THE DEATH HOUSE LANDLADY

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case another two-parter today we're gonna be talking about female serial killer named Dorothea Puente also known as the death house landlady this video is of course part 1 of 2 part 2 is gonna come out in the next few days I don't know when exactly you might want to follow me on my social cuz that will be the first place that I announce it or you could just put my notifications on on YouTube so then YouTube will inform you of every time I upload so you never miss a video so yeah part 2 coming soon but before I get into the first part I just want to thank kiss 2 5 for sponsoring this video anyone that knows me knows I love phone cases it's pretty much the only way I accessorize as you can tell not much of a jewelry person but I have like a drawer full of phone cases it's my favorite accessory I get to match it to my outfits match it to my mood match it to my style what's amazing about care staff is that they have military-grade 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case then go ahead if you got your name on it then we could even be matching on with the case so before we do I just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talked about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that I'm about to say is just information that I have found on the internet and I'm compiling into one video dorothea Helen Gray was born on january 9th 1929 in Redlands California she was the sixth of seven siblings and life was what I can only describe as traumatic for Dorothea right from the off her parents Trudy and Jesse were both abusive alcoholics they both and their money working on a cotton field however they just didn't make enough to support such a big family on the evenings her mother Trudy would do sex work for a little bit of extra money but she would often bring her clients back to the house so all of her young children were seeing new men walk in the house every day this case in the very beginning reminds me quite a bit of the marybelle case I don't know if you've heard of it I've done a video on it if you want to go and watch it but she was another female serial killer who grew up with her mother doing sex work and bringing it back to the house it's just a lot of seeing and hearing things that a little girl does not need to be seeing and hearing at such a young age you know as well as bringing her clients back to the house Dorothea's mother Trudy would often go away for days at a time to go and see clients and on these trips she'd be partying and she'd come back drunk and disheveled and she would leave the kids with her husband Jesse who like I said was also an abusive alcoholic and he just didn't care for the children and Dorothea was the sixth of seven children so she was one of the very youngest she couldn't look after herself and neither could her younger brother so her mother sometimes when she would go out on these trips would lock them in a closet with some food and just leave them there for hours at a time I don't know if she thought she was doing a good thing by doing that kind of locking them out of harm's way with some food until she could get back and look after them herself but that's horrible Jesse Dorothea's father was always too drunk to care for them he was always just kind of passed out on the couch and when he wasn't passed out he was very abusive he was also a very very depressed and I don't like to sit and speculate on people's potential mental illnesses but I do believe that there was possibly something else there as well because not only would he go through these super super low but he would also have really high highs and he was very unpredictable very just worrying to be around I don't know what other way to describe it other than scary for other people not knowing what it was gonna do at whatever time he did survive this suicide attempt however he ended up passing away and not long after from tuberculosis live in Dorothea to be cared for by her mother when she was just eight years old and bear in mind her mother wasn't much better than her father she was also an abusive alcoholic one year after that Dorothea's mother trudy also passed away in a motorcycle accident and so when Dorothea was just nine years old she was sent to various care homes various relatives to care for her she just had a very very unstable childhood not only did she suffer so much loss at such a young age on top of all the abuse but now she was being passed between all these different homes she could never make friends in any one area because she'd be whisked away to another home and it was just like she never had any stability in her life she never had a solid moment to kind of establish herself and when she was in some of these care homes kind of foster homes some sources said that she did enjoy some kind of sexual abuse eventually Dorothea settled permanently in Fresno in California with some relatives once she did grow up and became an adult and she would get into conversations with people about her childhood Dorothea would lie a lot and I don't know whether that's out of embarrassment I just kind of want into sound fun and exciting but she would say a lot of different things that just weren't true she would say that she was born and raised in Mexico which wasn't true she would say that her parents abandoned her and there she was picked up by some random people and raised by them which again was not really true sometimes she would tell people that she had 18 siblings only 14 of which reached adulthood which is a very strange like 18 siblings in 1945 when Dorothea was 16 years old she married a 22 year old man named Fred McFaul fred was a soldier who had just returned home from fighting he met Dorothea very quickly was six years younger than em and he was able to groom her essentially into this relationship and the two of them got married at this point during her life Dorothea lived in Washington she was going by the name Cheri and she would earn her money through sex work and weirdly enough this is the thing that attracted Fred to her which i think is so creepy and