Shane Bugbee first became interested in serial killers when John Wayne Gacy was arrested in 1978. Ten years later Bugbee, who’s 30, started writing to Gacy and other notorious murderers like Charles Manson and David Berkowitz in an effort to “find out more about their crimes.” He even worked with Gacy on Gacy’s book, A Question of Doubt. Though he says he has a “fondness” for all his pen pals, he was “getting bored with the serial killer type of thing” until he learned about Dorothea Puente. She’s serving a life sentence, convicted in 1993 of poisoning three residents at her Sacramento boarding house, burying them in her backyard, and cashing their social security checks.
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Bugbee, who runs the underground Michael Hunt Publications and the monthly tabloid Chicago at Night, was most interested in Puente’s recipes. The books he’d read about the 70-year-old grandmother had as much to say about her abilities as a cook (which is how she is supposed to have poisoned her victims) as her crimes. He requested her tamale recipe in his first letter to her last year. The two began corresponding regularly and even scheduled a weekly phone call, but she took her time sending the recipe. “She would make me send her more stamps or a box of food,” says Bugbee. “Then she’d send me ten recipes.”
The book also includes two excruciatingly bad love poems, which may be about Bugbee. “I think if you’re in a prison cell you’re going to create any kind of fantasy you can to get it out of your mind,” he says. “When she calls me, she talks to me like we’re an item or something.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): book cover, sample recipe, uncredited Dorothea Puente photo.
