Disturbed Ground (21 page)

Watching this stunning news report, Dorothea leaned over and whispered to fellow inmate Michelle Crowl, "I'm shocked that they linked him to the others." She shook her head, adding, "He was the first one."

Dorothea had trouble resisting a lifelong urge to be the center of attention. Here at the rambling, one-story Rio Consumnes Correctional Center (where she was being temporarily held until the new jail was completed) she was a celebrity. And now—after years of silence—she apparently felt compelled to talk. "I was very close to him," she continued. "He wanted to marry me, but he had such a nasty jealous streak."

A few days later the two women were again watching television when newscasters reported that, just as suddenly as he'd been arrested, Ismael Florez was being released.

"Florez is getting a deal," Dorothea grumbled. That stunk as far as she was concerned. (Her intuition was dead-on: Florez had hired an attorney, and in exchange for immunity, he'd agreed to testify against her.)

Michelle Crowl, a fresh-faced youngster doing time on drug charges, was a trustee here—a low-security inmate who brought others food and coffee—which gave her a fair opportunity to mingle. She noticed that Dorothea often got frustrated while watching news of her case, openly grousing about the report.

Crowl repeatedly warned Dorothea about talking too much. Housed just one cell away, she couldn't help overhearing bits of conversation between Puente and the outspoken inmate housed between them, Paulina Pinson. "I let her know that in the evening she and Paulina could be heard talking," Crowl explained defensively. "I wasn't the only one who could hear her."

Regardless, Dorothea passed the nights whispering confidences from cell to cell, and unbidden voices buzzed in Crowl's ears.

CHAPTER 21

Jerry Hobbs’s “colorful” mother had always been unpredictable, but
she'd completely disappeared in October 1987. When she'd failed to pick up the birthday gift he'd sent to Sacramento, her son had come searching for her, but found nothing.

Now Jerry Hobbs placed a call from San Diego to the Sacramento Police Department. All he knew was that his mother had supposedly been "located" in connection with the Dorothea Puente case. He gave her name, Vera Faye Martin, and waited anxiously for his call to be transferred. Hobbs next heard some clicking on the line, then a voice barked the crushing news: "Sacramento County Coroner's Office."

Usually, the families of possible murder victims are treated more sensitively. But now the system was so intent on attaching names to the numbers affixed to the bodies from F Street, few realized these names and number might have children.

Yet names were surfacing at last.
The remains of Hobbs's mother, sixty-three-year-old Vera Faye Martin, had been identified with medical X-rays. Next, a forty-hour fingerprint analysis yielded the positive identification of Dorothy Miller,
sixty-four. (Detective Cabrera would remember her name from the pill bottle he'd confiscated from Puente's bedroom.) On the heels of this news, X-rays confirmed the identification of sixty-three-year-old James Gallop.

How long had this been going on? Who else might have been killed? And why?

The alleged motive was money. Benefit checks, they said. Yet Dorothea Puente's tenants were mostly people who inhabited a world of shrinking horizons, their pockets a day from empty, their only extravagances memories. Why would anyone want to murder people barely on this side of homelessness?

It sounded ludicrous. The average Social Security payment, about $350 per month, seemed hardly enough to kill for. Still, if Puente had managed to collect this sum for seven people, the figure rose to $2,450 a month—hardly a fortune, but a healthy income. And that base figure of $29,400 a year would jump upward with larger benefit checks from disability or SSI—all of it tax-free, of course.

With Puente's criminal record, it was hard to understand how she could have gotten away with this. If the allegations were true, this was a case of a documented sociopath quietly murdering society's outcasts, preying on those who fell through the cracks because she knew how hard they were to trace. She'd fallen through the cracks herself.

As the dust settled from the calamity on F Street, as names were attached to the luckless deceased, the finger-pointing and soul-searching began in earnest. Blame was in the air. After all, this wasn't just some sleepy little community, this was the capital—the fountain of state law!—and if there was a flaw in the system, it had to be found.

Virtually every organization that had had contact with Puente was doused with condemnation, sending ripples of activity through the white-paper ponds of government. Office typewriters hummed with explanations and denials. Various agencies huffily traded accusations.

The police department’s gaffes made it an easy mark. (As a result of an Internal Affairs investigation, Lieutenant Joe Enloe and Sergeant Jim Jorgenson were reprimanded and reassigned.)

Other agencies were scrutinized and scolded as well: The parole board had failed to keep an eye on the ex-con! The human services network had
neglected to check her background! The city had failed to detect an illegally operated boardinghouse! The Social Security system had allowed her to cash checks unlawfully!

A scorching editorial in
The Sacramento Bee
, “The Mistakes on F Street,” expressed amazement that Puente's parole officers had visited her at the boardinghouse fifteen times, yet failed to detect that she was running a boardinghouse in violation of her parole.

The parole board countered that they'd been led to believe that Puente was merely a tenant at 1426 F Street. They had no legal cause to investigate, and were forbidden by federal privacy statutes from checking to see if Puente was forging checks.

Besides, "we never noticed anything about her lifestyle that led us to believe she was spending more money," protested federal probation officer Charles Varnon. "Usually, that's the mistake people make, but she didn't make it. She was crafty, very crafty."