disgusting to think about that a 22 year old man was attracted to a 16 year old girl because she was a sex worker because it proved that she was willing to do extreme things to be independent like he liked that she was independent and she was willing to do anything for it including sex work at 16 years old Dorothea and Fred actually had two children together two daughters although they didn't keep either of them one of them was put up for adoption very quickly and the other one was sent to live with Dorothea's relatives in Sacramento California she actually fell pregnant a third time very quickly after the second in 1948 however this time she suffered a miscarriage I'm very quickly after this miscarriage her husband Fred left Dorothea and got a divorce but just like with her childhood Dorothea had a cover story that she would tell people a lie she would actually tell people that Fred passed away from a heart attack now I don't know whether that was to mask the embarrassment of being divorced at such a young age especially in those times it probably would have been a level of shame I think it was to save her from the embarrassment of telling people that he left her I don't know what reason he left her far but I presume it was just a lot easier to tell people that he died so she wouldn't have to explain things you'll notice a trend here with Dorothea Puente a lot of the lies that she tells are either ones that will gain her a lot of sympathy like her husband dying or ones that make her seem more interesting like her being born and raised in Mexico and having 18 siblings she was actually just a straight-up pathological liar she would lie about every single aspect of her life her job she would tell people that she was an actress or a singer or celebrity she would lie about her connections she would tell people she had a lot of famous friends she had links to the royal family after Fred left her Dorothea began turning to alcohol just like her parents had when she was younger at this point she was still doing sex work as her job however it just wasn't paying her enough at this point and she wanted more and so it was at this point in her life that she began committing petty crimes she would Forge fake checks and steal things from shops and then one day when Dorothea was 19 years old she was in this one particular star she was forging this fake check to pay for things with when the store clerk was getting a bit suspicious of her the store clerk called the police without Dorothy and knowing however of course the store clerk had to stall Dorothea and keep her in the store until police got there and I think Dorothea was getting suspicious of the situation knowing the police would come in and in that moment she knew that she didn't want to stay in that style she didn't want to get arrested she didn't want to do prison time and so instead she ran out of the star hopped on the first bus she saw however at this point police had already arrived and they watched her hop on this bus so they knew exactly where she was going on the other side when she got off of the bus police in that area arrested her so she still got caught for this she was sentenced to one year in prison for that fraudulent check and as part of her trial she had to have a psychiatric assessment to kind of determine why she did this the psychiatrist concluded that Dorothea did this because she had low self-esteem due to her childhood and her divorce and everything she found her kind of self-worth in her clothes and in her possessions so she wanted to steal things to have the nicest things to make people like her and to boost her self-esteem the psychiatrist concluded that Dorothea would probably be a repeat offender if she didn't have some kind of rehabilitation like some kind of counseling or help to help her self-esteem so she wouldn't have to find it in outside sources like clothes however with our system that we have rehabilitation never really ends up happening and Dorothea only served four months of her one-year sentence after her release from jail Dorothea was put on probation for a year but not long into that she decided to run away which is obviously a violation of your probation because you've got to let them know of every change in location there was a lot of rhyming words there and I didn't like she physically just upped and left and no one knew where the hell she'd gone and so her probation officer had to report as missing because what else was he supposed to do and now she was a criminal for violating her probation police began an official search for Dorothea there was a warrant out for her arrest they were asking for leads they were following every single lead but everything came up short and eventually they just decided to stop looking meanwhile Dorothea had moved to San Francisco and continued to support herself with sex work there it was rumored that she fell pregnant during this time however I couldn't find that on too many sources so I don't know in 1952 Dorothea was going by the alias taya when she met and married a Swedish man named Alex Johansson once again she told this man so many lies that she was Muslim that she was a mixed African and Asian descent she also lied about her job I don't know what she told him that she did but it wasn't sex work that she told him and because he was a fisherman he was with long periods of time on these fishing trips and so he never actually realized that that was what she did but eventually because this was her husband they were married like how can you keep your whole job a secret from your husband he began to get a little bit suspicious Jonathan knew that Alex wouldn't like her being a sex worker so she didn't want to tell him that she was one so instead she decided to change her job but not entirely instead she decided that she would run a brothel so she was still within the sex working industry however she just wouldn't be taking clients herself she would be managing other sex workers that did take on clients she hired out this building and she told the landlord that she was renting it off that she was gonna be opening up some kind of book club library and he