True Crime Campfire - Mommy Darkest: Sante and Kenny Kimes, Part 2

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

So, campers. Last week we introduced you to Sante Kimes: Liz Taylor lookalike, scammer, arsonist, sadist, and mother of Kenny Kimes, a promising young man she groomed as her partner in crime from the moment he was born. After spending the early part of her childhood in poverty, Sante was determined to be fantastically rich, and she was willing to do anything to accomplish that goal. And we do mean anything, as you’re just about to see. Join us now for part 2 of this bizarre true story.Sources:Son of a Grifter by Kent Walker with Mark SchoneVanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2000/03/sante-kimes-mother-murderer-criminal-mastermindhttps://www.alixkirsta.com/articles/silverman/index.htmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sante_KimesNBC's "Dateline," episode "Missing Millionaire" A&E's "Biography," episode "Sante Kimes"A&E's "American Justice with Bill Kurtis," episode "Like Mother Like Son"Investigation Discovery's "Vanity Fair Confidential," episode "Sins of the Mother"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. So, campers, last week we introduced you to Sante Kimes. Liz Taylor lookalike, scammer, our personist, sadist, and mother of Kenny Kimes, a promising young man she groomed as her partner in crime from the moment he was born. After spending the early part of her childhood and poverty, Sante was determined to be fantastically rich, and she was willing to do anything to accomplish that goal. And we do mean anything, as you're just about to see. Join us now for Part 2 of Mommy Darkest, the crimes of Sante and Kenny Kimes. Okay, so when we left you last week, the law office of Sante's civil attorney had just been firebombed, and the lawyer felt sure that Sante was behind it. We agree, by the way.

And then, just a few months after that firebombing, an insurance adjuster named Elmer Holmgren went missing. This guy was, in the words of Vanity Fair reporter Susanna Andrews, a Kimes associate. and she'd asked him to help her lawyer with the lawsuit defense. About a decade earlier, Holmgren was the insurance guy who had made sure Sante and Kenneth got their money when there was yet another one of those mysterious fires that tended to follow Sante everywhere she went. There was another fire in 1990 and apparently one night, old Elmer crawled a little bit too far inside a whiskey bottle and told a friend that Sante had hired him to set that second fire for her. Well, well, well. Now, somehow, an ATF agent got wind of this, and the ATF got involved in the case, and Elmer Holmgren ended up becoming an informant against Sante and Kenneth.

Talk about getting stuck between a rock and a hard place, right? It's like, okay, dude, either you inform on this terrifying reptile in a wig who you suspect just firebombed her own attorney, or you go to jail. We'll give you a minute to think about it. Q Jeopardy theme. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And he's like, I don't know. And then, in February of 1991, Elmer left town with the Kimes'es on a trip to Costa Rica. Now, why the hell he went? I can't imagine. Because according to his son, he called Dante the

dragon lady, and he was scared shitless of her. He said, if anything ever happens to me, it'll probably be because of the dragon lady. So I don't know how Sante managed to sweet-talk him onto a plane with her. Maybe he was just too scared to say no, or maybe he thought if he refused to go, she would figure out that he was working with the ATF. But the long and short of it is campers that the poor guy was never heard from again after that. So last anybody knew, he was getting on that plane with Sante and company, and that was it. According to Vanity Fair, Santee told people that Holmgren had turned out to be a crook and run off. Hmm. Uh-huh. Now, not long after this, Sante tried to sue the amusingly named Chubb

corporation with two bees. So, yeah, let's all take the necessary beavis and butthead moment. Chub. So the chubs had refused to pony up for one of Sante's suspicious fires, and Sante was, of course, incensed about it. So much so that she started stalking the CEO of the company. Stalking the head chub. Good grief, right? She followed him around.

She sat in her car and watched his house, and eventually ended up threatening his kids. Man, she's a peach, ain't she? So, Katie, you work in insurance. Have you ever heard of anybody like stalking an insurer or a CEO or sending them threats or anything? I would not think that would happen much. Okay. First of all, for context, y'all, Chubb Corporation is like a multi-billion dollar company. It's huge. So her stalking the CEOs and just some guy down the street that owns an insurance agency. This is like he had a security team. It'd be like stalking like Jeff Bezos or something, right? Gates, yeah. But I do. So my dad also works in insurance, and he used to tell me this story about he worked for, we'll call it, Acmeco. And Acmeco denied a claim for this gentleman for decades before my dad even worked for them. But every Christmas, this man would show up at their offices,

dressed as Santa, with a sign that said, no Christmas this year, thanks to Acmeco. Oh my God. That is dedication. He had a costume. Every Christmas. Every Christmas. Oh, my God. And the employees were like, Santa's back. Wow. So for how many years did he do this? Up until my dad worked for them for about four or five years. So I think all through that time. Wow. And I at one point worked in the same building as the famed. general insurance company. Oh, with the annoying commercials. Mm-hmm.

