Disturbed Ground (48 page)

The defense drew multiple benefits with another witness, Carol Durning Westbrook. She described James Gallop as looking like "death warmed over," and Brenda Trujillo as a lying, ungrateful bitch who responded to Dorothea's help by giving only pain and disappointment. And Dorothea was again portrayed as Super-Landlady, cooking and cleaning for her tenants, even lending them money.

Plenty of time was lavished on Puente's role as the operator of a boardinghouse of last resort for the truly down-and-out. Boarders such as Ben Fink, Vera Martin, Betty Palmer, and Dorothy Miller were portrayed as so foulmouthed, offensive, unmanageable, and even deranged, that other landlords had turned them out on the street.

Kindhearted Dorothea Puente had stooped to accept even the lowliest clientele. How could she be held responsible for their alcoholic, pill-popping habits?

Additionally, Puente was exonerated as a hardworking woman who, despite some illicit pilferage, never showed much profit.

Running a boardinghouse was a tough business, as two former operators could attest. There were plenty of bills to pay, yet those paying rent were about as reliable as the weather. For most, a bottle was more important than a bed, regardless of debts outstanding. So, to make sure tenants paid, plenty of landlords collected the mail, deducting room and board from Social Security checks, then handing over the rest. Just like Dorothea Puente.

One operator said he even had to put a lock on the mailbox.
This same man testified about a young, apparently healthy tenant who'd died suddenly. "He was an alcoholic. He got some pills"—the man didn't know where—"and drank too much. He swallowed his tongue and choked to death."

Sudden, unexpected death. Not murder.

Witness by witness, they were sowing the seeds of doubt, underscoring
the possibility that these people had passed on without being pushed.

And the jurors—despite months of fatiguing testimony—seemed to absorb it all, jotting notes and revealing little.

The defense turned to diffusing the money issue by calling Carl Curtis. With his meaty face, close-cropped hair, and nice suit, it wasn't hard to believe that Curtis had spent twenty years as a special agent with the FBI, covering white-collar crimes, and currently ran his own private investigations business.

Clymo reviewed the man's ample experience, then offered him as an expert in fraud investigations.

Curtis testified that the defense had handed over all of their information, everything they'd received under "discovery," then asked him to independently arrive at "a conclusion about whether Mrs. Puente committed murder for profit." The message to the jury: Curtis was objective, his conclusions untainted by coercion or bias.

Using pie charts and comparison studies, Curtis undertook a detailed explanation of why Dorothea Puente's chronic larceny never brought in much revenue. Most of the money was eaten up in simply maintaining her business (which was, in his estimation, a "long-term care facility"). Food, laundry, utilities, rent—it all added up. At minimum, Curtis said, Puente's cost would be $13.20 per day per "patient." And even if Puente had filched every dime from checks totaling some $77,739 (based on the handwriting expert's figures), she just couldn't have made much profit over a three-year period. Curtis figured her breakeven point, given an average of five patients, at $55,536.

Further, since Puente had purloined funds from people both living and dead, Curtis concluded, "There is nothing that would suggest there was any reason to cause the demise of anybody.”
'

The press took note.

In fact, Curtis asserted, there was
more
money traceable to those still living then to those deceased.

The defense stuck fast to their contention that Puente stole, but did not murder.

But John O'Mara wasn't greatly impressed by this expert, or by his figures. He derided the comparison between a long-term care facility and Puente's boardinghouse, which he snidely characterized as "three hots and a cot," or "a mom-and-pop operation without the pop." In a three-day brawl, O'Mara thundered through the numbers, questioning the investigator's "universe" of funds, and forcing Curtis to back down on several points.

Naturally, the defense had saved the big gun for last. They called Dr. Randall Baselt, a man with such extensive credentials that it took Kevin Clymo nearly an hour to admiringly list them all before offering the toxicologist as an expert witness. He was a writer of multivolume texts, founder of the
Journal
of Analytical Toxicology,
esteemed member of myriad professional organizations, an expert among experts. And he looked every bit the part: the angular academic, wearing a serious, furrowed brow behind his spectacles.

Clymo was as pumped for this as a point guard in the NBA playoffs. Over and over, he passed the ball to his witness, who then took his shot.

"Given all the material you've reviewed for this case, Doctor," Clymo asked, "have you been able to arrive at any conclusions?"

"I've concluded that I cannot make a determination of the significance of the presence of flurazepam and its metabolites at these levels."

Clymo paced and waved, ready to clinch the game. "Do you have an opinion as to whether or not Dalmane was taken within twenty-four hours of death?"

"I have not been able to draw that conclusion. Whether or not tissue parallels drug levels in blood or plasma, we don't really know. I wouldn't be prepared to make that assumption. And if you did," he stated ominously, "you'd be in very dangerous territory."

Jurors exchanged looks and jotted notes. O'Mara furiously scribbled on a legal pad. Clymo gestured and queried, joking casually with the jury as his witness impassively deflated the conclusions of all the toxicologists who had testified before him. Dr. Anthony, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Beede, Dr. Peat—all were given a respectful nod before having their "unreasonable" opinions lanced like irksome blisters.

Next, Dr. Baselt compared the dehydration of human tissue to evaporation working on a glass of salt water. In the end, the doctor said, "the drugs are like salt. They don't evaporate."