believed it he had no reason not to but after a while the landlord of this building that she rented began getting suspicious of what was actually going on in there and so he called the police police decided to go undercover as clients to the brothel to try and kind of catch them in the act and of course they did Dorothea was arrested because it is actually illegal to run a brothel and she was sentenced to 90 days in prison following her release from jail Dorothea and her husband Alex began arguing like hell and these arguments were getting so bad that Alex actually got Dorothea admitted to a psychiatric ward the diagnosis given to her on the psychiatric ward was that she was a liar with an unstable personality that required antipsychotic medication in 1966 when Dorothea was 36 years old her husband Alex divorced her it was a mixture of her anger her behavior her lack of motivation as well she was a very lazy woman it was all just too much for Alex to handle he just didn't want to be married to this woman anymore I think it just made him kind of fall out of love with that and so he left her very soon after the breakup of her last marriage in the same year in fact Dorothea actually married again this time to a man that was over 20 years younger than her named Roberto Puente which is where she got the name Dorothea Puente and it was at this point that Dorothea decided to leave the sex work industry for good she hadn't been taking her own clients for a very long time at this point and she just decided that she didn't want to run a brothel anymore there was too much risk she found that she could make an honest living working as a nurse's aide in private homes so she wasn't a nurse because she didn't have the qualifications to be one but she would work with like elderly people disabled people people with kind of the things that meant that they couldn't properly care for themselves like she would work with a lot of alcoholics and her job was basically just to make sure that they've had them cash in make sure that they've eaten maybe help them wash those kind of things Dorothea's marriage to her husband Roberta only lasted two years well that's when they divorced they divorced after two years of marriage however a lot of sources said that Roberto had left Dorothea where before then he didn't actually divorce Heather he just left her so they were still married for a long time and obviously she didn't want to divorce him so she just stayed married to him for as long as she could really until I think he got to a point where she didn't really want to be married to him anymore cause they'd been separated for so long sir eventually she filed for divorce a lot of people that were friends with Dorothea at the time believe that Roberto was only with her just to gain US citizenship the relationship happened very fast they had nothing in common there was a huge age gap and then it fell apart very fast and a lot of her friends seemed to think that there wasn't really anything there wasn't like a mutual thing and now all that Dorothea had left in her life her husband was gone and everything she only really had her job as a nurse's aide and so she was sad thinking well what do I do with my life now and she decided to build on her career and it was a lot like with the sex working thing she knew that she could probably make more money if she was managing all the people doing that rather than actually doing the job herself so in 1968 when Dorothea was 39 years old she set about buying her own private herb and that was when she found a property on F Street in Sacramento in California 2,100 F Street it had three stories it had 16 bedrooms it was perfect it was exactly what she needed and here's she set up her own care home essentially for just anyone that needed somewhere to stay to be cared for so that was old people it was people with disabilities she would take on a lot of criminals that maybe had issues as well like maybe they were alcoholics or drug addicts but because they were criminals and they were quite problematic in the way that they behaved a lot of other care homes wouldn't take them on however Dorothea would she still didn't have any qualifications in medicine however she technically didn't need them for this job even though she was dispensing their medication like she was in charge of what they had how much they had at what times which sounds very dangerous and because of her lack of qualifications she wasn't actually allowed to take on patients that had super complex needs so it's not like she could ever get herself into a situation that she didn't know how to care for a patient you know so on the top floor of this house so the way it was built it had a basement floor a ground floor and a second floor Dorothea saved that second floor the top one all for herself she had a bedroom she had a full living quarters up there she had an office room where she actually hung up loads of fake diplomas so she was pretending like she had qualifications obviously because this wasn't like a licensed official care home she had to have a professional come once a month just to kind of check how everything was going check that all the tenants were having their needs met and I think all these diplomas were just to make Dorothea look good and look official and look like she knew what she was doing she also had just a bunch of drawers and cabinets full of medical stuff that she couldn't use like syringes and stuff she wasn't qualified to be able to use those on patients but she had them anyway so it was Dorothea's room on the third floor and then on the ground floor and the basement is where the tenants would stay tenants on the ground floor of the boardinghouse would have their own room each with a built-in bathroom and that's not an ensuite that is a built-in bathroom in the room they had a single bed and a TV and then any other items that they wanted to bring but that was all they were provided with the ground floor of the boardinghouse was for higher income tenants people willing to pay more but the lower-income tenants were in the basement and they did not have their own rooms this was actually