And we would regularly get bomb and arson threats from them. Like, they would get the threats and we'd have to, you know, evacuate. Yeah. So, you know, it's not uncommon. And actually, like, insurance claims adjusters go missing with frightening regularity. Are you shit and me? Holy crap. Well, I didn't know any of that.

There was a case in Florida where a claims adjuster was murdered by, guy just randomly, she was looking at storm damage at his house, and he was a creep. So anyway. Oh, my God. Okay, I wasn't planning on telling this story, but I'm going to. So y'all are getting a complete ad lib here, but I have to tell you the story because it's freaking nuts. So my uncle used to be an insurance adjuster, right?

And so one of their jobs is, like you say, they go out and they look for storm damage and stuff. And he always tells this story. At one time, he went out to this old, like beautiful old Victorian farmhouse. house, kind of out in middle of nowhere. There had just been a really bad storm, and he was just going to check, you know, see if the roof was okay and everything. And so there was this little old lady who lived there, and she opened the door, and there were, like, typical little old lady things that were just doilies, and there were big, fat, happy cats everywhere, and, you know,

she offered him tea. It was all lovely. And then he asked if he could check the attic, and she was like, oh, yes, please do. I store some of my most treasured possessions up there. So he's So he goes up to the attic. She goes with him. He opens the door. And it's like this very picturesque little peak roof attic with like the stained glass window and the sun shining in. And this entire attic room, I kid you not. I guess I should do a content warning here for some upsetting animal stuff. But I don't think there was any abuse involved. And I will explain what I mean in a minute. The entire attic room was nothing but shelves and shelves of jars. And in every jar, was a dead kitten, like in formaldehyde. No, thank you. Yeah. Every single, and there were dozens of them, like the entire room. And these were her most treasured possessions.

And he was like, I just beat feet to hell out of there. Yeah. But judging by the fact that she had all these happy, you know, purry, friendly cats around her, I suspect that this was just somebody who, for some reason, had this psychological need to not let these little babies go. I suspect they were still born or something like that because she seemed like a genuinely sweet person who genuinely loved her cats and her cats seemed happy. So I don't think she hurt them. She just kept them for some reason. And that story lives rent free in my brain and now we'll live rent free in yours as well. So you're welcome. You're welcome. Hey, just a tip for claims adjusters out

there. Just be aware you're in somebody's space. Yep. Absolutely. And you might see something. They don't want you to say. So just, you know, keep your head on a swivel. Absolutely. Absolutely. Stay frosty, y'all. Yeah. And then in 1994, Kenneth Kimes died of an aneurysm, leaving Sante and Kenny exactly

$0 in his will. All the money went to his children by his first wife, every penny. Which, damn, right? I mean, I can 100% understand not leaving Sante a red cent. Because by the end of his life, friends say Kenneth had come to resent Sante and be a little scared of her, which is understandable. He hadn't gotten any better at standing up to her, but maybe this was kind of his one big rebellion, you know, a sort of final middle finger up at the woman who had dragged him into one legal fight or scandal after another for the 20 years

or so they were married. But, you know, to leave your own kid out, that's something entirely different. I don't know what his motivation was for that, but dang. I think maybe he saw Little Kenny for what he was. Yeah, just an extension of Sante. Right. So, Because she and Kenny were left out of the will, Sante was now basically without any means of supporting herself. Her worst nightmare. Right. So I'm sure she's going to deal with that in a mature, intelligent manner, right? Go get a job, start standing on her own two feet. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Just kidding. Sante actually managed to hide Kenneth's death from everyone for almost two years.

She even hid it from Kenny for a while, who by now was grown and in college. How'd she let him find out, by the way? He came home for a visit one day, and Sante showed him an urn. Oh, my God, no, no, no, no, no. And when he asked, you know, what is that? She said, it's your father's ashes. God, so he comes home from college, like, where's Papa? Here he is. God, this kid never had a chance to be normal.

