I'm Craig Melvin,
and this is "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I just see Sante Kimes as the ultimate femme fatale.
Seducing lovers, lawyers, husbands, her son.
This is someone who gets what she wants.
This story about a mother and son grifter team.
This was a diabolical duo.
They seem quite, like, open, and friendly, and interesting.
Yeah, I didn't think they were killers.
We have a woman, a socialite goes missing.
There were several people who disappeared.
She had put a hit out on me.
She wanted me killed.
Why did she keep getting away with it?
She just had that power over me.
I was mom's first protege.
I was supposed to be her co-hort in crime.
Your mother instructed you to kill people.
Sinister. Scheming.
I felt like I was in the presence of Satan.
Hello and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
Irene Silverman lived a life of privilege
worthy of New York's Gilded Age.
Then one morning, the prominent socialite
vanished from her Manhattan townhouse.
What followed was a sprawling investigation
into a pair of outlaws known as Mommy and Clyde,
killers whose darkest secrets pointed to more than one victim.
Here's Keith Morrison with "The Devil Wore White."
It was evening when they found her.
Found her prone in her cell
at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
in New York.
A guard raised the alarm and they rushed her
to a nearby hospital.
But it was too late.
Her enlarged heart was so badly damaged,
it could not go on beating.
She was 79 when she died.
Sixteen years past the outrages,
the mayhem, the murders,
and the fabulous, fierce, frightening madness
that was the woman named Sante Kimes.
Are you more comfortable now?
Yes, because she's dead.
And that was-- that was the deciding factor.
- Yes. - She had to be dead.
She had to be dead.
There are many kinds of villains.
This is the story of a mother and two sons,
and all kinds of trouble.
Is it fair for me to say that though you knew
your mother was a terrible person,
you loved her as intensely as a son can love a mother.
There's probably not another son on
who loved his mother as much as I loved mine.
But as we say, this is about a mother and two sons.
The other, now speaking out,
his first recorded interview in decades.
When your mother died,
was that very difficult for you?
It hurt like hell.
There's just nothing I can do without her but pray.
So much history.
Darkly comic, to just plain dark.
But we can begin,
because why not begin here,
in a celebration.
July 4, 1998.
Millions gathered in New York City
to watch the nation's biggest fireworks spectacular.
And just off Manhattan's Millionaires Row,
a smaller crowd gathered for a different kind of spectacular.
A dinner party at a mansion on East 65th Street.
The hostess was an 82 year old widow
named Irene Silverman.
She's vivacious, she's a lot of fun.
Fashion designer Zang Toi was a close friend
and frequent party guest.
She know how to throw a great party
during her heyday, and she had the heart of gold.
Friend Janice Herbert also loved Irene's company.
She's delightful, she's funny.
I adored her.
Someone described her as Auntie Mame,
and that's exactly what she was.
She was absolutely fabulous.
Irene Silverman had quite literally danced her way
from poverty to a dream job as a ballet dancer
at Radio City Music Hall.
And by the time of our story,
she was a healthy, wealthy widow
with a fine big townhouse
in New York's most expensive neighborhood.
It was for companionship as much as anything
that Irene rented rooms in her mansion.
Her tenants included some A list celebrities
like Daniel Day Lewis, and Lenny Kravitz,
and Chaka Khan.
She lived by herself.
She rented just for fun,
and to also keep herself company.
The day after Irene's bash, July 5th was as quiet
as a country church on a Monday morning
at the NYPD's 19th Precinct where Detective Tom Hovagim
was working his shift.
Tell me about July 5th.
You were on duty, what was it-- what was that like?
Yeah, um, the city was empty fourth of July weekend,
so we expected a slow day.
Then we received a call from a patrol officer.
I picked up the phone.
We have a woman, elderly woman,
that is missing.
Her staff reported her missing.
The missing elderly woman was Irene Silverman.
I was the junior detective.
I just had gotten promoted in January.
Okay.
So the other two guys were pretty senior to me.
And they said, "Well, kid, this is yours."
Because no one really wants a missing person case.
- Oh, boy. - It's very tedious work.
With that in mind, Detective Hovagim
drove to the Upper East Side to the six story townhouse,
a stone's throw from Central Park.
This townhouse, what-- what was that like?
It was actually beautiful.
Beautiful artwork, beautiful furniture.
The night before she disappeared,
she had a great party.
American flags, hats, you know, the whole bit.
So yeah, she liked to entertain.
She was very social.
Did she have a-a staff to do all these things for her?
She did.
Keeping the townhouse clean, um, making her food,
uh, helping set up the party.
She loved her staff.
She treated them very well.
She was living the grand life, that woman.
Absolutely, 100%.
The staff last saw Irene inside her house that morning,
shortly before noon.
She appeared to have left without telling anyone.
Not what she would ever do, ever.
Which is why they reported her missing.
We did the preliminary investigation,
searched the townhouse, searched the surrounding areas,
looked for video cameras, interviewed neighbors.
But no sign of Irene.
And curiously, two other people
seemed to have vanished, too.
We couldn't find one of the staff members.
When we went up to his apartment,
he wasn't there.
So that was a little suspicious.
The other missing person was a young man
who was renting a room on the first floor.
We couldn't find the person in 1B.
He disappeared the same time she did.
You know, that raised our suspicion, of course.
- Okay. - Yes.
Though not alarmingly, yet.
But then outside, near the front entrance,
they found blood.
And Tom Hovagim's missing person case
suddenly became urgent.
When you get a person on the Upper East Side
like Irene Silverman, it becomes very special.
The whole city takes an interest.
Pretty soon, the whole country would take an interest.
Because the case of the missing socialite
was about to take an unexpected turn
into something diabolical.
Ever had any other case,
anything like this in your career?
Not even close.
What would follow and what came before
is a story, when all told,
of crimes astonishing in scale and scope.
Next thing I know, he's around my back
with his arm across my neck.
Stretching from New York to LA.
A transient found David Kazdin's body
stuffed into a dumpster.
Hawaii to the Caribbean, and at the center of it all,
a criminal mastermind the likes of which
we won't see again, with any luck.
When she looked at you,
she could look into your soul.
She is the most evil woman that I've ever met.
How do you tell the story and not be over the top?
She was over the top.
They looked everywhere
that fourth of July weekend in New York,
sent the canines sniffing through her mansion
top to bottom.
But try as they might,
they could not find Irene Silverman.
The boss who was running the investigation,
um, dubbed us the Silver Task Force.
'Cause we all had an affection for Irene
because it could have been our grandmother,
could have been our mother.
You know, this woman did nothing wrong.
She had purpose still in her life.
She was a good person to have in this world.
Irene's friends, like fashion designer Zang Toi,
were worried sick.
It was getting late. Everybody was worried.
My first thought is that I was just praying,
I was hoping that they would find that she was kidnapped.
Someone tried to ask for ransom.
But no ransom note appeared.
If someone had taken her, must have been a thief, too,
because 10,000 in cash she kept in the townhouse
vanished with her.
Suspicion landed first on that missing staff member.
Detective Hovagim learned he was a longtime employee
with access to Irene's financial records.
He'd boarded a flight to Atlanta
shortly after she vanished.
He had gone away, but once we got him
and brought him in,
we eliminated him pretty quickly.
He was innocent,
just like the rest of Irene's staff.
We went through the motions of interviewing him
and getting their alibis.
It wasn't anyone on the staff.
The detectives also talked to Irene's tenants, of course,
and all were quickly accounted for and alibi.
Except for that young guy from the room
on the first floor.
The staff told us that there was a person
staying in apartment 1B
who Irene thought was very suspicious
since she had rented the apartment to him.
His name was Manny Guerin.
