They saw her as a kind old lady. Then seven bodies were found in her garden

Sacramento, California. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Dorothea Puente as “the kind landlady”: she baked tamales for her neighbors, tended a blooming garden, and took in the city’s most vulnerable — lonely elderly people, people struggling with addiction, and those no one else would accept. On November 11, 1988, police began digging in her yard. Beneath the roses and azaleas, they found the remains of seven people. This is not the story of a monster in a dark alley. It is the story of how a woman with a criminal record — and an explicit ban on working with the elderly — ran a boarding house for vulnerable people, collected their benefit checks, and why a system that visited her more than fifteen times did nothing. A documentary analysis of one of the most disturbing cases in American criminal history: the face of “welcoming evil,” a chain of systemic failures, and the two ordinary people who stopped what the system had ignored for years. All facts are based on investigation files, court documents, and open sources.