Disturbed Ground (39 page)

"About one-thirty in the morning, there was a lot of noise on the stairs above my room. Right over my bed. It was a bumping sound, like somebody falling down the stairs or something."

A chill passed through the courtroom.

"Were you asleep at the time this occurred or were you awake?"

"It woke me." But he hadn't gotten up to see what the noise was.

The next morning, Dorothea asked if he'd slept all right. He'd lied, saying, "Just fine."

CHAPTER39

At the start of the fourth week the trial still revolved around Bert Montoya's mental and physical health. And since he was only one of nine victims, the jury had to be wondering just how long this would take. They'd sat through dozens of witnesses, each sharing a tiny peek at some picture they couldn't yet see. It was like trying to study at a cathedral through a keyhole.

Meanwhile, Dorothea Puente sat stoically between her two advocates, watching silently, inscrutable as a sphinx. If the jurors had trouble reading her, this was about to change.

Gloom hung over the defense table the morning of March 9 as a television was wheeled into place. The judge cautioned the jurors that they should keep in mind that questions were not evidence, but Clymo and Vlautin knew how damaging this videotape would be.

The bailiff loaded the VCR and a grainy image filled the screen. A younger, thinner Dorothea Puente faced Detective Cabrera across a table.

They heard the detective ask her basic questions about her residence, and now, for the first time, they heard the defendant's voice.
It was weak, plaintive, an old woman's timorous voice, spelling out her name, explaining that she didn't actually own the house. And then they heard her lie: "Well, I mean I don't, I don't have the downstairs. I, I collect the rent for my nephew."

It was the first lie of many.

Cabrera pressed Mrs. Puente about the whereabouts of Bert Montoya, and she insisted she'd seen him the previous weekend, that he'd gone to Utah with his brother-in-law.

Everyone in the courtroom now knew, however, that Bert was then dead and buried in her side yard.

How could Clymo and Vlautin counter the negative impact of their client lying in the face of a police detective? They surely felt every lie stab through their case.

Next, Detective Cabrera was mentioning that John Sharp had said he hadn't seen Ben Fink in about three months. Recognizing Fink's name, the jury listened carefully.

"He was gone most of the time because he was always out drinking," Puente explained. "And he, he was on, ah, he had a bad leg, and he would go sell his blood every week."

"Down at the plasma center?"

"Right. And he said he was going to go back to Marysville."

"When did he say that?"

"When I told him he had to leave." She'd kicked him out, she said.

Cabrera put a diagram of the yard on the table between them, asking about trenches that had been dug, trees that had been planted, concrete that had been poured over sections of her yard.

The concrete was "to keep the weeds down," she explained. "I just don't want to have to pull up weeds. I don't care that much for yard work."

Cabrera kept pounding away, and Puente gamely offered up answers about sewer lines, about landscaping, about compost and garbage, all the while portraying herself as a woman who didn't have much energy for more than a few rosebushes and a vegetable garden. "I have a bad heart," she volunteered. "I can't lift anything heavy."

Exasperated, Cabrera told her, "I've got a man missing. Nothing seems—nothing fits, Dorothea, that's what I'm trying to say. Nothing fits." Then Cabrera bluntly stated, "Mr. Montoya is dead—"

"No, he's not," she retorted.

"—somewhere in that backward," he went on.

She was indignant. "Sir, I have never killed anybody."

Alluding to her past arrests, Cabrera insinuated, "The similarities are there. The only thing that's different now is, rather than take something and let it go, you get rid of 'em and nothing's ever found."

The defense must have been sick.

Returning to Bert, Cabrera suggested that nobody cared about him. "Hey, when you're nobody, you're nobody. Nobody cares, so you disappear. You're a transient, or you're a bum, or you're an alcoholic—       "Dorothea stopped him. "I cared for him," she insisted. "I bought him clothes. I treated him very
,
very good."

Then the jury heard Cabrera lower his voice and whisper a bluff, "Dorothea, I know if we dig, we're going to find more. I know that."

"Well, I didn't put 'em there," the old woman retorted. "I couldn't drag a body any place."

The jury listened without reaction.

Cabrera's questioning seemed to go around in circles for a while. Then he asked, "Are there any other bodies—"

"No," she interjected.

"—in your backyard?"

"I didn't even know that one was there!"

"Did Mr. McCauley put any other bodies in the backyard?"

"You have to ask Mr. McCauley that."

"I intend to," the detective said earnestly, then continued, "Okay, I want you to be truthful—"

"Sir, I didn't even know that body was there," she repeated, adding, "If I had of, I would have said, 'No, don't search the yard,' you know. I had nothing to hide. I don't want to go back to prison."

The courtroom was hushed, the jury intent.

"I'm an old lady," she went on. "I'm trying to get off parole. I'm trying to get my life together."

