Disturbed Ground (15 page)

Police found it hard to imagine little old Dorothea Puente maneuvering dead bodies into the ground by herself. "We're making the assumption that it would be pretty hard for a woman of her small size to carry those bodies," Lieutenant Enloe disclosed to the press. So, with Puente off to parts unknown, finding an accomplice became a top priority.

When Puente's tenant and morning's escort, John McCauley, arrived back at the house, he was first confronted by voracious reporters. He loyally defended his landlady, saying, "She's helped people out. She's taken them in. She has let them stay there for a couple days without paying."

But as soon as the police learned that McCauley had returned, they challenged him, demanding to know where Puente was. McCauley claimed that she was still at the Clarion Hotel, and the police rushed over to search, but of course found nothing. (In the meantime, Puente allegedly phoned McCauley and advised him to flee.) Police then arrested the cantankerous fifty-nine-year-old McCauley as an accessory to homicide.

Puente had slipped past them, but at least they'd arrested
somebody.

With McCauley in jail, his arrest a welcome offering to on-the-spot news reports, the digging on F Street continued. News of the exhumations seeped through the community like a stain, and the crowd of spectators who gaped and endured the drizzle swelled to more than a hundred. They came on foot and on bicycles. They perched in trees and atop cars.

Early on, they joked nervously about the number of bodies that might be found in the landlady's yard, but when an actual body bag was loaded into the coroner's van, reality set in, and the titters fell to hushed exclamations, looks of naughty inquisitiveness tightening to shock and concern.

Initial reaction to the spectacle on F Street quickly moved into a
phase of disbelief. Surely that sweet little old lady couldn't be responsible for such atrocities. No one in his right mind could believe that a fragile grandmother could have murdered those people and then buried them in her own backyard! Right here in downtown Sacramento? It had to be some kind of mistake.

When the broadcast images spewing from F Street became too ugly, many found relief in detachment—that primordial numbness that clamps over our nervous systems to shield us from true horror. But eventually another sort of ugliness would begin. Minds and tongues would thaw, and then the conjecture would begin, the speculation and I-told-you-sos that spin off into accusation and rumor.

Police meanwhile hustled to contact those who might somehow shed light on the case. And some who had information to share made the effort to contact them.

One who came to the scene and asked to speak to an investigator was Patty Casey, Dorothea Puente's favorite taxi driver. Stunned by the discovery of bodies on F Street, Casey stood on the corner with Detective Terry Brown, telling of her fourteen-month friendship with Puente. She was rocked by the ramifications of incidents that had previously seemed innocent, recalling for the officer that she'd taken Dorothea to buy plants and flowers, to buy cement.

And she remembered that Dorothea had replaced her carpets— twice—saying that one of her rooms "had a curse" and that people were "constantly dying in there." It stuck in her mind that the grandmotherly passenger had moaned, "Everyone who has lived there has had something happen to them…. There's always blood in there." Through tears, Casey whispered, "I'm sorry my friend might have done something so horrible."

And Patty Casey wasn't the only one to whom events now seemed more sinister than mere coincidence. Puente's next-door neighbor, Will McIntyre, also made a point of talking to the police that Saturday. He, too, remembered Puente's problem with carpets: She'd offered to give him one, but he'd declined—it was stained.

And now he'd found some things out in his backyard, he said, that he believed had been tossed over the fence the night before: a handful of gold teeth, a bullet, and a piece of gold jewelry. They couldn't have been there yesterday, McIntyre insisted, because he would have noticed them during his daily cleanup after his dog. It seemed obvious to McIntyre that Puente had tossed them there to get rid of evidence,
and he was disgruntled when the police seemed unmoved by his assertions.

Peggy Nickerson also came forth, innocent of the trouble she was about to wade into. She introduced herself to Detective Cabrera as the street counselor who had spoken earlier with Sergeant Jorgensen about clients of hers who had roomed with Dorothea Puente. She handed Cabrera a list of people she'd placed with her during the past eighteen months. As he read it over, one name stopped him. "Is Dorothy Miller related to Puente in any way?" he asked.

"No, she was just rooming with her," she replied. "Dorothea was the payee for her benefits." Nickerson added that Miller had "disappeared sometime around January."

Cabrera mentally flashed to the vial of pills he'd confiscated from Puente's bedroom. The name on the prescription: Dorothy Miller.

The next day, as law enforcement's search for Puente spread, earth-moving equipment continued to rip through her yard, heaving through concrete, uprooting bushes, breaking small trees. Topsoil was shoved away, and when some odd-looking buried scrap aroused suspicions, forensic anthropologists, police, and coroner's investigators cooperated in the more delicate removal of underlayers of earth.

By now, neighbors had come to resent the noise, the confusion, the TV crews, the police blocks, and especially the growing crowd. The block was closed to traffic, and from curb to curb curiosity seekers gathered behind the yellow police line, craning to get some glimpse of this strange excavation. They gathered early and continued to multiply, drawn to the magnetic tragedy unfolding at Puente's boardinghouse as to some gala civic event. Some carried cameras. Others brought children, carrying them on their shoulders for a better look. Tourists and townspeople alike stood transfixed, watching with the interest of theatergoers while the excavations continued.

And their vigilance did not go unrewarded: Two more bodies were unearthed that Sunday.