Ah. It wasn't their fault. The wily old landlady had lied to them!

Of course, the Social Security Administration wasn't to blame either. It was simply routine that payees were named and checks issued. There was no cross-referencing to determine how many checks one payee might be cashing. And no one examined the backgrounds of those receiving the checks, not even the parole board. The Right to Privacy Act prohibited such "infringements."

To this chorus of "it's not my job," the Department of Health added a farcical note when a spokesperson explained why its investigation of an odor at Puente's property had revealed nothing: "Obviously, there was no problem. If there was any kind of problem, we would have given her a written notice of violation."

It was that simple: No notice, no problem.

Eventually, the bitter brouhaha boiled down to one issue: whether Puente's establishment should have been
licensed.
The argument went like this: If
care and supervision
were being provided, then Puente needed a license, which required fingerprints, which would have resulted in a criminal background check. (Rather than submit to this, Puente probably would have "simply evicted any individuals for whom we had determined she was providing care and supervision and continued to operate," as David Dodds, acting district manager of Community Care Licensing, pointed out. But this detail was disregarded.)

Besides handling her tenants' finances, Puente was overseeing their medications—certainly in Bert's case, and probably others—and this was deemed "care and supervision,” So Michael Coonan, the county ombudsman for senior care, was emphatic that Puente's establishment "should [have been] licensed. There's no question about that. This [was] an unlicensed residential care facility, not a rooming house, as it has been portrayed.” (Coonan went on to speculate, moreover, that as many as a thousand elderly and mentally disabled people in Sacramento County were living in similarly unlicensed establishments.)

Lest it be thought at fault, Community Care Licensing (CCL) promptly responded with indignation. "I believe, very clearly, that Licensing did not miss the boat here," protested Deputy Director Fred Miller. "This was a place that represented itself [as] a boarding home" which did not require a license.

No agency—not the police, not the parole board, not Social Security, not CCL—was willing to take responsibility for having overlooked the notorious landlady.

Individuals made easier targets.

The director of the Sacramento County Health Department launched an investigation into whether mental health and social service workers should have recognized that Puente was dangerous. (It was unclear exactly how these workers ought to have discerned this, especially since trained parole officers, familiar with Puente's criminal record and charged with keeping an eye on her, had not. But the thirst for fault-finding had yet to be slackened.)

Peggy Nickerson, the street counselor who faced daily the nigh-impossible task of finding housing for alcoholics and outcasts, became the scapegoat. With everyone so eager to assign blame, and with all parties so vigorously denying responsibility for whatever had gone wrong, it finally came down to the idea that Nickerson had lied. It was documented: Nickerson had misled the CCL investigator who'd inspected Puente's residence back in June. Never mind that she'd done it naively, with good intentions. Never mind that her little white lie would have made zero difference in the final balance.

Nickerson's colleagues described her as hardworking, compassionate, "one of the best people in the business." They especially praised her for having the courage to work "with hard-core people that other social workers had already written off." But none of this made the papers.

Instead, a local headline charged,
warning about puente ignored,
with the snide subtitle, "Social worker kept referring clients to landlady she thought was ‘kind.’" The article read: "Peggy Nickerson, who placed 19 clients in Puente's care since 1986, said county officials warned her about the landlady's criminal past in June. She said she ignored the warning because she didn't trust its source and because she liked the work Puente was doing."

Worse, Nickerson ingenuously opened up to reporters. "I was trying to protect the clients," she explained with anguish to the
Los Angeles Times.
"At least they would have a place to stay. I don't like the idea of people being thrown out on the street."

But with the scent of blood in the water, the lawyers were soon circling. Ben Fink's brother filed suit against Nickerson, as did the children of Vera Faye Martin and Dorothy Miller.

In the end, Peggy Nickerson lost her job.

CHAPTER 22

January 11, 1989, blew in clear, cold, and windy. Alvaro “Bert” Jose Rafael Gonzales Montoya was to be buried today in a remote and unremarkable corner of Saint Mary's Cemetery.

A handful of people gathered for the graveside service. Bert's nephew, Henry Montoya, had flown out from New Orleans with his wife. He stood as the sole blood relation in attendance, since Bert's mother was not strong enough to make the trip to California. A good number from the Volunteers of America had managed to come, including Judy Moise, Beth Valentine, Leo MacFarland, and Bert's longtime friend from Detox, Bill Johnson. Shifting from foot to foot in the bright cold, pulling their overcoats tight around them, all were recorded by news cameras, the media being another portion of those in attendance.

The mourners finally settled into metal folding chairs, then strained to catch the words of the reverend as they carried on the wind, beseeching God to take the soul of Bert Montoya up to "the perfection and the company of the saints."

As he spoke, Lucy Yokota, the nurse who had come to know Bert
through his weekly TB treatments, stared in dismay at his inelegant coffin. It was blue Styrofoam—standard for the derelicts buried here—and it looked like an ice chest you'd use at a picnic, Lucy Yokota thought. She watched the flimsy container shudder in the wind, distressed that it seemed about to blow away.