I'm, yeah. Not even a little bit. So, like, how many years in therapy do you think, Mom presented Dad's Ashes to me like she was Vanna White will get you? I'm guessing, like, 15. Minimum. Anyway, to hide Kenneth's death, Sante used the social security number of another guy named Kenneth Kimes on Ken's death certificate.

She told people he was away on business or on trips, and she forged his signature on all kinds of documents. Yeah, and we should note, by the way, that Sante was never prosecuted for this stuff, so these are allegations. Right. And allegedly, while she was keeping Ken's death a secret, she and Kenny got busy taking control of Kenneth's bank accounts and other assets. They bled his estate dry in a variety of inventive ways. Sonti and Kenny definitely made some boneheaded mistakes in this case, but there's no denying that Sante was a master fraudster.

Not so much a master killer, as we'll soon see, but when it came to stealing, she was a virtuoso. To steal a $6 million property in California, she used her husband's name to forge a deed of transfer and establish several shell corporations to hide her connection to the deal. Later, investigators would say it took them forever to figure out all the steps involved in that one.

She and Kenny also got involved with smoke, Buckling Cuban cigars into the states for sale on the black market. Kenny just loved that particular adventure. He bragged to friends about how he and his mom were involved with shady people in Cuba. One of his friends said he seemed to revel in the idea of being a gangster, a big change from the sweet kid he'd once been. Later, Sante got involved with a guy named Sheikh Khalifa Ben Jaber Althani, a member of the royal family in Qatar.

Yeah, I know. bananas. Just roll with it. How the hell does she even meet this dude? I have no idea. This woman is just full of surprises. You got to give her that. She's full of something. According to the shake, the two of them met up in 1996 to talk about going into business together, some kind of internet thing. I'm not sure exactly what. Okay, now this gets a little complicated, so hang in there with me. The Sheikh's family owned the Gulf Union Bank in the Cayman Islands. The Caymans, of course, are a favorite place for rich people who don't think they need to pay their fair share of taxes to stash their money, offshore bank accounts and all that

jazz. Kenneth Kimes was no exception, and he had bank accounts at Gulf Union, accounts that allegedly, Sonday had been treating like her own personal cookie jar ever since his death. So all banks have fraud investigators, and one of the investigators at Gulf Union was a guy named Syed Bilal Ahmed. According to a private investigator, Ahmed was last seen having dinner with Sante at a restaurant in Nassau, Bahamas, then going back to her house.

The investigator discovered that the guy had been looking into Sante's activities with Kenneth Kimes' accounts. Reportedly, he'd found some irregularities. I bet. And when authorities went to check out Ahmed's apartment, it had been cleaned out.

weird. Very weird. And he hasn't been seen or heard from since. That may as well be the quote under Sante's senior photo. Never seen or heard from again. The private investigator had evidence that suggested Santee might have had powerful contacts in the Bahamas and he thought maybe they'd helped her get rid of Ahmed. All this is just allegation. None of it was ever proven, but this kind of shit sure does seem to follow Sante around, doesn't it? I mean, I've never had one single person disappear or have their office firebombed or anything like that around me. Just saying. Boring. Haven't you heard, arson is the spice of life?

Yeah, arson is Sante's love language. So, right around the same time Sayed Ahmed disappeared, Sante talked Kenny into dropping out of college at UC Santa Barbara to become her full-time minion. By now, Sante had a total grip on Kenny, and their relationship was odd. One friend who always thought Sante was creepy but adored Kenny said whenever they'd visit, Sante would sleep in the same room with Kenny, a single bed room. It made her skin crawl. Another friend alleges that they once walked in on Santee and Kenny in bed together, naked. Now, both of them have denied that there was ever anything incestuous between them,

and I hope to God there wasn't. But a lot of people have commented on how touchy-feely they were with each other, always holding hands and canoodling on the couch and that kind of stuff. And if Sante was sexually abusing Kenny, it was just one more way, I think, for her to control him and maintain her tight grip on his psyche. And of course, that's exactly what it would be if it happened, sexual abuse. Mm-hmm. Kenny's personality was interesting.

A lot of people found him absolutely lovable, helpful and sweet and friendly. He'd come over and cookie dinner. But people who knew him well have said that, especially as Sante started to take more, more and more control of his life around 1995, he developed a really volatile angry side. But he'd only let it come out, as one friend put it, when he knew he could get away with it. And apparently, he was really, really good at getting away with stuff. While he was still in college, he lived with a married couple he was friends with for about six months, and they said he was just a delight, except when his mom came to visit.

