Who is sante kimes

The name was an alias used by year-old Kenneth Kimes. Within hours, the police figured out that the mother and son they had in custody were two of the most wanted criminals in the country.

The F. The police in Florida had been investigating them for check fraud and auto theft. The police in Nevada were after them for suspected arson and insurance fraud. The Los Angeles Police Department wanted them for questioning in the murder of David Kazdin, a year-old businessman who was found in a Dumpster near Los Angeles International Airport on March 14, , shot in the head with a.

And the police in the Bahamas had been looking for them in connection with the disappearance of a banker who has been missing since , when he was last seen having dinner with Sante Kimes in a Nassau restaurant. This month, testimony begins in what is expected to be one of the most high-profile courtroom dramas that New York has seen in years, as Kenny and Sante Kimes stand trial in Manhattan, charged with the murder of Irene Silverman.

According to New York prosecutors, the mother and son murdered Silverman as part of an elaborate scheme to steal her town house. Months before Silverman met Kenny Kimes, it is alleged, he and his mother were tracking her movements, investigating her finances, and spying on her.

They are believed to have killed her sometime between A. They suffocated her, police have said, then wrapped her body in a plastic tarp or shower curtain and loaded it into the trunk of the Lincoln Town Car.

When the Kimeses were arrested, N. The police also found in the car a Glock 9-mm. What the police have not found, despite one of the biggest murder investigations in the history of the N. Nor have they found witnesses or any forensic evidence such as fibers or hair that can tie the Kimeses to the murder.

If the prosecution is right, however, and the Kimeses did murder Silverman, they almost committed the perfect crime. But exactly what happened to Silverman is only one of the many mysteries surrounding the Kimeses. But the Barker clan was not nearly as clever as Sante and Kenny Kimes are alleged to be. Described by the police as expert, violent, and icy-cold criminals, the Kimeses are also among the most unusual suspects many in law enforcement have ever seen.

Sante Kimes is no lowrent grifter. She is the widow of a wealthy California motel developer, an articulate, charming, formidable woman who once worked as a Washington lobbyist. Perhaps never in the annals of crime has a woman been suspected of master-minding the breathtaking range of criminal activity ascribed to Sante Kimes—from arson to sophisticated financial fraud to multiple cold-blooded murders.

She has an extraordinary mind [and] she has no limits. She warped him. Even dressed in an old black pantsuit and a wrinkled down jacket, her gray hair swept up in a messy bun, Kimes is striking. Her eyes are dark and intense and emphasized by dramatic, thick black eyebrows. She has an almost regal presence, smiling warmly at her four attorneys, who hover around her as the court officers unlock her handcuffs and remove her jacket.

Just for a moment she turns and glances around the courtroom, then takes her seat at the defense table, adjusts her half-moon glasses, and begins to study a stack of documents her lawyers have brought for her. When Kenny is brought in moments later, also in manacles, wearing a gray-blue shirt, a striped tie, and blue jeans, his mother gives him a radiant, loving smile. Court authorities have insisted that during these hearings and for the trial itself mother and son not be seated next to each other.

They must be separated by at least one of their lawyers. He whispers to her that a strand of hair has fallen out of her bun, and she smiles shyly at him as she reaches back to fix it. At hearings last year they caused a commotion by whispering and touching each other constantly—as they also did in an interview with 60 Minutes , which appeared in September.

During the interview, Sante smiled lovingly at her son, who sat next to her, holding her hand. Hardy is a respected lawyer who gained renown for his aggressive, though unsuccessful, defense of the Reverend Al Sharpton in the recent libel trial stemming from the Tawana Brawley case. Their courtroom behavior has also changed dramatically.

Kenny sits at his end of the defense table, talking with his lawyers or listening to testimony by the law-enforcement officers who arrested him. Sometimes he looks very young and somewhat lost; at other moments, his expression is cold and mocking. His mother, in contrast, is completely in control, as though she were running a corporate board meeting.

She takes notes throughout the proceedings, whispers to her attorneys, and listens intently. When she disagrees with a line of questioning being pursued by one of her lawyers, she passes him a note. When she approves, she smiles a dazzling dimpled smile and blows him a kiss or squeezes his hand. At the end of the day, Kenny is escorted out of the courtroom first. As his mother is conferring with her attorneys, he puts on his ski jacket and then holds his hands out behind his back.

There is a long, rolling click as his handcuffs are locked. In a photograph taken with Vice President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, Kenneth Kimes, then 57 years old, looks like a typical prosperous businessman at a Washington fund-raiser. A tall, mustachioed man with an aquiline nose, he bears a resemblance to the actor David Niven. Next to him, looking terribly happy, if a bit overdressed for a Washington party in a frilly white dress and white mink turban, is his wife-to-be, Sante, then 39 years old.

The two had met three years earlier in Palm Springs. A self-made man, Kenneth had come from an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family of itinerant pickers. He had been divorced in from Charloette Taylor.

She was beautiful and fun, and she catered to him, praised him, and doted on him. Sometimes she hinted that she had royal blood; other times she claimed to be related to one or another show-business personality. For years, the Kimes family was certain of only the barest details: that she too had been born in Oklahoma, and that she had been raised in Carson City, Nevada.

