Dorothea Helen Puente (born January 9, 1929) is a convicted American serial killer. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and cashed the Social Security checks of her elderly and mentally disabled boarders. Those who complained were killed and buried in her yard.
Puente was born as Dorothea Helen Gray in San Bernardino County, California. Her parents – Trudy Mae Yates and Jesse James Gray – were an impoverished alco...
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Dorothea Helen Puente (born January 9, 1929) is a convicted American serial killer. In the 1980s, Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and cashed the Social Security checks of her elderly and mentally disabled boarders. Those who complained were killed and buried in her yard.
Puente was born as Dorothea Helen Gray in San Bernardino County, California. Her parents – Trudy Mae Yates and Jesse James Gray – were an impoverished alcoholic couple who both worked as cotton pickers. Puente's father died when she was four years old, and her mother died when she was six years old. She was sent to an orphanage until relatives from Fresno, California took her in. In later life, she lied about her childhood, saying that she was one of three children who all were born and raised in Mexico.
In 1945, she was married for the first time at the age of 16 to a soldier named Fred McFaul, who had just returned from the Pacific. Dorothea had two daughters between 1946 and 1948, but she...
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