just one big room with a bunch of single beds in it all separated by curtains so like a hospital ward every time she moved a tenant into the boardinghouse one of the rules to stare there was that they had to sign over all of their benefits checks to Dorothea so because a lot of them were unable to work because obviously they had to be in a care home they would get benefits money from the government just to like pay for their living and Dorothea said that they all had to transfer them to her to kind of pay for their upkeep and then she would help them manage their money from there because a lot of them were alcoholics and they kind of needed that supervision with their money and the business was going well at first Dorothea was still struggling with her alcohol dependency but it wasn't getting in the way of her new business she would kind of keep that part of her life for the evening and spend the day down in the car like actually doing her job and as she was earning more and more money with this care home she was getting more and more social outside of it her reputation was very important to her and as she was getting more money and she was spending more money on how she was perceived by other people she was very well-liked in the neighborhood she would go out a lot she would meet people a lot she was in bars almost every single night and you know she was still the same pathological liar that she'd always been and everyone always thought Dorothea was so interesting because she was a former actor and she had all these famous ex-boyfriends and because her care home was doing so well and she had so much money to spend she would often go on nights out and pay for the full thing for everyone she would pay for the full bill at a bar she would go to events and buy rounds and rounds and rounds of drinks as she was socializing and getting to know people and I know I've been saying as the business started doing better and better but really was it the business doing better and better or was she just bringing in more tenants to take all of their government benefits money she would often manage all of their money to the point where they didn't know where certain things were going she wasn't telling them how much her fees were or how much the boarding fees were how much food fees were she would just take a big chunk of it every month and say look that's for your upkeep but she wouldn't kind of break it down and show them okay so food is this much every month it was very very shared in 1974 after Dorothy owned and run this business for many years at this point she decided to hire a groundskeeper he was a very attractive young man named Pedro Montalvo and Dorothea very quickly took a liking to Pedro and she actually offered him his own room in the boarding house as part of his payment which we all know it was so that she could spend more time with him as his time at the boarding house went on the two of them spent more and more time together Dorothea started taking him on her lavish nights out where she would pay for everything and these nights would end up back in her bedroom and over time the two of them kind of developed feelings for each of them and as with all her other relationships this one was also built on lies she told Pedro that she was originally from Mexico just like he was but of course she wasn't she told him that she was a professional doctor and had all the qualifications and she did all of her studying in Mexico none of that is true before long Dorothea and Pedro got married making him her fourth husband when she was 45 years old and just like her last one Pedro was a lot younger than she was and just like her other marriages this one fell apart very quickly as well Pedro quickly became very aware of the dark side of Dorothy's business he suspected her of stealing from her tenants not only from their checks that they were getting every month but also physically stealing their possessions like jewelry and different things that their family would bring him for them and it was true she was doing all of that and she was doing way more than that as well she was going out to these bars without pedra and she would rob man she would have very flirtatious relationships with a few regulars at the bar so that they would buy her things they would give her money which I suppose is not a crime but it's infidelity outside of their marriage and Pedro just realized a lot of things that were going on that he was very naive to in the beginning and he didn't want to be in this marriage anymore but instead of bringing this up and like officially leaving her Pedro decided to just run away after a month of marriage and Dorothea was left to get an OL for the next few years Dorothea continued to run her boardinghouse and she really enjoyed her job her job this wasn't really a job she was stealing from all of her tenants that was how she was making the majority of her wage and surprisingly some of this money that Dorothea would acquire from stealing and other illegal activities she would actually put back into the community so there were a particular group of poor children that used to hang around on the street outside the boardinghouse and Dorothea would go out to them she would talk to them and play with them she would take them food because some of their families couldn't even afford to feed them and Dorothea would pay for their like kind of basic necessities that they needed like bags for school and books and pens but in the late 70s Dorothea was finally caught for her illegal cashing of her tenants checks this happened when one of her tenants at the boardinghouse was out one day and they got arrested while they were out and they were taken back to police custody and somehow while they were in a Cell their checks were getting signed for and police were thinking well how because they've been in a Cell this whole time so they decided to look into it and they found that it was actually Dorothea Puente who was signing the checks so police decided to look further into this and they were finding that all of the checks that were being delivered or being you know assigned to the boardinghouse