An elderly socialite is reported missing from her stately New York City brownstone. When Sante Kimes and her son Kenny are arrested, an investigation reveals decades of crime, deception and murder that captivated the nation. Keith Morrison reports.Keith Morrison and Josh Mankiewicz go behind the scenes of the making of this episode in ‘Talking Dateline’: Listen on Apple: https://apple.co/4aMy3ENListen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5vP5EDYVrfwzp5nMCy4cyu
Tonight on Dateline.
I just see Sante Kimes as the ultimate femme fatale, seducing lovers, lawyers, husbands, her son. This is someone who gets what she wants.
This story about a mother and son grifter team. This was a diabolical duo.
They seemed, what, like open and friendly and interesting.
Yeah, I didn't think they were killers. We have a woman. A socialite goes missing.
There were several people. It disappeared. She had put a hit out on me. She wanted me killed. Why did she keep getting away with it?
She just had that power over me. I was mom's first protege. I was supposed to be her cohort in crime. Your mother instructed you to kill people.
I only saw one road forward.
Sinister. Scheming.
I felt like I was in the presence of Satan.
They were known as Mommy and Clyde, charming, cunning, ice-cold criminals. Inside, the mother and son tale, almost too twisted to believe. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with The Devil Wore White.
It was evening when they found her, found her prone in her cell at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York. A guard raised the alarm, and they rushed her to a nearby hospital. But it was too late. Her enlarged heart was so badly damaged it could not go on beating. She was 79 when she died. Sixteen years past the outrages, the mayhem, the murders...
And the fabulous, fierce, frightening madness that was the woman named Sante Kimes. Are you more comfortable now?
Yes, because she's dead.
And that was a deciding factor? She had to be dead?
She had to be dead.
There are many kinds of villains. This is the story of a mother and two sons in all kinds of trouble. Is it fair for me to say that though you knew your mother was a terrible person, you loved her as intensely as a son can love a mother?
There's probably not another son on this planet who loved his mother as much as I loved mine.
But, as we say, this is about a mother and two sons. The other now speaking out. His first recorded interview in decades. When your mother died, was that very difficult for you?
It hurt like hell. There's just nothing I can do about it but pray.
So much history, darkly comic to just plain dark. But we can begin, because why not begin here, in a celebration. July 4th, 1998. Millions gathered in New York City to watch the nation's biggest fireworks spectacular. At just off Manhattan's Millionaire's Row, a smaller crowd gathered for a different kind of spectacular, a dinner party at a mansion on East 65th Street.
The hostess was an 82-year-old widow named Irene Silverman. She's vivacious. She's a lot of fun. Fashion designer Zhang Toy was a close friend and frequent party guest. She know how to throw a great party during her heyday, and she had the heart of gold. Friend Janice Herbert also loved Irene's company.
She's delightful. She's funny. I adored her. Someone described her as an Auntie Mame, and that's exactly what she was. She was absolutely fabulous.
Irene Silverman had quite literally danced her way from poverty to a dream job as a ballet dancer at Radio City Music Hall. And by the time of our story, she was a healthy, wealthy widow with a fine, big townhouse in New York's most expensive neighborhood. It was for companionship as much as anything that Irene rented rooms in her mansion.
Her tenants included some A-list celebrities like Daniel Day-Lewis and Lenny Kravitz and Chaka Khan.
She lived by herself. She rented just for fun and to also keep herself company.
The day after Irene's bash, July 5th, was as quiet as a country church on a Monday morning at the NYPD's 19th precinct, where Detective Tom Hovigum was working his shift. Tell me about July 5th. You were on duty. What was it like?
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.
The missing elderly woman was Irene Silverman.
I was the junior detective. I just had gotten promoted in January.
Okay.
So the other two guys were pretty senior to me, and they said, well, kid, this is yours, because no one really wants a missing person case. It's very tedious work.
With that in mind, Detective Hovigim drove to the Upper East Side, to the six-story townhouse, a stone's throw from Central Park. This townhouse, what was that like?
It was actually beautiful. Beautiful artwork, beautiful furniture. The night before she disappeared, she had a great party. American flags, hats, you know, the whole bit.
She was living the grand life, that woman.
Absolutely. 100%.
The staff last saw Irene inside her house that morning, shortly before noon. She appeared to have left without telling anyone. Not what she would ever do, ever. Which is why they reported her missing.
We did the preliminary investigation, searched the townhouse, searched the surrounding areas, looked for video cameras, interviewed neighbors.
But no sign of Irene. And curiously, two other people seem to have vanished too.
We couldn't find one of the staff members. When we went up to his apartment, he wasn't there. So that was a little suspicious. The other missing person was a young man who was renting a room on the first floor. We couldn't find the person in 1B. He disappeared the same time she did. You know, that raised our suspicion, of course, yes.
Though not alarmingly, yet. But then, outside, near the front entrance, they found blood. And Tom Hovigim's missing person case suddenly became urgent.
When you get a person on the Upper East Side like Irene Silverman, it becomes very special. The whole city takes an interest.
Pretty soon, the whole country would take an interest. Because the case of the missing socialite was about to take an unexpected turn into something diabolical. Ever had any other case anything like this in your career? Not even close. What would follow, and what came before, is a story when all told of crimes astonishing in scale and scope.
Next thing I know, he's around my back with his arm across my neck.
Stretching from New York to L.A.
A transient found David Kasdan's body stuffed into a dumpster.
Hawaii to the Caribbean. And at the center of it all, a criminal mastermind, the likes of which we won't see again, with any luck.
When she looked at you, she could look into your soul. She is the most evil woman that I've ever met.
How do you tell the story and not be over the top? She was over the top.
They looked everywhere that Fourth of July weekend in New York, sent the canines sniffing through her mansion top to bottom. But try as they might, they could not find Irene Silverman.
The boss who was running the investigation 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.
Irene's friends, like fashion designer Zhang Tui, were worried sick.
It was getting late. Everybody was worried. My first thought is that I was just praying. I was hoping that they would, probably she was kidnapped. Someone tried to ask for ransom.