Throughout the interview, Cabrera was clearly running on adrenaline, badgering her one moment, sympathizing the next. He kept goading her, then cutting her off, scarcely letting her finish a complete sentence. This is the sort of behavior that makes a defense attorney's pulse race. Clymo and Vlautin would grill Cabrera as soon as they had a chance to cross-examine. Now they stole glances at the jury.

Focusing on this bizarre discovery of bones in her yard, Cabrera
demanded, "How do you explain that? Somebody snuck in your backyard with a human body and buried it?"

Without flinching, Puente suggested that it must have been done by someone else. Then she turned the tables, asking the detective, "Do you really think I'm guilty?"

"I'm going to be real truthful with you, Dorothea," Cabrera said slowly. "I think somehow you're involved. And I think you are very
,
very frightened right now. I think you realize that whatever has been going on, is over. Because we are going to uncover that yard."

To the very end, Puente remained steadfast. "I haven't killed anyone," she repeated. "My conscience is not bothering me."

Finally, Cabrera was concluding. "Okay," he said, "do you have any problem with us digging, or—"

"No."

"None whatsoever?"

"No."

"Because you don't have to let us."

"Look, I want to get this over with."

After lying so boldly to Cabrera, Mrs. Puente had been taken back to 1426 F Street. The next morning, she'd put over three thousand dollars in her purse and fled.

The television was flipped off, and the jurors were excused for a short break, taking with them whatever images continued to flicker in their minds.

Any dramatic effect the video had on the jury that morning was soon blunted by another onslaught of detail. O'Mara believed in holding back nothing, so they sat through Detective Cabrera's recitation of evidence seized, from empty gel caps in a drawer, to phone bills, to medications for Dorothea's cats. Seeming almost bouncy, the detective was clearly unaware that most of his testimony was about as flat and dry as west Texas.

Cabrera also conducted painstaking tours through multiple representations of the house. By now the jury had seen scale models, photographs, charts, diagrams, and videotapes of the house. Was it truly necessary that, as the people's exhibits passed a thousand, they had to view these repeated images of 1426 F Street? After all, it wasn't the house that was on trial here.

O'Mara knew this was hardly thrilling, but he feared that if he left
out anything the defense would use it later to raise misgivings. He wanted to leave no questions unanswered. He wanted them to know he'd presented everything honestly, with no razzle-dazzle, no attempt to trick them.

If the jury still struggled with confusion, it involved not the floor plan of the house, but the landlady herself. They heard testimony that she was generous and warm, and that she was manipulative and cold; that she gave some people a second chance, and that she tossed others out on their ears. She was the queen of transmutations: the sweet matron, the manipulative ex-con, the generous retired doctor, the crabby old lady, the saintly landlady struggling with wayward tenants.

Chuck Willgues, the old gent who'd met "Donna" in a bar down in L.A. and ended up turning her in to authorities, recalled how she'd impressed him as "dignified… a lady of distinction."

The notary public who had documented the granting to Dorothea of power of attorney over Leona Carpenter's funds, said that Leona "was very grateful… She was looking at Dorothea as if she were her savior."

Marshall Losano, a former friend, recalled how Dorothea had shown him the curved incision along her hairline, telling him that she'd had an operation and was undergoing chemotherapy for brain cancer.

Puente seemed to have been everywhere at once. Some said she was always at the house, sitting on her porch, housekeeping, doing yard work. A few saw her mainly at charity organizations. Others saw her only in bars. To some, she was a toothless woman in curlers; to others, a fashionable, white-haired charmer.

Who was she?

Clearly, the old woman was a liar… but was she trying to protect someone? And who was this McCauley character they kept hearing about?

Sitting in court, the defendant looked so weary and old it was hard to imagine her even as a scam artist, much less a murderer.

But John O'Mara didn't care how old and kind Dorothea might appear to be, and he didn't care whether the defense uprooted every good deed she'd ever done and dragged it into the courtroom. This Mother Teresa bit didn't wash with him. She was a con who liked to call herself "doctor," a thief who stole from people who trusted her. And he was out to prove that she was a cold-blooded killer nine times over.

Carol Durning Westbrook, a former friend and tenant, described Dorothea as an aging barfly with a temper, and a busy landlady with a misplaced soft spot for hopeless cases. But most importantly, she'd lived in the boardinghouse when Puente was taking care of a woman named "Betty." This woman seemed so ill, Westbrook thought she should be in a hospital. She was "skeletal," never left the couch, and "moaned and groaned constantly. She always yelled for Dorothea to bring her pills."

Then, suddenly, Betty was gone. "I noticed the silence," Westbrook recalled.

When she asked Dorothea about Betty, the landlady told her that Betty's daughter had come and picked her up. But later, when a woman identifying herself as Betty's daughter came asking for her mother, Puente revised her story, saying that Betty had gone to a nursing home.

To O'Mara, this was vintage Puente: a sudden disappearance, a vague story, then those inconvenient contradictions, followed by some hasty backpedaling. He wanted to simply ask the jury
,
"Do you see the pattern?" But all he could do was call another witness.