O'Mara had expected this particular shtick. But it got worse.

The toxicologist tossed up three obstacles that, he said, prevented drawing
any
conclusions from the toxicology results. First, there was no blood to test, and blood, as every juror knew by now, was the "gold standard" of toxicology. Second, the toxicology tests were based on decomposed, putrefied tissue, for which there was no standard
whatsoever. And third, the drug levels ultimately detected were extremely low.

Amazingly, the defense somehow managed to turn the pride of the DOJ toxicology lab—that finely tuned marvel, the $375,000 tandem mass spectrometer—into a handicap. Why, its sensitivity levels were
too
low, the doctor suggested, so low that it actually took science into uncharted territory. James Beede's tests hadn't come close to the DOJ results; Dr. Peat's lab also failed to approach them. So, if the DOJ readings were
so infinitesimal,
who could possibly say what they meant?

It seemed to Dr. Baselt that these low readings could indicate some
residue
lingering in the body from past exposures. After all, he reasoned, Dalmane is fat soluble, so might be retained in "fairly fatty tissue" like the brain and liver. "It may be," Dr. Baselt concluded, "that every time you test anyone who has taken Dalmane in the past week, it would show up" on the DOJ's hypersensitive equipment.

How could John O'Mara hope to combat this pedigreed Ph.D. from hell? He loaded his arms full of scientific tomes and headed to his office for a long night of preparation.

The next morning, O'Mara was ready to take on this intellectual ace. He began slowly, courteously, citing first one scientific study, then another, discussing half-lives, fat solubility, and dosing regimens. But soon the debate heated, O'Mara's tone sharpened, and they clashed over fine points of interpretation.

It became a match of minds. And as technical terms were smacked from one end of court to the other— "pharmacokinetics," "dynamic equilibrium," "receptor occupancy," "electrophilic attraction"—the jurors watched, their heads pivoting like spectators at Wimbledon.

O'Mara even managed to score a couple of points. Though Dr. Baselt had given the opinion that the seven individuals exhumed from the yard had taken Dalmane within
three days
of their deaths (clearing Dorothea Puente of blame), he now conceded that he wouldn't exclude the
possibility
that the drug had been ingested within twenty-four hours.
And O'Mara got the doctor to admit that even though he believed
that Dalmane was retained in tissues, such as brain and liver, at levels many times higher than in the bloodstream, he could cite only anecdotal evidence to support this; there were no published studies.

Yet, as charged as the air had become, the jurors were drifting. It was an uncommonly hot day, the scientific jargon was hard to follow, and now this esoteric debate was straining the concentration of even the best among them. After all, what did it mean when experts disagreed? Didn't they just cancel each other out? Some jurors began to fidget. The XREM1ST dozed.

Finally, on the afternoon of June 24, the defense was wrapping up. A last forensic toxicologist took a few parting shots at the prosecution. A few stipulations were read into the record. Then the defense rested.

Save for a single certified document, O'Mara offered no rebuttal.

The attorneys would need time to prepare final arguments, so Judge Virga freed the jurors for a week's vacation. They exited cheerfully into the sunshine, without the faintest idea that they'd left Dorothea Puente fuming in the courtroom.

This trial had been a long, unpleasant ordeal for her, and with the attorneys momentarily out of the courtroom, she chose this moment to
act out. Glancing about, she spied Wayne Wilson,
The Sacramento Bee
reporter. Then someone mentioned Channel 3 reporter Mike Boyd, and that apparently set her off. "The
Bee
and Channel Three, those guys! The
Bee
and Channel Three have not been very kind to me," she announced loudly. "That's two I'd never give an interview to."

The bailiff hurried over, gesturing at Wilson, trying to get her to hush.

"I know he's sitting there!" Puente declared. "That's why I said it. All this shit they're writing about me! I've never killed anyone, I've said so since the day I was arrested. If I get the death penalty, I'll make damn sure they don't get to be there!"

After this stunning outburst, she fired a parting shot: "It's pretty bad when you have to make a living off somebody else's misery."

Coming from her, Wilson found this supremely ironic.

CHAPTER 45

On Tuesday, July 6, 1993, the jurors seemed eager and upbeat as they took their seats. Moments from closing arguments, days from deliberations, their ultimate role was nearly upon them.

Judge Virga solemnly assumed the bench. As he read each of the murder charges against Dorothea Montalvo Puente, Kevin Clymo scanned the jurors for clues to their mind-sets.
Then Judge Virga called on O'Mara, who gathered his thoughts and stood.

O’Mara was thirty pounds lighter than at the start of the trial, down to fighting trim, and he was ready to wrestle this case to the finish. It was massive and complex. And Dorothea Puente was the most unlikely killer he had ever prosecuted. She'd left an unruly trail of purely circumstantial evidence, and now he had to weave together threads from a thousand sources, some reaching back more than eleven years, to convey to them the truth of her crimes.

If he could convince each one of them, he believed they would convict. But he had to reach all twelve, even the most reticent.

Pacing the length of the jury box, O'Mara cautioned the jury not to be fooled by the visual and logical contradiction presented by the white-haired, little old lady accused of serial murder. Though she appeared to be a "grandmotherly figure," he said, she was actually a "cold, calculating" killer. And he quickly zeroed in on two counts that revealed her criminal nature.