Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: The Devil Wore White

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Keith Morrison and Josh Mankiewicz sit down to talk about Keith’s episode, “The Devil Wore White.” It’s the story of the charismatic and manipulative grifter Sante Kimes and her two sons. One son was able to escape their mother’s grip. The other was not. Kenny Kimes would do anything his mother asked, including murder. Josh and Keith break down the dynamics of the Kimes family and explore what drove Sante and Kenny to kill. Keith shares an extra clip from his interview with Sante’s eldest son, Kent Walker, highlighting what it was like growing up with Sante as a mother. Dateline producer Ann Preisman joins the discussion to help answer viewer and listener questions. Plus, Josh and Keith address those pesky rumors that they don’t get along.Listen to the full episode of "The Devil Wore White" on Apple: https://apple.co/4hitg0mListen to the full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sF1ger9rJECvnOtoyTdC5

Hi, everybody. I'm Josh Manekiewicz, and we're talking Dateline today with Keith. Hi, Keith. Oh, hello, Josh. So this episode is called The Devil War White, and it's the kind of story that we almost never do at Dateline because it's less about the relationship between killer and victim and almost entirely about the relationship between killer and other killer. Now, this is the story of a criminal mastermind, someone you might have heard of. Her name is Sante Khan. She became famous back in the 90s when investigators who were looking for a missing millionaire uncovered a very, very creepy dark history of crimes and her surprising partner in those crimes and those murders, her youngest son, Kenny.

Now if you have not listened to this broadcast yet, it is the episode right below this one in the list of podcasts that you chose from. So you can go there, you can listen to it, you can watch it on Peacock, and then when you come back, Keith has an extra clip that he wants to play for more of his interview back in 2001 with Kent Walker, who was sort of the heart and soul of this show in a lot of ways. And later, we're gonna be joined

by one of my favorite people, and that is Dateline producer Ann Priceman, who worked on this broadcast, and she is Dateline producer Ann Priceman, who worked on this broadcast. And she will also help answer some of the questions that you may have from social media. So stick around for that. Or stay tuned, as we often said in 1961. Keith, you remember saying stay tuned? I remember saying that. I still say stay tuned, Josh. Yeah, there's no tuner anymore. That's the problem. So let's talk Dateline. So as I said

in the intro, this is the kind of story we don't usually do here at Dateline. That is absolutely correct. This is less about killer and victim and more about killer and killer. And it's a crazy, crazy story. That's exactly what it is, the craziest story ever. And I was there in New York to cover it way back in 98 or whatever the heck it was. When you hear the story of Sante Cimes and her two sons,

particularly the youngest one, Kenny, and what they got up to over the years, my goodness. The whole circus of activities that she was involved in was quite extraordinary. Just a story that I hate to say it, but I really enjoyed living in it again, even though it's really dark in many respects. It's the kind of story that makes people want to get into journalism.

I mean, it's a long, endless, twisting yarn that touches on all the different localities, different people, different crimes. I mean, like Sante, her big talent clearly is that she doesn't come off as being as dangerous and as homicidal as she actually was. She was charismatic. She was the sort of person you love to be with. She was friendly and open.

She looked like Elizabeth Taylor. She looked fabulous all the time. When she could carry on a conversation with anybody, high or low, she came from low. She came from very modest beginnings, iffy beginnings. We don't really know what's true and what isn't true because she lied about everything. Her backstory is pretty murky. Yeah, it is, is intentionally on her part.

Right. She was an okie, supposedly, and a poor one was her story. But she got to the point where she could carry on a sophisticated and charming conversation with the Vice President of the United States. And was able to persuade or help persuade an official of the United Nations to make her husband into an honorary ambassador. I mean, it was just phenomenal, the sorts of things she was able to get away with. And then along the way, she was trying, of course, to get her son Kent to be her acolyte, to train him to be just like her. To be a criminal, to be a sort of small-time criminal.

