Disturbed Ground (23 page)

And their client was not charged with illegal burial.

Reasonable doubt
_,
reasonable doubt—
this is a mantra
of defense attorneys. No matter how small, how obscure, every doubt must be examined and amplified. Because, as every defense attorney knows, doubts can have hidden powers. With luck, they can even work miracles.

CHAPTER 24

Besides defending the case, said Peter Vlautin, you have to defend the person." His tried-and-true strategy was to "start from day one" and chronicle the defendant's life, tracking down former friends, family, and neighbors from decades past, while keeping an eye out for what he calls "outside influences."

So Clymo and Vlautin set their investigators on the trail of Dorothea Puente's long and decidedly tragic past. They quickly retained a private investigator who specialized in researching the social histories of defendants in death penalty cases. She was one of the few allowed to meet with Puente at the jail, asking personal questions, getting leads on distant family and forgotten friends, delving into Dorothea's childhood to try to discover the crosscurrents that had carried this orphaned child into adulthood, outside the law, and into the vortex of Sacramento's biggest murder case.

Clymo would only hint at some of the tragic events that his investigators
had uncovered. Steepling the fingers of his big hands, he would just murmur, "I think she's remarkably interesting. She has endured a lifetime of
trauma and adversity and upset, and has remained intact in spite of that."

Although he revealed about as much as a riverboat gambler, Clymo's team had already made real progress in answering the question that Judy Moise could never quite fathom: Who was Dorothea, this snowy-haired woman with the slippery personality? Was she the kind, generous, eccentric old landlady who went out of her way to make her guests comfortable, who treated Bert "like a son," who showered friends with gifts? Was she a pathetic old woman who lacked a firm grasp on reality, half believing her own outlandish stories? Was she a coldblooded killer who planned the deaths of her tenants as coolly as one scheduled removal of garbage? Or was she something else altogether?

Even on paper she was a chameleon. Her weight varied: She was 185, 135, 160, or 125 pounds. Her hair was white, or auburn, or dark, or blond. One probation report gave her height as a surprising five feet eight inches; others noted a more reasonable five two or five two and a half.

Her eyes, in any case, were blue. And she was born on January 9, 1929.

According to probation records, Dorothea's father, Jesus Sahagun, died when she was four, and her mother, Trudie Gray, when she was five. Dorothea had told her probation officer that she was the youngest of eighteen children, the only one of the surviving fourteen living in the United States, and that she was a primary means of support for her siblings in Mexico. On June 8, 1982, while in jail awaiting a hearing, she'd sent a pleading letter to the "Honrable Judge Warren," printing out her tragic history: "I'd like to tell you first off, I'm of Mexican descent. I look white tho. When I was 8 years old I had to start picking cotton, potatoes, cucumbers and chilies, then fruits."

She wrote that she felt "so terrible for the poor people I did wrong to, and my brothers and sisters, they are the ones who are suffering…. Please, your honor, find compassion in your heart."

In adulthood, Dorothea had garnered accolades for donating both time and money to political fund-raisers, Mexican-American scholarships, and charities. She spoke Spanish, handed out homemade tamales, and talked lovingly of her family south of the border.

But despite her pretensions of Hispanic heritage, state records show that Dorothea Montalvo Puente was in fact plain old white-bread American, born in Redlands, California—far south of Sacramento, but still hundreds of miles shy of the Mexican homeland she claimed. She
was the sixth of seven children born to Jesse James Gray, a thirty-four-year-old World War I veteran from Missouri, and Trudie Mae Yates, twenty-seven, a housewife from Oklahoma.

The Grays were evidently unprepared for the daughter that struggled into the world at six o'clock that January morning; it wasn't until eight days later that they managed to officially name their baby girl Dorothea Helen Gray.

She was born at a difficult time, for while Dorothea's mother lay in the sweat and pain of childbirth, her father lay in his own hospital bed, racked by a terrible, chronic illness.

Jesse James Gray had seemed a fit young farmer when he married sixteen-year-old Trudie Yates. But by the time he was discharged from the Army in July 1919, Jesse Gray was bent by a strange, relentless fatigue. Mustard gas poisoning, they said. Thin, shaky, unable to walk more than a few yards, he found himself bedridden by the age of twenty-five.

With months of rest and nurturing, Jesse's health gradually improved. By the next spring, he thought he'd recovered. He got out of bed and farmed for a season, then the restless young man packed up his family and moved to the golden promise of Southern California.

For short periods in California, Jesse Gray would feel strong, take a job, and work for a while. But then another relapse would knock him flat, this one longer and more severe than the last, and times grew lean again. The family moved often in search of a better life—Texas, California, Oklahoma—and paychecks were as rare as rain in the Dust Bowl. Though he'd once earned fifteen hundred dollars a year as a farmer, Jesse could scarcely raise fifteen dollars a month for his family.

And Trudie and Jesse were a fertile pair; no matter what their circumstances, babies were always on the way. The first son, James Gloe, came in 1918; the first daughter, Jessie Wilma, in 1920; another daughter, Sylvia Geraldine in 1921.

In 1922, Jesse Gray thinned to 118 pounds and weakened so much that he had to check into a veterans hospital. Then he learned that he wasn't just suffering the lingering effects of mustard gas poisoning, or an especially pernicious flu. His lungs had become traitors: He had the dreaded TB.