With her, Kimes began to enjoy his life, spending money as he never had. He and Sante bought a magnificent oceanfront house on Portlock Road in Honolulu, rented another in the Bahamas, and owned at least one house in Las Vegas. They had servants in each of them. They were a striking couple, Kenneth at the wheel of Cadillacs and Lincolns, his wife, in big dark wigs, flowing silky pantsuits, and large diamond rings, at his side.

In late , she and Kenneth came up with a scheme to make money from the bicentennial of the American Revolution by selling posters and bumper stickers. Unbelievably, Sante actually then managed to get Kenneth official recognition by the Bicentennial Commission.

She also got him on the program of the Rose Bowl Festival to speak on the subject of patriotism. And by allegedly forging the necessary documents, she arranged an audience for herself and Kenneth in April with the First Lady, Pat Nixon. In February , Sante created a sensation in Washington when, with Kenneth in tow, she crashed four A-list parties in one night, including one at Blair House thrown by the Fords, where the above-mentioned photograph was taken.

Horrified that the Kimeses had managed to slip by the Secret Service, the F. Kimes is a Will Rogers type, a self starter, a tiger. Silverman, a former ballerina, was suspicious of the pair and had been keeping notes herself to document her suspicions. Before their trial, the pair went on television to protest their innocence.

Sante claimed they were being framed by the police and she maintained her story after being convicted. She was sentenced to years for Silverman's death and the pair were due to be extradited to California to face the death penalty for Kazdin's death until Kenneth cut a deal with prosecutors there which involved him confessing to the murder to take the death penalty off the table. In , Kimes began a romantic relationship with write Traci Foust pictured.

She died in January this year from the flu. He now says he understands what he took from his victims because of her.

Had it not been for her son's confession, she would likely have been executed for the killings. In his article on Monday, Kenneth lamented how difficult it was to go against her after years of obedience. My mother would not cooperate, even to save my life.

She insisted that we carry on with our lies of innocence, so I testified against her to save us both. Only now I get to live. I am the Narc who escaped the Needle. I ratted my mom out. Now we get to live. I feel dead already … God have mercy on us. No one else will. Afterwards, Kenneth got in touch with Traci Foust, a writer who had been in touch with him while Sante was still alive to try to learn his story.

With his mother now dead, he said he finally felt free to talk about their twisted relationship. He and Foust's pen pal relationship later turned romantic. It lasted until she died from the flu and pneumonia in January this year. It was only when they fell in love, he said, that he understood what he had taken from his victims' families.

The system did not help me seek out absolution. Love did. I know I created my loneliness. In , while he was awaiting extradition to California to face charges for Kazdin's death, Kenneth took a journalist hostage in prison after she had gone to visit him to conduct an interview.

His only demand was that he did not want his mother to be sent to California to face the death penalty. He was not Sante's only son. She had another with her first husband, her high school sweetheart Edward Walker. Those close to the case of Sante Kimes and her son, Kenny Kimes, open up about the investigation and trial.

While Kenny took the responsibility for three separate murders, he said he did them all for his mother. He claimed she wanted them dead, and he carried out the killings. While most mothers were teaching their children their ABCs or how to tie their shoes, Sante Kimes was teaching her sons how to lie, cheat, and steal. Eventually, she taught one of them how to murder.

Kenny, brush your teeth. The obedient son. Irene was a dancer in the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall before marrying wealthy real estate man Samuel Silverman in The Silvermans' home was in one of the most expensive locations in the city, and Irene loved to entertain and throw lavish dinner parties in her opulent new mansion.

When Samuel died in , Irene converted the townhouse into an apartment building, renting out the rooms. On Independence Day weekend , property manager Jeff Feig reported Irene missing after her housekeeping staff said she mysteriously vanished from the house.

New York Police Department detectives searched the townhouse and the adjacent properties, but they found no sign of Irene. When Kimes, who was the last of the four to be given up, was in seventh grade, she was adopted by Edwin and Mary Chambers as "Sandra Chambers". The family moved to Carson City, Nevada, where Kimes did fairly well in high school and was also a cheerleader and a member of the Glee club and the Spanish club.

She also began what became the first of what became many crimes during those years, shoplifting and stealing her adoptive father's credit card. One day, her birth mother arrived in the city and wanted her back, but Kimes rejected her.

Three months after graduating, she married a high school sweetheart, Lee Powers, but divorced him just a few months later. In , she married another high school suitor, Edward Walker.

Their marriage ended as well in when Kimes was arrested in Sacramento for petty theft. She had a son with him, Kent Walker, who, though he became estranged from his mother, later wrote a book about her titled Son of a Grifter. Kimes rapidly descended into a criminal career. She became a seasoned con artist and thief, frequently scamming people of money and merchandise both through cons and theft and committing arson in order to claim the insurance money.

She would also enslave illegal immigrants she found at homeless shelters, employing them at her house and threatening to have them deported if they didn't do as they were told. One of her most notable cons involved impersonating actress Elizabeth Taylor , whom she slightly resembled.

She met her third husband, motel tycoon Kenneth Kimes the details of their meeting are vague , and married him after ten years, by which time their son, Kenneth Kimes Jr. He would later aid his mother in several crimes, including the two murders for which she was convicted.

Together, Sante and Ken Kimes, Sr. Kimes began traveling around the world and addressing American civil rights group about patriotism in order to establish some credentials. In order to get an official sanction, the couple booked a meeting with Patricia Nixon, the wife of President Richard Nixon.