He'd arrived two weeks earlier.
He didn't have a reference or an ID, but he seemed nice,
and he gave her 6,000 in cash up front.
She just let him in.
She let her guard down. She never did that.
Her friend Janice said Irene regretted that decision
right away.
He was very secretive.
She felt that something was wrong,
and she was worried about it.
She was smart enough to write everything down in detail
about this guy's suspicious behavior.
What kind of behaviors?
When there was a conversation in the lobby of the townhouse,
she would see his feet underneath the door
or the shadow of his feet, like he was eavesdropping.
And when he came into the house, into the townhouse,
he would avoid the cameras, walk on the sides of the walls,
things like that, to stay out of camera view.
And she described him, you know, male, white,
you know, 5' 9", about 180 pounds.
She was a sharp woman, man.
And this Manny Guerin, Irene's longtime caregiver,
Marta Rivera, said he refused to let housekeepers
inside his room to clean,
and she thought she knew why.
There was a woman in the apartment with him.
Nobody know who she was.
Because that's the reason that they--
they not let nobody go inside,
so they don't see her.
An unknown woman in there.
That was it for Irene.
She told friends she wanted Manny Guerin to leave.
She was going to evict him, right--
you know, right around the time she disappeared.
So police searched the room Manny Guerin had been renting.
We found all kinds of things.
Garbage bags, roll of duct tape,
um, shower curtain rings, but no shower curtain,
things like that, which raised our suspicion.
On Monday night, July 6,
Hovagim's unit asked the public for help
to find Irene Silverman
and her suspicious missing tenant.
We posted pictures of Irene Silverman.
We had a sketch done of Manny Guerin.
We had a news conference where we posted the sketch.
The next day, Hovagim got a call.
Someone had recognized Manny Guerin
from the police sketch.
It wasn't a member of the public,
but another of New York's finest,
from a different department
of the city's sprawling police organization.
No doubt in my mind that was him.
Ed Murray was a detective working for
the NYPD's Fugitive Task Force.
When he saw the sketch of Manny Guerin,
he said he knew right away who it was.
And it wasn't Manny Guerin.
I see that picture,
and it's exactly a composite sketch
of Kenny Kimes.
Kenny Kimes?
Murray was certain the man in the sketch
was actually a car thief named Kenny Kimes,
who he'd taken into custody just a few hours after
Irene Silverman disappeared.
Kimes had been arrested with his mother, Sante,
for writing a bad check for a Lincoln Towncar
back in Utah.
An unusual pair, those two.
It was something that I just didn't think,
it was like mother and son.
Like she was the boss and he was--
Well, she was. She-- definitely,
without a doubt, she was.
So one department talked to the other,
and pretty soon, Detective Hovagim
was showing Kenny Kimes's booking photo
to Irene's employees.
And then when we did the photo array of Kenny,
the staff picked him out, saying, yeah,
that's Manny Guerin.
In that moment, there was no way, of course,
for Detective Hovagim to fathom just who he was dealing with,
where this Kenny Kimes and his mother, Sante,
had already been, and what they had already done.
Almost 48 hours after Irene Silverman disappeared,
NYPD detectives found her missing tenant,
Manny Guerin, already in custody.
But he'd been arrested under a different name,
his real one, Kenny Kimes.
He was locked up alongside his mother, Sante.
And she, they learned, had a rap sheet miles long,
reaching back decades before her son Kenny was born.
You know, we had some background on his mother,
on Sante at that point, so I used that against him.
Like, look, we know your mother put you up to this.
We know she-she's been arrested before
and that she's manipulative and she's manipulating you.
Didn't work.
Kenny Kimes gave away nothing.
So who were these people?
Mother and son, car thieves, and maybe killers.
And what might they have done with innocent elderly Irene?
In a New York minute,
those questions became a huge national story.
- Hope is fading tonight... - ...that the suspect
in her disappearance-- - A missing person,
who vanished from her million dollar home.
When they first got arrested,
it is no exaggeration within the first 10 days,
I had 100 news agencies attack my office
looking for me.
You guys, NBC, ABC. - Hmm? Oh.
Kent Walker, that firstborn son,
Kenny's older brother, the one we told you about
back at the beginning.
Kent had the answers.
Some of them, anyway.
That's my mother.
She had a force.
It was a force we were acting with.
Oh, yes.
Kent's mother, Sante Kimes, was a woman of many names,
and many schemes.
Every bawdy, gorgeous, terrible bit of her.
She was born in 1934.
Her birth name was Sante.
As a teen, she switched it to Sandy
and then back again.
She changed her name frequently from then on.
Changed her story often, too.
The original story was that she was born in Oklahoma, uh,
was one of the Okies.
She ended up in Hollywood.
True?
Maybe, maybe not.
As Sante told it, her father abandoned the family.
Mom was on the streets for the most part,
what mom said.
Supposedly her mother was a prostitute.
Later find out that's not the case.
- So she made up a story. - Oh, the whole--
My mother's entire life's made up.
You know, you get that one little germ of truth.
She always started out with that kernel
that-that you can believe, that's probably honest.
But as Kent learned as a little boy,
his single mom knew how to survive,
no matter how straitened their circumstances.
Our refrigerator up until that point was peanut butter,
and tortillas, and cheese. That was it.
I was lucky if there was some milk in there.
As for the way Sante survived,
that seemed normal to young Kent.
She certainly didn't hide it from him.
She was a credit card thief, a shoplifter, a check kiter.
And Kent became her very handy and willing assistant,
with some careful, motherly schooling.
I was small. I fit through windows.
I knew how to be a decoy.
I knew how to make attention happen.
So people looked at me instead of her
while she did her thing.
She was training me how to do that.
And somehow Sante got away with it again and again.
And young Kent looked at her with a kind of awe.
She didn't bow down to anybody.
Out in the world, out in public,
people noticed Sante, and she liked it.
I think the name of the restaurant
was the Cock and Bull. It was in Hollywood.
I don't think it's there anymore.
- I remember it well, yeah. - Yeah.
We were sitting at the bar and a gal came up to her
and asked her for her autograph.
And mom signed it, "Elizabeth Taylor."
- Elizabeth Taylor? - Elizabeth Taylor.
She looked that much like Elizabeth Taylor sometimes.
She didn't have the eyes, but she had the charisma,
the look, the cheeks, the mouth.
And then pure, corrupt ambition.
Sante's charisma changed their lives for good.
The truth is, mom was on a hunt
for a millionaire.
In 1970, Sante even took a job at something
called Palm Springs Millionaire Magazine
and was thereby able to interview a man
named Kenneth Kimes, a millionaire 20 times over,
his fortune made in real estate,
casinos, motels, and mansions.
Sante turned on her charm, and Kenneth was smitten.
A year later, they returned from a trip to Mexico,
declared they were married.
And just like that...
Our lives was beyond the American dream.
I mean, we lived in five different oceanfront properties
in Hawaii.
We had an oceanfront estate in the Bahamas.
We had a golf course home in Las Vegas.
They were all home.
You know, it was almost embarrassing.
You know, it was before cell phones.
You give your phone number out.
Well, I had to give five different phones out
because I didn't know where I was going to be.
Four years later, 1975, Kenny Jr. Was born.
And now Sante ran a full house,
but not a nurturing one.
She had rules,
the sort no one would dare defy.
"No one answers the phone and no one answers the door.
"Do you got that?"
And I just went, "Oh, yeah, I got that."
Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Craig Melvin.
Sante and Kenny Kimes were behind bars,
suspects in the disappearance of Irene Silverman.
Turns out mother and son were lifelong hustlers,
and Sante's secret schemes had made them rich.
But, as you'll see, it was the thrill of the crime
that drove Sante, no matter who paid the price.
