James Gallop, a 62-year-old male tenant from Sacramento, California, entered Dorothea Puente’s Victorian boarding house at 1426 F Street while recuperating from recent brain-tumor surgery and a prior heart attack. Sources place his move-in as early as February 1987, though some chronologies list July; all agree he disappeared only weeks later, and investigators believe his killing occurred in mid-1987, close to the June 14 window often cited in summaries.
No public record specifies his ethnicity, so contemporary accounts identify him simply as a 62-year-old male boarder.
The 62-year-old male survivor was still under active medical care. On July 20 1987 doctors discovered a suspicious colon tumor and scheduled further testing, but Puente soon telephoned the clinic claiming he had “gone to Los Angeles indefinitely.” He was never seen alive again.
More than a year later, on 11 November 1988, detectives searching for another missing tenant began digging in Puente’s yard. Beneath a backyard gazebo they uncovered the wrapped remains of the 62-year-old male victim. Toxicology reports on his brain and liver showed heavy doses of amitriptyline, nortriptyline, phenytoin and flurazepam—sedative and anticonvulsant drugs consistent with Puente’s pattern of chemically subduing residents before burial.
Puente, then 59, was allowed to leave the property during the initial search; she fled the city but was arrested four days later at a Los Angeles motel after a tip from bar patrons who recognized her from television coverage. She was returned to Sacramento and ultimately charged with nine murders, including that of the 62-year-old male James Gallop.
The 1993 trial lasted seven months. After deliberating 35 days, jurors convicted Puente on three murders but deadlocked on six counts—among them the homicide of the 62-year-old male victim. Although the hung jury meant no formal conviction for Gallop’s death, investigators never identified another suspect, and the case has been considered solved in practical terms. Puente received life without parole and died in prison in 2011, leaving the fatal drugging and burial of James Gallop, 62-year-old male boarder from Sacramento, officially unadjudicated yet firmly attributed to her.
