After the notorious female serial killer Dorothea Puente died in prison at the age of 82, the filmmaker Nick Coles stumbled upon her obituary. “I was hooked when I saw that she had published a cookbook from prison titled Cooking With a Serial Killer,” Coles recently told The Atlantic. “Who does that?”
Looking into her story further, Coles was horrified and intrigued in equal measure. Puente endured a tragic youth—she was orphaned as a young child, abused, and suffered from mental illness—which eventually gave way to a life of crime. Over time, her crimes escalated to murder. While running a boarding house in Sacramento, she killed seven of her tenants, buried them in her backyard, and cashed their Social Security checks. All the while, Puente masqueraded as a pillar of her community. She attended political fund-raisers, donated money to causes, and looked after the sick and homeless. Were it not for a dogged social worker who noticed a client missing, Puente might never have been caught; most of her victims were previously living on the streets.
© The Atlantic | Author: Emily Buder | Video by Nick Coles