Back to Keith Morrison with "The Devil Wore White."
It was the late 1970s, 20 years or so before
the unfortunate events at Irene Silverman's place.
Sante, Kenneth, Kent, and now little Kenny Jr.,
all living the lush life, fancy clothes, and luxury cars,
and villas full of servants.
In the house in Hawaii, we had a secret storage spot
in the master bedroom.
She had 30 mink coats.
Um, I've never seen anyone wear a mink coat in Hawaii.
I don't know if you have or not.
Sante at last seemed to have the life she wanted.
She always called me "my darling Rhonda."
Rhonda Martin was Kent's high school girlfriend
and spent lots of time with the family
in their seaside mansion.
Sante was like a dream, said Rhonda.
A lovely dream.
And she would hug me, and,
"My son has such a beautiful girlfriend."
She would just lavish me with love.
- Stop! - You look good.
She always wore white, muumuus at home, pantsuits,
and just beautiful.
And she always had her hair perfect.
I mean, it was always perfect.
Her eyes were black.
Her-- like, her pupils, they were piercing.
When she looked at you, she could look into your soul.
I don't know if you've ever had anyone do that to you,
but she--
You could feel her in-- knowing you.
I mean, it was-- it was really--
Well, in the beginning, it was fabulous
because she knew everything to say to me.
And she knew exactly what she wanted.
- Shh. - Let's do it, sweetie.
I'm the director.
Made sure everyone else did, too.
One, two, three, camera.
Action.
So now that she was rich, did Sante Kimes change her ways,
renounce her compulsion to lie and steal?
Oh, no, not at all.
And her compliant husband, Ken Sr., seemed to love it.
Didn't he participate willingly in her crimes?
He didn't mind not having to pay for dresses.
He didn't mind not having to pay for Cadillac Biarritz Eldorados
in our driveway.
He fell in love with getting away with it.
So from practically the moment they met,
Ken played along,
even with some of Sante's wackier schemes.
Like an idea to make money from the 1976 bicentennial.
Sante used her considerable charm
to cozy up to an official of the United Nations.
She got an endorsement where Ken was actually named
an honorary Bicentennial ambassador.
Well, that's all you need to give Mom.
It meant nothing, really, but Sante and Kenneth
went swanning around like very important people,
using the title to flog a collection
of Bicentennial memorabilia.
And with an extra lie or two,
the fake ambassador and his wife crashed a reception
at Blair House in Washington,
shook hands with Vice President Ford.
Secret Service let them right through.
And then they say, "Well, who are you?"
They couldn't answer, so they kicked them out.
And the next morning is when everything hit the fan.
The weird stunt was exposed in the Washington Post.
Just a hiccup for Sante.
DC, again, a few years later.
It was late and this couple came through the door.
They were so distinctive, you couldn't miss them.
Winter, 1980.
Rina Beechy was enjoying a nightcap
at a Washington, D.C. bar when Ken and Sante swept in.
Rina watched as Sante, wearing a mink coat herself,
nicked another one right from another table.
She was just pulling her own coat up over it,
and she stood up and sauntered out of the place.
The DC caper didn't work out so well.
Sante was charged with grand and petty larceny.
But then she ditched her own trial,
simply skipped out of court and went on as ever.
That's who she was. Why did she do this?
Because that's what she was.
Sante's ambitions only seemed to get bigger.
Like what she did with her own beautiful beachfront home
in Hawaii.
Burned it to the ground to collect the insurance money.
But she was much too clever to actually do it herself.
My father was involved in an arson in Honolulu.
This is Ken Holmgren.
His father, Elmer, was a down on his luck attorney
who got roped into it somehow.
Did they tell him or ask him to set fire
to the Kimes house in Honolulu?
I assume the Kimes wanted him to do it,
you know, as for the Kimes's gain.
If anyone knew how persuasive Sante could be,
it was Kent.
She knew the words to you.
She knew the emotions to put onto you.
And sometimes she did it in positive ways,
with love and affection.
And she also knew how to scare the hell out of you.
Like when Kent was 12
and still his mother's little helper.
And one day on his own, he stole a surfboard
and got busted.
I thought I was going to go to jail.
So Kent tried his best to go straight.
Maybe the difference between you and your mother
is if you get-- you get caught stealing a surfboard,
it scares you straight.
If she gets caught stealing a surfboard,
it's encouragement for the next time.
She got mad because I got caught
and she tried to give me--
She actually took me to where I got caught,
and she told me how I should have done it
so I wouldn't have got caught.
So Sante did nurture, in a way, the criminal way.
And she wasn't about to let anyone get between
her and her sons.
A lieutenant from Hawaii 5-0 showed up at my house.
That lieutenant told me, if you contact him,
she'll find you and she will kill you.
On the outside, Kent lived what seemed to be
a normal teenager's life.
High school, sports,
his girlfriend, Rhonda,
who loved spending time with Sante, too.
Until the day...
I was over there,
and all of a sudden the doorbell rang,
and I jumped up to answer it.
She was in the kitchen, and I swear to you,
she flew over the counter before I got to the door.
She got right up in my face and she pulled me.
I mean, I was this close to her face.
It was so close, I could feel her breath.
And she goes, "There are two rules in this house.
"No one answers the phone and no one answers the door.
"Do you got that?"
And I just went, "Oh, yeah, I got that."
This is the first time you saw anything other than
the wonderful, Elizabeth Taylor person? - Very first time.
I thought-- exactly.
I had never seen that, until that day.
And that freaked me out.
That day was a turning point for Rhonda and Kent.
Kent started talking to me about things his mom
would have him do.
You know, like he said, "Yeah, you know, my mom,
"you know, she likes to steal stuff
"and she likes me to help her out.
"Like, I have to break into people's houses
"and climb in their windows, dig in their--"
Ooh, what is that like to hear?
I said, "You know, if you get caught doing that,
"you could go to jail and then eventually prison,
"and then your mom gets off scot free
"because she can fly off to Europe
"and you're stuck paying the bill for her crimes."
I said, "You can't do that."
Rhonda got through to Kent.
He refused to help his mom steal anymore.
And Sante was furious with Rhonda.
She called my mom one day and said,
"Your daughter has got to stay away from my son.
"I've had it with her."
Well then about that same time,
a lieutenant from Hawaii 5-0 showed up at my house
and knocked on the door and told my mom and dad
that she had put a hit out on me.
That lieutenant told me, "Don't stick your head up
"because if you contact him, she'll find you
"and she will kill you."
And he thought that I just left
because he thought that I just, you know,
like an airhead kid,
"Well, I don't love you anymore."
But that wasn't true.
So Rhonda was gone
and Kent was going straight.
After he graduated from high school,
Kent left home and later joined the army.
When I left for the army, it was tough.
I mean, I will say, I have to be honest with myself now.
I ran away. - Yeah.
That's when mom was her worst.
But then, with Kent out of the house,
Sante turned to his half brother, Kenny.
Maybe he would make a better partner in crime.
I am my mother's biggest disappointment.
I was the one who was supposed to be Kenny.
Kent knew his mother loved Kenny a little bit differently.
He was the prince.
He was tutored, never got spanked.
He was treated as a golden child.
He was so lonely. He had no friends.
He had a tutor.
And Kent and I would take him to go get ice cream.
But she hardly would ever let us take him anywhere.
We had to, like, sneak him off.
He had a very unusual upbringing, your brother.
Kenny didn't have a chance.
He didn't have a chance.
Not with his mother, no.
Take for example, a little problem she had
with the household staff.
At first, Sante's maids were treated well, said Kent,
like members of the family, really, but not for long.
The anger is like a warm bath sometimes.
It's just like everything else in her life.
