Silverman asked her to walk the dog around the roof garden and then to do several errands. When the maid returned late that afternoon, the house was empty and there was no sign of Silverman. Concerned, she called Feig, who phoned the police. That evening police detectives searched the entire house.
According to a source close to the investigation, police found no obvious signs of a struggle, and no obvious traces of blood. The next day the police stepped up their investigation. They also ran a name check on Guerrin, who had disappeared. Nearly two days went by before the police learned that Manny Guerrin did not exist.
The name was an alias used by year-old Kenneth Kimes. Within hours, the police figured out that the mother and son they had in custody were two of the most wanted criminals in the country.
The F. The police in Florida had been investigating them for check fraud and auto theft. The police in Nevada were after them for suspected arson and insurance fraud. The Los Angeles Police Department wanted them for questioning in the murder of David Kazdin, a year-old businessman who was found in a Dumpster near Los Angeles International Airport on March 14, , shot in the head with a. And the police in the Bahamas had been looking for them in connection with the disappearance of a banker who has been missing since , when he was last seen having dinner with Sante Kimes in a Nassau restaurant.
This month, testimony begins in what is expected to be one of the most high-profile courtroom dramas that New York has seen in years, as Kenny and Sante Kimes stand trial in Manhattan, charged with the murder of Irene Silverman. According to New York prosecutors, the mother and son murdered Silverman as part of an elaborate scheme to steal her town house. Months before Silverman met Kenny Kimes, it is alleged, he and his mother were tracking her movements, investigating her finances, and spying on her.
They are believed to have killed her sometime between A. They suffocated her, police have said, then wrapped her body in a plastic tarp or shower curtain and loaded it into the trunk of the Lincoln Town Car. When the Kimeses were arrested, N.
The police also found in the car a Glock 9-mm. What the police have not found, despite one of the biggest murder investigations in the history of the N. Nor have they found witnesses or any forensic evidence such as fibers or hair that can tie the Kimeses to the murder. If the prosecution is right, however, and the Kimeses did murder Silverman, they almost committed the perfect crime.
But exactly what happened to Silverman is only one of the many mysteries surrounding the Kimeses. But the Barker clan was not nearly as clever as Sante and Kenny Kimes are alleged to be. Described by the police as expert, violent, and icy-cold criminals, the Kimeses are also among the most unusual suspects many in law enforcement have ever seen. Sante Kimes is no lowrent grifter. She is the widow of a wealthy California motel developer, an articulate, charming, formidable woman who once worked as a Washington lobbyist.
Perhaps never in the annals of crime has a woman been suspected of master-minding the breathtaking range of criminal activity ascribed to Sante Kimes—from arson to sophisticated financial fraud to multiple cold-blooded murders. She has an extraordinary mind [and] she has no limits. She warped him. Even dressed in an old black pantsuit and a wrinkled down jacket, her gray hair swept up in a messy bun, Kimes is striking. Her eyes are dark and intense and emphasized by dramatic, thick black eyebrows.
She has an almost regal presence, smiling warmly at her four attorneys, who hover around her as the court officers unlock her handcuffs and remove her jacket. Just for a moment she turns and glances around the courtroom, then takes her seat at the defense table, adjusts her half-moon glasses, and begins to study a stack of documents her lawyers have brought for her.
When Kenny is brought in moments later, also in manacles, wearing a gray-blue shirt, a striped tie, and blue jeans, his mother gives him a radiant, loving smile. Court authorities have insisted that during these hearings and for the trial itself mother and son not be seated next to each other.
They must be separated by at least one of their lawyers. He whispers to her that a strand of hair has fallen out of her bun, and she smiles shyly at him as she reaches back to fix it. At hearings last year they caused a commotion by whispering and touching each other constantly—as they also did in an interview with 60 Minutes , which appeared in September.
During the interview, Sante smiled lovingly at her son, who sat next to her, holding her hand. Hardy is a respected lawyer who gained renown for his aggressive, though unsuccessful, defense of the Reverend Al Sharpton in the recent libel trial stemming from the Tawana Brawley case.
Their courtroom behavior has also changed dramatically. Kenny sits at his end of the defense table, talking with his lawyers or listening to testimony by the law-enforcement officers who arrested him.
Sometimes he looks very young and somewhat lost; at other moments, his expression is cold and mocking. His mother, in contrast, is completely in control, as though she were running a corporate board meeting. She takes notes throughout the proceedings, whispers to her attorneys, and listens intently.
When she disagrees with a line of questioning being pursued by one of her lawyers, she passes him a note. When she approves, she smiles a dazzling dimpled smile and blows him a kiss or squeezes his hand.
At the end of the day, Kenny is escorted out of the courtroom first. As his mother is conferring with her attorneys, he puts on his ski jacket and then holds his hands out behind his back.
There is a long, rolling click as his handcuffs are locked. In a photograph taken with Vice President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, Kenneth Kimes, then 57 years old, looks like a typical prosperous businessman at a Washington fund-raiser. A tall, mustachioed man with an aquiline nose, he bears a resemblance to the actor David Niven.