we're all being signed by Dorothea which is illegal they found that she'd done this to at least 40 or the people totaling over $4,000 Dorothea was arrested and given five years on probation so no jail time but only on the condition that she gave up the boardinghouse and she couldn't work in anything like that again once again she had another psychiatric appointment and this time she was diagnosed with unspecified schizophrenia so I believe there's multiple types of schizophrenia and she was showing behaviors of more than one so they just said it was unspecified at least I believe that how they diagnosed people back then I don't know what it's like now during this five-year probation Dorothea Puente was allowed to move around and she took this opportunity with open arms she was moving all over California she was picking up jobs everywhere she went but none of them really stopped she didn't enjoy any of them she wanted nothing more than to have her care home back she really enjoyed it and so she hatched a plan to kind of work her way back to that eventually she moved back to Sacramento in 1979 and she decided that the way that she was gonna get her foot back in the door of that industry was that she was gonna be a carer for a family so a family's private carer but in order to do this she knew that she had to change up her look because she was going back to Sacramento this was the exact same place that she was a known criminal in so she had to change up the look and she knew that the best look to girl for when you want in that kind of job is to look as innocent and trustworthy and wise as you possibly can and so she made herself look intentionally older she stopped dying in her hair she let it grow out naturally brer she would dress older than her age she would lie about her age so at this point I think she was in her 50s and she would tell people she was in her 60s she would wear these big round blasters and she was just basically trying to look the part of this lay kind little old lady and it worked she found a family on F Street in Sacramento the exact same Street where she once had the boardinghouse and they wanted her to be their kind of nanny almost and this family were the Eureka family they were Mexican and Spanish speaking and the reason that they chose Dorothea over anyone else was because she could also speak Spanish and they kind of wanted that nanny figure around their children to help them learn as part of her payment Dorothea was also allowed to live in the house they actually gave her the full top floor of their house and her job was basically to be a nanny a hell coworker kind of a general housekeeper just kind of like someone to be there pretty much and quickly Dorothea became part of the family for the Audrey cos she was so close she was just like a grandmother figure to the children even to the point where when they had another child they actually asked Dorothea to be the godmother and because she was employed full-time with the other Iike family but they didn't necessarily need her full-time because I mean she's not always gonna be busy is she Dorothea decided that she wanted to go out and get herself some other work on the side kind of health care work in the same field that she was in before so Dorothea went out and she was looking for a job and she eventually came across a company that didn't ask for your criminal history so she went for that one and the job that she was given was pretty much a nurse's aide she'd pretty much done this job before but instead of being in one place and all the tenants being there she would go to their own individual houses and this was going really well for Dorothea she was enjoying her job that was until a lot of them suspected that maybe she was stealing from them but Dorothea was very good at manipulation and gaslighting and obviously all the people that she was going to care for were vulnerable in somewhere whether they were old or disabled and once Dorothea I realized that she could get away with this and that she was good at talking her way out of this she decided to step up her crimes and get more out of it so Dorothea had this one particular woman that she would vote care for named Esther and Esther had pretty bad heart problems but they were on the mend and she didn't require as much care anymore but Dorothea didn't want to lose Esther as a client because Esther was wealthy and she had a lot to steal and Esther was doing really really well in terms of her heart condition and then all of a sudden it got really bad again and she was being rushed to hospital every single week for like irregular heartbeat and other issues like that of course the doctors did treat her for every single time but they were just very confused as to where the sudden decline had come from that was until one social worker at the hospital pointed out the fact that Esther always seemed to be quite sick in the days after Dorothy is visit and all the other doctors agreed that this was very suspicious and so to check on Esther they decided that they were gonna visit her house one time when Dorothea was there just to kind of observe the dynamic observe what's going on so the doctors went there and Dorothea was very helpful she was very reassuring that Esther was getting all the medication she needed and Esther herself even told doctors that she was really glad that Dorothea was there because she just really liked having her around and she felt like she couldn't really look after herself at this point but then all of a sudden after this doctor's visit Esther stopped coming to the hospital it was kind of like her heart condition was cured but of course doctors knew that that couldn't be the case and not long after that doctors at that hospital received a call from doctors at another hospital saying that Esther had arrived at their hospital for these heart problems and they just wanted to communicate with her old doctors just to kind of get a better idea of what she was going through and when the doctor from the first hospital realized that Dorothea had taken Esther to a different hospital miles and miles away just to avoid seeing that one doctor