But no ransom note appeared. If someone had taken her, must have been a thief too, because $10,000 in cash she kept in the townhouse vanished with her. Suspicion landed first on that missing staff member. Detective Hovigum learned he was a longtime employee with access to Irene's financial records. He'd boarded a flight to Atlanta shortly after she vanished.
He had gone away, but once we got him and brought him in, we eliminated him pretty quickly.
He was innocent, just like the rest of Irene's staff.
We went through the motions of interviewing him and getting their alibis. There wasn't anyone on the staff.
The detectives also talked to Irene's tenants, of course, and all were quickly accounted for and alibied, except for that young guy from the room on the first floor.
The staff told us that there was a person staying in apartment 1B who Irene thought was very suspicious since she had rented the apartment to him.
His name was Manny Guerin. He'd arrived two weeks earlier. He didn't have a reference or an ID, but he seemed nice and he gave her $6,000 in cash up front.
She just let him in. She let her guard down. She never did that.
Her friend Janice said Irene regretted that decision right away.
He was very secretive. She felt that something was wrong, and she was worried about it.
She was smart enough to write everything down in detail about this guy's suspicious behavior. What kind of behaviors? When there was a conversation in the lobby of the townhouse, she would see his feet. underneath the door or the shadow of his feet like he was eavesdropping.
And when he came into the house, into the townhouse, he would avoid the cameras, walk on the sides of the walls, things like that to stay out of camera view. And she described him, you know, male, white, you know, 5'9", about 180 pounds. She was a sharp woman, man.
And this Manny Guerin, Irene's longtime caregiver, Marta Rivera, said he refused to let housekeepers inside his room to clean. And she thought she knew why.
There was a woman in the apartment with him. Nobody knew who she was. So this is the reason they don't let nobody go inside. So they don't see her.
An unknown woman in there? That was it for Irene. She told friends she wanted Manny Guerin to leave.
She was going to evict him right, you know, right around the time she disappeared.
So police searched the room Manny Guerin had been renting.
We found all kinds of things, garbage bags, a roll of duct tape, shower curtain rings, but no shower curtain, things like that, which raised our suspicion.
On Monday night, July 6th, Hovigim's unit asked the public for help to find Irene Silverman and her suspicious missing tenant.
We posted pictures of Irene Silverman. We had a sketch done of Manny Guerin. We had a news conference where we posted the sketch.
The next day, Hovigim got a call. Someone had recognized Manny Guerin from the police sketch. It wasn't a member of the public, but another of New York's finest from a different department of the city's sprawling police organization.
No doubt in my mind, that was him.
Ed Murray was a detective working for the NYPD's Fugitive Task Force. When he saw the sketch of Manny Guerin, he said he knew right away who it was, and it wasn't Manny Guerin.
I see that picture, and it's exactly a composite sketch of Kenny Kimes.
Kenny Kimes? Murray was certain the man in the sketch was actually a car thief named Kenny Kimes, who he'd taken into custody just a few hours after Irene Silverman disappeared. Kimes had been arrested with his mother, Sante, for writing a bad check for a Lincoln Town car back in Utah. An unusual pair, those two.
It was something that I just didn't think it was like mother and son.
Like she was the boss.
Well, she was. She definitely, without a doubt, she was.
So one department talked to the other, and pretty soon Detective Hovingham was showing Kenny Kime's booking photo to Irene's employees.
And then when we did the photo array of Kenny, the staff picked him out, saying, yeah, that's Manny Yarin.
In that moment, there was no way, of course, for Detective Hovigim to fathom just who he was dealing with, where this Kenny Kimes and his mother Sante had already been, and what they had already done. Almost 48 hours after Irene Silverman disappeared, NYPD detectives found her missing tenant, Manny Guerin, already in custody. But he'd been arrested under a different name. His real one.
Kenny Kimes. He was locked up alongside his mother, Sante. And she, they learned, had a rap sheet miles long, reaching back decades before her son Kenny was born.
You know, we had some background on his mother, on Sante, at that point. So I used that against him, like, look, we know your mother put you up to this. We know she's been arrested before and that she's manipulative and she's manipulating you.
Didn't work. Kenny Kimes gave away nothing. So who were these people? Mother and son car thieves and maybe killers. And what might they have done with innocent elderly Irene Kimes? In a New York Minute, those questions became a huge national story.
Hope is fading tonight. The suspect in her disappearance.
A missing person who vanished from her million-dollar home.
When they first got arrested, it is no exaggeration within the first 10 days, I had 100 news agencies attack my office looking for me. You guys, NBC, ABC.
Kent Walker, that firstborn son, Kenny's older brother, the one we told you about back at the beginning. Kent had the answers. Some of them, anyway.
That's my mother.
She had a force.
It was a force to be reckoned with.
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.
The original story was that she was born in Oklahoma. was one of the Okies. She ended up in Hollywood.
True? Maybe. Maybe not. Asante told it, her father abandoned the family.
Mom was on the streets for the most part, what mom said. Supposedly her mother was a prostitute. We'll later find out that's not the case. So she made up a story? Oh, my mother's entire life's made up. You know, you get that one little germ of truth. She always started out with that kernel that you can believe is probably honest.
But as Kent learned as a little boy, his single mom knew how to survive no matter how straightened their circumstances.
Our refrigerator up until that point was peanut butter and tortillas and cheese. That was it. I was lucky if there was some milk in there.
As for the way Sante survived, 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.
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, well, she did her thing. She was training me how to do that.
And somehow, Sante got away with it, again and again. And young Kent looked at her with a kind of awe. She didn't bow down to anybody. Out in the world, out in public, people noticed Sante. And she liked it.
I think the name of the restaurant was a Cock and Bull. It was in Hollywood. I don't think it's there anymore. We were sitting at the bar and a gal came up to her and asked her for her autograph. And mom signed it. Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor? Elizabeth Taylor. She looked that much like Elizabeth Taylor sometimes.
She didn't have the eyes, but she had the charisma, the look, the cheeks, the mouth.
