SERIAL KILLER: The Death House Landlady Pt. 1
Serial Killers & Murderous Minds
Crime House
4.5 • 713 Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Before she became one of America’s most notorious female serial killers, Dorothea Puente was a master of reinvention — a woman who survived a traumatic childhood, escaped into elaborate lies, and learned to weaponize trust. In Part 1, Killer Minds traces Dorothea’s tumultuous early life, from abuse, abandonment, and shapeshifting identities to the scams, marriages, and manipulations that set the stage for her deadly crimes. Vanessa Richardson and Dr. Tristin Engels explore how Dorothea’s need for control, admiration, and survival shaped the dangerous caretaker she would eventually become.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, Crime House community. It's Vanessa Richardson. |
| 0:05.5 | Exciting news, conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is leveling up. |
| 0:10.2 | Starting the week of January 12th, you'll be getting two episodes every week. |
| 0:14.8 | Wednesdays, we unravel the conspiracy or the cult, and on Fridays we look at a corresponding crime. |
| 0:21.3 | Every week has a theme. |
| 0:23.0 | Tech, bioterror, power, paranoia, you name it. |
| 0:27.1 | Follow conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes now on your podcast app, |
| 0:31.4 | because you're about to dive deeper, get weirder, and go darker than ever before. |
| 0:49.3 | Music get weirder and go darker than ever before. This is Crime House. |
| 0:55.0 | We all like to reinvent ourselves every once in a while. Maybe we move to a new city, start a new job, or take up a new hobby. |
| 1:00.0 | Sometimes we want to challenge ourselves to try something new, and usually it's healthy. |
| 1:06.0 | But Dorothea Puente took her love of reinvention to new extremes. |
| 1:11.6 | Dorothea loved to make up stories about her past and who she was, |
| 1:15.6 | and what started as a way to cope with her demons became a pathological love of power and manipulation. |
| 1:23.6 | Soon, Dorothea's mistruths and misdeeds spiraled out of control. |
| 1:29.3 | When the truth about her was finally uncovered, she became known as one of the most prolific female serial killers in U.S. history. The human mind is powerful. |
| 1:51.4 | It shapes how we think, feel, love, and hate. |
| 1:56.1 | But sometimes it drives people to commit the unthinkable. |
| 2:00.0 | This is Killer Minds, a crimehouse original. |
| 2:02.8 | I'm Vanessa Richardson. And I'm Dr. Tristan Engels. Every Monday and Thursday, we uncover the |
| 2:08.5 | darkest minds in history, analyzing what makes a killer. |
| 2:12.9 | Crime House is made possible by you. Follow Killer Minds and subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple |
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