Veterans compensation checks helped put food on the table, but by
the time Dorothea came along, the Grays already had five youngsters to provide for. Dorothea’s earliest years were spent in a home full of hungry children in Redlands, California, with a mother unsuited to the burdens of caring for an ailing husband and managing a noisy household. The older children were frequently charged with taking care of little Dorothea, whose needs were often eclipsed by more urgent demands. By the time she was five, the family had moved to the nearby town of Pomona, and a baby brother, Ray June, had been added to the fray.

By now, their mother chronically sought comfort in a bottle. Her father was also a drinker, but at least he stayed home. Dorothea's unruly mother was apt to take off. She was incarcerated more than once for being drunk and disorderly. Once the eldest son, Jim, even locked Mom in the pantry so she couldn't go out.

When Trudie landed in jail, the kids were with Jesse; when he was in the hospital, they were with her. Sometimes the elder siblings were in charge, sometimes no one was. The only consistency was upheaval: When the rent was past due, it was time to move.

As Dorothea got older, she sometimes took care of Daddy, who could no longer manage even sporadic employment. Advanced tuberculosis was eating away at his lungs, eating away at the time he could spend out of bed. Other families of the time sent TB patients to fancy sanitariums, but the Grays couldn't afford that. Sometimes, when his health deteriorated badly, Jesse would check into the nearest veterans hospital for a spell. The rest of the time he was at home—depressed, angry, and practically an invalid.

No one could reverse the steady sixteen-year progression of his disease. Finally, the painful
,
bloody coughing of chronic tuberculosis put Jesse Gray back in the hospital, and then, coupled with bronchopneumonia, it ended his life. On March 29, 1937, at age forty-two, he stopped breathing.

Dorothea was eight.

Did she stand at her father's bedside, watching him labor for breath? Did she watch the nurses come and go, giving him pills, administering injections? Did she wish there were some way she could help? What went through her little eight-year-old mind?

And what was she told after her father died? Did her mother stoop down and whisper that this was really the best thing, that now his suffering was over?

Probably not. With so many years of waiting for this inevitability, Jesse's death apparently came as a relief to Dorothea’s mother, who wasn't about to be hindered by widowhood. Even after seven children, Trudie Yates Gray still had her charms, and it wasn't long until she had moved in with a lover, George Coyne, at his Los Angeles address.

By now, some of the children had been shipped off to live with assorted relatives, and the three youngest, having attracted the attention of juvenile authorities, had been placed in an orphanage: The Church of Christ Home, in Ontario, California.

Released from the burdens of needy children and a sick husband, Trudie briefly enjoyed her new freedom, but soon veered recklessly toward calamity. She died in a motorcycle accident on December 27, 1988—two days after Christmas, and just two weeks shy of Dorothea's tenth birthday. Her body was cremated six days later.

It was a clearly tragic beginning. What sort of person would feel compelled to embellish it?

CHAPTER25

Dorothea Montalvo Puente was like a Russian babushka doll: open her up, and find another doll inside; open that up, and find another. Dorothea Helen Gray was buried deep inside a long series of personas.

What youthful experiences formed the woman who would become known as Dorothea Puente? The defense team was working tirelessly to solve the riddle of their client, but her versions of the truth were as changeable as her hair color,

Her own family had lost track of her early on. The orphaned Gray children were split up, and Dorothea was shifted from household to household. A sister living in Southern California disclosed, "The people that adopted me tried to take her, and she ran away from them."

When she was fifteen, she moved with her oldest brother and his wife to a modest house in Napa, a small, charming town in California's not-yet-famous wine country. James and Louise Gray took her in, and school records show that Dorothea transferred as a ninth grader to Napa Junior High midyear, November 6, 1944.

She made a big splash at her new school, telling everyone she was an exchange student from Portugal (Louise was Portuguese). English was difficult for her, she said, so she had to have her homework translated every night. But she was no dummy; she boasted that she was a math whiz, able to solve problems that stumped even Einstein.

This fascinating new pupil quickly caught the attention of the school newspaper.

School authorities read the article about their new "exchange student" with alarm, then called Louise to tell her that Dorothea needed counseling. But this suggestion fell on deaf ears, and soon Dorothea was gone. She left abruptly on January 22, 1945, less than three months after she had entered.

Back in Los Angeles, she stayed briefly with a sister's adoptive family
and enrolled in Garfield High School, then switched to Whidney High School, which she attended until the next June. But Dorothea Helen Gray would never graduate, completing her education in much different ways.

At sixteen, Dorothea ran away and traveled north to Olympia, Washington. Part of the time she was scooping ice cream, calling herself Sherri. The rest of the time, she and a friend were sharing a motel room, working as prostitutes. (The defense team took note. Psychotherapists who specialize in treating criminals contend that women who turn to prostitution suffer from low self-esteem, usually precipitated by having been abused or molested as children.)

It wasn't long before this good-looking teenager caught the eye of Fred McFaul, a twenty-two-year-old soldier just back from the Philippines. Unperturbed by her profession, McFaul took her to Reno and married her on November 18, 1945. Never mind that she was underage; she said that she was thirty and widowed, then signed the register Sherriale A. Riscile. Aliases came to her early.