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Dorothea Puente Research Paper

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Dorothea Puente was not always a Puente. She was born as Dorothea Helen Gray in Redlands, California on January 9, 1929. Trudy Mae Yates, her mother, and Jesse James Gray, her father, according to Dorothea Puente, were alcoholics and abused her. Her father was a cotton-picker, and Puente claimed that her mother was a prostitute. However, how accurate is this information is debatable since Puente has been proven as a compulsive liar. She has lied about her life since she was young so as to make her seem more interesting to others and gain attention. When she was eight years old, her father died from tuberculosis in 1937. Her mother died a year later from a motorcycle accident in 1938. Left as an orphan at a very young age, she was sent to an …show more content…

She urged them to join her boarding house. She was later charged with thirty-four counts of treasury fraud from her tenants. She did five years with probation, and was forced to take a psychiatric evaluation. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She did not stop there. Dorothea Puente committed her first murder in the spring of 1982 by overdosing her business partner, Ruth Munroe, and stole her money. Puente managed to keep authorities off of her, however, by lying that Munroe was depressed over her terminally ill husband, so they wrote it off as a suicide. A month later, Puente was not so lucky this time as she was arrested for drugging and looting four elderly people, when one of her victims reported her to the police. She served three out of five year in jail, and was told to “stay away from the elderly, and not handle government checks of any kind issued to others.” During this jail sentence, however, Puente made a pen-pal relationship with Everson Gillmouth. After she got out of jail, they became a couple and created a joint bank account together, with Gillmouth believing they were going to get married soon. However, he met a terrible fate, as Puente poisoned him as well, hired Ismael Florez to make her a box, and then tricked Florez into dumping that box with Gillmouth’s body in it into the nearby river. She also made sure her tenants would not touch their mail before she did, so she could take most of their money for “expenses” and give little of their checks to them. She even picked up a homeless alcoholic known as “Chief,” who she hired to dig in the basement and install a concrete slab there. He soon disappeared after his work was finished. It is noted, however, that her parole officers visited her frequently, but never reported her for violations against her being near the

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