What Happened To Dorothea Puente's Victim Ruth Monroe?

On the outside, Dorothea Puente looked like an average grandmother (via the New York Post). She had white hair, oversized glasses, and a pleasant demeanor. As it turns out, Puente was the definition of evil. According to All That's Interesting, it's believed she killed up to nine people in her Sacramento home between 1982 and 1988. Puente targeted individuals who were on the fringes of society — those with mental illnesses, addictions, the elderly. Puente would poison or strangle them to cash in their social security checks. Sactown Magazine writes that this would earn Puente $5,000 a month.

As she involved herself with charity work and the local community, no one suspected a thing. Oxygen writes that Puente's early life was marred with tragedy and perhaps contributed to making her a serial killer. She was orphaned as a child and allegedly sexually abused. Puente turned to sex work and eventually got married four times, per Bustle. She subsequently ran into legal trouble for sex work and writing a check under a false name. This didn't stop Puente from opening up her first boarding house to the needy and disabled in the 1970s. She was eventually shut down and arrested after being caught stealing from her helpless tenets.

According to The Cinemaholic, Montoya suffered from schizophrenia and went missing in 1988. The New York Post writes that Moise was his social worker and noticed something was amiss when she was unable to get hold of him. Puente insisted that he had gone to visit his family in Mexico but Moise knew this was a blatant lie. Eventually, the authorities got involved and went to Puente's home (via Oxygen). They searched the residence and found nothing. Moreover, the other tenants corroborated Puente's story.

Before they left, one of them slipped a note to the police that stated that Puente had asked him to lie. Later, Bustle reports that he also told them to check the backyard. At Moise's instance, Screen Rant explains that they did exactly that and began to dig. In Puente's backyard, authorities unearthed the remains of her seven missing tenants, including Montoya. Before she could be arrested, Puente fled to Los Angeles (per All That's Interesting). She was quickly caught when a man at a bar called the authorities after he recognized her from TV.

As explained by Sactown Magazine, Puente and Monroe had history. Screen Rant writes that Monroe considered Puente her best friend, to the point where Puente insisted she be called Grandma by Monroe's children (via the New York Post). In 1981, the duo decided to open a restaurant together. Not long after that, Monroe's husband received the news that he had terminal cancer. When Monroe moved in with Puente, her family notes that Monroe quickly went down hill. She complained of feeling ill and began drinking alcohol. Her son William Clausen later said, "That didn't seem right, but Dorothea had conned our whole family into thinking she was a nurse."

Days later, Monroe died, leaving her family shocked and confused, and even more so when police ruled her death a suicide (via All That's Interesting). They also found that Puente had taken all of Monroe's money. The Cinemaholic writes that soon after, Puente was arrested for drugging and robbing elderly people for their pensions. With this news, Monroe's family insisted to authorities that she had been poisoned by Puente and was another one of her victims. The police refused to look into it until the seven bodies were found in her yard a few years later. Clausen expressed regret and said that if Puente had been held responsible for his mother's murder, she perhaps would not have been able to kill her other tenants.