She and Kenny would get in these huge riproar and fights, just screaming at each other. Sontay was always crawling up Kenny's ass about his spending habits, the women he tried to date. Surprise, surprise, she hated every last one of them. Any and everything. And Kenny would just rail against her and rail against her and then give in every time. He'd just give up and say, you're right, mother, you're always right. Okay, there, Norman. And I don't know if this was part of the reason Kenny left UC Santa Barbara, but in 1995, a fellow student accused him of completely curking out on her during an

argument. He started screaming at her like a wild man, calling her names like classless bitch and whore, like really scared her. Yeah, charming. And she was so upset, she filed a formal complaint against him with the school. So it would seem that Kenny had just as big a reservoir of weird pent-up rage as his mama did. So Kenny dropped out of school in 96, and he and Sante stepped up the scammon, determined to scoop up as much of Ken at the state as they could before his other kids found out he was dead and invoked his will. In 1997, Sante and Kenny showed back up at Kenny's married couple friend's house, asking if Kenny could buy a gun from them.

The husband was a retired cop and a gun collector. Kenny's old friends had a sinking feeling about the whole thing. They told him, we're afraid the next time we see you, you're going to be in prison. And they refused point blank to sell him a gun. Okay. Enter a guy named David Kasden. Kastin was a friend of Kenneth Kimes, and way back in 1992, when Ken and Sante were in that little spot of bother about involuntary servitude, Ken Kimes had asked him if they could put their Nevada house in his name,

just temporarily to keep it out of the fray, because, you know, they were being sued and whatnot. Yeah, I'd say fuck off no, but... Well, yeah, I've never dealt with any of my friends being accused and guilty of slavery, but... Yeah, but if they were, yeah, they wouldn't be my friend anymore. let's just be honest about that. He might have not known what it was about, though. I mean, and it's very possible. I don't think they were close friends at all. I think they were more business associates. It's even more suspicious. Yeah, but I mean, who knows? Like, I've heard

David Kaston's, like, family talk about him, and he sounded like a very much beloved guy. But, yeah, like, I feel like I'd be like, what? I don't think so. Regardless of whether he knew or not, Kaston said, sure. The agreement was that when the trouble had passed, Ken and Sante would transfer the house back into Ken's name, and he thought they'd done it. But then, in January of 1998, Cazden got a nasty shock. A bank in Florida was holding a mortgage on that house for almost $300,000 in his name. When Cazden and his lawyer looked into it, they discovered that Sante had forged his signature on the loan documents. See, she couldn't sell the house because it wasn't in her name, so she decided to go another way.

On January 31st, the house burned down. An accelerant sniffing dog alerted on 14 different spots throughout the wreckage, but the fire investigators couldn't find Sante or Kenny anywhere. They never called to ask about the fire, never made contact in any way. They were, who the hell knew where. Finally, somebody did make contact about the fire. A guy named Robert. McCarran. The guy demanded that the insurance company pay up on the house. He agreed to meet with

the investigators, but insisted on doing so in the lobby of a nearby hotel. Turns out, the deed to the house had been transferred quite recently from David Kazden to this McCarran guy. And there was, of course, a huge fire insurance policy on the house, also in McCarran's name. So who was this guy? Oh my God. Campers. A few weeks after the fire, Robert McCarran showed up at the LAPD. He told him he'd just escaped from Sante and Kenny Kimes. It was one hell of a story. He said that months earlier,

Santa and Kenny had plucked him out of a homeless shelter, saying they wanted to help him. Give him a job, etc. They'd been holding him against his will ever since. They'd transferred the deed of this Nevada house into his name and coached him on what to say to investigators once the house burned down. His job was to collect on the insurance once they set the house on fire and give them the money. McCarran said Sante and Kenny had beaten him, made him cook and clean for them. And now that he'd escaped, he was scared for his life.

They knew, he knew they'd set that fire, he said. He needed protection. Yeah, I'm sure they were planning on getting their money and then killing this poor guy and putting him where nobody would ever find him. and I'm sure that was the exact conclusion he'd come to himself. So I'm glad he was able to get away, poor dude. And later, the investigators found out that while they were meeting with him in that hotel lobby to talk about the insurance and everything, Santee and Kenny were like listening in. Of course.