Next to him, looking terribly happy, if a bit overdressed for a Washington party in a frilly white dress and white mink turban, is his wife-to-be, Sante, then 39 years old. The two had met three years earlier in Palm Springs. A self-made man, Kenneth had come from an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family of itinerant pickers.
He had been divorced in from Charloette Taylor. She was beautiful and fun, and she catered to him, praised him, and doted on him. Sometimes she hinted that she had royal blood; other times she claimed to be related to one or another show-business personality. For years, the Kimes family was certain of only the barest details: that she too had been born in Oklahoma, and that she had been raised in Carson City, Nevada.
With her, Kimes began to enjoy his life, spending money as he never had. He and Sante bought a magnificent oceanfront house on Portlock Road in Honolulu, rented another in the Bahamas, and owned at least one house in Las Vegas.
They had servants in each of them. She asked the maid to take her boxer George to the roof garden for a walk, and then to leave. The year-old, New Orleans-born bon vivant — who had danced in the Corps de Ballet at Radio City as a teen, then married well and lived a life of boisterous luxury, surrounded by friends, champagne and fascinating tenants who through the years included actor Daniel Day-Lewis, singer Chaka Khan and bandleader Peter Duchin — vanished without a trace.
Manhattan detectives were soon certain that after the maid left, Kenneth, 23, and Sante, 64 — who three days before had bribed a notary to stamp forged documents deeding them the townhouse — murdered Silverman quickly and coldly.
Kenneth would recount the killing years later, in testimony to a jury in yet another murder in Los Angeles. The mother-son swindlers turned out to be serial killers, guilty of a cross-country spree of homicides, disappearances, arsons and frauds. He did as mommy instructed, strangling the 4-foot Silverman and stuffing her small frame into garbage bags, then into a duffel bag, then into the trunk of their teal, dark-windowed, Lincoln Continental.
They drove the Lincoln, purchased with a bad check in Utah, through the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, where Kenneth heaved the corpse into a trash bin somewhere in Hoboken. The exhibits filled five of the big, metal shopping carts that prosecutors use to wheel evidence in and out of a courtroom. She lost both times and never tried after that. There was a darker side emerging as well. She seemed to be happy--so much so that when her own mother showed up in Carson City one day without warning and wanted her back, Sante refused.
On her high school graduation day in June of , Sante told everyone within listening range that she was going on to college, get a degree and become a journalist. Instead, three months later, she married a high school sweetheart, Lee Powers, and divorced him three months after that. After that there would be a six-week secretarial course at a Reno Business School and two years of bouncing around northern California--San Francisco and Sacramento-- with her friend Ruth Tanis, alternating between office work and college courses.
By most accounts, it was a grand time. Sante eventually returned to Carson City and married another high school admirer, Edward Walker, in Her husband accused her of stealing and shoplifting and indeed she was arrested in in Sacramento for petty theft. Disgraced, she ended the marriage and returned to the streets of Los Angeles where she alternated between prostitution and crime. Court records show she was arrested for grand theft in Los Angeles in , and auto theft a few days later in Norwalk, California.
Alone, of course. And, of course, she never came back and drove the car for months as if she owned it. The names of Sante Singhrs and several aliases were filling up the police blotters of Southern California. There was a charge against her in Glendale in , and another grand-theft charge in Riverside the next year. She also worked as a prostitute in Palm Springs. By now, Sante was looking for the big score, something or someone who could put her on easy street for the rest of her life.
She began looking for a soul mate that thought the same way and enjoyed the rush, the thrill of stealing just like she did. Perhaps it was fate. His name was Kenneth Kimes, a hustler just like her. He was worth nearly ten million dollars when she met him. That wealth still did not stop them from attempting to con all who got in their way, including the president of the United States.
High Plains Hustler. About the time Sante was being born, he was on his way to California with three brothers and two sisters and riding on an old flatbed truck, part of the Great Depression migration.
For years, the family moved up and down the fertile valleys of the Golden State, picking melons and harvesting lettuces for pennies a day. Despite the low salary, Ken Kimes had the mentality of the times, saving part of each pay packet, which eventually grew into a nice nest egg.
He spent the war years helping to liberate and then occupy the Aleutian Islands from the Japanese. He also operated a small casino inside a Quonset hut. By V-Day he had managed to send a tidy sum home. During one leave he found time to woo and marry a Texas beauty, Charloette Tayor. Everyone seemed to be buying cars, highways were being built and the couple decided to get into the construction business.
After building a few apartment complexes and trailer parks, they began focusing on what fit the autos and road boom best -- motels. Soon there was a small empire with the crown jewel of their chain built directly across the street from a newly constructed Disneyland.
The room complex was called the Mecca Motel. Charloette soon discovered that her husband had a dark side. Not only was Ken Kimes Sr. But he never did. Money became his god. And he was a womanizer. Slick as a button about it and he got away with it for a long time. Eventually I got blindsided. Charloette filed for divorce in , but Ken Kimes hired the former attorney general for the state of California to represent him.
