Tender Murderers Read online

  He turned to religion, and sat quietly during the trial, glumly accepting his fate. Ruth's attitude was more of a “What, me worry?” She had received 164 proposals of marriage while in prison, and she was confident that she'd escape The Chair. “They will never send a woman to the death house in this state,” she said.

  Woops, wrong again, Ruth! The couple were found guilty on May 9, 1927, and sentenced to death. They were electrocuted, Ruth first, and then Judd, on January 22, 1928. She was such a bungler that you can almost feel sorry for her.

  The Picture

  Ruth and Judd's sordid story inspired the noir 1944 film Double Indemnity, with Barbara Stanwyck as a suitably brassy 1940s version of the deadly flapper.

  And then there was The Picture. One of the official witnesses at Ruth Snyder's execution was a young New York Daily News photographer named Thomas Howard. He had smuggled in a camera, taped to his leg. When the current went on, his camera went off: he crossed his legs, uncovering the camera, squeezed a bulb hidden in his pocket, and snapped the picture.

  The next day the picture, now considered one of the most famous photos in the history of photojournalism, occupied the entire front page of the New York Daily News. Ruth sold one million extra copies for the Daily News that day and earned a third dubious distinction: Cover girl at the moment of her death.

  The Picture

  Dorothea Puente

  Arsenic and Old Lace Redux

  In the 1940s dark comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, the sweetly homicidal maiden-lady Brewster sisters take in lonely old men and, wanting to put them out of their misery, dose them with arsenic-laced elderberry wine and bury them in their basement. In a case of life imitating art, kindly, white-haired Dorothea Puente took lonely old people–often alcoholic, drug addicted, or mentally ill old people–into her boarding house, put them out of their misery with cocktails of potentially lethal drugs and alcohol, buried them in her garden, and cashed their Social Security checks.

  Everyone loved the sweet widow lady who r an her boarding house in a blue-and-white gingerbread building. The retired doctor, who still called herself Dr. Puente, played auntie to so many needy young people, gave to so many charities, opened her house to the neighborhood on Christmas and Easter. A lady all the way, she was always impeccably dressed and perfumed, wearing real jewelry, and she had such fascinating stories to tell about her experience as an army nurse on the Bataan Death March. Wasn't it sad that she had cancer? And everyone agreed that seventy-year-old Dorothea, born in Mexico into a family of eight children, was a wonderful cook!

  Not. To start with, she wasn't Mexican (she wasn't a doctor, either). And she was never widowed. Born Dorothea Helen Gray, in 1929–she was also a good ten years younger than she let on–in San Bernardino, California, to a physically and mentally ill father and an alcoholic mother, she was orphaned by the age of six. Raised by relatives, Dorothea had to work at picking fruits and vegetables while still a child. At an early age she started making things up, perhaps in an attempt to deny the reality of her wretched life. In high school, she told her classmates that she was a Portuguese exchange student. She married at seventeen, using the name Sherriale A. Riscile. The marriage lasted three years, and Dorothea–she was not widowed–entered a life of crime before she was even twenty, serving four months in jail for writing bad checks. Her second marriage, at the age of twenty-three, was to Axel Bert Johanson. This time she called herself Teya Singoalla Neyaarda (where did she get those names?) and claimed to be an Israeli-Egyptian Muslim. That marriage lasted fourteen years, but Johanson, a merchant seaman, was often away for months at a time, and during his absences Dorothea seems to have consoled herself with a long list of men. In i960, she was busted in a brothel, and given ninety days in the pokey, but she claimed she was merely visiting a friend there and had no idea it was a house of ill repute. After separating from Axel, she moved to Sacramento, now using the name Sharon Johanson, and in i968 she married the much younger Roberto Puente. That marriage was a disaster, and it was over by i969. By now Dorothea was running a boarding house, a white, three-story Victorian gingerbread house on F Street, and acquiring her reputation as a charitable, helpful woman, active in the Spanish-speaking community, whose tidy mansion was a refuge for the poor, the mentally ill, the old people who fell through the cracks of the welfare system.

