence of victims as expendable kindling for carceral justice.
Though I reject the idea that anyone can have a truly accurate telling of someone else’s destiny, something so intimate and ever-changing, I feel resolute in my belief that Bert’s purpose was not to be part of Puente’s undoing. Bert’s purpose was to live life as he saw fit. His death was a divergence, rather than the essential endpoint of that purpose. It is vital that we shift the way we think of the outcomes of disabled life so as to disentangle them from tragedy, harm, and injustice. Bert, himself, did not essentially predispose himself to harm by staying alive. Rather, it was the world in which he lived, via systematic neglect and violence. I mourn Bert, I mourn the lives of the eight other people Puente killed, and what dreams and deeds they bore that we will never get to know.
Disabling Ghosts
I wish I could say that in the aftermath of Puente’s imprisonment that there were no future mismanagements of her house at 1426 F. Street. I wish that I could write “henceforth, everyone took the tragedy to heart and remained respectful of its memory.” I am afraid though that is where my work comes in.
In August of 2022 (yes, this year), an article was published on Newsweek’s website. The title?
'I Live in a Serial Killer's Old Home. She Laid Her Victims Out in Our Bedroom'
The article is written by the current owner of the house, Tom Williams. He and his wife, Barbara, bought the house in the early 2010s. The realtor who showed them the house was too inexperienced and didn’t know what he was setting them up for when he first showed the house. In spite of his ignorance, it seems he found just the couple for the place:
“On the way home we looked up the address online. When we discovered the crimes which had taken place at the house, I got excited. As a fan of true crime books, this kind of thing interests me. I immediately wanted to live in the house.”
According to him, the house’s past never phased the couple, or his mother-in-law, for that matter. She ended up moving into the basement — yes, the basement. The article goes on to add a couple more rather-interesting attempts at “making light” of the situation. His is mother-in-law even jokes that they should bury her in the backyard when she passes away. There’s a framed sign they put up which states “trespassers will be drugged and buried in the backyard.” As if those details weren’t enough, they have the mannequin that is dressed as Puente out on the front porch.
All the while, Williams argues that he and his family have had no problems living in the house, and that despite suspicion or the occasional refusal to visit from relatives, no one’s complained in the decade or so they’ve lived there.
Okay, that’s so interesting, because that definitely was not the tune they were singing when they invited the Ghost Adventures show to come film an investigation there in…oh, 2017?
Now, there was a real “inside” look. Instead of completely dauntless, the mother-in-law expressed grave concern to the GA crew over her paranormal encounters. She attested to even being visited by Puente’s ghost in her sleep a week before they showed up to film. The couple’s nephew also spoke with the team and said that there was an unnerving, negative energy in the home, which reappeared after Puente’s death in prison that same year. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? Her spirit, wretched and unsatisfied, makes its ultimate return to the home it knew so well. It is a tried-and-true narrative arc found in many a ghost story.
The GA crew explain very early on in the episode that they were specifically invited by the family to come investigate. Unsurprisingly, they make it their goal to “vanquish” Puente’s spirit from the home for good. They repeatedly antagonize her, describing her as a sadistic serial killer who was trying to keep control of her victims’ souls in the hereafter. GA invites a couple who work as illustrative psychic mediums. The husband encounters the spirits in the space, while the wife draws those spirits on paper. The husband says he meets a large, hulking, and melancholic man, who the GA team assume is the ghost of Bert. However, the only portrait we see done by the wife is that of an old lady, who everyone concludes must be Puente, herself. Of course.
Even though I was skeptical that the encounter was with Bert’s ghost, period, I found myself sad about the editorial decision to not show the illustration of “him.” It felt like one more clink in the bucket of “disabled-person-as-plot-device.” The repeated description of him as huge, overbearing, intimidating, etc. reminded me of other instances in which peoples’ physical sizes are deployed so as to undermine the degree of their victimization.
I digress. The point of this recourse is to make clear that things aren’t adding up. Williams says that they live largely-unbothered in a former serial killer’s home, yet when it comes to convincing a television show to come film a paranormal investigation that will be broadcast nationwide, there’s a “looming” problem that just won’t go away? Family members being disturbed in their sleep by a creeping Puente refusing to give him her home or her power over the lives she took?
In the Newsweek article, Williams claims that:
“We've only done two tours inside the house, both of which were not for profit. We don't want to profit from murder. One was for the historical society and another was in aid of a homeless shelter.”
So…where were they going to mention Ghost Adventures? Was that actually profitable, and therefore useless to the above argument that they have only ever given public access for charitable reasons? Do they not think that people reading this article online also have access to Google?
I’m getting testier in my language here mainly because the Williams, in my eyes at least, are perpetuating the perpetrator fixation for more generations beyond that which lived during Puente’s time. They are actively shaping the historiography and cultural composite of both the house and Puente. For Williams, the goal is to minimize the “bad” kind of stigma about the house which degrades its material worth, but also capitalize off of the “good” stigma and taboo so as to preserve/cultivate cultural capital. That may be a coarse way of describing it, but, whatever.
The fact is that owners of “haunted” sites make these rope-jumping maneuvers all the time, with their feet hopping in and over boundaries so as to benefit themselves. And why not, when law dictates that their properties are of historical significance, and should be preserved as such rather than torn down to make way for something new? This is not me saying “ergo, gentrification is pro-ghost,” by any means. I am speaking instead to the complex interlocking pursuits of capitalists, law, property, and governmental recognition of historical value.
Lastly: where the fuck is anyone asking the Williams’ about whether they think their methods of renovating and also reimagining the house are quite insensitive to the memories of those killed there? Forget all the theory and intellectual might, just think of how uncomfortable it would be knowing that the place in which your loved one was brutally murdered has been reinvented as a local spectacle for all those fascinated by the macabre? How would you make sense of it all, of people severing the gothic from its (partial) sincere origins in human brutality? How they remember Puente’s name, and all of her grotesque aliases, but your loved one’s name, well, that’s just a bit harder to come up with on the spot?
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Look, I hope that beyond all of this, that in spite of it all, Bert is anywhere but at 1426 F. Street. I hope he no longer feels the sensation of Judy’s “his destiny was…” and the Williams’ fixation on their own self-centered relationship to the place in which he was killed. Regardless, I find myself wishing that the psychic medium was lying, or that he saw something else, and it was the pressure to perform rather than a truthful encounter. I believe in ghosts, I just don’t believe that everyone has the right to call upon them to “perform,” even if they promise to be championed or protected. They know better than to ignore the limitations involved in those offerings.