Dorothea Puente ran a halfway house in Sacramento for the down and out. She murdered 7 of the residents and buried them in the front yard.
When Dorothea Puente was finally put on trial in 1992, the prosecutor called her one of the most “cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen.” And though Puente didn’t look the part, the prosecutor was absolutely right.
For six years in the 1980s, Puente preyed on the elderly tenants of her boarding house in Sacramento, California. She’d welcome them into her home — then drug them, strangle them, and dump their bodies in a nearby river or bury them in her garden. All the while, she’d cash their benefit checks, eventually raking in thousands of dollars a month thanks to her grisly scheme. This is the full story of the “Death House Landlady”:
