The Devil Wore White - Update

Summary

Dateline NBC – "The Devil Wore White: Update" (June 2, 2026)

Detailed Episode Summary

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Main Theme & Purpose

This special Dateline episode dives deep into the incredible true-crime saga of Sante Kimes and her son, Kenny Kimes—a darkly fascinating mother-son criminal duo. With new updates and interviews, Dateline revisits their notorious crime spree spanning decades and continents: from arson and grifting, to multiple murders. The episode tells their story through the personal lens of family members, investigators, and the victims’ loved ones—unpacking their manipulation, the devastation they wrought, and the devastating legacy left behind. New revelations include the fates of Kimes family members and the victims, with particular focus on recent developments and emotional reckonings.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Rise of Sante Kimes – Grifter, Manipulator, and "Ultimate Femme Fatale"

• Background: Sante Kimes, born in 1934 (possibly Oklahoma), built a life on elaborate lies and cons. Her criminal inclination began early, teaching her son Kent the basics of theft and deception as a child.

  • Kent Walker: “Our refrigerator up until that point was peanut butter and tortillas and cheese. That was it. … She was training me how to do that.” (19:32)

• A Charismatic Predator: Sante’s beauty, ambition and manipulative powers made her both alluring and dangerous.

  • CeCe McNair: “I just see Sante Kimes as the ultimate femme fatale. Seducing lovers, lawyers, husbands, her son.” (01:23)

• Marriage into Wealth: Using an assignment at "Palm Springs Millionaire" magazine, Sante wed real estate millionaire Kenneth Kimes, setting the stage for greater schemes, including high-society cons and insurance fraud. The family’s lavish lifestyle served as the perfect front for criminal ambitions (21:00-22:53).

Family Patterns: The Making of Kenny Kimes

• Kent's Early Exit: Kent Walker, Sante’s eldest son, actively participated in petty crimes as a child, but left the fold in young adulthood, alarmed by his mother’s escalating recklessness and violence.
• Kenny, the "Golden Child": With Kent gone, Sante turned her attention to Kenny—isolating, tutoring, and grooming him as her perfect accomplice.
  • Kent Walker: “Brother Kenny didn’t have a chance, not with his mother.” (31:33)
  • Rhonda Martin: “He had no friends. He had a tutor… she hardly would ever let us take him anywhere.” (31:21)

Escalation to Violence: The Silverman and Kazdan Murders

• The Disappearance of Irene Silverman (1998, NYC)

  • Irene Silverman was an 82-year-old socialite, beloved by her tenants and friends. When she disappeared after a July 4th party, the disappearance sparked a massive investigation.
  • Suspicion quickly centered on a mysterious tenant, "Manny Guerin," and his female companion—soon revealed as Kenny and Sante Kimes. Evidence (blood, missing cash, suspicious behaviors) pointed to foul play.
    • Detective Tom Hovigam: “We found all kinds of things. Garbage bags, a roll of duct tape, shower curtain rings…” (13:12)
  • The pair’s intent was not just theft—they meticulously plotted to steal not just Silverman’s fortune, but her very identity and property.

• Discovery of Their Past: Cross-Country Crimes

  • Kenny and Sante were arrested on a car theft warrant, but police soon discovered links to another murder: David Kazdan, a former friend whose body had been found in a dumpster near LAX. Kasdan was killed after he threatened to expose their financial fraud involving a Las Vegas property.
    • Detective Bill Cox: “She went down to a bank, Mrs. Kimes did, and...tricked the bank into taking a loan out of Mr. Kazdan.” (40:21)
  • Sante’s reach and ruthlessness shocked investigators.
    • Detective Bill Cox: "She is the most evil woman that I've ever met." (09:28)

The Evidence & Trial

• Case-Building Without a Body: Despite compelling circumstantial evidence and damning notebooks seized from Sante (53:53-54:25), police never located Irene Silverman’s remains.
• Forensic Breakthrough: Through persistent detective work (e.g., finding Silverman’s passport in Sante’s bag), the case pivoted from missing person to homicide.
• Trial Spectacle: At trial, prosecutors presented overwhelming circumstantial evidence, including a forged deed to Silverman’s townhouse which police recovered from a bag at the Plaza Hotel.
  • Detective Tom Hovigam: “In the bag was the deed to the house. The most important piece of evidence... That was the nail in the coffin.” (66:09)
• Verdicts: Sante and Kenny were pronounced guilty on 118 counts—including second-degree murder, larceny, and conspiracy—sentenced to over 100 years each.

Exclusive Insights & Notable Quotes

• Mother-Son Dynamic: The enigmatic bond between Sante and Kenny fueled both tabloid intrigue and prosecutorial arguments. Their relationship—often described as uncomfortably close, bordering on emotional incest—became a media focal point.

  • Kent Walker: “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.” (61:28)
  • CeCe McNair: “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 the history of the United States.” (56:51)
  • Kenny Kimes: “I love my mom and dad forever, before God. I love my mom and dad.” (82:46)

• Remorse & Aftermath: Now middle-aged and incarcerated in California, Kenny Kimes gave his first recorded interview in decades—finally expressing regret and pondering the origins of his crimes.

  • Kenny Kimes: "The ignorance of my past crimes makes me want to do better and…want to engage in...tangible contrition." (80:39)
  • Kenny Kimes: “100% I'm sorry. My answer is I am sorry. And I was an idiot and my ignorance, I'm ashamed of, mind you.” (81:54)
  • When asked about the influence of his mother: “When you live an isolated life…I only saw one road forward and I didn’t have a support system.” (82:09)

• The Family Legacy: Kent Walker, deeply conflicted, expresses relief at escaping Sante’s grip—but lingering sorrow at losing his brother.

  • Kent Walker: “I still carry a lot of guilt with Kenny. I mean, it’s my biggest regret not trying harder to pull him from that grasp. But I was outmatched. Mom’s stronger than me in that department.” (80:01)
  • Kent Walker: "It feels good to be bored once in a while. It's okay, you know." (87:51)

New Revelations & Updates

• Resolution in Cold Case: Genetic genealogy revealed the fate of Elmer Holmgren, a lawyer Sante once manipulated into committing arson. His remains, missing for 35 years, were finally linked to Sante as the probable killer.

  • Ken Holmgren: “He was found on February 19, 1991, maybe four or five days after I talked to him last.” (86:14)
  • Lester Holt: “Genetic genealogy led investigators to Ken…His dad’s killer was probably a woman, very likely Sante herself.” (86:22)

• Direct Admissions: Kenny eventually confessed, detailing how he and Sante murdered Irene Silverman and David Kazdan, as well as a Bahamian banker, Syed Ahmed—solidifying not just their guilt, but their utter coldness.

  • CeCe McNair: "He had his hands around her throat and he said, I didn't know how long to squeeze." (73:58; 74:17)
  • Detective Bill Cox (on Ahmed): “They spiked his drink. They had already filled the bathtub...and when he passed out...Kenny takes him into the tub...it was a bigger battle than I thought. But eventually he was able to drown him.” (74:54)

• Closure for Some, Not All: Families of victims, notably Irene Silverman and Elmer Holmgren, finally got answers after decades, but for Kent and Kenny, the family trauma lingers on.

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Memorable Quotes by Segment

• "She is the most evil woman that I've ever met." — Detective Bill Cox (09:28)
• "She was over the top…How do you tell the story and not be over the top?" — Kent Walker (09:32)
• "I love my mom and dad forever, before God." — Kenny Kimes (82:46)
• "No one answers the phone and no one answers the door. Do you got that?" — Rhonda Martin recalling Sante (22:01, 28:36)
• "That's who she was. Why did she do this? Because that's what she was." — Kent Walker on Sante's compulsion (26:10)

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Major Timestamps & Segments

• Sante’s Early Scams, Family Dynamics – 19:15–24:09
• Lifestyle and Early Crimes in Hawaii, Vegas, D.C. – 22:21–26:34
• The Silverman Case Unfolds – 4:59–16:47
• Kimes' Arrest and Police Insights – 43:13–47:24
• Emotional Fallout and Family Testimonies – 78:54–88:05
• New Evidence and Kenny’s Prison Interview – 80:12–84:17
• Closure on the Holmgren Case – 85:59–86:46

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Tone & Storytelling Style

The narrative weaves together chilling, blackly comic anecdotes and trauma with first-person honesty and reflection. It balances tight investigative reporting with the emotional fallout for those left behind—using measured, sometimes wry narration (Lester Holt, Keith Morrison) and raw candor from family members and detectives.

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Conclusion

“The Devil Wore White – Update” offers an engrossing, multifaceted look at the Kimes family’s criminal legacy: a testament to Sante’s virulent charisma and control, the generational wreckage she caused, and the enduring questions left in her wake. With new interviews, never-before-heard confessions, and long-awaited forensic break-throughs, this episode not only revisits the headline-grabbing crimes but also, with empathy and restraint, considers what survives in the aftermath—for families, investigators, and even the perpetrators themselves.

Transcript

[Lester Holt]

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[Kent Walker]

Tonight on Dateline.

[CeCe McNair]

I just see Sante Kimes as the ultimate femme fatale. Seducing lovers, lawyers, husbands, her son.

[Kent Walker]

A whole new twist in a case chock full of them.

[CeCe McNair]

This is someone who gets what she wants.

[Maria Zone]

This story about a mother and son grifter team. This was a diabolical duo.

[Lester Holt]

They seem, what, like open and friendly and interesting.

[Detective Ed Murray]

Yeah, I didn't think they were killers.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We have a woman socialite goes missing.

[CeCe McNair]

There were several people who've disappeared.

[Rhonda Martin]

She had put a hit out on me. She wanted me killed. Why did she keep getting away with it?

[Kent Walker]

She just had that power over me. That was Mom's first protege. I was supposed to be her cohort in crime.

[Lester Holt]

Your mother instructed you to kill people?

[Kenny Kimes]

I only saw one road forward.

[Kent Walker]

They were called Mommy and Clyde. Charming, cunning, ice cold criminals. Now, a new chapter in the story.

[Ken Holmgren]

They left a trail of bodies. I knew I was my dad.

[Kent Walker]

I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's keith morrison with the devil wore white.

[Lester Holt]

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 passed. The outrages, the mayhem, the murders and the fabulous, fierce, frightening madness that was the woman named Sante Kimes. Are you more comfortable now?

[Rhonda Martin]

Yes, because she's dead.

[Lester Holt]

And that was the deciding factor. She had to be dead.

[Rhonda Martin]

She had to be dead.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

There's probably not another son on this planet who loved his mother as much as I loved mine.

[Lester Holt]

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?

[Kenny Kimes]

It hurt like hell. There's just nothing I can do about it but pray.

[Lester Holt]

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 fleet fireworks spectacular at 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.

[Zhang Toi]

She's vivacious, she's a lot of fun.

[Lester Holt]

Fashion designer Zhang Toi was a close friend and frequent party guest.

[Zhang Toi]

She know how to throw up a great party during her heyday and she had the heart of gold.

[Lester Holt]

Friend Janice Herbert also loved Irene's company.

[Rhonda Martin]

She's delightful, she's funny. I adored her.

[Lester Holt]

Someone described her as an Auntie Mame

[Rhonda Martin]

and that's exactly what she was. She was absolutely fabulous.

[Lester Holt]

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 Shaka Khan.

[Zhang Toi]

She lived by herself. She rented just for fun and to also keep herself company.

[Lester Holt]

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 Hovigam was working his shift. Tell me about July 5th. You were on duty. What was that like?

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

Yeah, 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.

[Lester Holt]

The missing elderly woman was Irene Silverman.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

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. It's very tedious work.

[Lester Holt]

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 was that like?

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

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.

[Lester Holt]

She was living the grand life, that woman.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

Absolutely 100%.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We did the preliminary investigation, searched the townhouse, searched the surrounding areas, looked for video cameras, interviewed neighbors, but no sign of Irene.

[Lester Holt]

And curiously, two other people seem to have vanished, too.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

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.

[Lester Holt]

The other missing person was a young man who was renting a room on the first floor.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We couldn't find the person in 1B. He disappeared the same time she did. You know, that raised our suspicion, of course. Yes.

[Lester Holt]

Though not alarmingly yet. But then outside, near the front entrance, they found blood. And Tom Hovigam's missing person case suddenly became urgent.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

When you get a person on the Upper east side like Irene Silverman, it becomes very special. The whole city takes an interest.

[Lester Holt]

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?

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

Not even close.

[Lester Holt]

What would follow and what came before is a story, when all told of crimes astonishing in scale and scope.

[Maria Zone]

Next thing I know, he's around my back with his arm across my neck.

[Lester Holt]

Stretching from New York to la, a

[CeCe McNair]

transient found David Kasdan's stuffed into a dumpster.

[Lester Holt]

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

[Rhonda Martin]

you, she could look into your soul.

[Detective Bill Cox]

She is the most evil woman that I've ever met.

[Kent Walker]

How do you tell the story and not be over the top. She was over the top.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

The boss who was running the investigation dubbed us the Silver Task force because we all had an affection for Irene, because it could have been our grandmother, could have been our mother.

[Lester Holt]

Irene's friends, like fashion designer Zhang Toi, were worried sick.

[Zhang Toi]

It was getting late. Everybody was worried. My first thought was that I was just praying. I was hoping that they would probably kidnap someone.

[Lester Holt]

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 Hovagam learned he was a longtime employee with access to Irene's financial records. He'd boarded a flight to Atlanta shortly after she vanished.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

He had gone away, but once we got him and brought him in, we eliminated him pretty quickly.

[Lester Holt]

He was innocent, just like the rest of Irene's staff.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We went through the motions of interviewing him and getting their alibis. It wasn't anyone on the staff.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

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.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

He was very secretive.

[Lester Holt]

She felt that something was wrong, and she was worried about it.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

She was smart enough to write everything down in detail about this guy's suspicious behavior.

[Lester Holt]

What kind of behaviors.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

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, five, nine, about 180 pounds. She was a sharp woman, man.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

Nobody know who she was.

[Lester Holt]

Because that's the reason that they not

[Zhang Toi]

let nobody go inside, so they don't see her.

[Lester Holt]

An unknown woman in there. That was it for Irene. She told friends she wanted Manny Guerin to leave.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

She was going to evict him. Right. You know, right around the time she disappeared.

[Lester Holt]

So police searched the room Manny Guerin had been renting.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We found all kinds of things. Garbage bags, a roll of duct tape, shower curtain rings, but no shower curtain. Things like that. Which raised our suspicion.

[Lester Holt]

On Monday night, July 6, Hovagam's unit asked the public for help to find Irene Silverman and her suspicious missing tenant.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We posted pictures of Irene Silverman. We had a sketch done of Manny Guerin. We had a news conference where we posted the sketch.

[Lester Holt]

The next day, Irene Hovagam 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.

[Detective Ed Murray]

No doubt in my mind that was him.

[Lester Holt]

Ed Murray was a detective working for the NYPD's Fugitive Task Force. When he saw the sketch of Manny Garon, he said he knew right away who it was, and it wasn't Manny Guerin.

[Detective Ed Murray]

I see that picture, and it's exactly a composite sketch of Kenny Kimes.

[Lester Holt]

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 Town Car back in Utah. An unusual pair, those two.

[Detective Ed Murray]

It was something that I just didn't think it was like mother and son.

[Lester Holt]

Like she was the boss and he was.

[Detective Ed Murray]

Well, she was. She definitely. Without a doubt, she was.

[Lester Holt]

So one department talked to the other, and pretty soon, Detective Hovingham was showing Kenny Kime's booking photo to Irene's employees.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

And then when we did the photo array of Kenny, the staff picked him out, saying, yeah, that's Manny Yerin.

[Lester Holt]

In that moment, there was no way, of course, for Detective Hovigam to fathom just who he was dealing with, where this Kenny Kimes and his mother, Sante had already been. And what they had. Insurance is not one size fits all. That's why drivers of trusted progressives name your price tool for years. Just tell progressive what you want to pay, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Visit progressive.com to find a car insurance rate that works for you. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law.

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[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

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's been arrested before and that she's manipulative and she's manipulating you.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

Hope is fading tonight that the suspect

[Lester Holt]

in her disappearance, a missing person who vanished from her million dollar home when

[Kent Walker]

they first got arrested. It is no exaggeration. Within the first 10 days, I had a hundred news agencies attack my office looking for me. You guys, NBC, abc.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

She had a force. It was a force we were reckoned with.

[Lester Holt]

Oh, yes. Kent's mother, Sante Kimes, was a woman of many names and many schemes. Every body 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.

[Kent Walker]

The original story was that she was born in Oklahoma, was one of the Okies. She ended up in Hollywood.

[Lester Holt]

True? Maybe, maybe not. As Sante told it, her father abandoned the family.

[Kent Walker]

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.

[Lester Holt]

So she made up a story.

[Detective Bill Cox]

Oh, the whole.

[Kent Walker]

My mother's entire life's made up. You know, you get that one little Germa truth. She always started out with that kernel that you can believe. That's probably honest.

[Lester Holt]

But as Kent learned as a little boy, his single mom knew how to survive, no matter how straitened their circumstances.

[Kent Walker]

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.

[Lester Holt]

As for the way Sante survived, well, 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.

[Kent Walker]

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 and said to her, while she did her thing, she was training me how to do that.

[Lester Holt]

And somehow Sante got away with it again and again. And young Kent looked at her with a kind of awe.

[Kent Walker]

She didn't bow down to anybody out

[Lester Holt]

in the world, out in public, people noticed Sante, and she liked it.

[Kent Walker]

I think the name of the restaurant was A Cock and Bull. It was in Hollywood. I don't think it was anymore. Yeah, we were sitting at the bar, and Gal came up to her and asked her for her autograph. And mom signed it Elizabeth Taylor.

[Lester Holt]

Elizabeth Taylor.

[Kent Walker]

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,

[Lester Holt]

the mouth, and then pure, corrupt ambition. Sante's charisma changed their lives for good.

[Kent Walker]

The truth is, mom was on a hunt for a millionaire.

[Lester Holt]

In 1970, Santa 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

[Kent Walker]

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.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Rhonda Martin]

No one answers the phone and no one answers the door. Do you got that? And I just went, oh, yeah, I got that.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

In the house in Hawaii, we had a secret storage spot in the master bedroom. She had 30 mink coats. I've never seen anyone wear a mink coat in Hawaii. I don't know if you have or not.

[Lester Holt]

Sante at last seemed to have the life she wanted.

[Rhonda Martin]

She always called me my darling Rhonda.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Rhonda Martin]

And she would hug me. And my son has such a beautiful girlfriend. She would just lavish me with love. Stop.

[John Doughty]

You look good.

[Rhonda Martin]

She always wore white muumus at home, pantsuits and just beautiful. And she always had her hair perfect. I mean, it was always perfect. Her eyes were black. Her pupils, they were piercing. When she looked at you, she could look into your soul.

[Lester Holt]

And she knew exactly what she wanted. Let's do it, sweetheart.

[CeCe McNair]

I'm the director.

[Lester Holt]

Made sure everyone else did, too.

[CeCe McNair]

One, two, three, camera. Action.

[Lester Holt]

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 hate, participate willingly in her crimes.

[Kent Walker]

He didn't mind not having to pay for dresses. He didn't mind not having to pay for Cadillac Baritz El Dorados in our driveway. He fell in love with the getting away with it.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

She got an endorsement where Ken was actually named an honorary Bicentennial ambassador. Well, that's all you need to give, Mom.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

Secret Service let him ride through. And then they said, well, who are you?

[Lester Holt]

The weird stunt was exposed in the Washington Post. Just a hiccup for Zonte. DC again a few years later. It was late and this couple came through the door. And they were so distinctive you couldn't miss them. Winter 1980. Rena Beachy was enjoying a nightcap at a Washington D.C. bar when Ken and Sante swept in. Rena 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.

[Kent Walker]

That's who she was. Why did she do this? Because that's what she was.

[Lester Holt]

Sante's ambitions only seemed to get bigger. Like what she did with her own beautiful beachfront home in Hawaii. No one was home when the Portlock house burned yesterday. Burned it to the ground to collect the insurance money. But she was much too clever to actually do it herself.

[Ken Holmgren]

My father was involved in a arson in Honolulu.

[Lester Holt]

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 Kaimes house in Honolulu?

[Ken Holmgren]

I assume the Kimes wanted him to do it. You know it was for the Kimes gain.

[Lester Holt]

If anyone knew how persuasive Sante could be, it was Kent.

[Kent Walker]

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 know how to scare the hell out of you.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

I thought I was going to go to jail.

[Lester Holt]

So Kent tried his best to go straight. Maybe the difference between you and your mother is if you get a. If you get caught stealing a surfboard, it scares you straight. If she gets caught stealing a surfboard, it's encouragement for the next time.

[Kent Walker]

She got mad because it 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.

[Lester Holt]

So Sante did nurture, in a way, the criminal way. And she wasn't about to let anyone get between her and her son.

[Rhonda Martin]

A lieutenant from Hawaii 5o showed up at my house. That lieutenant told me, if you contact him, she'll find you and she will kill you.

[Lester Holt]

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

[Rhonda Martin]

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.

[Lester Holt]

This is the first time you saw anything other than the wonderful Elizabeth Taylor person.

[Rhonda Martin]

Exactly. I had never seen that until that day, and that freaked me out.

[Lester Holt]

That day was a turning point for Rhonda and Kent.

[Rhonda Martin]

Kent started talking to me about things his mom would have him do. You know, like, she said, yeah, you know, he was 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 there. I said, you know, if you get caught doing that, you could go to jail.

[Lester Holt]

Rhonda got through to Kent. He refused to help his mom steal anymore. Asante was furious with Rhonda.

[Rhonda Martin]

She called my mom one day and said, you, 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 5o 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.

[Lester Holt]

So Rhonda was gone, and Kent was going straight. After he graduated from high school, Kent left home and later joined the Army.

[Kent Walker]

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.

[Lester Holt]

But then, with Kent out of the house, Zante turned to his half brother, Kenny. Maybe he would make a better partner in crime.

[Kent Walker]

I am my mother's biggest disappointment. I was the one who was supposed to be Kenny.

[Lester Holt]

Kent knew his mother loved Kenny a little bit better, differently.

[Kent Walker]

He was the prince. He was tutored, never got spanked. He was treated as a golden child.

[Rhonda Martin]

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.

[Lester Holt]

He had a very unusual upbringing here.

[Kent Walker]

Brother Kenny didn't have a chance.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

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.

[Lester Holt]

The women complained to law enforcement and in a lawsuit. John Doughty is a private detective who's investigated Sonte's background.

[John Doughty]

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.

[Lester Holt]

Here she is forced to sit for a deposition about the allegations.

[CeCe McNair]

I'm very unhappy with having to give any testimony to you.

[Lester Holt]

It was all a fabrication, said Santa.

[CeCe McNair]

But I have never yelled loudly, and I have certainly never physically touched any of them.

[Lester Holt]

She denied it all.

[CeCe McNair]

No, that is not correct. That is a total lie.

[Lester Holt]

Making herself into the victim.

[CeCe McNair]

I have been through an intolerable nightmare.

[Lester Holt]

The law intervened and laid a criminal charge that hadn't been used for a very, very long time.

[LifeLock Advertiser]

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[Lester Holt]

Kent 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.

[Kent Walker]

I was kind of a surrogate father to Kenny in a way.

[Lester Holt]

And then mom returned and things went back to normal, if such a word could be used for the life of Sante Kimes. Ghent got married, started his own family, made Sante a grandmother.

[CeCe McNair]

Say, honey, give a smile.

[Lester Holt]

This 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.

[CeCe McNair]

Don't take me when I'm sat like

[Lester Holt]

they're at the Kimes beachfront estate in the Bahamas, an address that will come into play a little later in our story.

[Kent Walker]

Last day here. Been a great vacation. Thanks for everything, guys.

[Lester Holt]

Just a few months after that island vacation in 1994, Kent got a call from his mom.

[Kent Walker]

Mom's hysterical. They won't fix them. They won't fix them. They won't fix them. And I had at the time. I'm not putting two and two together. She hangs up.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

Mom didn't have any checkbooks. She had no accounts. She had nothing.

[Lester Holt]

Now she was scrambling for money. The frenzy of it all spooked Kent. He eventually stopped taking her calls.

[Kent Walker]

I had made a break from mom and Kenny. We were estranged. And I miss Mom.

[Lester Holt]

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?

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[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

It was Hard, you know, But I was doing okay.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Bill Cox]

I was working Homicide. The Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Bill

[Lester Holt]

Cox, was also unaware the crimes had 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 the back alley near lax.

[Detective Bill Cox]

There was a homeless man walking down the alley, looking through the garbage cans. Big dumpsters, yeah. Dug through the trash, and there was a big green trash bag in there. And saw that there was a body in there.

[Lester Holt]

The body in the dumpster was a male, middle aged, with a single bullet hole in the back of his head.

[Detective Bill Cox]

He was identified quickly by the coroner's office as being David Kazdan.

[Lester Holt]

David Kasdan. 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.

[Detective Bill Cox]

My partner and I went over to the house. The first thing that we went into his bedroom, we saw that the bed was turned down. And then when we went into the living room area, you look in the carpet, and the carpet was just perfect.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Bill Cox]

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.

[Lester Holt]

And that wasn't the only time, said the daughter. For weeks, somebody had been harassing David Kasdan, 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.

[Detective Bill Cox]

She's the one that brought up right away about Sante Kimes.

[Lester Holt]

Yes, that's Sante Kimes. A little digging revealed the connection. Kasdan 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 Kazdan to put his name on the deed to one of their properties, a mansion on Geronimo Way in Las Vegas.

[John Doughty]

David, you know, reluctantly, I guess, just said, yeah, go ahead, you know, but not for too long. And so they did it. And 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 Shantae because Ken was dead by this time and said, you know, take me off the thing. And she goes, oh, yes, dear, we'll do all this.

[Lester Holt]

But Sante didn't do that. Instead, without telling Kazdan, she came up with a scheme to turn a problem into a money making solution for her. At least.

[Detective Bill Cox]

She went down to a bank, Mrs. Kimes did, and. And she's the one that tricked the bank into taking a loan out of Mr. Kazden. I don't know how she did it. I don't know how the bank allowed her to do it.

[Lester Holt]

Sante got ready to walk away with 280,000, and Kazden was on the hook for it all. And then he discovers he's got to pay back all this money.

[Detective Bill Cox]

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.

[John Doughty]

And so he goes through the roof and basically calls Shantae and says, 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 won't be good for your health.

[Lester Holt]

Kazdan 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.

[Detective Bill Cox]

She was constantly thinking, how am I going to get the next dollar?

[Lester Holt]

It was obvious to detectives that Sante Kimes needed to be questioned about the murder of David Kasdan. And they learned that she and her son were staying in that Brentwood house.

[Detective Bill Cox]

So my partner and I went to the house that night. Just missed them. By hours.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[John Doughty]

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.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Bill Cox]

Every place we went, we. We would miss him. Just by day. Sometimes a day, sometimes just hours. They were constantly moving.

[Lester Holt]

Did she know you were on their tail?

[Detective Bill Cox]

I. Well, I think so.

[Lester Holt]

The mother and the son in that Lincoln were in the wind. And 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. But the fourth of July was right around the corner. And so was a confrontation on a busy street in midtown Manhattan.

[Detective Ed Murray]

One of the agents grabbed Santa, took her bag. I saw there were, like, five agents struggling with Kenneth.

[Lester Holt]

Couldn't take him down.

[Detective Ed Murray]

Couldn't take them down.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kenny Kimes]

There's a lot of chaos in my youth. I love my parents, but there's a lot of complexity.

[Lester Holt]

It was the beginning of summer now, and LAPD Detective Bill Cox had a pretty good idea what happened to David Kasdan. The guy who wound up in the dumpster near the airport knew his suspects, too, but finding them was quite another matter. Sante and Kenny were just gone. And then sleuthing paid off. Detective Cox landed an informant, a guy who'd done odd jobs for Sante in LA and Las Vegas named Stan Patterson.

[Detective Bill Cox]

Stan became basically our eyes and ears because he said Sante would call him once in a while. So we told him, hey, next time she calls, you let us know.

[Lester Holt]

Then, on July 3rd, just before the holiday weekend, the detective's phone rang. It was Stan.

[Detective Bill Cox]

He says that the Kimeses are in New York and they are getting an apartment and they wanted me to manage it.

[Lester Holt]

My, my, my.

[Detective Bill Cox]

And to bring a gun with me when I. When I come out there to New York.

[Lester Holt]

Stan, the informant, agreed to go to New York and help lead police to Santee and Kenny.

[Detective Bill Cox]

We contact nypd, and. 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.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Ed Murray]

When Stanley arrived, he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

[Lester Holt]

Okay. Was he spooked?

[Detective Ed Murray]

He was scared. He did tell me that he was afraid of Kenny and Santi and that they're there to kill him.

[Lester Holt]

Stan arranged a meeting with Santi and Kenny at the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Outside the hotel, there happened to be a street fair and a huge Bustling crowd.

[Detective Ed Murray]

There was a lot of pedestrian traffic going on. And you know what? It kind of helped. During our surveillance of the hotel.

[Lester Holt]

How'd they show up?

[Detective Ed Murray]

Well, we waited about eight hours.

[Lester Holt]

Good Lord. At around 5pm they decided to call it a day. Sante and Kenny were clearly no shows.

[Detective Ed Murray]

We're standing in the lobby, the hotel, and we're trying to come up with a plan.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Detective Ed Murray]

And all of a sudden I hear this screeching woman yell out, stanley.

[Lester Holt]

It was Sante. She walked through that hotel lobby as if she owned the place.

[Detective Ed Murray]

And she comes over to Stanley. She embraces Stanley.

[Lester Holt]

Kenny was running late, so Sante and Stan grabbed a drink and took a walk on 6th Avenue. You and then Kenny arrived. Time to move in.

[Detective Ed Murray]

One of the agents grabbed Santa, took her bag. I saw there were like five agents struggling 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. He urinated in his pants, wet his pants.

[Lester Holt]

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?

[Detective Ed Murray]

What was in the bag was a lot of cash. I said to my partner, and Santee is in the backseat of the car. I say, there's gotta be about $10,000 in cash in here. Santee responds. Now she responds, oh, well, you can't come to Manhattan on vacation without less than $10,000.

[Lester Holt]

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 east side townhouse, held their press conference.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

Irene Silverman was in good health, both physically and mentally.

[Lester Holt]

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 incriminating discovery. One that tied the Kimes directly to the missing widow.

[Detective Ed Murray]

They had in their possession. Possession identification belonging to Irene Silverman.

[Lester Holt]

Inside Sante's purse, along with the big wallet of cash, was Irene's passport. And just like that, two completely separate investigations suddenly merged into one very big and very strange case.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We knew we were looking at a homicide investigation at that point.

[LifeLock Advertiser]

Twists and turns of flying in. The disappearance of 82 year old Irene Silverman.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We got the phone numbers from every dumpster that we saw to find out where they dumped their garbage.

[Lester Holt]

Did any part of you think that she might still be alive?

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

No, not me personally, no.

[Lester Holt]

Hovagam 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 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?

[CeCe McNair]

Hope is fading tonight that Irene Silverman will ever be found alive.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

She fluffed her hair, she tilted her head, she batted her eyes. This onslaught of flirtatious energy.

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[Kent Walker]

Ashantae Kimes is the walking contradiction.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

And I had no doubt, I knew

[Lester Holt]

there was just no doubt that they were guilty.

[Ken Holmgren]

Yeah,

[Kent Walker]

I didn't want that. I wanted so much for them not to be guilty of this, you know, but I just. I had to be honest with myself.

[Lester Holt]

What was it that made you about this, that made you so sure?

[Kent Walker]

Well, things had gone terribly wrong. And I had become familiar, fearful of them. Fearful enough to where I didn't want to be around them, and I didn't want them around me because I knew, nor to the scope of this. But I knew they were heading for a fall. I should have seen it coming. I didn't.

[Lester Holt]

You always thought they'd just try to calm people.

[Kent Walker]

Scams, the cons, you know, shoplifting, Shoplifting. And I'm not condoning that. I mean, it's bad stuff, don't get me wrong. But there's a far cry from stealing some lipstick, picking up a stereo, and killing someone.

[Lester Holt]

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 would be quite difficult. But then they recovered that stolen Lincoln, and it was a gold mine.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

There was a lot of things in that car. Clothes, wigs, a gun, an empty taser

[Lester Holt]

box, and perhaps most damaging of all, a stack of Sante's notebooks.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

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, hand curtain, cuffs, stun gun.

[Lester Holt]

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 6,000amonth. That's why they asked Stan to come and join them in New York, unaware he was now an informant.

[Detective Ed Murray]

Kenny and Santee, they knew what they were gonna do, sadly, with Irene Silverman. They were going to use Stanley Patterson as a person that was supposed to maintain the building that Irene Silverman owned.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

They found out that Irene owned the building outright. There was no mortgage left on it. She owned it. So. 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.

[Lester Holt]

On December 16, 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

[CeCe McNair]

was one of the most fascinating people I've ever met.

[Lester Holt]

Back in 1998, CeCe 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.

[CeCe McNair]

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.

[Lester Holt]

Sante insisted through her lawyers that she and her Kenny were as innocent as newborn babes.

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Let's just say with reference to Ms.

[Detective Ed Murray]

Silverman, they deny categorically, all the charges.

[Lester Holt]

Categorically. Denial.

[CeCe McNair]

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.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

It just feels a little unnatural to anyone on the.

[Lester Holt]

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 that trail led reporters to Douglas Hanna, the lead investigator at the Royal Bahamas Police Force.

[Kent Walker]

We have a missing man here. And it appears that this woman has been surrounded by missing persons.

[Lester Holt]

Hannah 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

[Kent Walker]

flew to the Bahamas to investigate irregularities in Ken Senior's accounts.

[Lester Holt]

John Marquis was a journalist in the Bahamas and he learned about Sante's desperate scramble for money after Ken Sr. Died.

[Kent Walker]

Shanti had been drawing money from the

[Lester Holt]

accounts to quickly get at whatever was left of Ken's fortune. Sante pretended he was still alive and forged documents to his 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.

[Kent Walker]

Mr. Ahmed was anticipating a fairly conciliatory meeting which was aimed primarily at just

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

sorting the matter out and finding out

[Kent Walker]

what was going on.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

We tried to find a. To try to find out about what the link was all about, but the

[Lester Holt]

police chief had no idea where she was until those New York booking photos made international headlines. So now Santee and K. Kenny were suspects in not one or two, but perhaps three murder investigations. But from her jail cell, Sante was determined.

[CeCe McNair]

She continued to proclaim her innocence and

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

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.

[Lester Holt]

There they were, mother and son, accused murderers, looking a little too intimate.

[CeCe McNair]

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.

