Grandma The Killer

By Erica Byram

Arthritis, dentures and hip replacements could not stop these senior citizens from committing shocking acts of depravity. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201623463

Book preview

Grandma The Killer

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ERICA BYRAM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DOROTHEA PUENTE

DEATH ROW GRANNY

DOROTHEA PUENTE

Dorothea Puente became infamous in the 1980s for being the Death House Landlady. She ran a boarding home in Sacramento, California and proceeded to steal the Social Security checks of her elderly and mentally disabled tenants. Those tenants who proved to be too troublesome would be given increased dosages of sleeping pills until they died. She would chop up the bodies and bury them in her backyard.

EARLY LIFE

Dorothea Puente was born Dorothea Gray on January 9th, 1929 in Redlands, California. Both her mother, Trudy Mae, and her father Jesse James Gray, worked as cotton pickers in Central California. Her father would die of tuberculosis in 1937 while her mother would die the following year in a car accident.

Dorothea was delusional so some parts of her childhood have conflicting accounts. She states that she was the product of two alcoholic parents and that her mother was working as a prostitute before she died. She claimed her father was mentally unstable and often threatened to kill himself with a gun pointed to his head in front of the children (Dorothea would sometimes claim to be one of fourteen children.)

What is clear is that she was orphaned at the age of nine. Dorothea would then live in different orphanages, claiming to be sexually abused at one in particular. Eventually, her relatives from Fresno took her in. In her later years, she would discount the fourteen children claim and state that she was one of three children who were all born and raised in Mexico.

Dorothea would marry at the age of sixteen to a returning soldier named Fred McFaul. She would have two daughters a year later. Dorothea would give up both daughters, sending one to relatives in Sacramento and the other for adoption.

Dorothea would suffer a miscarriage in 1948 and McFaul would divorce her that same year. Angry at the failure of her marriage, she lied to everyone about the divorce and said that McFaul died of a heart attack shortly after their marriage ceremony.

She then turned to a life of crime. She would steal and forge checks. Dorothea would be caught in a forgery scam, serving six months of a one-year sentence.  She would meet another man and become pregnant again. Dorothea would put the baby up for adoption as she hardly knew the man and could not afford the baby.

In 1952, she would marry a Swedish man named Axel Johansson.

CHOOSING A LIFE OF CRIME

Dorothea Puente would be married a total of four times with two documented divorces. She had another daughter which was put up for adoption at birth. The two would eventually meet, however, in 1986. Her daughter would describe her birth mother in unflattering terms, saying that she had no real personality.

Dorothea would divorce Johansson in 1966 and marry Roberto Puente, a man that was almost twenty years her junior. The union would last only two years but Dorothea would keep