  At forty-seven Dorothea married one last time–she was never widowed!–to Pedro Angel Montalvo. This time she gave her fathers name as Jesus Sahagun, and her mother's maiden name as Puente. She may have even begun to believe the Mexican heritage she claimed. Her marriage with Pedro lasted a whole week and was eventually annulled.

  By 1978, Dorothea was busted again. She'd been stealing her tenants' welfare and Social Security mail, forging their names, and cashing the checks. A kind-hearted judge gave her five years probation and ordered her to pay back the $4,000 she'd stolen. Pedro Montalvo, no longer her husband but still her pal, even helped her make restitution by giving her some of his own money.

  Another bust in i982, and this one was more serious. Dorothea liked to hang out in bars, sipping tall glasses of vodka and grapefruit juice. Sitting at the bar, dressed to kill and sporting good jewelry, she attracted lonely older men the way garbage attracts flies. One day she met a seventy-four-year-old pensioner named Malcolm Mackenzie at a joint called the Zebra Club, slipped a mickey into his drink, went back with him to his apartment, and while he lay helplessly drugged, she helped herself to his valuables, including his ring, which she coolly pulled off his finger. A few months later she drugged and robbed two women, eighty-two and eighty-four years old. Dorothea was arrested, and a plane ticket to Mexico was found in her purse. This time she got four years and was paroled in 1985.

  One condition of Dorothea's parole was that she not run any more boarding houses, but that didn't stop her. Once out of prison, Dorothea picked herself up, dusted herself off, and started all over again, this time with a smaller, two-story boarding house further down on F Street. Once again, her boarders were the elderly, alcoholic, and disabled. Nobody bothered looking into Dorothea's past. And anyway, how could this sweet old granny have possibly done anything wrong?

  One of the welfare clients sent to Dorothea was a harmless madman named Bert Montoya. This Costa Rican native heard voices, and answered them, loudly. Unable to take care of himself, for years he'd been wandering the streets by day and spending his nights on a mat on the floor of the Sacramento Volunteers of America detox center. By all accounts, Bert, though pretty grungy, was a likable cuss, and even though he wasn't an alcoholic, the VOA staff let him sleep there because he had nowhere else to go, and because they cared about him. VOA street counselor Judy Moise looked for a place to put Bert and found Dorothea. The sweet white-haired boarding house landlady kept a cozy, spotless house, and she really was a great cook. She even had a beautiful garden, which she tended in the extreme early morning hours, before sunrise. Judy Moise gladly placed Bert there.

  Dorothea Puente

  At first, Dorothea worked wonders on Bert. She cleaned him up, cooked his favorite Mexican food, even got him speaking lucidly sometimes. All in all, life was good for the pathetic tenants of the house on F Street. Many of them had never had a room to themselves, and now they even had television sets in their rooms. Grandmotherly Dorothea made sure they took their medication, and the food was delicious. If one or another of them suddenly disappeared, nobody cared much. After all, these were transients, prone to picking up and moving on.

  Then in October 1988, Bert disappeared. Gone to Mexico for a month, Dorothea told his social worker, not to worry, he was staying with her family there. But Bert didn't return. Stayed longer for the fiesta, said Dorothea; then, gone off to live with his brother-in-law in Utah. Brother-in-law? Judy Moise, the social worker, didn't know Bert had a brother-in-law. It was time to call the cops.

  Officer Richard Ewing went to the house on F Street and quizzed Dorothea and her tenants. They corroborated her story: that's right, Bert came bac
k from Mexico, but then he left again with his brother-in-law. But one tenant slipped the cop a note that read, “She wants me to lie to you.” In private, the tenant related gruesome tales of holes being dug in the garden during pre-dawn hours, and of the stomach-turning stink of rot coming from one room.

  On the morning of November 11, 1988, cops rang Dorothea's doorbell. After questioning her they asked, and were given, permission to dig in her garden. Dorothea watched from her doorway as they dug several small holes and found nothing. After an hour of fruitless searching, they were ready to give up when Detective Terry Brown struck pay dirt, about eight inches down.

  Actually, what his shovel struck was a human leg bone, encased in a dirty sneaker.

  “Oh my lord!” exclaimed Dorothea, watching. She was shocked–shocked!

  But the skeleton had been in the ground too long for it to be Bert Montoya, and anyway, it was a woman. There was nothing to pin on Dorothea yet, and the next day the digging continued. By now, word of the grisly find had gotten out, and the house was surrounded by reporters, video cameras, and neighbors in a state of horrified fascination. At around 8:30 A,M. Dorothea, dressed in a pink dress, red coat, and purple pumps, and carrying a matching pink umbrella (it was drizzling) and purple handbag, approached Detective John Cabrera. Would it be all right if she walked down to the Clarion Hotel to have a cup of coffee with her nephew, who worked there? I'm not under arrest, am I? she wanted to know, her voice quavering. There there, little lady, Cabrera reassured her, and he walked her past the bothersome rubberneckers and the TV crews.

  Moments after Dorothea disappeared down the street, the second body was found, two feet underground.

  The cops actually went to look for Dorothea at the Clarion Hotel! Of course, she was long gone. She had taken a cab to the nearby city of Stockton and bought a plane ticket for Los Angeles, paid for with some of the $3,200 in cash she had stuffed into that matching purple handbag. In Los Angeles, she checked into the Royal Viking Motel, using the name Dorothy Johanson.

  She stayed in her room for three days, laying low and venturing out only for takeout food. Meanwhile, five more bodies were dug up in her yard, bringing the total to seven. And the third body was Bert Montoya.

  Finally, feeling stir-crazy, or maybe just ready to bounce back as she always had, Dorothea put on her makeup and perfume, fluffed up her white coiffeur, and taxied to a seedy little bar called the Monte Carlo. There, up to her old tricks, she sipped her vodka and grapefruit juice and struck up a conversation with a sixty-seven-year-old pensioner named Charles Willigues. Willigues must have thought he'd died and gone to heaven. Well-bred, well-dressed widows (she said) like Donna Johanson (she said) just didn't frequent places like the Monte Carlo, and certainly had never expressed an interest in him. And this nice fifty-five-year-old lady (she said) had already offered to cook him a nice turkey dinner when Thanksgiving rolled around next week, and was even talking about maybe moving in with him! He started getting a little nervous when she quizzed him on the amount of his pension, but nevertheless made a date with her for the following day.

  It wasn't until Willigues got home and turned on the TV news that he got alarmed. He phoned Gene Silver, editor for the Channel 2 news. Maybe that nice Donna Johanson was the Sacramento landlady the police were looking for? Silver called the cops. Could the police possibly wait until tomorrow night to arrest her, Willigues asked hopefully, after his date with her? No such luck. By 11 P.M., Dorothea was in handcuffs and Willigues was dateless in Los Angeles.

  By the time Dorothea's trial actually started in 1993, two more bodies had been added to the count, and she was accused of nine counts of murder. It was the longest trial in the history of California, with 153 people testifying, and the evidence mounting up to 3,500 pages. Yet all the evidence was circumstantial: the bodies had been too decomposed to determine the exact cause of death, although the sedative Dalmane had been found in all of them. But Dalmane is a common prescriptive drug, taken by many people to help them sleep. However, in the right combination with other drugs or alcohol, it can be lethal. This is what the prosecution argued, along with the possibility that Dorothea had drugged her tenants and then simply smothered them with a pillow. Dorothea's defense insisted that all those people had simply died of natural causes, and Dorothy had buried them in her back yard so that she could continue to collect their checks. Sure she's a thief, they said, but she didn't kill anyone.

  It took days for a jury to find Dorothea guilty of only three of the nine murders. The jury deadlocked again over whether to give her the death penalty, and when they couldn't reach a decision, the judge sentenced her to life in prison by default.