And then, pure corrupt ambition, Sante's charisma changed their lives for good. The truth is, Mom was on a hunt for a millionaire. In 1970, Sante even took a job at something called Palm Springs Millionaire Magazine and was thereby able to interview a man named Kenneth Kimes, a millionaire 20 times over, his fortune made in real estate, casinos, motels, and mansions.
Sante turned on her charm, and Kenneth was smitten. A year later, they returned from a trip to Mexico, declared they were married, and just like that... Our lives was beyond the American dream.
I mean, we lived in five different oceanfront properties in Hawaii. We had an oceanfront estate in the Bahamas. We had a golf course home in Las Vegas. They were all home. You know, it was almost embarrassing.
Four years later, 1975, Kenny Jr. was born. And now Sante ran a full house, but not a nurturing one. She had rules, the sort no one would dare defy.
No one answers the phone and no one answers the door. Do you got that? And I just went, oh yeah, I got that.
It was the late 1970s, 20 years or so before the unfortunate events at Irene Silverman's place. Sante, Kenneth, Kent, and now little Kenny Jr., all living the lush life. Fancy clothes and luxury cars and villas full of servants.
In the house in Hawaii, we had a secret storage spot in the master bedroom. She had 30 mink coats. I've never seen anyone wear a mink coat in Hawaii. I don't know if you have or not.
Sante, at last, seemed to have the life she wanted.
She always called me my darling Rhonda.
Rhonda Martin was Kent's high school girlfriend and spent lots of time with the family in their seaside mansion. Sante was like a dream, said Rhonda, a lovely dream.
And she would hug me, and my son has such a beautiful girlfriend. She would just lavish me with love. She always wore white. Moo-moos at home, pantsuits, and just beautiful. And she always had her hair perfect. I mean, it was always perfect. Her eyes were black. Like her pupils, they were piercing. When she looked at you, she could look into your soul.
And she knew exactly what she wanted. Made sure everyone else did, too.
One, two, three, camera, action!
So, now that she was rich, did Sante Kimes change her ways, renounce her compulsion to lie and steal? Oh, no, not at all. And her compliant husband, Ken Sr., seemed to love it. Didn't he participate willingly in her crimes?
He didn't mind not having to pay for dresses. He didn't mind not having to pay for Cadillac Baritz Eldorados in our driveway. He fell in love with the getting away with it.
So, from practically the moment they met, Ken played along. Even with some of Sante's wackier schemes, like an idea to make money from the 1976 Bicentennial, Sante used her considerable charm to cozy up to an official of the United Nations.
She got an endorsement where Ken was actually named an honorary bicentennial ambassador. Well, that's all you need to get mom.
It meant nothing, really. But Sante and Kenneth went swanning around like very important people, using the title to flog a collection of bicentennial memorabilia. And with an extra lie or two, the fake ambassador and his wife crashed a reception at Blair House in Washington, shook hands with Vice President Ford. Secret Service let them right through, and then they said, well, who are you?
The weird stunt was exposed in the Washington Post. Just a hiccup for Zante. D.C. again, a few years later.
It was late, and this couple came through the door. They were so distinctive, you couldn't miss them.
Winter 1980. Rena Beachy was enjoying a nightcap at a Washington, D.C. bar when Cannon 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 D.C. caper didn't work out so well. Sante was charged with grand and petty larceny. But then she ditched her own trial, simply skipped out of court, and went on as ever. That's who she was. Why did she do this? Because that's what she was. Sante's ambitions only seemed to get bigger. Like what she did with her own beautiful beachfront home in Hawaii.
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.
My father was involved in an arson in Honolulu.
This is Ken Holmgren. His father, Elmer, was a down-on-his-luck attorney who got roped into it somehow. Did they tell him or ask him to set fire to the Kimes house in Honolulu?
I assume the Kimes... Wanted him to do it. You know, it was for the Kimes' gain.
If anyone knew how persuasive Sante could be, it was Kent. She knew the words to you.
She knew the emotions to put onto you. And sometimes she did it in positive ways, with love and affection. And she also knew how to scare the hell out of you.
Like when Kent was 12 and still his mother's little helper. And one day, on his own, he stole a surfboard and got busted. I thought I was going to go to jail. So Kent tried his best to go straight. Maybe the difference between you and your mother is... If you get caught stealing a surfboard, it scares you straight. If she gets caught stealing a surfboard, it's encouragement for the next time.
She got mad because I got caught. And she tried to give me, she actually took me to where I got caught and she told me how I should have done it so I wouldn't have got caught.
So Sante did nurture, in a way, the criminal way. And she wasn't about to let anyone get between her and her sons.
A lieutenant from Hawaii Five-0 showed up at my house. That lieutenant told me, if you contact him, she'll find you and she will kill you.
On the outside, Kent lived what seemed to be a normal teenager's life. High school, sports, his girlfriend Rhonda, who loved spending time with Sante too, until the day... I was over there, and all of a sudden the doorbell rang, and I jumped up to answer it.
She was in the kitchen, and I swear to you, she flew over the counter and... Before I got to the door, she got right up in my face, and she pulled me. I mean, I was this close to her face. It was so close. I could feel her breath. And she goes, there are two rules in this house. No one answers the phone, and no one answers the door. Do you got that? And I just went, oh, yeah, I got that.
This is the first time you saw anything other than the wonderful Elizabeth Taylor person.
Exactly. I had never seen that until that day. And that freaked me out.
That day was a turning point for Rhonda and Kent.
Kent started talking to me about things his mom would have him do. You know, like 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.
What does that like to hear?
I said, you know, if you get caught doing that, you could go to jail.
When Rhonda got through to Kent, he refused to help his mom steal anymore. Asante was furious with Rhonda.
She called my mom one day and said, your daughter has got to stay away from my son. I've had it with her. Well then, about that same time, A lieutenant from Hawaii Five-O showed up at my house and knocked on the door and told my mom and dad that she had put a hit out on me. That lieutenant told me, don't stick your head up because if you contact him, she'll find you and she will kill you.
And he thought that I just left because he thought that I just, you know, like an airhead kid. Well, I don't love you anymore, but that wasn't true.