And she was making fine progress until he got scared straight in his mid-teens by the efforts of a girlfriend and by the recognition that he would probably spend most of the rest of his life in prison if he kept doing this sort of thing. Let's talk for a second about Kent's girlfriend, because I don't think she understood for a long time. One, what a huge service she did for him by talking him out of that life. And second, how lucky she was to be finished with that world.

That's right. Because she could have been in a landfill somewhere. Oh yeah, absolutely. I have no doubt she would have been. Simply, you cannot cross Sante and get away with it. And she didn't want somebody coming between her and either one of her sons. That was simply not going to be allowed. Well, what's interesting is that Sante was arrested a few times and had a criminal record,

and that didn't slow her down. But the possibility that might happen to him clearly did slow Kent down. It did. I think she felt that she was smarter than any authority. She would try to catch her. One of the other things about that bunch that fascinated me, and I'll include Kenneth Senior, her husband with this, the millionaire, was how good they were at persuading

otherwise normal people to engage in criminal behavior at their behest. They could persuade them to burn a house down. They could persuade them to illegally sign their name to a deed. They were just phenomenally good at doing that sort of thing, and she was. And I think it was her charisma and charm that really led that parade. You know, frequently on Dateline, we cover the stories of murders, and the murder is the point of the person's criminal activity,

which is like they want to get rid of their husband or wife or, you know, a boyfriend or whatever, right? Or whatever. But in this case, frequently the murders were to cover up other crimes, financial crimes, insurance fraud, check kiting, when they would be found out like they were with that bank examiner, right? Like they killed that guy. Like they didn't gain anything from his death except that he was no longer investigating them. And they clearly killed that poor old woman in New York City just because they wanted to either, what, live in her house or sell it and cash it out. They had two ideas. One was that they were going to take it over

and rent the apartments for a lot of money. And then the second idea was to sell it. Obviously it was a pretty valuable piece of property. And the antics that she went through, poor old Irene Silverman didn't see what was coming, but the antics that Sante went through to try to get a notary public to sign the right kind of paperwork so that she could take over the property.

Phenomenal. And she found one that would. Yes. Right. And she was posing as Irene at that point. She was lying in bed like the big bad wolf in Grandma's house. She was trying to pretend to be Irene Silverman. And actually, at one point, appeared to be succeeding. I think

she would have succeeded had she not been caught that day. Great police work in this one. And also some incredible luck in which one officer recognizes the sketch put out by a different part of the department. Yes. I think, you know, would they have, they probably would have figured that out in not too long a period of time. But the luck in my mind was the fact that the LA cops decided it was worth chasing down this woman who had stolen this car because they thought that she was good for the murder of David Casden. And they persuaded the Fugitive task force that this couple,

the mother and son should be arrested on a car theft warrant. You know, can you imagine just this 12 person or whatever it was, New York task force spending a lot of time planning and arranging for the capture of these two people based on a car theft warrant that must have taken some persuading, even if they knew there was a murder in the background.

Yeah, I mean, one sense is there must have been a conversation in which they said, look, this is a car theft warrant, but these two are on the hook for a bunch of murders. There's a whole lot more than that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When we come back, Keith has some extra sound that did not make the broadcast that he's going to play for us from his first interview with Kent Walker. You know, most moms don't lead their kids into lives of crime, but that is a position

of some colossal influence. I hear my mom's voice when I have not made the bet, right? I hear my mom saying, go make the bet. And I do, and I'm good at it too. That's all Holly Mankiewicz. But most moms don't groom their kids for a life of crime. And the idea that one son couldn't break away and the other one knew he had to is such a great part of this story. It is.

You know, when the older son wouldn't cooperate, the younger son became her next Mark, and he was so attached to his mother. I think she made sure of that from the very beginning of his life. She coddled him. He was her little prince. She did everything imaginable for him, and she attached him to herself from such an early age.

She wouldn't let him out of her sight except to go on very brief sojourns with a brother. I don't excuse his behavior at all. He's right where he belongs. He's a killer. Yeah, exactly. But one does sense that he sort of never had a chance. Right. Yeah, pretty much. It would have taken a lot for him to break free. Pretty much. It would have taken a lot for him to break free. And the continuing relationship or non-relationship between those two brothers, I found fascinating.

I don't even know exactly how to describe it. I'm not a psychiatrist, so I couldn't go there. But one who loved her, even as he recognized that she was a terrible person, and he couldn't possibly associate with her. The other one who loved her in a way that a person who cannot break away from somebody loves them. Poor Kenny, I say poor Kenny, he did some terrible things.

So in a way, I don't feel sorry for him at all. He's exactly as you say, where he belongs, but he's trying so hard to make it look like it, you know, he's making amends for his past behavior. Yeah. Kent doesn't buy it. Yeah. I'm not sure I'd buy it.

I don't know what to think about it exactly. I don't think I'd buy it either. Well, I mean, first of all, you do this, he does this interview, you know, but I don't want to talk about my mom, right? Exactly, yeah. The only thing he wanted to talk about was, I'm, you know, I want to raise a million dollars and you're going to help me raise that million dollars. Yeah, come on.

And then we'll spend it on education, because education needs to be better. And maybe I'll take a course in being a good military guy. And then he didn't want to really talk about it or much of anything else. That's a guy who sort of is disconnected from reality now as he was when he was under his mother's thrall. Yes.

And as I'm sure you have encountered frequently in doing these stories, Josh, as I have, when people go into prison, they tend to stay the same age in some weird way. That they'll come out 20 years later and they're still the 20-year-old who went in in the first place, intellectually, emotionally. And you think that's Kenny? Seems to me, yeah. I mean, you know, he has done some things in there.

He had a girlfriend for a while, though she passed away. He had a girlfriend while he was incarcerated? Yes, exactly. Yeah. He wouldn't have been able to have one before he was incarcerated. Right. I will never understand that. Although I did work years ago with a woman who was dating a guy and he was locked up. And I assumed wrongly that they had been together before

he got locked up. She's like, no, I met him, you know, after he was... And I'm like, why are you dating somebody who is incarcerated? And she said to me, well, you always know where he is. It's right. That's one of the more interesting factlets about criminal justice in America. A lot of these people who have done really terrible things have whole fan clubs full of people who would like to have relationships with them.

And they say that our culture is flawed. Just imagine. All right. like to have relationships with them. And they say that our culture is flawed. Just imagine. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so this is the first interview that Kenny has done in a very long time. Well, ever since he tried to, it appeared to try to either strangle or stab the CNN reporter back in 2000 or whatever it was.

That was a harrowing story. You hear anything from Kenny that sounded like remorse to you? Oh, you heard the usual, the kind of practiced remorse. And I, sometimes I feel sorry for people who are in situations like that. And when society around them demands that they be remorseful before that they are able to achieve anything like forgiveness or even understanding whether they're forgiven or not. And so they'll go through all the motions of remorse. And then the reaction is more often than not

is I don't believe you or you're not really remorseful, you're just saying that. So in some ways, somebody who is locked up in his situation would say, well, you know, what do you have to do to be believed? I feel terrible about all this stuff. And I really would like to make amends somehow, but you just don't know. Is it real or not real? Not sure. Yeah, we're big on that in this country, on confession and redemption. Oh, yeah. And not believing the

confession for a long time. Maybe more cynical. So was it difficult to get Kent to sit down and talk about this? Well, no, Kent, I wouldn't say difficult. Kent has actually written a book about this case and has been interviewed before. We interviewed him a couple of times before. So he's happy to tell the story.

I think he is getting to a point where he would like some sort of resolution with his brother, but he's not quite there yet. I think once he achieves that, maybe he'll be, he'll move on from the story. But that's been the cornerstone of his life. This feels like a good time to play the extra sound from Kent Walker. This is a piece of the interview that did not make the broadcast

and he's talking about some early memories with Sante. You're a kid, you're in a drug store or something with your mother. What happens? Well, she's got a big purse, real big purse. And we're going up and down the aisles and I'm usually a few feet in farmer. And when she comes out,

the purse is half full of stuff. Might be oysters, might be lipstick, might be a roast. A roast? Yeah, we got caught one time in Newport Beach, and Storm Angie caught her, dead or rights, and she turned around and just, how dare you accuse me of this? After about five minutes, he's apologizing to her,

saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We get in the car, and she reaches into her purse and pulls out a big roast, not a little roast, a big roast, some oysters, she loves smoked oysters. Oysters and a roast, a roast beef. I mean, you can put it in the oven and cook it for dinner. Sunday dinner. Yeah, we ate well.

It's not like six days a week she was a good girl and in one week she went bad. No, that was always that. Was it for a thrill, you think? I think in my early years it was more of a necessity. That's how we ate. I mean, she didn't do that, we didn't eat. You fall in love with the good stuff that she was,

and you know that was never going to be replaced, and it made it too easy to forgive the bad stuff sometimes. You know, you kind of held out hope that maybe she'd calm down, maybe she'd become rational, maybe she'll outgrow this, maybe. You know? Once Shantay Khayyam's got in your blood, she never laughed. Never completely. Wow. Well, that tells you something.

That's actually a very good way of describing it. That's a good bit to use. Did police have anything to say about whether or not Sante and Kenny are suspects in any uncharged murders? There are other people out there that they killed? I didn't hear anybody saying they think there are more. I think that probably is it possible there's another one, but you know, it's never been anything

that any police department has been chasing down that I know of. So they're both on the hook for these murders. Kenny confesses to save her. Like, it's like the last act of this controlling relationship that they have. Well, yes. Kenny confessed to all the murders to save her from death row. Save her from the death penalty.

Save himself too at the same time. But really, I think the more important thing to him was saving her. As you pointed out earlier, Kenny really didn't have a chance. He was up against it from the beginning. His brother Kent feels bad for not doing a little bit more to save him, but I'm not sure he could have, you know, because Sante, you know, she loved this boy and she was enveloping him in her protective arms. And I guess the way of describing it from the outside is that she was trying to make

herself his whole world. Yeah, yeah, that part was super creepy. Okay, after the break, we will be back with Dateline producer extraordinaire Anne Priceman, and she will answer some of your questions from social media. We are back, and we are joined by Dateline producer Anne Priceman. Hi Anne. Hi Josh, how are you? I'm good.

I love having you here on Talking Dateline. Love talking to you. We are going to take some questions from social media, which Anne is going to help us answer. But first, Anne, tell us about sort of your journey with this case. I was a booker back in 97, and I was an assistant producer, so it's just like the lowest on the rung.

I was on something called booking duty, where you go through all the papers and this and that, and it's before the internet mostly, so you're doing all the wires, and stitching together something to our boss, who says, great, thanks. But that morning, the Daily News had a story that I know it was going to be enormous.

So I handed her the note. I went downstairs to smoke a cigarette, which I no longer do, but it was my 20s. For the next few weeks, it was just 90 percent of my time. It was a fun story to work on mainly because the developments were everywhere, and I got to meet Keith for the first time.

