Dorothea Montalvo Puente died March 27 at the age of 82. Finally, the Wicked Witch is dead.

         The notorious Sacramento murderess had been a guest of the state of California for the past 22 years or so, complaining all the while that she was about to succumb to a variety of cancers and other infirmities. Her final years, though, were much more pleasant than the last moments of her many elderly victims. She killed with malice and forethought, and buried the bodies of eight innocents in her Victorian home’s yard to reap their Social Security checks.

         She protested her innocence to the very end, as far as I know, just as she did in the beginning, in a series of telephone calls made to me in the months after her 1988 arrest. Those conversations thrust me, unwillingly, into the midst of her sensational murder trial and set the stage for the 1990 publication of my best-selling book, “Human Harvest,”  and what was to be my only appearance on “Larry King Live.”

         The morning after Dorothea’s death, my e-mail box began filling. I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only reporter to have interviewed Dorothea in the aftermath of her infamous string of crimes. My book was published prior to her trial, because her existing public record was a blueprint to the crimes for which she was eventually convicted. “Human Harvest” did not speculate as to her guilt or innocence; rather, it demonstrated the clear path she took to her eventual conclusion.

         Her attorney, Kevin Clymo, decided that Dorothea’s comments made to me during those several tape-recorded conversations, subsequently published in “Human Harvest,” contained “proof” of her innocence. Clymo, who would ride this case into a successful death-penalty defense career, figured that his client’s expression of innocence to a reporter without knowledge that the conversation was recorded would hold some weight in court.

         Clymo issued subpoenas to the Sacramento Bee, for photographs; to KCRA-TV, for video; and to me, for my unpublished notes, tapes and other materials.

         The Bee, to its credit, effectively quashed their subpoena by distributing the desired photos near and wide in the newsroom and challenging Clymo to find them.  KCRA, in the true tradition of television “news,” quickly gave up all the materials demanded by the defense.

         That left me, hovering under California’s reporter’s shield law and refusing to give up those unpublished items.

         Clymo’s contention was that I did not qualify as a journalist under California law because I was under contract to a private publisher during the time I wrote the book, thus not employed by any news media organization.

         Judge John V. Stroud heard Clymo’s arguments, then those of my attorney, John Blood. Stroud allowed a copy of my book to be introduced into evidence -- a “Defense Exhibit” -- and then asked me to stand up in court.

         There was a battery of media in the courtroom, many my friends and associates, in the kind of gaggle I was much more comfortable being part of.  As Stroud read his decision, I was conscious of the whirr and click of cameras pointed at me. It was a singularly unpleasant feeling.

         Anyway, Stroud decided that my overall historical consistency in the world of ink-stained wretches qualified me for protection under that shield law, and he denied Clymo’s demand.

         And that’s how I became California’s only adjudicated journalist.

         My legal savior, attorney Blood, died a few years back, as did Clymo. Dorothea outlived them despite her claim upon her arrest that cancer would kill her before she got to prison. Fortunately for justice, she was wrong.