that was suspicious of this whole thing that was pretty much confirmation to him that something was going on It was as if Dorothea realized that the doctors were suspicious of her and she thought well I can't be taken Esther back to that hospital we'll go to a different one so the first doctor advised the second to have a look at Esther's toxicology reports and sure enough there were high levels of various different drugs in Esther's body none of which were prescribed to her all of which were prescribed to Dorothea and so doctors concluded that Dorothea had been drugging Esther to keep her just unwell enough that she needed someone to go and check on her every week so that Dorothea could be going and stealing all of her possessions of course when all of this came Esther fired Dorothea as her kara and they all tried to take it to the police the doctors Esther Esther's family they all went to the police however nothing could really be done because there was no evidence that Dorothea actually give those drugs to Esther & frustratingly enough Dorothea just continued on with her career she wasn't even given so much as a warning in 1982 Dorothea was 53 years old and she was out at bar one night when she met a significantly older man 74 year old Malcolm Mackenzie and the two of them got flared in and Malcolm suggested that Dorothea come back to his that night so the two of them got in a cab and they went back to Malcolm Mackenzie's house but as they were coming to get out of the cab Malcolm realized that he was a lot more intoxicated than he thought he was he could barely even get out of the cab he was stumbling all over the place he was almost collapsing bear in mind this was a 74 year old man and Dorothea had to pretty much carry him into his house and lame on the surface he was fine back at the club fine enough to be flirting and dancing with Dorothea and charming her back to his house so how was he so intoxicated as soon as he arrived her and what he couldn't understand was why he was so awake and alert in his thoughts and kind of sober in his brain but his body was just the complete opposite it was like his body was drunk but his mind was sober well he quickly realized exactly what was going on when Dorothea led him on the couch and he watched as she got up and began rummaging through all of his things Dorothea had drugged this man so that she could go around his house and steal all of his possessions she got out a big red suitcase and she laid it on the floor and she was filling it with everything she was grabbing loads of stuff from his drawers and just on the side anything that looked valuable and then right before she left she went over to Malcolm Mackenzie who was led on the couch still alert in his brain he understood and knew everything that was going on she walked over to him picked up his hand took the pinky ring off of his finger and left his house obviously malcolm mckenzie knew who Dorothea was he knew her full name because he'd been speaking to her all night and so I don't know how she thought she was gonna get away with this but as soon as he was alert again he was able to call the police who showed up on Dorothea's doorstep two days later she was arrested and a court date was set for three months time all she had to do for three months was just stay out of trouble of course Dorothea Puente couldn't do that after she lost her job with Esther Dorothea was very worried about her career and how she was gonna make money from now on and that was when she had the idea to enlist the help of one of her friends this friend was 61 year old Ruth Monroe Ruth's husband had sadly been diagnosed with terminal cancer and she was very worried about what her life was gonna look like once he passed away and Dorothea saw this as an opportunity for them to help each other Ruth needed a friend and Dorothea needed money Dorothea suggested to Ruth that the two of them should set up a catering company almost entirely funded by Ruth and this would give them something to do it would give them a brand-new hobby and a career but I'm sure you already see the issue with this most of the initial funding pretty much all of the initial funding had to come from Ruth because Dorothea didn't really have much money but she did swear that once the business was up and running Ruth would see all of her money back and more Dorothea suggested that the two of them opened a joint bank account for the catering business and Ruth was perfectly happy to do so she went and opened this joint bank account and Ruth deposited $2,000 into it which was their initial Kickstarter fee and then the two of them got to planning and budgeting this new business in April of 1982 Ruth's husband was getting very very ill he was nearing the end of his life and of course this was having a huge effect on Ruth she was watching the love of her life die in front of us and Dorothea had no patience for this whatsoever this was making Ruth you know not useful in the business and she couldn't have that so to try and fix this dorothea invited Ruth to come and stay with her where she lived at the Eureka family's house and hopefully this would cheer her up being able to live with her friend and roof and all of her children thought that this was a really good idea because Ruth really needed someone now that her husband was gone and this was the perfect answer her best friend all of her children helped him move in and she was really happy she was really settled in the Oder Rica house but then her health seemed to take a sharp decline when Ruth would meet up with friends they all noticed how spaced out she seemed and all of her kids noticed the same thing as well they'd never seen their mum like this before one of Ruth's daughters actually got quite concerned when she went to the or dareka house to go and visit her mother and she found her asleep on the couch in the middle of the day and Ruth wasn't the type to have midday naps so Ruth's daughter sat Dorothea down and she said look you live with my mom now can you tell me what was going on like why is she suddenly really ill and tired and spaced out and Dorothea explained Ruth's very