Dorothea (2025)

The film begins at a California State Prison with an elderly and dying Dorothea Puente recounting her past to a younger cellmate named Queenie. Through flashbacks to the 1980s, Puente is played by actress Susan Priver, who is in the role of a younger Puente living on F Street in Sacramento, California, where she runs a boarding house. In the 1980s, Puente is a respected member of the local community in Sacramento, welcoming vulnerable people into her home, including elderly and mentally disabled residents.

However, beneath the facade of normality and the image of a gentle and sweet grandmother, Dorothea murders her tenants, taking advantage of their mental vulnerability to deceive and kill them, subsequently disposing of their bodies by burying them in her backyard garden. In order to have enough plots to bury the victims, Dorothea hires a local handyman named Billy 'Hurricane' Hodges to help her with the manual labor of the crimes while dealing with rat infestations and deep burial sites.

When social worker Judy Moise begins to suspect foul play at the F Street home, she informs detectives John Cabrera and Laurence Kaufman, who end up uncovering the horrors committed by the true Dorothea, a deceptive and psychopathic woman who killed defenseless people in cold blood to cash their Social Security disability checks.