Through the 1980s, a landlady named Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. Her tenants were the people nobody else would take: the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the newly homeless. Social workers who visited described her as warm and unusually attentive, the rare operator who cooked real meals. Puente also collected their mail and cashed their Social Security checks, and she was on parole, under orders to stay away from elderly people and stop handling government money. In November 1988, a social worker reported a tenant missing: Alvaro Montoya, a gentle man with intellectual disabilities who everyone called Bert. Days later, detectives started digging in the garden. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces Dorothea Puente and the record of fraud and violence behind her, the boarding house she ran on other people's benefit checks, and the missing tenant whose social worker refused to accept the story she was given.

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