Landlady to Spend Life in Prison for Killing Tenants

MONTEREY — Sacramento landlady Dorothea Puente will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing tenants for their benefit checks after a jury deadlocked Wednesday over whether to condemn her to death.

Judge Michael J. Virga declared a mistrial after the jury said it was hopelessly hung--five for death and seven for a life term--after two days of deliberations in the penalty phase of her trial. Puente, looking ghostly pale, sat stoically without expression as the judge ruled.

Prosecutor John O’Mara said he will not try again to have the death penalty imposed, and life without parole is the only other sentence provided under law. Puente will be officially sentenced Nov. 10, almost five years to the day after the first of seven bodies was discovered in the garden of her Victorian-style Sacramento boardinghouse.

“Dorothea is relieved,” said Peter Valutin, one of her attorneys. “We are very satisfied with the outcome. We could never see Dorothea getting the death penalty.”

Puente, 64, was convicted in August of killing three of her tenants for their government benefit checks and burying their bodies in the garden. She had been charged with murdering nine people, most of them elderly alcoholics whom she befriended and took in as boarders.

The jury, after deliberating for 24 days, could not reach a verdict on six of the murders.

The penalty phase of the trial began Sept. 21, and after two weeks of testimony, the same jurors began deliberating whether to condemn Puente to death or sentence her to life without parole. The jury had declared itself deadlocked Tuesday but reconvened Wednesday at the request of the judge to try again.

During the penalty phase, the defense portrayed Puente as the victim of a deeply troubled childhood who nevertheless showed generosity and kindness to others over her life.

The sixth of seven children, Puente was scarred by the alcoholism of her parents during her early childhood in Southern California, the defense maintained. Her father, witnesses said, sometimes held a gun to his head in front of his young children and threatened to kill himself.

Her mother was a prostitute who, after the death of her husband, often abandoned the children and brought clients home. From the time she was 10, when her mother died, Puente lived in a variety of homes.

Witnesses testified that she was sexually abused in an orphanage and possibly by a relative. She married at 16, had two children and gave them both up for adoption.

O’Mara urged the jury to condemn Puente to death, calling it a moral imperative. Despite her troubled background, he told the jurors, killing was a choice she made rationally.

After declaring a mistrial, Virga invited the jurors and the attorneys into his chambers for lemonade and cookies and gave them certificates of appreciation.

Gary Frost, one of the jurors, said he was not satisfied with the fact that Puente was convicted of murdering only three people. The jury had been split 11 to 1 on four of the murder charges.

“I didn’t see, as a reasonable human being, how you could ignore what was presented to us,” Frost said Wednesday. “We didn’t leave anything unturned. There was a lot riding on this, and I didn’t take it lightly.”

Asked why one of the jurors had refused to convict on all but three of the murder charges, Frost said: “I can’t get inside his head.”

The jurors said in interviews that it would have been impossible to have come to an agreement on the sentence.

“There was no changing any of our minds,” juror Marsha Stockton said. “We knew each other well by this point.”

Another juror, Ruby Hewlett-Ratcliff, said: “There was anger and frustration at times, but no hard feelings.”

Times legal affairs writer Dolan reported from San Francisco, special correspondent Norton from Monterey.