Human Harvest

Nine bodies, one loophole. In the 1980s, a Sacramento landlady named Dorothea Puente murdered at least nine of her elderly tenants for their monthly Social Security checks. Authorities eventually unearthed seven bodies buried in her boarding-house yard. She had been doing it for years, in plain sight, because the system designed to protect those tenants made it easy. Dorothea Gray Johanson Montalvo Puente is one of only a handful of women in American history known to have killed at this scale, and the only one whose entire career was built on a single exploitable flaw in federal benefits law. She secured positions of trust, drugged her victims to keep them compliant, stole their checks, and killed them when they outlived their usefulness. She was not an anomaly. She was a predictable consequence. This is the story of the loophole and the woman who worked it longest, and of an administrative failure that has allowed others like her to operate in communities large and small. Essential reading for fans of Ann Rule and Michelle McNamara, students of elder abuse and social policy, and anyone drawn to the rare and chilling case files of America's female serial killers.