  Dorothea still resides (no, she never had cancer) in the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California, where she whiles away the hours crafting knick-knacks. She has also written a cookbook in her spare time. She really was a good cook!

  The House on F Street

  In 2002, Dorothea Puente's house was sold, a bargain at $199,000. The house, built in 1889, is a Victorian beauty, and the neighborhood, once seedy back in the days when Dorothea was planting her tenants in the yard, has become gentrified and very desirable. Naturally, there are rumors that the house is haunted, as would be any house with that many murders connected to it. However, neighbor Alicia Wenbourne told reporters, “Since this neighborhood was built a century ago, there are quite a few people who died in these houses. They just didn't die quite so notoriously.”

  The little house of horrors, undergoing renovation (M. Parfitt, photographer)

  At the time of this writing, the new owners are renovating the house. One hopes they won't chase away the ghosts.

  Three

  Bandit Queens and Gun Molls

  Belle Starr

  The Petticoat Terror of the Plains

  By the time Myra Maebelle Shirley had become known as Belle Starr, she was already a living legend, written about in scandal sheets of the 1880s like the Police Gazette, and the subject of endless speculation. Among her many lovers, it was said, were the infamous bandit Jesse James himself, perhaps his brother Frank, and William Clarke Quantrill, leader of the Civil War guerillas known as Quantrill's Raiders. In fact, these may have been among the only famous outlaws that Belle did not sleep with during her violent, action-packed life. She was good friends with Jesse, though, and had done a little spying for Quantrill back when she was a teenager and her brother had run away to join the Raiders.

  You'd never have known that little Myra, born in 1848 of prosperous, respectable parents–her father, John, owned a city block of business real estate and her mother entertained friends and neighbors by playing and singing genteel songs on the piano–would end her days shot down by a bushwhacker on a lonely country road. Myra was a good student at the Carthage Female Academy in Carthage, Missouri, where she learned Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Maybe it was the advent of the Civil War, when her father took sides with the South and her brother ran off with Quantrill, that Myra discovered the thrill of living outside the law.

  Brother Bud got shot down, the South lost the war, and Myra's daddy lost his business. The family went west, settled in Dallas, and bought a farm. Men like the James brothers and the Younger brothers, who'd fought with Quantrill's Raiders alongside brother Bud, had become outlaws by then, and, perhaps because he felt it was his patriotic duty as a rebel, daddy John Shirley had a habit of taking them in when they needed a hideout. Belle–let's call her Belle now–grown into a pretty eighteen-year-old, met and fell for Cole Younger, and gave birth to his daughter, Pearl Younger, in 1866. By that time, Cole had ridden off into the sunset, although Belle never forgot her first love, and she married another outlaw, Jim Reed.

  Well, not exactly legally married. Giving refuge to outlaws was one thing, but Belle's parents didn't want their daughter marrying one, so Jim and Belle rode off with his gang, and one of the gang members performed a wedding ceremony on horseback. Belle, Jim, and baby Pearl moved in with his folks back in Mis
souri, but pretty soon things got too hot for the newlyweds. Jim was wanted by the law for murder and for selling whiskey to Indians, so the family headed for California, where Belle gave birth to their son, James Edwin. But that goldurned law was still on Jim's trail, and off the family went again, this time back to Texas and a little farm near Scyene. Jim, who apparently just couldn't resist committing crimes, was soon wanted for cattle rustling and two more murders.

  This time Belle left the kids with her folks and headed with her man to Indian territory, where Belle may have participated in her first crime, if you don't count poor choice in men. Disguised as a man, but obviously not fooling anybody, Belle, along with Jim and several other outlaws, kidnapped a prospector and hung him from a tree until he told them where he had hidden about $30,000 worth of gold.

  By 1874, Jim had a price on his head of $1,500. An ex-gang member of Jim's, John T. Morris, got himself deputized just for the occasion, and shot Jim for the reward. Belle's revenge was to prevent Morris from claiming the money. When asked to identify the corpse, she flatly denied that it was her husband.