So creepy. So yet again, we have Sante literally enslaving another human being. Can you even begin to imagine the sense of personal entitlement it would take to do something like that? And of course, she chose a homeless person for this bullshit. Following page one of the Predator Handbook, she always picks on the most vulnerable people she can find. Apparently, she once told a friend that she believed some people were put on this earth to serve,

and some were put on the earth to be served. Gross. I wonder which category she put Boy Wonder Kenny in it. I mean, she never let him have his own life, so was he in the servant category, too? This woman is the con artist version of the barefoot contessa. but kidnapped is fine if you, if you can't. Barefoot con Tessa. Well played. I'm only laughing because I will scream into my microphone, much to the detriment of

campers' ears about this fucking horrible piece of gutter slime. I think the enslavement stuff makes me even matter than the murders for some reason. It's just so... Evil. Yeah. Evil. Evil. murder. Murder is one level of evil, but slavery? Mm-hmm. Yeah, just taking a living, breathing human being and devaluing them to that extent that they just exist.

To chattel? Yeah, it's disgusting. The investigators figured Sante's plan was to keep some of the money for herself and use some to buy off David Kastin, so he wouldn't rat her out about forging his signature on that mortgage paperwork. But Kaston apparently didn't want any part of this bullshit, and he told her so. After that, Sante started calling Cazden up and harassing him, saying stuff like, don't make a fuss about this thing, or you might get hurt. And like so many people before him, who had had the bad luck of running into this act of God and her little personal pan hit man, David Cazden, I know that's good, isn't it? Proud of that one.

That's what he is. I mean, you know. Yeah, she baked him herself. She did. He is her personal pan hit man. so David Kasden was soon fearing for his life. The night before he went missing, he had dinner with a friend and talked about Sante and the threats she'd been making.

The friend was worried for him. And the next day, March 13th, was the last time anybody heard from him. His body was discovered in a dumpster days later, shot through the neck and wrapped in heavy-duty garbage bags. His family was devastated. He'd been just about to move down to Florida to enjoy his retirement. A couple weeks after Kazden's murder, Sontay and Kenny Skipped Town. And on their way out, they bought a Lincoln town car with a bad check.

It's funny, they were so bulletproof for so long, but this one little scam would end up being the thing that finally brought them down. It's always the little things that trip up these kinds of idiots. Like, it was a parking ticket for David Berkowitz, aka son of Sam. It was tax evasion for Al Capone, and it was a bad check for these two shining examples of dipshittery. You got to come correct if you're going to do crimes, you know? and you've got to come correct every time. But that was a little ways still. The car dealer tried several times to get the money from Sante, and for a while she tried to work the old charm offensive on him.

At one point, she invited the car dealer and his wife out to dinner, and later they felt certain she'd drugged their drinks. They'd had some wine she gave them, and neither of them remembered much after that. But before long, Sante just stopped returning the guy's calls and managed to stay just beyond his reach, so he contacted the police. So with the Utah cops hot on their heels about the town car,

Sante and Kenny headed cross-country. They went to Florida for a little while first, and it was down there where they began getting their evil little ducks in a row to steal Irene Silverman's house. Now, how Sante found out about Irene, I'm not entirely sure. Some sources say she became aware of her and her big beautiful home on a trip to New York sometime earlier that year. And others say she found out about Irene down in Florida.

But whatever the truth of the matter, it was in Palm Beach where she and Kenny began drawing up the phony paperwork to transfer the deed of the $6 million brownstone from Irene's name to theirs. At one point, Sante called Irene and posed as an official from a travel agency. She told her, you've won a trip to Las Vegas. You just need to give me your social security number so I can get the ball rolling on your prize. Well, Irene was old, but she wasn't born yesterday, and I imagine she had zero interest in a trip to Vegas, so she didn't pony up. but never when to give up, Sante tried another tack. She called Irene's insurance company and said she was considering moving into an apartment at the Brownstone, but she just wanted to do a background check on the landlady first.

Could she have her social security number, please and thank you? Yeah, that didn't work either. But Sante and Kenny were not about to throw in the towel on this one. They were looking at big money if they could pull this off. Prosecutors think they were probably planning to borrow against the house initially, but eventually decided to just out and out steal it. How the hell they thought they'd get away with this? I can't imagine. I mean, Irene had tenants in that house. She had a staff of 10 people. Do they think all these folks would just accept that Mrs. Silverman had decided to sell them her house and skip town and, like, not tell anybody about it? It's ridiculous. But of course, narcissists operate this way. They're prone to that magical thinking that everything they try will turn out shiny. Anywho, at some point they moved the operation to Manhattan, and poor Irene made the acquaintance of Manny Garan, aka Kenny Kimes, and sadly, we know that story already from Part 1.

