April 4, 1929 - Dorothea Puente
Puente operated within a structure of care and dependency, turning a boarding house for elderly and mentally disabled tenants into the mechanism of her crimes. The financial motive — collecting Social Security payments from those she had killed — is what drove the pattern of murders across six years, and what ultimately drew investigators' attention. The case remains notable for how thoroughly ordinary circumstances concealed what was happening at the Sacramento property.
From Wikipedia
Dorothea Helen Puente (née Gray; January 9, 1929 – March 27, 2011), also known as the Killer Landlady or the Death House Landlady, was an American serial killer and financial fraudster who murdered various tenants of the boarding house she ran in Sacramento, California, between 1982 and 1988.
Posing as a landlady, Puente procured various elderly and mentally disabled people to stay at the boarding house she ran. Beginning in 1982, she began killing her tenants, typically by poisoning, before burying their bodies around the residence and then cashing their Social Security checks. Puente was arrested on November 16, 1988, after authorities uncovered the bodies during the investigation into the disappearance of one of her victims.
Puente was tried on nine first-degree murder charges in 1993, but she was only convicted of three as the jury deadlocked on the six other counts. She was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole on December 10, 1993, and was imprisoned at Central California Women's Facility until her death in 2011.
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