DOROTHEA Puente killed her boyfriend Everson Gillmouth, along with seven of her tenants, in a series of gruesome killings that rocked California during the 1980s.
Her story is now being told in a new Netflix documentary, Worst Roommate Ever.
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Puente welcomed vulnerable folks into her boarding home – only to kill them and bury or dispose of their bodies.
Everson Gillmouth had developed a relationship with Puente while she was serving time in prison for theft.
The 77-year-old retiree maintained the correspondence with Puente until she was released in 1985.
Then, the two moved in together, but he suddenly disappeared.
Shortly after his disappearance, Puente hired a handyman to build her a six-foot-long box, which she claimed would be used to store books and other household items in a storage facility.
But the storage box never made it to the facility.
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Instead, Puente asked the handyman, Ismael Florez, to pull over on the side of the road while the two were transporting the box and push it into the water.
Weeks later, a fisherman discovered the box and alerted police. They found an elderly man’s body rotting inside.
However, it wasn’t until three years later that the body was identified as Gillmouth’s.
“SHE’S BEEN DIGGING A LOT OF HOLES”
When Alvaro Montoya vanished after being placed at Puente’s house by an outreach counselor with Volunteers of America, suspicions arose about Puente.
Puente allegedly told the man’s counselor, Judy, that he had left to go on vacation with his brother in Mexico.
But Montoya didn’t speak to his family, and Judy knew this.
Montoya had also reportedly struggled with mental health issues and had been homeless, so Judy, did not buy Puente’s explanation regarding the man’s disappearance.
Judy had also been tipped off by another resident in Puente’s home, John Sharp.
He told her: “Something is wrong. She’s been digging a lot of holes.”
Judy alerted police, who were given the same response about Montoya’s disappearance – that he was on holiday.
But Sharp then gave police a message: “She’s making me lie for her.”
BEEF JERKY OR HUMAN FLESH?
The police returned and searched the house, but didn’t find anything. So they asked Puente if they could dig up the garden.
She agreed and even provided another shovel for them.
In the Netflix documentary, one of the cops who worked on the case recalls digging up Puente’s property and finding “pieces of cloth, egg shells, and leather pieces that looked like beef jerky”.
“We were just digging and digging,” he says. “And I could see Dorothea staring out the window at us, above.”
Police then found the body of 78-year-old Leona Carpenter. They realized that what they thought was beef jerky was, in reality, human flesh.
“I had been removing it from the bone,” one policeman says in the documentary.
Puente remained calm and denied everything when questioned by police.
The man who interrogated her revealed: “She was emotionless and she would look straight into my eyes and answer every question.
“She never flinched. She never said anything. She denied everything.”
SERIAL KILLER
Puente committed at least nine murders during the 1980s. She would eventually be convicted of three.
She was accused of poisoning and strangling some of the guests she welcomed into her boarding home, before then burying them on the property and even going so far as to cash their Social Security checks.
Puente died in prison on March 27, 2011. She was 82 years old.
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