At some point during Manny's stay in the apartment, Sante put on that red wig the cops would eventually find in her luggage, climbed into bed, and posed as Irene to try and convince a notary public to sign some of the paperwork they needed to steal the house. The notary refused good for him, because they couldn't provide any ID. Sante said, oh, I lost my driver's license. It's been terrible. And also because the papers had already been signed, and, you know, you have to sign papers in front of a notary. That's not how that works. Right. And all this happened right under the real Irene's nose. She must have been working in her study at the time or watering her plants on her rooftop garden, playing with her dogs.

And meanwhile, these two vipers were inching one step closer to murder. It's so creepy. And the notary said she really handed it up, too. In retrospect, he said he said he suspected she might have actually been wearing some padding to make her look heavier. Good Lord, woman. Chew the scenery much. Anybody else flashing back to our bad bitches two-pack episode, by the way? Remember when fraudster killer Quenetta Harris had a boyfriend pose as her murder victim to get some paperwork authorized? Remember? And the guy was like, it was a dark room and he was in bed and all bandaged up and stuff.

It's just amazing how these people all seem to operate from the same playbook. And once they felt that they had all those ducks in a row, And once Irene figured out that Manny was a creep and a liar and might be dangerous and Kenny realized she was probably getting ready to throw him out, it was time to strike. Sometime on the morning of July 5, 1998, Kenny summoned Irene to his apartment. Maybe he told her he finally had his ID and references to give her. Who knows? But once he had her inside, he and Mommy Dearest killed her. Sante used a stun gun to subdue her. The police later found the box for it in their luggage. And then Kenny, the boy who Sante had trained up as her own personal murder droid since the day he was born, strangled her to death. They stuffed her body into a bag, and then threw it unceremoniously into a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey.

And that was the end of Irene Silverman, a woman who had brought light and sparkle to the lives of so many people in her 82 years, just thrown away, like a bag of trash. And as I'm sure you'll remember from part one, it wasn't long after the murder. murder that the cops arrested Sante and Kenny at the Plaza Hotel. Not for Irene's murder, but for the theft of that Lincoln Town car back in Utah. I have two classic nuggets of joy to share with you from that arrest. First, while Sante was standing there, like, yeah, that bag's not mine. I don't know how those documents got there. Stun Gun, Stun One.

Just as cool as a fridge full of cucumbers. Kenny peed his pants. Yep. He did a little peddle in his breeches, right there on the street outside the plaza hotel. Not quite as ice cold as mom there, are we Ken? And even better than that, when they finally got Sante back to the station and started booking her, and she realized what the warrant was for, she perked right back up and said, oh, this is just about the car? Oh, well, that's all right then.

Sometime when I get back from Utah, I'll buy you a drink. Smooth, Sante. Real smooth, girl. Way to stay under the radar. Wow. But of course, soon the cop who arrested them saw that sketch of Manny Garen on the news and realized it was a dead ringer for Kenny Kimes. And they started uncovering all those documents with the missing Irene Silverman's name all over them. And the rest is history.

Kent Walker, Sante's son from her first marriage, was at the third. upset when he learned about the arrests, but he wasn't surprised. He knew his mom and half-brother were con artists, and he wouldn't put murder past them for a second. He said, I never even considered for a second that they weren't guilty. I knew they were guilty. Kent has a lot of angst about Kenny, the little brother he loved so much as a kid. He doesn't absolve him of responsibility, but he feels like Sante never gave Kenny much of a chance to be anything other than what he became. He said, I never met anybody with a personality as strong as my mother's. And he also said this. She wanted that accomplice, and it wasn't going to be me. So it had to be

Kenny. And he was willing to do it. Yeah, I find that interesting because it sounds like she tried to enlist him to be her minion first. And when he refused, she started grooming Kenny, which just really points to how determined she was, you know, she was going to have a partner in crime, period. It's really scary. And, I mean, it goes back to part one where we were discussing the tutor and how, yeah, yeah. She learned, I can't let anybody else adjust or calibrate his moral cup as it has to be. Don't you dare try to teach my son morals. That's what she said.