Elevated, elevated, elevated.
And so the maids then became the enemy in the house.
The women complained to law enforcement
and in a lawsuit.
John Doty is a private detective
who's investigated Sante's background.
Evidently, she would lock the maids in their rooms.
They were under constant watch, and I believe she attacked
one of them with a hot iron once.
Here she is forced to sit for a deposition
about the allegations.
I'm very unhappy with having to give any testimony to you.
It was all a fabrication, said Sante.
But I've never yelled loudly or--
And I haven't-- certainly never, um,
physically touched any of them.
She denied it all.
No, that is not correct.
That is a total lie.
Making herself into the victim.
I have been through an intolerable nightmare.
The law intervened, and indicted Kenneth and Sante
for violating anti slavery laws,
a charge that hadn't been used for a very, very long time.
Ken Sr. accepted a plea deal on the criminal charges,
but Sante took her case to trial and was convicted.
She spent three years in federal prison.
And Kent came back around to help his stepfather
and brother.
I was kind of a surrogate father to Kenny
in a way, and the part that's frustrating,
that was the time maybe I could have helped Kenny more,
and I didn't, you know?
And then mom returned and things went back to normal,
if such could be used for the life of Sante Kimes.
Kent got married, started his own family,
made Sante a grandmother.
- Say hi. Give a smile. - Cheese!
This a decade before the events
on that July 4th weekend in New York when
Irene Silverman disappeared.
And though Kent tried to put some distance
between his old life and his new one,
here he is running the video camera
on a family vacation.
Don't tape me when I'm fat like--
They're at the Kimes beachfront estate
in the Bahamas,
an address that will come into play a little later
in our story.
Last day here. Been a great vacation.
Thanks for everything, guys.
Just a few months after that island vacation in 1994,
Kent got a call from his mom.
Mom's hysterical.
"They won't fix him. They won't fix him.
"They won't fix him."
And I had-- you know, at the time,
I'm not putting two and two together.
She hangs up.
And then it dawned on him.
His mother was telling him that Ken Sr.,
his stepfather, had died.
And after Sante seemed unhinged,
even more than usual,
because it turned out they'd blown through
most of Ken's fortune when he was alive.
And now that he was dead, all that was left
were a few properties and some cash tucked away
in offshore accounts.
Mom didn't have any checkbooks.
She had no accounts. She had nothing.
Now she was scrambling for money.
The frenzy of it all spooked Kent.
He eventually stopped taking her calls.
I had made a break from mom and Kenny.
We were estranged.
And I missed Mom.
Kent had no idea then that he had timed his exit perfectly.
It was now just a year before that New York City summer
when Irene Silverman disappeared.
Who knew what a desperate mother and son
were capable of together?
There was a homeless man looking through
the garbage cans, big dumpsters.
- Yeah. - Dug through--
through the trash,
and saw that there was a body in there.
It was the spring of 1998,
four months before Irene Silverman disappeared
in New York City,
and Kent Walker was living in Las Vegas.
He had done the hard part.
Cut off his mother and little brother,
who was now 23, for good.
And now... - I missed the good stuff.
It was hard, you know, but I was doing okay.
Kent had no idea where Kenny and Sante were
or that they had moved on themselves.
In fact, they were in Los Angeles now.
Had rented a wing of a house in affluent Brentwood.
Looking for trouble, maybe.
I was working homicide
at the Los Angeles Police Department.
Detective Bill Cox was also unaware the Kimes
that arrived in the City of Angels.
In fact, he had never heard of them,
not yet anyway,
when he caught a curious case about 15 miles down the freeway
from Brentwood.
Something about a body in a dumpster
in a back alley near LAX.
There was a homeless man walking down the alley,
looking through the garbage cans.
Big dumpsters. - Yeah.
Dug through the-- through the trash
and there was a big green trash bag in there,
and saw that there was a body in there.
The body in the dumpster was a male, middle aged,
with a single bullet hole in the back of his head.
He was identified quickly by the coroner's office
as being David Kazdin.
David Kazdin.
He seemed like a regular sort of guy.
63 years old, businessman.
He lived alone up in the valley,
30 miles from the dumpster where he ended up.
My partner and I went over to the house.
The first thing that we went into his bedroom,
we saw that the bed had-- was turned down.
And then when we went into the living room area,
you look at the carpet, and the carpet was just perfect.
In fact, the whole house was just about pristine.
David's daughter told them she'd been there
two nights previous and she was sure
they saw someone lurking outside.
There was a Car parked in front of the house.
And they got very nervous about it.
And I think the car slowly drove off
when they looked out there.
And that wasn't the only time, said the daughter.
For weeks, somebody had been harassing David Kazdin,
calling, stopping by.
She knew there was some kind of business dispute,
something about a real estate transaction
gone bad.
So she gave the detectives a name.
She's the one that brought up right away about, uh,
Sante Kimes.
Yes, that Sante Kimes.
A little digging revealed the connection.
Kazdin had been a longtime friend
and sometimes business partner to both Sante and Ken Sr.,
and years earlier, he had done them a small favor.
Ken Sr., trying to dodge legal bills and hide his assets,
asked Kazdin to put his name on the deed
to one of their properties, a mansion on Geronimo Way
in Las Vegas.
David, you know, reluctantly, I guess, just said,
"Yeah, go ahead, you know, but not for too long."
And so they did it.
And, uh, about six months later, from what I understand,
he had asked if, you know, can, you know--
"Can you guys take me off of the thing?"
And he had talked to Sante because Ken was dead
by this time, and said, you know,
"Take me off the-the thing."
And she goes, "Oh, yes, dear, we'll do all this."
But Sante didn't do that.
Instead, without telling Kazdin, she came up with a scheme
to turn a problem into a money making solution,
for her, at least.
She went down to a bank, Mrs. Kimes did,
And she's the one that tricked the bank
into taking a loan out of Mr. Kazdin.
I don't know how she did it.
I don't know how the bank allowed her to do it.
Sante got ready to walk away with 280,000,
and Kazdin was on the hook for it all.
And then he discovers he's got to pay back
all this money.
Yeah, he gets this thing in the-- in the mail
with 360 payments, and you owe this much money
every month, and he was just flabbergasted.
And so he goes through the roof
and basically calls Sante and says,
"What-what are you doing?"
You know, and leaves a message for her.
And she calls him back and she says, "You know,
"asking questions about the loan--"
something to the effect of it won't be good
for your health.
Kazdin ignored the warning,
and the bank launched an investigation.
And then, what do you know,
a suspicious fire destroyed that Vegas mansion.
And Sante, claiming the house was hers,
tried to collect the insurance.
She was constantly thinking,
"How am I going to get the next dollar?"
It was obvious to detectives that Sante Kimes
needed to be questioned about the murder
of David Kazdin.
And they learned that she and her son
were staying in that Brentwood house.
So my partner and I went up to the house that night
and just missed them by hours.
They had left LA and Sante's preferred mode of transport,
a Lincoln Town Car.
PI Doty traced it to a dealership in Utah
where Sante bought it, sort of.
And she'd trade in her old car,
an older Lincoln,
and then give the guy a check for the difference.
But the check never cleared.
The dealer reported the car stolen,
and the local sheriff issued warrants for Sante and Kenny,
wanted for grand theft auto.
That was just what the LAPD needed to amp up their search,
something concrete to hold Sante and Kenny on.
If only they could find them.
For months, detectives ran down tips from people
who knew them in Los Angeles, in Las Vegas,
in you name it.
Every place we went, we would miss them
just by days,
sometimes a day, sometimes just hours.
They were constantly moving.
Did she know you were on their tail?
I-- well, I think so.
And then sleuthing paid off.