[Lester Holt]

I think she's a beautiful person spiritually

[Kenny Kimes]

and intellectually and physically.

[Lester Holt]

What was going on here exactly? Kent saw that TV interview too, of course. Saw the very public intimacy cause the

[Kent Walker]

60 Minutes interview, they're holding their hand and stuff like that.

[Lester Holt]

The whole incest thing, it was weird. Yeah. It just, I mean, and it's catnip,

[Kent Walker]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

I asked her about It. And she said, oh, honey, 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.

[Lester Holt]

Kenny denied it too. And Cece said she believed Sante to a point.

[CeCe McNair]

But maybe there is such a thing as an emotional incest where they're so close that it just feels a little unnatural to anyone on the outside.

[Lester Holt]

Rhonda was inside for a while, saw Sante try to groom Kent and then succeed with Kenny.

[Rhonda Martin]

All of his grooming years, he was completely under her. Yeah, she never let him go. She took him everywhere.

[Lester Holt]

Yes. And this whole so called incestuous thing, whether it happened or not, it didn't really matter. They were always like that.

[Rhonda Martin]

And I have no, I can't say that any of that happened because I never saw it. You know, I'm not saying it didn't, but I never saw it happen like that.

[Lester Holt]

But, I mean, it's the codependency that matters.

[Rhonda Martin]

Yes. Yes, he was a victim because he never had any influence from anyone else.

[Lester Holt]

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?

[Maria Zone]

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.

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[CeCe McNair]

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[Lester Holt]

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 away no body and no DNA or other physical evidence to tie mother and son to the crime. But Detective Hovigam was Feeling as confident as he could be.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

We had such circumstantial, overwhelming evidence that I knew we'd get a conviction.

[CeCe McNair]

I think the DA presented 130 witnesses.

[Lester Holt]

The motive was pure, cold blooded, Grave 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.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

They got the notary to come in, they forged the deed, they got her signature.

[Lester Holt]

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 Cece and another private detective to go pick up a bag she checked at New York's Plaza Hotel. It sounded urgent.

[CeCe McNair]

You have to go and pick up the bag at the Plaza. You have to go, you have to go hundreds of times.

[Lester Holt]

When the PI went to get the bag, investigators were right behind what was in the bag.

[Detective Tom Hovigam]

In the bag was the deed to the house. The most important piece of evidence that. That we needed. That's what we were searching for. That was the nail in the coffin.

[Lester Holt]

A jury found Sante and Kenny kimes guilty of 118 charges, including second degree murder.

[CeCe McNair]

Just rang out in the courtroom over and over and over again. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.

[Kent Walker]

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 really thought they were going to get away with it.

[Lester Holt]

Right after it was over, cece went to check on Sante.

[CeCe McNair]

I expected tears, 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.

[Lester Holt]

Kenny's reaction was starkly different.

[CeCe McNair]

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.

[Lester Holt]

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 father, freelance journalist Maria Zone, went to interview him while working on a Court TV documentary.

[Maria Zone]

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

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apartment with your mother?

[Kent Walker]

Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Maria Zone]

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?

[Detective Bill Cox]

Could we take a break?

[Lester Holt]

And maybe five or six, 10 minutes.

[Maria Zone]

Then finally, the third time, he said to me, maria, I'm really hungry. Would you mind getting me something to eat?

[Lester Holt]

So Maria got a Snickers bar and a water from a vending machine, and then she handed them to Kenny. Big mistake.

[Maria Zone]

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.

[Lester Holt]

The core TV crew recorded a few seconds of it until Kenny demanded they stop.

[Detective Ed Murray]

Two handcuffs, one blanket, cameraman back.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Maria Zone]

I said to him, kenny, why are you doing? And he basically said, I want to be extradited to Canada. My mother is an elderly woman. She can't live the rest of her life in prison.

[Lester Holt]

He held her there on the floor for hours while hostage negotiators kept looking for an opening. And Maria kept talking.

[Maria Zone]

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 going to try to help you. Here is my business card. And he pulled out a business card and he reached out to Kenneth.

[Lester Holt]

That was the distraction the authorities needed. The guards pounced.

[Maria Zone]

They must have taken. Just all jumped on him. And I heard him grunting and groaning, and I didn't look back.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

I got her in the bathtub, and he had had his hands around her throat, and he said, I didn't know how long to squeeze.

[Lester Holt]

The Kaimes 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 faced the death penalty for that one.

[Kent Walker]

They were Extradited to Los Angeles. I went to see Kenny.

[Lester Holt]

Kent urged his little brother to play let's make a deal.

[Kent Walker]

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, my kids that you've been executed. Don't do that.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Bill Cox]

We liked the deal, the DA liked it. So we made a deal with Kenny.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

Sante was wheeled in in a wheelchair. This was for dramatic effect, which is if you know Asante, her life is dramatic effect.

[Lester Holt]

Defense investigator CeCe McNair was there when Kenny took the stand.

[CeCe McNair]

He then told the story of murdering David Kasten. Sante was in front in the wheelchair, and you could hear her sobbing, crying as Kenny spoke.

[Lester Holt]

A lifetime of loyalty died, he told the jury. It was so Sante who decided Kazdan had to go because Kazdan 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

[Detective Bill Cox]

Kazdan's door, he recognized Kenny. And so he let Kenny in. So Kenny walked in And I think Mr. Kazdan offered him some coffee or something. And when Mr. Kazdan turned around and they kitchen, and that's when Kenny took the gun and shot him in the back of the head.

[Lester Holt]

And then he heaved Kazdan's body into that dumpster by the airport. And then on the way home to

[Kent Walker]

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. How sick their minds were.

[Lester Holt]

Oh, but there was more. Kenny described exactly how he and his mother murdered Irene Silverman.

[CeCe McNair]

His mother came into 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.

[Lester Holt]

After, said Kenney, 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.