Investigators discovered the fourth corpse in the morning, buried just in front of a metal shed standing in the side yard. A second forensic anthropologist, Dr. Chuck Cecil, oversaw the exhumation. Using a technique that had by now become familiar, the workers "pedestaled" the body, circumscribing the earth around it until it rested on a preserved pedestal of dirt. All evidence was carefully
labeled and photographed. Then, using hand trowels and brushes, they removed the last blanket of soil.

This individual had been wrapped not in cloth but in plastic, carefully sealed with duct tape. While this hid the corpse's features, it only slightly diminished its stench. Even after the body was zipped into a body bag, death hung in the air.

The forensic team grimly carried the corpse from the landlady's garden, the morgue its destination. Excitement rippled through the crowd and television cameras sparked to life as the body was loaded into a waiting van.

The work continued—taking some toll on those who had drawn this awful duty. Muscles ached, and stomachs wrestled with impending nausea.

(One police clerk was so sickened that she later claimed disability. Handling the evidence, including body bags and victims' clothing, triggered violent nightmares and vomiting. "I still have the taste of death in my mouth," she said. "I can't eat vegetables grown in the ground because they have dirt around them, like the people dug up" from Puente's yard.)

At midday a decorative gazebo, dismantled and removed, turned out to be an apparent attempt to conceal yet another unmarked grave. The concrete beneath the structure was shattered, shovels bit into the ground below, and a fifth body soon yielded to the search. Coroner's case #88-3334 was tagged and photographed. It, too, had been wrapped for burial, this time in bed sheets.

"We're still digging," Police Sergeant Bob Burns assured the gathered media. "We'll continue to dig, and we won't stop digging until we've dug up every square inch of this yard."

Long and narrow, the side yard was now pocked with freshly overturned earth. It almost seemed the bodies had been planted in an uneven row, from the end of the driveway all the way to the back fence.

The systematic digging continued late into the afternoon, but the gashes in Puente's once-lovely garden yielded nothing further. The day's work came to a close, a tractor shoving soil and broken branches into piles of debris, the crowd dispersing into the chilling air before darkness fell.

CHAPTER 14

Five bodies awaited identification at the morgue. The coroner's office revealed little except that it would be difficult to determine rates of decomposition because of the way the bodies had been wrapped and buried.

With the corpses thus far unidentifiable, no one could say whether Bert Montoya's body had been unearthed from Puente's yard. Yet it seemed unlikely that someone dead only two months could be among such extremely decomposed remains. People began to wonder just how many bodies could possibly be buried in the innocent-looking grounds of that gingerbread house. The long silences of itinerant siblings, alcoholic uncles, and absentminded aunts became suddenly less a source of relief than of alarm, spurring some to do a quick check on the well-being of vagrant friends and family members. Some made contact and were reassured. Others drew blanks, swallowed, and contemplated the news stories about disinterred remains, wondering what to do.

One woman in Sweet Home, Oregon, had already decided on a course of action. On Monday, November 14, for the second time in
three years, Reba Nicklous found herself contacting the Sacramento Police Department. On Saturday, she'd received a phone call from her daughter in California who had asked, "What was the name of the woman in Sacramento that Everson went to live with?" When she'd replied, "Puente," her daughter had gasped and spilled fears about the ominous reports coming out of Sacramento.

Now Reba Nicklous waited "on hold," a cold dread coursing through her veins. When an officer picked up the line, she wrestled her facts into order. "My brother Everson went to live with Dorothea Puente in September 1985. I haven't heard from him in three years." She explained that she felt there might be "some connection" between his disappearance and the graves being discovered at Puente's residence. The last thing she'd known for certain, Everson had been intent on marrying Dorothea Puente.

He'd started writing to Dorothea Puente while she was in prison. The family hadn't approved of this correspondence, but the lonely, trusting widower found comfort in two primary pastimes: crafting elaborate wood carvings and writing to various women.

Puente wasn't the only prison inmate to whom he wrote, but only she had captured the man's heart, bewitching the septuagenarian so that he was deaf to criticism. He insisted he'd found "a good woman," discounting the objections of one family member who countered, "Everson, they don't put good women in prison."

In August 1985, Everson Gillmouth had packed up his red pickup truck and new trailer and bade good-bye to his family in Oregon. He'd told Reba that he was going down to California to meet Dorothea, "and if things worked out all right, they planned on getting married."

Since Everson had lived with Reba and her husband for two years after his wife's death, she'd assumed he'd send word as soon as he got settled. When no word came after a few weeks, she wrote the Sacramento police, asking that they check on her older brother.

This had brought results from 1426 F Street, for Everson promptly phoned his sister.

"Were the police there?" Reba had asked him.

"They just left," he'd replied, sounding ruffled. But contrition soon crept into his voice, and he'd apologized for his silence. "I should have written," he said over and over.

That was the last time Reba Nicklous had heard from her brother.

Later, Dorothea Puente had written on Everson's behalf, but Reba thought the letters—where had she put those letters?—were a pack of lies.

Now Reba gave police all the pertinent information she could muster. By the time she hung up, assured she would get a call back sometime soon, she was hopeful of learning some answers, of gaining some sense of closure, perhaps even of seeing justice done.