Detective Cox landed an informant,
a guy who'd done odd jobs for Sante
in LA and Las Vegas by the name of Stan Patterson.
Stan became basically our eyes and ears,
because he said Sante would call him once in a while.
So we told them, "Hey, next time she calls you,
"let us know."
Meanwhile, across the country in New York,
that wealthy widow, Irene Silverman was still
living her fine life on the Upper East Side.
Nothing to worry about.
But the fourth of July was right around the corner.
And so was a confrontation on a busy street
in midtown Manhattan.
One of the agents grabbed Sante, took her bag.
I saw there were, like, five agents
struggling with Kenneth.
- Couldn't take him down? - Couldn't take him down.
Mother and son, suspects in a years long crime spree,
that included two murders, at least.
How did it ever get this far?
Kenny Kimes will tell us.
There's a lot of chaos in my youth.
I love my parents,
but there's a lot of complexity there.
Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Detectives in LA had a good idea
how David Kazdin ended up in a dumpster,
and who put him there.
Their suspects, Sante and Kenny Kimes, had vanished.
But a reliable tip was about to reveal their location,
setting the stage for
a high stakes undercover operation.
Back to Keith Morrison with "The Devil Wore White".
It was the summer 1998.
Mother and son outlaws, Sante and Kenny Kimes
had been dodging police for months.
And then, on July 3rd,
just before the holiday weekend,
Detective Cox's phone rang.
It was his informant, Stan Patterson.
He says that the Kimeses
are in New York
and they are getting an apartment,
and they wanted me to manage it.
My, my, my.
And to bring a gun with me when I--
when I come out there to New York.
Stan the informant, agreed to go to New York
and help lead police to Sante and Kenny.
We contact NYPD, and so we told them
that Stan was on an airplane coming out there,
and could they follow him?
And we needed the Kimeses, if they found them,
to arrest them.
Arrest them for that outstanding car theft warrant,
which is how Detective Ed Murray
of the NYPD Fugitive Task Force got involved.
He was part of a sting operation
using Stan the informant as bait.
When Stanley arrived, he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
Okay, was he spooked?
He was scared.
He-he did tell me that he was afraid of Kenny and Sante,
and that they're there to kill him.
Stan arranged a meeting with Sante and Kenny
at the Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
Outside the hotel, there happened to be a street fair
and a huge bustling crowd.
There was a lot of pedestrian traffic going on.
And you know what? It kind of helped
during our surveillance of the hotel.
How'd they show up?
Well, we waited about eight hours.
Good Lord.
At around 5:00 PM, they decided to call it a day.
Sante and Kenny were clearly no shows.
We're standing in the lobby of the hotel,
and, uh, we're trying to come up with a plan.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden, I hear this screeching woman
yell out, "Stanley!"
It was Sante.
She walked through that hotel lobby
as if she owned the place.
And she comes over to Stanley.
She embraces Stanley.
Kenny was running late,
so Sante and Stan grabbed a drink,
took a walk on 6th Avenue, and then Kenny arrived.
Time to move in.
One of the agents grabbed Sante, took her bag.
I saw there were, like, five agents struggling
with-with Kenneth.
- Couldn't take him down. - Couldn't take him down.
And then we got him down.
I searched Kenneth,
and he had a set of brass knuckles.
He had a knife on him.
As we were struggling with him,
he, uh, he urinated in his pants,
wet his pants.
Finally subdued and cuffed, Kenny and Sante were driven
downtown for questioning.
Ed Murray rode up front, holding Sante's bag.
What was in the bag?
What was in the bag was a lot of cash.
I said to my partner,
and Sante is in the back seat of the car.
I say, there's gotta be about $10,000 in cash in here.
Sante responds now. - Okay.
She responds, oh, well, you can't come
to Manhattan on vacation without less than $10,000.
Murray situated the odd pair in that Manhattan jail.
And the next day, the police unit looking
for Irene Silverman, the millionaire widow
missing from her swanky Eastside townhouse,
held their press conference.
Irene Silverman was in good health,
both physically and mentally.
That is when, you may recall, police presented
that sketch of Silverman's missing tenant, Manny Guerin.
And soon after, Murray recognized that man
as the car thief he had just arrested, Kenny Kimes.
And by then, Murray had made another incrimination discovery,
one that tied the Kimes directly to the missing widow.
They had in their possession
identification belonging to Irene Silverman.
Inside Sante's purse, along with the big wad of cash,
was Irene's passport.
And just like that,
two completely separate investigations
suddenly merged into one very big
and very strange case.
We knew we were looking at a homicide investigation
at that point.
Twists and turns aplenty today
in the disappearance of 82-year-old Irene Silverman.
Police are not sure where this investigation is heading.
It turned out the investigation was headed
to New Jersey because the informant Stan Patterson
told police that when Sante and Kenny
were late for that meeting at the Hilton Hotel,
it was because they were stuck in traffic
in New Jersey.
We got the phone numbers from every dumpster that we saw
to find out where they dumped their garbage.
Did any part of you think that she might still be alive?
No. Not me personally, no.
Hovagim was convinced they'd been busy
dumping Irene Silverman's body that morning,
returning to New York just in time
to be arrested
on that unrelated car theft charge.
That arrest came just hours after Irene Silverman
last week was seen.
Impossible not to wonder
if that out of state warrant had arrived
just a few hours earlier,
would Irene Silverman's life have been spared?
Hope is fading tonight that Irene Silverman
will ever be found alive.
But Sante Kimes, now caged with son Kenny
in a downtown jail, was as confident as ever.
And her charm offensive was just getting started.
She fluffed her hair, she tilted her head,
she batted her eyes.
This onslaught of flirtatious energy.
Sante Kimes is-is the--
is a walking contradiction.
It was more than two decades ago
when I met Sante Kimes firstborn son, Kent Walker,
the kid apprentice who went straight.
Kent saw it all, lived it all.
But the big arrest in New York City?
That he learned about from the news.
And...
I had no doubt. I don't.
There was just no doubt. - That they were guilty.
Yeah.
Yeah, I-I didn't want that.
I-I wanted so much for them not to be guilty of this,
you know, uh, but I just--
I had to be honest with myself.
What was it that made you--
about this, that made you so sure?
Well, things had gone terribly wrong,
and I'd become fearful of them.
Um, fearful enough to where I didn't want to be around them
and I didn't want them around me
because I knew-- not to the scope of this.
But I knew they were heading for a fall.
I should have seen it coming.
I didn't.
You always thought they'd just try to con people.
The scams, the cons, you know--
- Shoplifting. - Shoplifting.
And I'm not condoning that.
I mean, that's bad stuff, don't get me wrong.
But there's a far-far cry from stealing some lipstick
or picking up a stereo and-and killing someone.
Investigators, too, were quite sure
that Kenny and Sante Kimes
were behind Irene's sudden disappearance.
They were certain they had a murder case on their hands.
But they just had one big problem.
They could not find Irene's body.
And proving murder could be quite difficult.
But then they recovered that stolen Lincoln,
and it was a gold mine.
There was a lot of things in that car.
Clothes, wigs, a gun, an empty Taser box.
And perhaps most damaging of all,
a stack of Sante's notebooks.
I think she had 15 notebooks of all kinds of things,
Irene's movements.
Then she'd write, like a laundry list,
like shower curtain, handcuffs, stun gun.
From the notebooks, it was obvious
Sante and Kenny targeted Irene for her wealth
and plotted to steal her identity
and drain her fortune.
The big prize was that incredibly valuable townhouse,
not to mention the apartments inside
that rented for 6,000 a month.
That's why they asked Stan to come and join them in New York,
unaware he was now an informant.