Jeez, Louise. The case was all over the news, of course. the media started calling Sante and Kenny the grifters, and Sante and Kenny took full advantage of the attention, doing lots of interviews. They both seemed to be enjoying the attention. One interview on the show's 60 Minutes was so unnerving that it sparked a whole bunch of rumors about an incestuous relationship between Sante and Kenny, and it's not hard to see why if you watch it. They're holding hands, and the whole vibe is just weird. Yeah, it's uncomfortable.

This continued during the trial. Sante and Kenny skeved out the whole courtroom by holding hands, caressing each other, brushing hair out of each other's faces, and whispering and giggling together at the defense table. Yeah, if you didn't know they were mother and son, you might actually think they were like a romantic couple. The judge finally told them to knock it the fuck off, probably because he knew if they didn't, somebody was going to barf. Sante and Kenny maintained their innocence. Despite having initially claimed to be a friend of Irene's, now Sante said she'd never met the woman. And the defense hammered home the fact that Irene's body had never been found.

But the prosecutors had a solid case. Among other evidence, they presented 17 notebooks they'd found among the kinds of stuff, and they were damning. Written in both Sante and Kenny's handwriting, they were essentially a detailed game plan for infiltrating Irene Silverman's house, forging the necessary documents to get her power of attorney and a deed to the house, then killing her and taking ownership of everything she had. They planned, of course, to sell the house eventually in Cashen Big. There were also pages and pages of Sante practicing Irene's signature, which gives me the hebes.

A friend of Santes said she'd come back from a trip to New York earlier in 1998 and told him she was planning to buy a fabulous brownstone in Manhattan and rent out the rooms to rich tenants. Yeah, I wonder what house she was talking about. That's a thinker. Santee and Kenny were each convicted of Irene's murder and sentenced to more than 120 years in prison each. When the verdict was read, Sante shot lasers out of her eyes at the jury, while Kenny just laughed and talked loudly over the judge like a bratty kid in a history class. They were outraged that they'd been convicted.

They both went on Larry King just a few months after sentencing with Sante ranton, Raven at the NYPD, and the district attorney's office had framed them both, planted Irene's stuff on them. him, bribed nearly a hundred witnesses to testify against them. Basically, she did an excellent impression of the megaphone-wielding shouty guy on a street corner wearing a sandwich board and a Mickey Mouse hat and yelling about Russian spies and fluoride in the water. You know, chem trails! Camtrails! She claimed that the NYPD was concealing evidence that Irene Silverman had been running a brothel for years. She said, they just wanted her dead and they wanted to pin it on us. Wow. Okay. Settle down, Suntay. I'm sure that NYPD have a lot better things to do than go after a fading Liz Taylor wannabe and her oily gangster son.

And I'm pretty sure their method of dealing with brothels is a little more pedestrian than a murder in a frame-up. God's sake. It's so absurd. Like, come out with a better story than that, at least, if you can. Come on. I thought you were supposed to be a good liar. And as Larry King sat there, probably trying not to yak, Sante vowed to spend the rest of her life proving Kenny's innocence. She said The only reason I think I'm alive Is that I must prove his innocence

Being a parent is the most important thing in the world And that boy is as innocent And as wonderful as son as you could pray for He is in hell And he's done nothing wrong Ugh Gross And if you think I'm exaggerating that presentation

Go watch it Mm-mm Okay, I toned it down Of course, in her eyes I'm sure he hadn't done anything wrong because in Sante's world, it's not wrong to murder somebody if they try to get in the way of your payday. And, campers, if you thought this story could not get any weirder, hold on to your marshmallows. Because later, Sante and Kenny were scheduled for trial in California for the murder of David Kastin.

When Kenny found out they were eligible for the death penalty, it apparently broke his brain worse than it was already broken. Because shortly before he and his mom were due to be extradited to California for the Kastin trial, Kenny gave an interview to court TV reporter Maria Zone. And during a break in the interview, Kenny suddenly lunged at the reporter, grabbed her and put the tip of an ink pin against her jugular vein. And he threatened to stab her with it and let her bleed out all over the floor

if prosecutors didn't stop the extradition of his mother. So that's terrifying, right? And of course they brought in hostage negotiators and four hours into the standoff with Maria Zone sitting there wondering whether she might not live to see another sunrise, the negotiators managed to create a diversion, and it distracted Kenny long enough for officers to wrestle him down and free Maria.

Holy shit, right? Holy shit. Yeah. Big tough guy. We mentioned that he peed his pants when they arrested him, right? Mm-hmm. We mentioned that? Yeah, just wanted to make sure y'all remember that.