Yes, yes, yes. Was it as intimidating to work with Keith in 1998 as it is now? No, we know each other. We've traveled the world together. We have. Let's talk about some social media questions which have come in. Now, they're more statements than questions. But here's one from Tammy Manosky, who we

know very well here at Dateline. She said, Kenny probably has no idea how to live without his mother. And I have to say that sounds true to me because she has like dominated his life, controlled almost every aspect of it forever. Yeah, he struggled certainly. He had a, and you know more about this than I do. You've spent more time talking to him. I think as much as he's an influence,

you can't survive maximum security in a prison thinking of your mother's guidance. But one thing, I think this is not even a theory. If you were raised as a con artist, it's great training to negotiate prison in a certain way because you know how to target people, befriend people, get things out of people. Andy's like a bunch of other people that we occasionally interview on Dateline, which

is I'll do the interview, but I don't want to talk about the thing that you want to talk about, which is the only thing anybody wants to interview you about. Yeah. Keith did a really great job of making sure like we handled both, you know? Okay. One, I think you're right. Two, stop kissing up to Keith. I don't have to kiss up anymore. He likes me.

I think I like him better than I like you, Josh. Oh, first of all, I don't have any question that that's true. Most people feel that way. So you're definitely the majority. Joan GVS says, I had to go to the bank four times in a month to answer for everything in my life to buy my house over 20 pages of information proving we're not laundering money was completed. It was crazy.

How do these people get away with it? You know, uh, first of all, the answer is one of the answers is it was easier to do that previously than it is now. The other thing is, she didn't go through the normal front door kind of way, you know, in New York City, of buying an apartment, getting approvals, taking, you know, 90 days and doing that. She was trying to go around it. And frankly, it's something in my mind, what partly brought her down is the, like, incredibly

antiquated real estate laws of New York City. Yeah. Stacey Delilah writes in to say, if these people had put this time and effort into a legitimate business, they could have been successful. And that's probably true, but going straight's not as much fun, is it?

No, that wasn't the point. I also don't think Sante could have survived in a legit business. Like, you know, the nine to five, just keeping up with what's... No. In the business of conning and scamming people, sort of have contempt for, for like, you know, the squares who, you know, work every day and don't break the rules. And in fact, to show how contagious this sort of feeling about the legitimacy or the lack of it is,

when she married Ken, who had made a success of his life in the legitimate way. He was really no longer interested in being legitimate. He loved when she broke the rules and he could kind of live vicariously in her badness. Now, Andrea and Blaine got a question last week that they want us to listen to. So let's listen to that. So we've got another one. This is from Instagram.

This is Javiva Gordon-Binnett with a question. I just got done listening to an episode of Talking Dateline. It was Keith Morrison, who I love, and Josh Mankiewicz, who I also love. They were trying to be funny with each other. Like Keith Morrison called Josh like an infidel and Josh was like, yep, totally an infidel. But there was like so many moments of that. It felt really like almost like, do they really not get along or do they get along? Are they frenemies? It was an interesting back

and forth and now I'm not sure. And I want Andrea Canning to chime in and like let me know if they're actual frenemies. That was a great question. No, I can absolutely tell you that they are friends and they love rubbing each other and they love, you know, getting into these conversations with each other and I've been around them so many times and I have never seen anything but love between those two. Yeah, Andrea could not be more wrong. Keith is essentially... No, she clearly doesn't know us well at all.

Andrea is correct. Keith is one of those people that you never hear anything bad about. And now that I've gotten to know Keith a little better, I do understand why, because he is a pro and a great journalist and- Just go, yes. You know what? Everybody loves him. What is he doing?

Keith is so great. La la la la la. Can't get enough of Keith. Yeah, yeah. It's like the rest of us don't exist, okay? There you go. All right, I feel better now. Okay, so that is Talking Dateline for the week.

Thanks very much, Keith and Anne. And thanks to all of you for listening. Remember, if you have any questions for us about our stories or any case that you think we should be covering, you can reach out to us on social media at at Dateline NBC or you can send us an audio message for a chance to be featured in our next Talking Dateline episode, which I know there's fistfights to do that.

And don't forget to tune in Friday for my all new episode on Dateline at nine o'clock Eastern eight central about the April 2023 murder of the guy who founded Cash App, a man named Bob Lee. It's a story you've heard about. And now we're going to tell you about the hunt to find his killer. See you on Dateline on NBC.