So Rhonda was gone, and Kent was going straight. After he graduated from high school, Kent left home and later joined the Army.
When I left for the Army, it was tough. I mean, I will say, I have to be honest with myself, now I ran away. That's when Mom was her worst.
But then, with Kent out of the house, Zante turned to his half-brother, Kenny. Maybe he would make a better partner in crime.
I am my mother's biggest disappointment. I was the one who was supposed to be Kenny. Kent knew his mother loved Kenny a little bit differently. He was the prince. He was tutored, never got spanked. He was treated as a golden child.
He was so lonely. He had no friends. He had a tutor. And Kent and I would take him to go get ice cream, but she hardly would ever let us take him anywhere. We had to, like, sneak him off.
He had a very unusual upbringing, your brother. Kenny didn't have a chance. He didn't have a chance.
Not with his mother, no. Take, for example, a little problem she had with the household staff. At first, Sante's maids were treated well, said Kent. Like members of the family, really. but not for long.
The anger is like a warm bath sometimes. It's just like everything else in her life, elevated, elevated, elevated. And so the maids then became the enemy in the house.
The women complained to law enforcement, and in a lawsuit, John Doty is a private detective who's investigated Sante's background.
Evidently, she would lock the maids in their rooms. They were under constant watch, and I believe she attacked one of them with a hot iron once.
Here she is, forced to sit for a deposition about the allegations.
I'm very unhappy with having to give any testimony to you.
It was all a fabrication, said Sante.
But I've never yelled loudly, and I have certainly never... physically touched any of them.
She denied it all.
No, that is not correct. That is a total lie.
Making herself into the victim.
I have been through an intolerable nightmare.
The law intervened and laid a criminal charge that hadn't been used for a very, very long time.
Kenneth and Santee Kimes were indicted this past summer on charges of violating immigration and anti-slavery laws.
Ken Sr. accepted a plea deal on the criminal charges, but Sante took her case to trial and was convicted. She spent three years in federal prison, and Kent came back around to help his stepfather and brother. I was kind of a surrogate father to Kenny, in a way. And then Mom returned and things went back to normal, if such a word could be used, for the life of Sante Kimes.
Kent got married, started his own family, made Sante a grandmother. This a decade before the events on that July 4th weekend in New York, when Irene Silverman disappeared. And though Kent tried to put some distance between his old life and his new one, Here he is running the video camera on a family vacation.
They're at the Kimes Beachfront Estate in the Bahamas, an address that will come into play a little later in our story.
Last day here. It's been a great vacation. Thanks for everything, guys.
Just a few months after that island vacation in 1994, Kent got a call from his mom. Mom's hysterical.
They won't fix him. They won't fix him. They won't fix him. And at the time, I'm not putting two and two together, and she hangs up.
And then it dawned on him. His mother was telling him that Ken Sr., his stepfather, had died. And after, Sante seemed unhinged, even more than usual. Because, it turned out, they'd blown through most of Ken's fortune when he was alive. And now that he was dead... All that was left were a few properties and some cash tucked away in offshore accounts. Mom didn't have any checkbooks.
She had no accounts. She had nothing. Now she was scrambling for money. The frenzy of it all spooked Kent. He eventually stopped taking her calls. I had made a break from Mom and Kenny. We were estranged. And I missed Mom. Kent had no idea then that he had timed his exit perfectly. It was now just a year before that New York City summer when Irene Silverman disappeared.
Who knew what a desperate mother and son were capable of together? It was the spring of 1998, four months before Irene Silverman disappeared in New York City. And Kent Walker was living in Las Vegas. He had done the hard part, cut off his mother and little brother, who was now 23, for good. And now? I missed the good stuff. It was hard, you know, but I was doing okay.
Kent had no idea where Kenny and Sante were, or that they had moved on themselves. In fact, they were in Los Angeles now, had rented a wing of a house in affluent Brentwood. Looking for trouble, maybe?
I was working homicide at the Los Angeles Police Department.
Detective Bill Cox was also unaware the times it 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.
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.
The body in the dumpster was a male, middle-aged, with a single bullet hole in the back of his head.
He was identified quickly by the coroner's office as being David Kasdan.
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.
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.
In fact, the whole house was just about pristine. David's daughter told them she'd been there two nights previous, and she was sure they saw someone lurking outside.
There was a car parked in front of the house and they got very nervous about it. And I think the car slowly drove off when they looked out there.
And that wasn't the only time, said the daughter. For weeks, somebody had been harassing David 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.
She's the one that brought up right away about Sante Kimes.
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 Kasdan to put his name on the deed to one of their properties, a mansion on Geronimo Way in Las Vegas.
David, you know, reluctantly, I guess, just said, yeah, go ahead, you know, but not for too long. And so they did it. And about six months later, from what I understand, he had asked if, 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.
But Sante didn't do that. Instead, without telling Kasdan, she came up with a scheme to turn a problem into a money-making solution. For her, at least.
She went down to a bank, Mrs. Kimes did, and she's the one that tricked the bank into taking a loan out of Mr. Kasdan. I don't know how she did it. I don't know how the bank allowed her to do it.
Shante got ready to walk away with $280,000, and Kasdan was on the hook for it all. And then he discovers he's got to pay back all this money.
Yeah, he gets this thing in the mail with 360 payments, and you owe this much money every month, and he was just flabbergasted.
And so he goes through the roof and basically calls Shante 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.
Kasdan ignored the warning, and the bank launched an investigation. And then what do you know? A suspicious fire destroyed that Vegas mansion, and Sante, claiming the house was hers, tried to collect the insurance.
She was constantly thinking, how am I going to get the next dollar back?
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.
So my partner and I went to the house that night and just missed them by hours.
They had left L.A. in Sante's preferred mode of transport, a Lincoln Town Car. P.I. Doty traced it to a dealership in Utah, where Sante bought it, sort of.
And she'd trade in her old car, an older Lincoln, and then give the guy a check for the difference. But the check never cleared.
The dealer reported the car stolen. And the local sheriff issued warrants for Sante and Kenny, wanted for grand theft auto. That was just what the LAPD needed to amp up their search. Something concrete to hold Sante and Kenny on. If only they could find them. For months, detectives ran down tips from people who knew them. In Los Angeles, in Las Vegas, in you name it.
Every place we went, we would miss him just by days sometimes, a day, sometimes just hours. They were constantly moving.
Did she know you were on their tail?
Well, I think so.
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 about. But the Fourth of July was right around the corner. And so was a confrontation on a busy street in midtown Manhattan.
One of the agents grabbed Santee, took her bag. I saw there were like five agents struggling with Kenneth. Couldn't take him down. Couldn't take him down.
Mother and son, suspects in a years-long crime spree that included two murders at least. How did it ever get this far? Kenny Kimes will tell us.
There's a lot of chaos in my youth. I love my parents, but there's a lot of complexity there.
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 fining 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 L.A.
and Las Vegas, named Stan Patterson.
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.
Then, on July 3rd, just before the holiday weekend, the detective's phone rang. It was Stan.
He says that the Kimeses are... in New York, and they are getting an apartment, and they wanted me to manage it.
My, my, my.
And to bring a gun with me when I come out there to New York.
Stan, the informant, agreed to go to New York and help lead police to Sante and Kenny.
We contact NYPD, and so we told them that Stan was on an airplane coming out there, and could they follow him, and we needed the Kynzes, if they found them, to arrest them.
Arrest them for that outstanding car theft warrant, which is how Detective Ed Murray of the NYPD Fugitive Task Force got involved. He was part of a sting operation, using Stan, the informant, as bait.
When Stanley arrived, he was wearing a bulletproof vest. Okay. Was he spooked? He was scared. He did tell me that he was afraid of Kenny and Santi and that they're there to kill him.
Stan arranged a meeting with Sante and Kenny at the Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Outside the hotel, there happened to be a street fair and a huge, bustling crowd.
There was a lot of pedestrian traffic going on. And, you know, it kind of helped during our surveillance of the hotel. How'd they show up? Well, we waited about eight hours.
Good Lord. At around 5 p.m., they decided to call it a day. Sante and Kenny were clearly no-shows.
We're standing in the lobby of the hotel, and we're trying to come up with a plan. Yeah. And all of a sudden, I hear this screeching woman yell out, Stanley!
It was Sante. She walked through that hotel lobby as if she owned the place.
And she comes over to Stanley. She embraces Stanley.
Kenny was running late. So Sante and Stan grabbed a drink and took a walk on 6th Avenue. And then Kenny arrived. Time to move in.
One of the agents grabbed Sante, took her bag. I saw there were like five agents struggling with 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 urinated in his pants, wet his pants.
Finally subdued and cuffed, Kenny and Sante were driven downtown for questioning. Ed Murray rode up front, holding Sante's bag. What was in the bag?
What was in the bag was a lot of cash. I said to my partner, and Santee is in the backseat of the car, I say, there's got to 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.
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.
Irene Silverman was in good health, both physically and mentally.
That is when, you may recall, police presented that sketch of Silverman's missing tenant, Manny Guerin. And soon after, Murray recognized that man as the car thief he had just arrested, Kenny Kimes. And by then, Murray had made another incriminating discovery, one that tied the Kimes directly to the missing widow.
They had in their possession identification belonging to Irene Silverman.
Inside Sante's purse, along with the big wad of cash, was Irene's passport. And just like that, two completely separate investigations suddenly merged into one very big and very strange case.
We knew we were looking at a homicide investigation at that point.
Twisson turns a plenty today in the disappearance of 82-year-old Irene Silverman. Police are not sure where this investigation is heading.
It turned out the investigation was headed to New Jersey because the informant, Stan Patterson, told police that when Sante and Kenny were late for that meeting at the Hilton Hotel, it was because they were stuck in traffic in New Jersey.
We got the phone numbers from every dumpster that we saw to find out where they dumped their garbage.
Did any part of you think that she might still be alive?
No, not me personally, no.
Hovigim 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?
Hope is fading tonight that Irene Silverman will ever be found alive.
But Sante Kimes, now caged with son Kenny in a downtown jail, was as confident as ever. And her charm offensive was just getting started.
She fluffed her hair. She tilted her head. She batted her eyes. This onslaught of flirtatious energy.
Shante Kimes is a walking contradiction.
It was more than two decades ago when I met Shante Kimes' firstborn son, Kent Walker, the kid apprentice who went straight. Kent saw it all, lived it all. But the big arrest in New York City... That he learned about from the news and... I had no doubt. I knew.
There was just no doubt. That they were guilty. Yeah. 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. What was it that made you, about this, that made you so sure? Well, things had gone terribly wrong. And I had become 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.
You always thought they'd just try to con people.
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 or picking up a stereo and killing someone.
Investigators, too, were quite sure that Kenny and Sante Kimes were behind Irene's sudden disappearance. They were certain they had a murder case on their hands, but they just had one big problem. They could not find Irene's body, and proving murder could be quite difficult. But then they recovered that stolen Lincoln. And it was a gold mine.
There was a lot of things in that car. Clothes, wigs, a gun, an empty taser box.
And perhaps most damaging of all, a stack of Sante's notebooks.
I think she had 15 notebooks of all kinds of things. Irene's movements. Then she'd write like a laundry list, like shower curtain, handcuffs, stun gun.
From the notebooks, it was obvious Sante and Kenny targeted Irene for her wealth and plotted to steal her identity and drain her fortune. The big prize was that incredibly valuable townhouse. not to mention the apartments inside that rented for $6,000 a month. That's why they asked Stan to come and join them in New York. Unaware, he was now an informant.
Kenny and Santee, they knew what they were going to 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.
They found out that Irene owned the building outright. There was no mortgage left on it. She owned it. So that put the scheme in motion. Then they, you know, they looked for a notary. They did their research, I guess, as far as the deed, obtaining a deed and things like that.
On December 16th, Sante and Kenny Kimes were charged with murdering Irene Silverman. They would remain behind bars to await trial. But Sante was by no means ready to admit defeat, locked up or no.