Kenny and Sante, they had to--
they knew what they were gonna do with-with--
sadly, with Irene Silverman.
- Sure. - They were going to use
Stanley Patterson as, uh, a person that
was supposed to maintain
the building that Irene Silverman owned.
They found out that Irene owned the building outright.
There was no mortgage left on it.
She owned it.
Um, so that put the scheme in motion.
Then they-- you know, they looked for a notary.
They did their research, I guess, as far as the deed,
obtaining a deed and things like that.
On December 16th, Sante and Kenny Kimes
were charged with murdering Irene Silverman.
They would remain behind bars to await trial.
But Sante was by no means ready to admit defeat,
locked up or no.
I think Sante is one of the most fascinating people
I've ever met.
Back in 1998, CiCi McNair was a private investigator
in New York City.
Sante had assembled a legal team
to fight every one of the charges against her,
and CiCi was brought in to help.
In their first meeting, CiCi saw that jail
had not dimmed Sante one bit.
She came down a long hallway.
She's wearing sort of a gray track suit.
Her hair was black, thick black eyebrows.
And you could see that she really was
a beautiful woman.
I was there with Matthew Wiseman,
who was one of the four lawyers.
And Matthew Wiseman was immediately the focus
of her attention.
She fluffed her hair, she tilted her head,
she batted her eyes.
This onslaught of flirtatious energy.
Sante insisted through her lawyers
that she and her Kenny were as innocent
as newborn babes.
Let's just say with reference to Ms. Silverman,
they deny, uh, categorically all the charges.
We are categorically denying them.
We are being framed.
You've got to help us.
Sante was never anything less than self assured,
absolutely certain of what she was saying.
And this is someone who gets what she wants
because I watched her and she manipulated me.
She would appeal to me
as the only other woman on the case.
The men just don't get it.
You get it.
You're going to save me and my darling Kenny
from the greatest injustice in history of the United States.
And the story just kept getting bigger.
Tips and leads popping up from all the places
Sante had left an impression.
Oh, and of course, Sante had a plan.
She and Kenny were going to play offense
on national TV.
Oh, boy.
It just feels a little unnatural
to anyone on the outside.
By the time Kenny and Sante Kimes
were charged with murder,
they had become household names.
The mother and son made headlines
not just in New York City, but around the whole world.
I'm Tiwa Chang in the Bahamas, following
the trail of Kenneth and Sante Kimes.
That trail led reporters to Douglas Hanna,
the lead investigator at the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
We have a missing man here.
And it appears that this woman has been surrounded
by missing persons.
Hanna knew all about Sante and Kenny Kimes
because two years earlier,
they were the last people seen with a man named
Syed Bilal Ahmed, a man missing ever since.
Mr. Ahmed flew to the Bahamas
to investigate irregularities in Ken Sr.'s accounts.
John Marquis was a journalist in the Bahamas,
and he learned about
Sante's desperate scramble for money
after Ken Sr. died.
Sante had been drawing money from the accounts.
To quickly get at whatever was left of Ken's fortune,
Sante pretended he was still alive
and forged documents to withdraw money
from Ken's offshore Caribbean accounts.
There was just one problem.
Ahmed, a bank auditor, was paying attention,
and he asked to talk to Sante.
Mr. Ahmed was anticipating a fairly conciliatory meeting,
which was aimed primarily at just sorting the matter out
and finding out what was going on.
Ahmed met with Sante and Kenny over dinner.
And when the sun came up the next day,
the phone rang at the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Ahmed was nowhere to be found,
but neither was Sante.
We tried to find a-- to try to find a link,
uh, about what the link was all about.
But the police chief had no idea where she was
until those New York booking photos
made international headlines.
So now Sante and Kenny were suspects in not one or two,
but perhaps three murder investigations.
But from her jail cell, Sante was determined.
She continued to proclaim her innocence
and that they were framed.
And they didn't do it quietly.
She and Kenny started talking to reporters,
including a sit down interview with 60 Minutes.
I was married to a wonderful man.
He was a big old Irishman. Kenny looks a lot like him.
There was the interview on 60 Minutes.
Everybody was talking about it.
There they were, mother and son,
accused murderers, looking a little too intimate.
Sante and Kenny were sitting way too close together
and they were holding hands.
And... it just didn't look
exactly normal for a mother and son
to be sitting that close
or holding hands.
And there was the gushing about
how beautiful his mother was.
I think she's a beautiful person,
spiritually and intellectually
and-and physically.
What was going on here exactly?
Kent saw that TV interview too, of course.
Saw the very public intimacy.
'Cause the 60 Minutes interview,
they're holding their hand and stuff like that.
The whole incest thing, it was weird.
- Yeah, it just-- - I mean, and it's--
And it's Catnip, you know.
I don't believe, and it's not because
I don't want to believe it.
I know it didn't happen.
And I will say this.
Their relationship was not normal.
It was short of sexual, let's put it that way.
I mean, was it intimate? I'm sure it was intimate,
but I don't think it was anything sexual.
Now I asked her about it,
and she said, "Oh, honey, who could--
how could anybody ever say something like that?
I only held Kenny to my breast
when he was a baby to keep him warm.
It's disgusting."
Kenny denied it, too.
And CiCi said she believed Sante...
to a point.
But maybe there is such thing as an emotional incest
where they're so close
that it just feels a little unnatural
to anyone on the outside.
Rhonda was inside for a while.
Saw Sante try to groom Kent
and then succeed with Kenny.
All of his grooming years, he was completely under her.
- Yeah. - She never let him go.
She took him everywhere.
Yes, and this whole so called incestuous thing,
whether it happened or not,
she was-- - Yeah.
It didn't really matter. It was--
They were always like that together.
And I don't-- I have no--
I can't say that any of that happened
because I never saw it. - Yeah.
You know, I'm not saying it didn't, and I'm--
but I never saw it happen like that.
But--
I mean, it's-it's-it's the codependency
that matters, right? - Yes, yes.
He was a victim because he never had
any influence from anyone else.
So a new question now.
Kenny was behind bars, separated from his mother
for the first time in years.
What would Sante's son do left to his own devices?
Next thing I know, he's around my back
with his arm across my neck
and he did say to me, this is a hostage situation.
Welcome back.
Sante and Kenny Kimes were still making headlines,
even from behind bars.
Speaking to reporters,
the oddly affectionate mother and son
insisted they did not kill Irene Silverman.
Now the case was headed to court,
where prosecutors would lay out
a detailed theory of the crime
and reveal an explosive piece of evidence.
Back to Keith Morrison with "The Devil Wore White".
The moment of reckoning had arrived.
The trial of Sante and Kenny Kimes
for murdering Irene Silverman began
in a Manhattan courthouse.
It was a tricky case in a way.
No body and no DNA or other physical evidence
to tie mother and son to the crime.
But Detective Hovagim was feeling
as confident as he could be.
We had such circumstantial, overwhelming evidence
that I knew we'd get a conviction.
I think the DA presented 130 witnesses.
The motive was pure cold-blooded greed,
said the prosecution.
Sante wanted that townhouse.
And so they killed Irene.
And Sante pretended to be Irene,
duping a notary into approving
the legal documents to steal the house.
They got the notary to come in.
They forged a deed. They got her signature.
The notary testified to that,
but where was the deed now?
Well, the jury learned that police had been listening in
on Sante's jailhouse calls.
And so they heard when she asked CiCi
and another private detective to go pick up
a bag she checked at New York's Plaza Hotel.
It sounded urgent.
You have to go and pick up the bag at the Plaza.
You have to go. You have to go.
Hundreds of times.
When the PI went to get the bag,
investigators were right behind.
What was in the bag?
In the bag was the deed to the house.
The most important piece of evidence
that, uh, that we needed.
