The Bone Garden

“William P. Wood writes with the authenticity of an insider and the sensitivity of a thinking man.” —Darcy O’Brien, bestselling author of A Dark and Bloody Ground


She looked like everyone’s grandmother: white-haired, plump, bespectacled, and kindly. Only Dorothea Montalvo Puente’s eyes, black and hard behind her glasses, hinted at the evil that lurked within. She was the rarest of murderers, a female serial killer—probably the most cold-blooded ever recorded in the annals of crime.

This shocking story of the gruesome murder of seven men for profit comes from bestselling author William P.  Wood, the Deputy D.A. who had earlier prosecuted Puente for drugging and robbing elderly people. He knew intimately the malice that coursed through her veins, and thought he had seen the last of this callous and calculating woman. But her chameleon-like deviousness helped her reappear as a sweet, benevolent landlord—and later allowed her to escape police custody as they stood in her yard surrounded by the gaping graves. Featuring unique photographs documenting Puente’s crimes, The Bone Garden chronicles the discoveries that ignited a media firestorm and transfixed a nation, putting an entirely new face on evil in this country.


WILLIAM P. WOOD was Deputy District Attorney in Sacramento County, California, and prosecuted Dorothea Montalvo Puente in 1982 on charges of drugging and robbing elderly people. He is the author of nine novels, including Sudden Impact, Broken Trust, Quicksand, Fugitive City, Gangland, and Rampage, a novel about the trial of a serial killer, which was made into a motion picture, directed by Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin. Broken Trust was also made into a motion picture starring Tom Selleck, with a screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Wood lives in Sacramento, California.