I think Sante was one of the most fascinating people I've ever met.
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 CeCe was brought in to help. In their first meeting, CeCe saw that jail had not dimmed Sante one bit.
She came down a long hallway. She's wearing sort of a gray tracksuit. Her hair was black, thick black eyebrows. And you could see that she really was a beautiful woman. I was there with Matthew Wiseman, who was one of the four lawyers. And Matthew Wiseman was immediately the focus of her attention. She fluffed her hair. She tilted her head. She batted her eyes.
This onslaught of flirtatious energy.
Sante insisted through her lawyers that she and her Kenny were as innocent as newborn babes.
Let's just say with reference to Ms. Silverman, they deny categorically all the charges.
We are being framed. You've got to help us. Sante was never anything less than self-assured, absolutely certain of what she was saying. And this is someone who gets what she wants. because I watched her, and she manipulated me. She would appeal to me as the only other woman on the case. The men just don't get it. You get it.
You're going to save me and my darling Kenny from the greatest injustice in history of the United States.
And the story just kept getting bigger. Tips and leads popping up from all the places Sante had left an impression. Oh, and of course, Sante had a plan. She and Kenny were going to play offense on national TV. Oh, boy.
It just feels a little unnatural to anyone on the outside.
By the time Kenny and Sante Kimes were charged with murder, they had become household names. The mother and son made headlines not just in New York City, but around the whole world.
I'm Tiwa Chang in the Bahamas following the trail of Kenneth and Sante Kimes.
That trail led reporters to Douglas Hanna, a lead investigator at the Royal Bahamas Police Force. We have a missing man here, and it appears that this woman is being surrounded by missing persons. 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 flew to the Bahamas to investigate irregularities in Ken Sr. 's accounts.
John Marquis was a journalist in the Bahamas, and he learned about Sante's desperate scramble for money after Ken Sr. died.
Sante had been drawing money from the accounts.
To quickly get at whatever was left of Ken's fortune, Sante pretended he was still alive and forged documents to withdraw money from Ken's offshore Caribbean accounts. There was just one problem. Ahmed, a bank auditor, was paying attention, and he asked to talk to Sante.
Mr. Ahmed was anticipating a fairly conciliatory meeting which was aimed primarily at just sorting the matter out and finding out what was going on.
Ahmed met with Sante and Kenny over dinner, and when the sun came up the next day, the phone rang at the Royal Bahamas Police Force. Ahmed was nowhere to be found, but neither was Sante. We tried to find out about what the link was all about. But the police chief had no idea where she was until those New York booking photos made international headlines.
So now, Sante and Kenny were suspects in not one or two, but perhaps three murder investigations. But from her jail cell, Sante was determined.
She continued to proclaim her innocence and that they were framed.
And they didn't do it quietly. She and Kenny started talking to reporters, including a sit-down interview with 60 Minutes.
I was married to a wonderful man. He was a big old Irishman. Kenny looks a lot like him.
There was the interview on 60 Minutes. Everybody was talking about it.
There they were, mother and son, accused murderers, looking a little too intimate.
Sante and Kenny were sitting way too close together and they were holding hands. And it just didn't look exactly normal for a mother and son to be sitting that close or holding hands. And there was the gushing about how beautiful his mother was.
I think she's a beautiful person spiritually and intellectually and physically.
What was going on here exactly? Irene's employees said that Manny Guerin, or Kenny, was sharing a room that only had one bed with a much older female friend. And now police knew that woman was Sante. Did you hear these stories about supposedly the intimate relationship between the two of them? Yes.
The guy they picked up in Florida, when they drove up the coast, he claims that he went into the room, he walked in, and they were in bed naked together.
The Florida guy was someone Sante and Kenny roped into their schemes. Later, he spilled it all to the police.
So that's where we got the incestuous relationship from. It wouldn't surprise me. You know, it really would not surprise me.
I think it's true. I suppose as much as anything, it's part of the control mechanism for young Kenny. Kent saw that TV interview, too, of course. Saw the very public intimacy. Because of the 60 Minutes interview, they're holding their hands and stuff like that. The whole incest thing, it was weird. Yeah, it just... I mean, and it's catnip, you know.
I don't believe, and it's not because I don't want to believe it. I know it didn't happen. And I will say this, their relationship was not normal at all. 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.
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.
Kenny denied it, too. And CeCe said she believed Sante, to a point.
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.
Rhonda was inside for a while, saw Sante try to groom Kent and then succeed with Kenny.
All of his grooming years, he was completely under her. Yeah. She never let him go. She took him everywhere.
Yes, and this whole so-called incestuous thing, whether it happened or not, it didn't really matter. They were always like that together.
I can't say that any of that happened because I never saw it. I'm not saying it didn't, but I never saw it happen like that. Yeah.
I mean, it's the co-dependency that matters.
Yes, yes. He was a victim because he never had any influence from anyone else.
So a new question now. Kenny was behind bars, separated from his mother for the first time in years. What would Sante's son do, left to his own devices?
Next thing I know, he's around my back with his arm across my neck. And he did say to me, this is a hostage situation.
The moment of reckoning had arrived. The trial of Sansei and Kenny Kimes for murdering Irene Silverman began in a Manhattan courthouse. It was a tricky case in a way. No body and no DNA or other physical evidence to tie mother and son to the crime. But Detective Hovigin was feeling as confident as he could be.
We had such circumstantial, overwhelming evidence that I knew we'd get a conviction.
I think the DA presented 130 witnesses.
Irene's friend, Zhang Toi, was one of them.
For one moment, I was really scared and nervous, and then I got to see the mother and son there. I was so angry. Suddenly, it just took me over. I said, you know, I have to do whatever I have to do, the right thing, to send them to jail for murdering my friend.
The motive was pure cold-blooded greed, said the prosecution. Sante wanted that townhouse, and so they killed Irene. And Sante pretended to be Irene, duping a notary into approving the legal documents to steal the house.
They got the notary to come in, they forged the deed, they got her signature.