That's what we were searching for.
That was the nail in the coffin.
A jury found Sante and Kenny Kimes
guilty of 118 charges,
including second degree murder.
Just rang out in the courtroom over and over and over again.
Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
I was so happy when the verdict came
that they were guilty of murder,
but at the same time with a lot of sadness, you know.
Uh, my friend's never coming back.
Kent Walker, the son who escaped,
has been contemplating that awful act for years.
I think at the time they found Silverman,
I think they'd gotten away with so much up to that point
where they didn't have a fear
of going for that big score.
They thought-- they really thought they were
gonna get away with it.
Right after it was over, CiCi went to check on Sante.
I expected tears.
I-I expected hysteria
because of her volatile personality.
And instead of that,
she threw her arms around me
and she just said, we have to start on the appeal.
Kenny's reaction was starkly different.
He was absolutely gray.
Ashen is the perfect word.
He could not believe what had happened
because hadn't his mother told him a thousand times,
we're innocent, we're innocent.
Despite the guilty verdict, crucial questions remained,
like, where and how was Irene murdered?
Only they knew that, and neither would say yet.
Kenny was sentenced to 125 years,
his mother to 120.
Kenny was sent to a prison in upstate New York.
And that's where freelance journalist Maria Zone
went to interview him
while working on a Court TV documentary.
The interview was at noon.
The corrections officer brings me to an empty cafeteria.
There were two chairs.
And Kenny walks in in his prison garb.
And I'm sitting down with my two man crew.
And right away I could tell something was going on,
like his mind was racing.
Are you saying, though, that Mrs. Silverman
was aware that you were sharing
the apartment with your mother?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
And after about 10 minutes, he said,
can I go to the bathroom?
So he went to the bathroom the first time,
asked him a couple of more questions.
10 minutes must have gone by.
Can I go to the bathroom again?
Could we take a break in maybe five or ten minutes?
Then finally, the third time, he said to me,
"Maria, I'm really hungry.
Would you mind getting me something to eat?"
So Maria got a Snickers bar and a water
from a vending machine,
and then she handed them to Kenny.
Big mistake.
It all happened incredibly fast.
Next thing I know he's around my back
with his arm across my neck.
And he did say to me, this is a hostage situation.
The Court TV crew recorded a few seconds of it
until Kenny demanded they stop.
Back, cameraman back!
He was holding a pen to Maria's throat,
the same pen you could see him handling
during the interview.
Maria was terrified,
but like a good reporter, kept asking questions.
I said to him, "Kenny, why are you doing this?"
And he basically said, I want to be extradited
to Can-- to Canada.
My mother is an elderly woman.
She can't live the rest of her life in prison.
He held her there on the floor for hours
while hostage negotiators kept looking for an opening.
And Maria kept talking.
I finally said, do you know how to pray?
And he said, yes.
And he actually was very receptive to it.
I know I needed some comfort.
So we said the Lord's Prayer together.
There was a hostage negotiator
that after we prayed together,
he said to Kenny,
"Kenny, I'm gonna try to help you."
Here is my business card.
And he pulled out a business card
and he reached out to Kenneth.
That was the distraction the authorities needed.
The guards pounced.
They must have just all jumped on him.
And I heard him grunting and groaning,
and I didn't look back.
For his violent stunt,
Kenny got sent to solitary confinement.
And years would pass
before he would see his mother again.
A reunion in an LA courtroom
where a chilling story would come tumbling out.
I got her in the bathtub
and he had his hands around her throat
and he said, I didn't know how long to squeeze.
The Kimes were serving time for killing Irene Silverman,
but the story was far from over.
California was waiting to try them
for the murder of David Kazdin.
Mother and son face the death penalty for that one.
They were extradited to Los Angeles.
I went to see Kenny.
Kent urged his little brother to play
Let's Make a Deal.
I was in Kenny's ear, and I was telling him,
you're not gonna win this one.
You got the death penalty.
Do not put me in the position
where I have to explain to your-your-- my kids
that you've been executed.
Don't do that.
Advice Kenny took.
He agreed to plead guilty if prosecutors
took the death penalty off the table.
And not just for him, but for his mother, too.
It was a no brainer for LA.
We liked the deal, the DA liked it.
Uh, so we made a deal with Kenny.
Sante, however, wasn't quite so flexible.
Confess? Not a chance.
Not even when they told her that her Kenny,
though few would have imagined it possible,
was going to testify against her.
It began in June 2004.
It was theatrics from the start.
Sante was wheeled in in a wheelchair.
This was for dramatic effect,
which is if you know Sante,
her-her life is dramatic effect.
Defense investigator CiCi McNair was there
when Kenny took the stand.
He then told the story of murdering David Kazdin.
Sante was in front in the wheelchair.
And you could hear her sobbing, crying.
As Kenny spoke, a lifetime of loyalty died.
He told the jury it was Sante who decided Kazdin had to go
because Kazdin got wise to their scams.
Sante who ordered him, Kenny, to do it.
And so, of course, Kenny went,
and took his pistol when he presented
his smiling face at Kazdin's door.
He recognized Kenny, and so he let Kenny in.
So Kenny walked in and I think Mr. Kazdin
offered him some coffee or something.
And, uh, when Mr. Kazdin turned around in the kitchen,
that's when Kenny took the gun
and shot him in the back of the head.
And then he heaved Kazdin's body
into that dumpster by the airport.
And...
Then on the way home to see Mom,
Kenny stopped and bought
a hundred dollar bouquet of flowers to give to her
to celebrate the job accomplished.
Kind of a window into how sick their minds were.
Oh, but there was more.
Kenny described exactly how he and his mother
murdered Irene Silverman.
His mother came in to Irene's bedroom,
turned on the television.
They hit her with a stun gun.
They got her in the bathtub
and he had his hands around her throat.
And he said, I didn't know how long to squeeze.
After, said Kenny, he put Irene's body
in the trunk of that stolen Lincoln
and dumped it in a trash bin
in Hoboken, New Jersey,
and drove back to Manhattan just in time to be
arrested with his mother.
It was horrifying to hear.
I was viscerally affected
by... this description.
And Kenny had one more story to tell.
This one about that missing banker in the Bahamas,
Syed Ahmed.
Last seen having dinner with Kenny and Sante,
last meal of his life.
They spiked his drink.
They had already filled the bathtub
because they knew they were gonna drown him.
And when he passed out from drinking,
Kenny takes him into the tub.
But he says, as soon as I put
his head underwater and held him,
he said the fight was on.
Mmm!
He said, that guy was stronger than what I thought.
- Yeah. - It was a bigger battle
than I thought.
But eventually he was able to drown him.
God, you can just imagine that scene, huh?
I know, I know.
So was he sorry for his crimes?
Is that why he offered his confession?
Kenny's brother didn't think so.
His confession was not exoneration.
It was purely self-serving.
It was, you know, best he can do at the time.
Sante was convicted
and sentenced to life without parole
and installed in New York's Bedford Hills Prison,
there to spend the rest of her days,
though not quietly.
I went up to see her,
and you would think she would claim that
her son had turned against her by confessing.
And instead of that,
she said, Kenny saved my life.
He saved my life.
But we didn't do it.
This is the greatest miscarriage of justice
in American history.
Defiant as usual.
But for the victims families,
at least the not knowing was over.
Except not quite.
There is one more story.
This one happened back when Kenny Jr. was still a teenager,
and not yet a killer.
It's the story about that other son named Ken
and his father Elmer.
I think he just got caught up in a situation
he didn't know how to get out of.
Elmer Holmgren, the down on his luck lawyer
Sante somehow persuaded
to burn her house down in Hawaii
for the insurance of course.
