In the 1980s, Dorothea Puente operated a boarding house in Sacramento, California, where she presented herself as a kind, grandmotherly figure who cared for "shadow people"—the elderly, alcoholics, and the mentally disabled who had no one else to look after them. In reality, she was a cold and calculating serial killer who drugged her vulnerable tenants with sedatives, strangled or suffocated them, and then buried their bodies in her backyard to continue cashing their Social Security checks.