spaced out stared to her daughter by saying that Ruth had actually had a nervous breakdown earlier that day and because Dorothea was such a good best friend to Ruth she'd taken her to the emergency room and the doctors have given her like a tranquilizer shot that had made a really drowsy and this did seem very likely because Ruth was going through a lot and so her daughter believed exactly what Dorothea had said she even thanked Dorothea for being such a good friend to her mother a few days later Dorothea got in contact with Ruth's children and told them that their mother was in a very bad way in terms of her physical health and so her son bill came to check on her and when he walked in the room he saw his mother curled up in a really tight ball staring at the wall unable to move unable to speak to him and this was obviously very concerning for bill because he'd never seen his mother like this before however he just thought it must have been some kind of bad flu since his mother didn't actually have any underlying health con anything that would be overly worrying however in the early hours of the next morning Dorothea called all of Ruth's children and told them to get to the house as quick as they possibly could because Ruth had passed away a coroner was called as well to come and collect the body and at one point Dorothea was stood speaking to the coroner and all of Ruth's children and she said that she believed that Ruth had taken too much of her medication and that is what killed us she said she didn't know whether it was an accident or maybe even Ruth intentionally trying to take her own life but that's just what Dorothea thought the cause was but Ruth's kids were stood there saying no that's not my mama oh they knew their mother better than anyone else did in the whole entire world and they knew that she wouldn't take her own life especially without telling anyone are discussing it she was very much the type to do things very matter-of-fact if she was gonna take her own life she wasn't gonna do it in secret one night she was gonna tell her kids that she was gonna do it she was gonna sort out her assets they just knew that their mother hadn't taken her own life that just wasn't even an option the coroner insisted that they have an autopsy on Ruth's body because no one was actually there when she passed away there was no witnesses there's no one to say for sure what killed her and when the results came back it was confirmed that Ruth had passed away from a drug overdose particularly tylenol and codeine neither of which were actually prescribed to Ruth so her cause of death was a drug overdose however the actual way that she overdosed on the drugs was not determined at this point so whether it was a suicide whether it was you know accidental overdose whether she'd been drugged and actually killed none of that was determined but her kids weren't happy with that her kids weren't happy with them just ruling it as a drug overdose and not looking into it further neither of these drugs were prescribed to their mother so where had she got them from and it was at this point that one of Ruth's soon in-laws began voicing concerns about Dorothea because Ruth had been perfectly physically healthy before she went to live that and now all of a sudden wow she's really really ill and then passes away from a drug overdose she wasn't convinced that this was suicide or that his mother had just randomly found some drugs and accidentally overdosed on them he wanted to do his own investigation so he began looking through Ruth's medical records and everything that he could get his hands on and he found that Ruth had actually never been seen by a professional so like Dorothy I said she took her to the hospital when she had a nervous breakdown and they gave her tranquilizers that never happened so Ruth's son-in-law took this information to the police and said look my mother-in-law has passed away in a very strange suspicious way and her best friend that she lived with is lying about this like this looks weird can you please look into this and the police pretty much said yeah that looks bad but there's nothing we can really do because this is all circumstantial evidence there is nothing to prove that Dorothea gave those drugs to Ruth and by this point in the case it had been three months since Dorothea had drugged and robbed Malcolm Mackenzie and so it was time for her court there and her trial in that time between the crime and the court date police had done as much investigating as they possibly could to see if anyone else had possibly had interactions like this with Dorothea and they actually found at least three other victims that claimed that they had been drugged and robbed by Dorothea Puente however none of these other cases were actually willing or physically able to testify against Dorothea and so the only kind of witness statement used in this court there was Malcolm Mackenzie's so the court date was coming up it was in literally like a few days and Dorothea knew that it wasn't looking good she knew that she was probably gonna go to prison and it was gonna be for a long time as well so she needed to do something so she went down to the bank and she took all of the money out of that joint account for the catering company that she set up with Ruth there was like $2,000 in that account and with that money she bought a plane ticket to Mexico after that she took a trip to her friend's house and at this point it was like 11 a.m. and the friend opened the door to Dorothy as stunned in there with a bunch of bottles of alcohol in her hand and she was like yeah I know it's early but I'm really stressed so can we just drink and this friend wanted to be there for Dorothea so she was like yeah fine come in we'll have a couple of drinks this friend was called Dorothy Osbourne and to save confusion I'm just gonna call her oz Baum so Dorothy I went straight to the kitchen she was like don't worry I'll take care of it I'll make the cocktails and she made two glasses and brought them into the living room where I was born was sat on the couch Osbourne remembers taking a sip of this cocktail and it