Except the Feds got wind of it
and Holmgren decided to cooperate, wear a wire.
He was working with the ATF, you know,
to implicate the Kimes on this.
But then, Ken Holmgren is sure,
Sante and Kenneth Sr. found out,
and they took Elmer on a little holiday to Costa Rica.
He was never seen again.
My father was gone, and I mean mysteriously gone.
Murdered, his son believes.
So there was never a trial, there was never a charge,
there was never anything having to do
with your dad.
Does that matter to you a lot?
It did at the time.
You know, the ATF agent said, well, they're gonna be
in prison for the rest of their lives.
What difference does it make?
Well, it made a difference to me
and it made a difference to the family too.
Sure, Elmer Holgren's name would have been there
as somebody whose death
had been... accounted for
and some kind of justice done.
Correct, yes.
Justice.
Kenny Kimes has had more than two decades in prison
to reflect on that,
and to make sense of the broken life and love
he shared with his mother.
I find that very interesting actually, Kenny,
that-that you can say you love your mother,
uh, that you-- - I love--
I love my mom and dad forever.
And now in his first TV interview in decades,
he's going to try to explain.
Even in prison, Sante Kimes could seem
glamorous and terrifying.
I feared for my life.
- For a long time? - For years.
Rhonda Martin, Kent's high school girlfriend,
finally got the new with everyone else in 2014.
After 16 years behind bars, Sante Kimes died.
Are you more comfortable now?
Yes, because she's dead.
Wow, that's saying something, isn't it?
A woman who charmed and harmed,
whose death, even for the son who ran from her
all those years ago,
was very, very hard.
I knew I was the only person on this planet
that would feel pain from it
and no one else could understand why.
And, you know,
one thing I'll never apologize for
is loving my mother.
Though there is Kenny.
So Kent is not the only son to feel the pain.
I still carry a lot of guilt with Kenny.
I-I mean, it's my biggest regret
not trying harder to-to pull him from that grasp.
But, um, I was outmatched.
Mom's stronger than me in that department.
The R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility,
San Diego, California.
Today, Kenny Kimes is a middle aged man
serving his time in a prison in San Diego.
Hello, good morning.
He agreed to speak with us on the phone,
which is what the California prison system allows.
This would be his first recorded interview
since the day he took that Court TV reporter hostage
a quarter century ago.
And it was a much different Kenny this time.
The first thing I want to say is
that I absolutely regret my past
and the ignorance of my past crimes.
Uh, it makes me want to do better
and makes me want to engage in what I would call
tangible contrition.
This was his reason for talking to us,
to tell us he had come up with,
on his own, a grand idea.
If I can prove
the ability to raise a million or more
for San Diego Unified for education,
could I do basic military training on film
while in custody?
This could help teachers, kids, the military and prisoners.
That-that's what I'd like to do.
Just how did this convicted killer plan
to raise a million while in prison for life?
Well, he isn't exactly sure about that, he said.
It was that kind of conversation,
friendly with some kind of limit, we sensed, coming soon.
Is there anything that you would like to say now
to the families of those people,
to the survivors of those people
that would be-- - I'm sorry.
100%. 100%, I'm sorry.
My answer is I am sorry, and I was an idiot.
And my ignorance I'm ashamed of.
Mind you, he said it was his mother who did it,
who made him a killer.
There was a--
There's was a lot of chaos in that youth, uh, Keith.
- Yeah. - And when-when you...
live an isolated life, and-and-and I was isolated,
I only saw one road forward.
And I-I-I didn't have a support system.
I didn't have an escape valve.
So her fault?
Well, yes, and yet...
I-I love my parents,
but there's a lot of complexity there.
I find that very interesting, actually, Kenny,
that-that you can say you love your mother,
uh, that you-- - I love-I love my mom and dad.
Forever, before God, I love my mom and dad.
Yeah, and-and-and have those positive feelings
toward them, even though your mother
was the one who instructed you to, uh, kill people.
I mean, it's-it's, um--
it's-it's something for people to wrap their heads around.
Uh, I'd like to wrap my head around it.
I-- Your perspective and my perspective
and anyone's perspective-- - Uh-huh.
...is the culmination of-of their existence.
And-and I choose to not focus
on the negative elements of my parents.
And that's-- that is just what-what feels right
and appropriate to me, Keith.
Still friendly, but his mood
seemed to have changed.
When your mother died, was that very difficult for you?
It hurt like hell.
It hurt. And-and, uh--
There's just nothing I can do about it but pray.
He was baptized a Catholic in prison, he told us.
Then I probed a little more about his mother,
rather gently,
and the conversation grew strained.
Well, I was just curious to know if-if your mother,
like you, um, uh, came to regret her crimes
and-and-and, uh, tried to achieve her own
kind of redemption
or whether she was just, you know, Sante all the way
along to the end.
- I don't know. - Don't know?
I-I don't know, Keith. I'm-I'm sorry.
Yeah, there was no-- they-they cut off all--
- Can I take--? - Yeah?
Could-could we take--
Keith, could we take a little break real quick?
Yeah, yeah.
And that was that.
But as we tried to understand why
that would be a trigger for a hang up,
Kenny called back to tell me
he didn't want to talk about his mother anymore.
I-I don't want to go
into my-my family in-in a media venue.
I'm gonna keep my laundry to myself.
All right.
I, uh, maybe in the future, we could talk about
more rehabilitative elements and so forth,
and I-and I-I hope that could happen.
By which he meant his pitch to raise a million dollars
for education, his "tangible contrition".
I think that maybe I can pay for my crimes
by supporting education.
But there is one more bit of family laundry,
and it is still unwashed.
Your brother, Kent,
the last time I talked to him, he-he talked about
how he regrets not being able
to help rescue you from that situation.
Is that something that bothers you, too?
I-I-I wish Kent well.
I just-- I wish he would have done a little more.
In the Kimes family saga,
the what ifs seem never ending.
As do the questions.
But after 35 years, Elmer Holmgren's son
finally learned some truth.
This past January, three cold case detectives
showed up at Ken Holmgren's door,
autopsy photos in hand.
It was a definite. That was my dad.
Elmer's body was found not in Costa Rica,
as Ken had long believed, but in a dumpster near LAX,
Just like David Kazdin.
Elmer's body had been unidentified for decades.
He was found on February 19th, 1991,
maybe four or five days after I talked to him last.
Now, all these years later,
genetic genealogy led investigators to Ken.
They told him his dad's killer was probably a woman
and very likely Sante herself.
Even the coroner didn't think it was a man
landing those blows.
They felt a man would have inflicted
a lot deeper wounds.
And though they're still investigating,
it feels like a resolution to Ken.
There's a lot of times over 35 years
where you just, you know,
your mind kind of runs wild.
It's nice to be able to put it to rest.
But Kent can't ever put it all to rest,
not completely, though he is trying.
Kent told us he doesn't visit Kenny often.
Not sure he wants to anytime soon,
because for one thing,
that contrition Kenny talked about,
Kent is a skeptic.
I still don't believe he has regret for what he did,
which is hard for me.
The sons of Sante Kimes,
that magnetic criminal homicidal mother,
that tireless teacher of grift and chaos and violence,
one who killed for her, locked up for a lifetime.
The other focused on gratitude
for escaping her lethal orbit
to find a life that's full and a little more boring.
You know, life among the cons is a lot more exciting
than life among the marks.
And I'm looking back now, 25 years later.
Um, it feels good to be bored once in a while.
It-it-it's okay, you know.
It's a normal state of things.
Yeah, I-I didn't know what normal was.
Yeah.
My normal was different than everyone else's.
Um, I like it this way a lot better.
That's all for this edition of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin. Thank you for watching.