Dorothea Gray Johanson Montalvo Puente was a female serial killer, an extremely rare phenomenon in the annals of American crime. She took advantage of a flaw in the Social Security laws to carve a lifelong career out of exploiting elderly, ill, often-helpless people. She established herself in positions of trust in order to steal these people’s only source of income, then drugged them to expedite her chicanery and, finally, murdered them. Dorothea did not exist in a vacuum. She simply took full advantage of a system that fails to protect America’s most helpless citizens. A stubborn and unreasonable refusal to correct a faulty administrative code has perpetuated the callous exploitation of the elderly, allowing people like Dorothea to operate all over the country, in communities large and small.