The notary testified to that, but where was the deed now? Well, the jury learned that police had been listening in on Sante's jailhouse calls. And so they heard when she asked Cece and another private detective to go pick up a bag she checked at New York's Plaza Hotel. It sounded urgent.
You have to go and pick up the bag at the Plaza. You have to go, you have to go, hundreds of times.
When the P.I. went to get the bag, investigators were right behind.
What was in the bag? In the bag was the deed to the house, the most important piece of evidence that we needed. That's what we were searching for. That was the nail in the coffin.
A jury found Sante and Kenny Kimes guilty of 118 charges, including second-degree murder.
just rang out in the courtroom over and over and over again, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
I was so happy when the verdict came that they were guilty of murder, but at the same time, with a lot of sadness, you know, my friends never coming back.
Kent Walker, the son who escaped, has been contemplating that awful act for years.
I think at the time they found Silverman, I think they'd gotten away with so much up to that point. where they didn't have a fear of going for that big score. They really thought they were going to get away with it.
Right after it was over, CeCe went to check on Sante.
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.
Kenny's reaction was starkly different.
He was absolutely gray. Ashen is the perfect word. He could not believe what had happened because hadn't his mother told him a thousand times, we're innocent, we're innocent.
Despite the guilty verdict, crucial questions remained. Like, where and how was Irene murdered? Only they knew that, and neither would say, yet. Kenny was sentenced to 125 years, his mother to 120. Kenny was sent to a prison in upstate New York, and that's where freelance journalist Maria Zone went to interview him while working on a court TV documentary.
The interview was at noon. The corrections officer brings me to an empty cafeteria. There were two chairs. And Kenny walks in in his prison garb, and I'm sitting down with my two-man crew. And right away, I could tell something was going on, like his mind was racing. Are you saying, though, that Mrs. Silverman was aware that you were sharing the apartment with your mother? Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. And after about 10 minutes, he said, can I go to the bathroom? So he went to the bathroom the first time. Asked him a couple of more questions. 10 minutes must have gone by. Can I go to the bathroom again?
Could we take a break and maybe five or 10 minutes?
Then finally, the third time, he said to me, Maria, I'm really hungry. Would you mind getting me something to eat?
So Maria got a Snickers bar and a water from a vending machine. And then she handed them to Kenny. Big mistake.
It all happened incredibly fast. Next thing I know, he's around my back with his arm across my neck. And he did say to me, this is a hostage situation.
The core TV crew recorded a few seconds of it until Kenny demanded they stop. He was holding a pen to Maria's throat, the same pen you could see him handling during the interview. Maria was terrified, but like a good reporter, kept asking questions.
I said to him, Kenny, why are you doing this? And he basically said, I want to be extradited to Canada. My mother is an elderly woman. She can't live the rest of her life in prison.
He held her there on the floor for hours while hostage negotiators kept looking for an opening and Maria kept talking.
I finally said, do you know how to pray? And he said, yes. And he actually was very receptive to it. I know I needed some comfort. So we said the Lord's Prayer together. There was a hostage negotiator that after we prayed together, he said to Kenny, Kenny, I'm going to try to help you. Here is my business card. And he pulled out a business card and he reached out to Kenneth.
That was the distraction the authorities needed. The guards pounced.
They must have just all jumped on him, and I heard him grunting and groaning, and I didn't look back.
For his violent stunt, Kenny got sent to solitary confinement. And years would pass before he would see his mother again. A reunion in an L.A. courtroom where a chilling story would come tumbling out.
I got her in the bathtub, and he had his hands around her throat, and he said, I didn't know how long to squeeze.
The Kimes were serving time for killing Irene Silverman, but the story was far from over. California was waiting to try them for the murder of David Kasdan. Mother and son faced the death penalty for that one.
They were extradited to Los Angeles. I went to see Kenny.
Kent urged his little brother to play. Let's make a deal.
I was in Kenny's ear, and I was telling him, you're not going to win this one. You got the death penalty. Do not put me in the position where I have to explain to my kids that you've been executed. Don't do that.
Advice Kenny took. He agreed to plead guilty if prosecutors took the death penalty off the table, and not just for him, but for his mother, too. It was a no-brainer for L.A.
We liked the deal. The D.A. liked it. So we made a deal with Kenny.
Sante, however, wasn't quite so flexible. Confess? Not a chance. Not even when they told her that her Kenny, though few would have imagined it possible, was going to testify against her. It began in June 2004. It was theatrics from the start.
Sante was wheeled in in a wheelchair. This was for dramatic effect, which is, if you know Sante, her life is dramatic effect.
Defense investigator CeCe McNair was there when Kenny took the stand.
He then told the story of murdering David Kasdan. Sante was in front in the wheelchair and you could hear her sobbing, crying.
As Kenny spoke, a lifetime of loyalty died. He told the jury it was Sante who decided Kasdan had to go because Kasdan 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 Kasdan's door.
He recognized Kenny, and so he let Kenny in. So Kenny walked in, and I think Mr. Kasdan offered him some coffee or something. And when Mr. Kasdan turned around in the kitchen, that's when Kenny took the gun and shot him in the back of the head.
And then he heaved Kasdan's body into that dumpster by the airport.
And... On the way home to see Mom, Kenny stopped and bought a $100 bouquet of flowers to give to her to celebrate the job accomplished. Kind of a window of how sick their minds were.
Oh, but there was more. Kenny described exactly how he and his mother murdered Irene Silverman.
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.
After, said Kenny, he put Irene's body in the trunk of that stolen Lincoln and dumped it in a trash bin in Hoboken, New Jersey, and drove back to Manhattan just in time to be arrested with his mother.
It was horrifying to hear. I was viscerally affected by this description.
And Kenny had one more story to tell. This one about that missing banker in the Bahamas, Zayed Ahmed, last seen having dinner with Kenny and Sante. Last meal of his life.
They spiked his drink. They had already filled the bathtub because they knew they were going to drown him. And when he passed out from drinking, And 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.
God, you can just imagine that scene.
I know. I know.