In the end, Ken got away with the bulk of their fortune. Charloette had no regrets. There are two stories on how Kenneth Kimes met Sante, a romantic match surely struck up by the devil in hell. The first is that Sante saw an article on California millionaires in a magazine in She liked his looks, not to mention his estimated net worth and began circling him like a hawk.
The second is that he went after her. He needed a public relations person for an American Bicentennial scheme he was cooking up--one in which he hoped to make several million dollars. Whichever is true, Kenneth Kimes had more than met his match. At first she behaved like a geisha--or maybe a practiced bar girl out to earn a commission on each shot sold.
The courtesan talents she had learned at the knee of her mother served her well. She would personally stir his whiskey cocktails with her little finger while pretending to keep up with him drink for drink. Instead hers would be deposited into a planter or a wastebasket. When he would get drunk, she would take charge. And if called upon, she could perform every sexual trick in the book.
Ken Kimes may have once controlled Charloette, but it was Sante who was calling the shots now. When he told her, she went to a perfume shop and had them duplicate the fragrance for her to wear. In fact, it would take ten years for Ken to marry her. By that time, their son Kenny would be six years old, Sante would have escaped a lengthy prison term, and was already beginning to teach their son the tricks of the trade. A Capital Caper. The scheme cooked up by Ken Kimes and put into motion by Sante involved making money from the American Bicentennial.
They thought that simply by being seen in the right Washington circles and by being photographed in the right places, the government would put a poster in every classroom in America and sell the excess through post offices. They estimated that there were , such schoolrooms and at ten dollars each, well, do the math. Ken Kimes needed credentials and he began addressing civic groups on patriotism.
Ken and Sante had forged a memo on White House stationery that supposedly was to Mrs. Nixon from a high-ranking White House assistant asking her to see him. It represented Ken Kimes as a big Republican donor and philanthropist who only wanted to give back to his country. It soon appeared in the Bicentennial Times , the official newsletter for the big year. Sante and Ken appeared halfway there and used the photo with Mrs.
Nixon to arrange meetings with other federal officials. On February 26, , Sante and Ken went way over the top and did themselves in. At the Belgian residence, Sante boldly took the floor and made a pitch for the flag posters before being asked to leave. They might have gotten away with the whole scam except the next morning telephone calls began flooding the desks of Washington society editors.
People ask me if I am involved with him. Well, I love him. I just love his warmth. The Boy Slave. Imagine, for a moment, that you are Kenny Kimes Jr. You have a mom who smothers you with an unnaturally close form of love at an early age. Your dad is drunk more often than he is sober and seems to be operated by his spouse as if he were a marionette. Your first memories are of police and investigators constantly showing up at your home to look into one shady scheme after another.
Any hope of a normal life was doomed from the beginning. Then he recalled a cruel, condescending Sante. In Hawaii, there was Kara Craver-Jones. He never talked back.
She was dominant of him, of me, of everybody. Sante trotted out an old ploy left over from her Bicentennial scam. Kara was picked up each day in a limousine to visit Kenny. From time to time, Kenny would confide in her, though he often made the stories up.
The boy slave was learning the scams. Tell a story, win sympathy, and unbalance the mark. It was a classic grifter trick. That was strange. And each house came with several Mexican maids whom Sante forced to go barefoot. Once one of them got out and the Rahos remembered her screaming as she ran down the street until Sante captured her and brought her back. The Kimes trio was one strange family. Everyone agreed on that. One scam after another. Sante kept getting arrested for grand theft, petty theft, and schemes that involved claiming an item had been stolen from her home, putting an inflated price tag on it, and getting an insurance company to cough up a check.
Often houses owned by Ken and Sante would mysteriously burn to the ground and an insurance firm would have to write an even larger one. I was small. As investigators dug deeper into the Kimes' background, they learned Sante and Kenny were also suspects in the murder of their family friend David Kazdin, whose body was found in a dumpster near the Los Angeles International Airport in March , dead from a single gunshot to the back of the head.
When the bank began investigating the case, Sante called Kazdin and threatened him, according to a report by Vanity Fair. Soon after, the house burned down in an arson fire, and Kazdin wound up dead.
California detectives were able to track down the Kimeses to a home in suburban Los Angeles, but when they went to question them, they had vanished without a trace.
The bag also contained more than a dozen notebooks that detailed the entire con. The evidence proved that the Kimeses intended to get rid of Irene and take possession of her multi-million dollar property. Although authorities were unable to locate Irene's body, Sante and Kenny were both charged for her murder.
They were also formally charged with the murder of Kazdin. The Kimeses were tried in New York first, and in May , they were found guilty of murder, robbery, burglary, conspiracy, grand larceny, illegal weapons possession, forgery, and eavesdropping in connection to Irene's death, reported The New York Times. A month later, they received their sentences: Sante was given years to life in prison while Kenny received a sentence of years to life, according to The New York Times.
But that didn't put an end to the terror.
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