[CeCe McNair]

It was horrifying to hear. I was viscerally affected by this description.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Detective Bill Cox]

They spiked his drink. They had already filled the bathtub because they knew they were going to 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. He said that guy was stronger than what I thought. It was a bigger battle than I thought. But eventually he was able to drown him.

[Lester Holt]

God, you can just imagine that scene, huh?

[Detective Bill Cox]

I know, I know.

[Lester Holt]

So was he sorry for his crimes? Is that why he offered his confession? Kenny's brother didn't think so.

[Kent Walker]

His confession was not exoneration. It was purely self serving. It was, you know, best he can do at the time.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[CeCe McNair]

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.

[Lester Holt]

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, not yet a killer. It's the story about that other son named Ken and his father Elmer.

[Ken Holmgren]

I think he just got caught up in a situation he didn't know how to get out of.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Ken Holmgren]

He was working with the atf, you know, to implicate the Times on this.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Ken Holmgren]

My father was gone, and I mean mysteriously gone.

[Lester Holt]

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?

[Ken Holmgren]

It did at the time. You know, the ATF agent said, well, they're going to 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.

[Lester Holt]

Sure, Elmer Holdgren's name would have been there as somebody whose death had been accounted for and some kind of justice done, correct?

[Ken Holmgren]

Yes, justice.

[Lester Holt]

Kenny Kimes has had more than two decades in prison. 20 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 you can say you love your mother, that you.

[Kenny Kimes]

I love. I love my mom and dad forever.

[Lester Holt]

And now, in his first TV interview in decades, he's going to try to explain.

[Kenny Kimes]

There we go.

[Lester Holt]

Even in prison, Sante Kimes could seem glamorous and terrifying.

[Rhonda Martin]

I feared for my life for a long time.

[Lester Holt]

For years, Rhonda Martin, Kent's high school girlfriend, finally got the news with everyone else. In 2014, after 16 years behind bars, Sante Kimes died. Are you more comfortable now?

[Rhonda Martin]

Yes, because she's dead.

[Lester Holt]

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 years ago was very, very hard.

[Kent Walker]

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.

[Lester Holt]

Though there is Kenny. So Kent is not the only son to feel the pain.

[Kent Walker]

I still carry a lot of guilt with Kenny. I mean, it's my biggest regret not trying harder to pull him from that grasp. But I was outmatched. Mom's stronger than me in that department.

[CeCe McNair]

The R.J. donovan Correctional Facility, San Diego, California.

[Lester Holt]

Today, Kenny Kimes is a middle aged man serving his time in a prison in San Diego.

[Kenny Kimes]

Hello. Good morning.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kenny Kimes]

The first thing I want to say is that I absolutely regret my past and the ignorance of my past crimes makes me want to do better and makes to me want, want to engage in what I would call tangible contrition.

[Lester Holt]

This was his reason for talking to us, to tell us he had come up with, on his own, a grand idea.

[Kenny Kimes]

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.

[Lester Holt]

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 sorry?

[Kenny Kimes]

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.

[Lester Holt]

He said it was his mother who did it, who made him a killer.

[Kenny Kimes]

There was a. There's a lot of chaos in my youth, Keith. And when you live an isolated life, and I was isolated, I only saw one road forward and I didn't have a support system. I didn't have an escape valve.

[Lester Holt]

So her fault. Well, yes.

[Kenny Kimes]

And yet I love my parents, but there's a lot of complexity there.

[Lester Holt]

I find that very interesting, actually, Kenny, that. That you can say you love your mother, that you.

[Kenny Kimes]

I love. I love my mom and dad forever before God. I love my mom and dad And.

[Lester Holt]

And. And have those positive feelings toward them. Even though your mother was the one who instructed you to kill people. I mean, it's. It's.

[Kenny Kimes]

It's.

[Lester Holt]

It's something for people to wrap their heads around. I'd like to wrap my head around it.

[Kenny Kimes]

I. Your perspective and my perspective and anyone's perspective is the culmination of their existence. And I choose to not focus on the negative elements of my parents. And that's. That is just what feels right and appropriate to me.

[Lester Holt]

Still friendly, but his mood seemed to have changed when your mother died. Was that very difficult for you?

[Kenny Kimes]

It hurt like hell. It hurt. And. And. There's just nothing I can do without it but pray.

[Lester Holt]

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 your mother, like you, came to regret her crimes and try to achieve her own kind of redemption or whether she was just, you know, sante all the way along to the end.

[Kenny Kimes]

I don't know. I don't know, Keith. I'm sorry.

[Kent Walker]

There was no.

[Lester Holt]

They cut off.

[Kenny Kimes]

Could we take. Keith, could we take a little break real quick?

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kenny Kimes]

I don't want to go into my. My family in a media venue. I'm going to keep my laundry to my floor.

[Lester Holt]

All right?

[Kenny Kimes]

I. Maybe in the future we can talk about more rehabilitative elements and so forth, and I. I hope that could happen.

[Lester Holt]

By which he meant his pitch to raise a million dollars for education is tangible contrition.

[Kenny Kimes]

I think that maybe I can pay for my crimes by supporting education.

[Lester Holt]

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?

[Kenny Kimes]

I wish Kent well, I just. I wish he would have done a little more.

[Lester Holt]

In the Kaim's family saga, the what ifs seemed never ending. As to 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.

[Ken Holmgren]

It was a definite. That was my dad.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Ken Holmgren]

He was found on February 19, 1991, maybe four or five days after I talked to him last.

[Lester Holt]

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 son herself.

[Ken Holmgren]

Even the coroner didn't think it was a man landing those blows. They felt a man would have inflicted a lot deeper wounds.

[Lester Holt]

And though they're still investigating, it feels like a resolution, said Ken.

[Ken Holmgren]

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.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

I still don't believe he has regret for what he did, which hard for me.

[Lester Holt]

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.

[Kent Walker]

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. It feels good to be bored once in a while. It's okay, you know.

[Lester Holt]

It's a normal state of things.

[Kent Walker]

Yeah. I didn't know what normal was. My normal was different than everyone else's. I like it this way. A lot better. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.

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