So, was he sorry for his crimes? Is that why he offered his confession? Kenny's brother didn't think so.
His confession was not exoneration. It was purely self-serving. It was, you know, the best he could do at the time.
Sante was convicted and sentenced to life without parole and installed in New York's Bedford Hills Prison, there to spend the rest of her days, though not quietly.
I went up to see her, and you would think she would claim that her son had turned against her by confessing. And instead of that, she said, Kenny saved my life. He saved my life. But we didn't do it. This is the greatest miscarriage of justice in American history.
Defiant as usual. But for the victim's 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.
I think he just got caught up in a situation he didn't know how to get out of.
Elmer Holmgren, the down-on-his-luck lawyer Sante somehow persuaded to burn her house down in Hawaii. For the insurance, of course. Except the feds got wind of it, and Holmgren decided to cooperate, wear a wire.
He was working with the ATF, you know, to implicate the Kimes on this.
But then, Ken Holmgren is sure, Sante and Kenneth Sr. found out. And they took Elmer on a little holiday to Costa Rica.
He was never seen again. My father was gone and, I mean, mysteriously gone.
Murdered, his son believes. So there was never a trial, there was never a charge, there was never anything having to do with your dad. Does that matter to you a lot?
It did at the time. You know, the ATF agent said, well, they're 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. Sure.
Elmer Holdgren's name would have been there as somebody whose death had been accounted for and some kind of justice done. Correct. Yes. Yes. Justice. Kenny Kimes has had more than two decades in prison to reflect on that. and to make sense of the broken life and love he shared with his mother.
I find that very interesting, actually, Kenny, that you can say you love your mother, that you... I love my mom and dad forever. And now, in his first TV interview in decades, he's going to try to explain...
There's always more to the story. To go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, listen to our Talking Dateline series with Josh and Keith. Available Wednesday.
Even in prison, Sante Kimes could seem glamorous and terrifying.
I feared for my life.
For a long time? For years. Rhonda Martin, Kent's high school girlfriend, finally got the news with everyone else in 2014. After 16 years behind bars, Sante Kimes died. Are you more comfortable now?
Yes, because she's dead.
Wow, that's saying something, isn't it? A woman who charmed and harmed, whose death, even for the son who ran from her all those years ago, was very, very hard.
I knew I was the only person on this planet that would feel pain from it. And no one else could understand why. And, you know, one thing I'll never apologize for is loving my mother.
Though there is Kenny, so Kent is not the only son to feel the pain.
I still carry a lot of guilt with Kenny. I mean, it's my biggest regret not trying harder to pull him from that grass. But I was outmatched. Mom's stronger than me in that department.
The R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility, San Diego, California.
Today, Kenny Kimes is 49 years old, serving his time in a prison in San Diego.
Hello, good morning.
He agreed to speak with us on the phone, which is what the California prison system allows. But this would be his first recorded interview since the day he took that court TV reporter hostage a quarter century ago. And it was a much different Kenny this time.
The first thing I want to say is that I absolutely regret... My past and the ignorance of my past crimes makes me want to do better and makes me want to engage in what I would call tangible contrition.
This was his reason for talking to us, to tell us he had come up with, on his own, a grand idea.
If I can prove the ability to raise a million or more for San Diego Unified for education... Could I do basic military training on film while in custody? This could help teachers, kids, the military, and prisoners. That's what I'd like to do.
Just how did this convicted killer plan to raise a million while in prison for life? Well, he isn't exactly sure about that, he said. It was that kind of conversation, friendly, with some kind of limit, we sensed, coming soon. Is there anything that you would like to say now to the families of those people, to the survivors of those people, that would be... I'm sorry.
A hundred percent, a hundred percent, I'm sorry. My answer is I am sorry, and I was an idiot. And my ignorance, I'm ashamed of.
Mind you, he said, it was his mother who did it, who made him a killer.
There was a lot of chaos in my youth, Keith. 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.
So, her fault? Well, yes.
And yet... I love my parents, but there's a lot of complexity there.
I find that very interesting, actually, Kenny, that you can say you love your mother.
I love my mom and dad forever. Before God, I love my mom and dad.
And have those positive feelings toward them, even though your mother was the one who instructed you to kill people. I mean, it's something for people to wrap their heads around. I'd like to wrap my head around it.
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 is just what feels right and appropriate to me.
Still friendly, but his mood seemed to have changed. When your mother died, was that very difficult for you?
It hurt like hell. It hurt. And... There's just nothing I can do about it but pray.
He was baptized a Catholic in prison, he told us. Then I probed a little more about his mother, rather gently, and the conversation grew strained. Well, I was just curious to know if your mother, like you, came to regret her crimes and... And try to achieve her own kind of redemption or whether she was just, you know, Sante all the way along to the end.
I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry.
There was no way they cut off.
Could we take a little break real quick? Yeah.
And that was that. But as we tried to understand why that would be a trigger for a hang up. Kenny called back to tell me he didn't want to talk about his mother anymore.
I don't want to go into my family in a media venue. I'm going to keep my laundry to myself. All right. Maybe in the future we could talk about more rehabilitative elements and so forth, and I hope that could happen.
By which he meant his pitch to raise a million dollars for education is tangible contrition.
I think that maybe I can pay for my crimes by supporting education.
But there is one more bit of family laundry and it is still unwashed. Your brother, Kent, the last time I talked to him, he talked about how he regrets not being able to help rescue you from that situation. Is that something that bothers you too?
I wish Kent well. I just, I wish he would have done a little more.
And Kent told us he doesn't visit Kenny often. Not sure he wants to anytime soon. Because, for one thing, that contrition Kenny talked about? Kent is a skeptic.
I still don't believe he has regret for what he did, which is hard for me.
The sons of Sante Kimes... That magnetic criminal homicidal mother. That tireless teacher of grift and chaos and violence. One who killed for her, locked up for a lifetime. The other, focused on gratitude for escaping her lethal orbit. To find a life that's full and a little more boring.
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. It's a normal state of things. 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 this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Sunday at 9, 8 central. And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News. Good night.