was like the strongest thing she'd ever tasted in her whole life there were like three different types of liquor in it after Osbourne finished this cocktail she actually needed another drink to kind of wash the taste out of her mouth it was that strong and the next thing she recalls was that she was waking up on the server 12 hours later and Dorothea was gone so Osbourne gets up she's really confused and disoriented and she's thinking well did I drink so much that I passed out and so she starts tidying up in her living room she's grabbing all the glasses taking them to the kitchen and that's when she notices some white powder on the side in the kitchen and this wasn't hers so this had to have been Dorothea's Osbourne continues looking through her house and she quickly notices that a lot of stuff is missing loose change on the side checkbooks credit cards debit cards and in that woman it was very clear to Osborn that she had just been drugged and robbed by one of her closest friends Dorothea Puente so Osborn called the police who came to her house and they took the powder and what was left of the cocktail as evidence and then they began an official search for Dorothea Puente she was found three days later with a bunch of oz bonds belongings she hadn't even tried to either sell them or get rid of them or flee to Mexico she had that plane ticket they found the plane ticket on her so I had she gone it was all that she was trying to flee and that she was trying to get some last money some last possessions that she could sell before she went to Mexico just to make sure that she had enough after this incident police knew that they couldn't just let her back home until her court date because she was trying to get away so they put her in a holding cell and eventually the court date came around and now not only was she on trial for the drugging and robbery of Malcolm Mackenzie but also of her friend Dorothy Osborne and all the evidence was right in front of us she was literally caught with Dorothy Osborne's things still in her bag and so Dorothy appointed pled guilty to all of the charges against her and she was sentenced to five years in prison so the news broke in the town that this had happened and that Dorothea was arrested for it and as soon as Ruth's children found out this was pretty much confirmation that that is exactly what she'd done to their mother as well and so Ruth's children tried to reopen this case with the police saying look this woman that we think drugged our mother has admitted to drugging two other people but somehow this ended even worse for Ruth's kids the case was kind of reopened but not in the way that they wanted not in the way that they were looking for suspects it was reopened in the way that they were trying to figure out how she'd overdosed like I said they didn't work out whether it was suicide homicide or accidental overdose and once this case was looked at again it was ruled that Ruth Monroe's death had been a suicide which is exactly the opposite of what her children wanted to happen Dorothea Puentes of just three years of her 5-year sentence and it was then when she was finally free but the worst of her crimes truly began the crimes that she'd already committed seemed miniscule in comparison to the three year-long murder spree that she was about to embark on at the unlikely age of sixty something and that is where I'm gonna leave part two of this case thank you so much for watching part one comeback in the next few days for part two make sure you've got my notifications on whatever thanks again - kiss - five four in this video like I said if you want to get 20% off then you need to be going through my link which is kiss if I comm /l na I'm real quick before I go I just want to tell you guys about this really cool charity project that me and a bunch of other UK youtubers have been a part of recently the amazing Zack and Jo have pulled together 40 different youtubers to create the first-ever youtuber calendar and all of the proceeds got to amazing charities the first charity is Action Aid which is an international charity that helps women and children in poverty and the second charity is the black curriculum which helps to push the education in UK schools of black history it'd mean a lot to me if you did want to go and buy one and if you do please make sure you use my code at checkout my could is just kneel each of the youtubers in that calendar are all competing with each other to see who can raise the most money and when you put Neil in a checkout it shows that you've come from me that you've come through my channel and I'm not too much of a competitive person but when it comes to raising money for charity I recovered doesn't further if you do put my card in at checkout it made me super happy and just really proud a huge following really means nothing if you can't do good things with it like raise money for charity I've linked the website down below it's also on screen it's literally just youtuber calendar com if you do go and pick one up and if you do use my code Neil at checkout send me a screenshot make sure you scribble out like your address and your information and stuff and I'll repost you on my Instagram story or I'll retweet you on Twitter but anyway thank you so so much for watching this video I really hope you enjoyed it if you did make sure you leave a big thumbs up and subscribe down below if you want to see some more from me thank you so so much to all of my channel members in tears one and two for their continued support of the channel and to my tier two members for their help in deciding the cases that I cover make sure you 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Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,887,331

Rating: 4.9422832 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, eleanor neale makeup, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, dorothea, puente, death house, murder house, death house landlady, house, boarding house, female killer, american horror story, dorothea puente

Id: P8Kzq3qdUKI

Length: 50min 25sec (3025 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020