So when his well-thought-out, reasonable take-a-hostage plan didn't work out, Kenny offered to testify against Sante in exchange for a plea deal that included life in prison and a promise not to seek the death penalty against his mom. So... Hang on. Hold on.

I like that the less extreme option of the two was to take a woman hostage. Yes. He was like, okay, I have option A. And if option A doesn't work out, absolutely last Hail Mary option is to testify against mother. justify against mommy. That was the worst outcome. Like, possibly kill an innocent person. Well,

we've done that before, right? Oh, my God. And I imagine the cameras were rolling for this whole thing. Because if they weren't, they should have been, because that's good watching, you know. I would pay to see that footage. And I'm sure the reporter was like, don't turn the cameras off. Get this. If I were a reporter, I would be. But bless her heart. I've seen her do an interview about it, and she's remarkably poised about it. She says he was actually quite, like, polite to her during the standoff, which is really kind of a weird thing to say, but it fits with Kenny, you know, and his personality, and he and Sante always trying to charm their way out of everything, that he was kind of apologetic about it and, like, yeah, and she seemed to have recovered very well. But holy, I mean, can you imagine how terrifying that would be. That almost makes it worse to me that he was polite because he clearly just thought as his only option. He was like, oh, we wouldn't be here if I didn't have to do this. Right, right. I'm terribly sorry about this, but it's my only option. because I can't possibly tell the truth. So despite the fact that hell had not in fact frozen over and pigs had not learned to fly,

Kenny took the stand and testified against Mother. The whole time he was on the stand, Sante chewed the scenery up one side of the courtroom and down the other, just weeping and crying, oh, Kenny, my darling, oh, my darling. Like, et tu Brute, how couldst thou betray me, my beloved son? Oh, calamity! It was a ridiculous performance, but Kenny teared up and wouldn't look at her. For God's sake, woman, he's trying to save your skank-ass life. Suck it up.

Kenny admitted to the whole affair. He said Sante had told him to take care of Kasden so he couldn't get them prosecuted for their attempt to steal the house Kenneth Sr. had put in his name. Kenny and an accomplice had gone over to Kasden's house to talk about it on March 13th. and when Kazden turned his back on him to make some coffee, Kenny shot him in the neck. Oh, man. Shot a man when this fucking back was turned.

Yep. God damn coward. Yeah, it's horrible. That was it. The accomplice later became an informant and ratted Kenny out to the LAPD, which is why they'd been looking for Sante and Kenny at this time they killed Irene. Kenny also confessed to Irene's murder during the trial, which is where we got the details we gave you about how it went down.

Sante was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. Yay. Suck on that, you absolute walking nightmare of a harpy of a woman. Ugh. Yeah. Kent Walker told the show American Justice, I don't think there's ever been anyone in the world who could figure my mother out. There's never been anyone like her, and there will probably never be anyone like her again.

Thank God. Yeah, think, as you say, Kent, God. By the way, years ago, Kent told Dateline that he'd spoken to Kenneth Kimes just a few days before his death. He said Kenneth seemed scared, and he told him he thought he'd been poisoned. Oh, boy. Kent always wondered if his mom had something to do with Kenneth's death, but of course, we have no way to know for sure. Would I put it past her? Hell no.

16 years into her sentence, at age 79, Sante died in prison of natural causes. Yeah, and I remember once coming. across a comment from somebody who'd been locked up with her for a while. I think it was on a YouTube video. And she said that she was lovely to her fellow inmates, kind of a cell block den mother. And I'm actually not surprised to hear that. She could always turn on the charm. And everybody who knew her well said she could seem to be incredibly loving when it suited her. It probably suited her to have the other inmates see her as a matriarch. Oh, yeah. I mean, it certainly suited her on the outside as well.

I'm just a mom. She would always say that in an interview. views. As for Kenny, he's still in prison, where he needs to be. So how do we feel about Kenny, Whitney? Do we have sympathy? Do we not? I have some. I do, because I really agree with his brother Kent that he did not have much of a chance. I mean, you can't absolve him of responsibility because once he was an adult, you know, he could have chosen to sit down and unravel all of that trauma from his childhood and get some help and, you know, at least you have to know it's wrong to murder somebody. Right. But I do have some sympathy at least for the person he might have become if she hadn't have taken his brain and molded it into what she molded it into. What do you

think? I have sympathy for Kenny the child. Right, right. I think everyone's responsible for their own actions at the end of the day. And, you know, if you're an adult, no matter how horrible and built against you, your childhood was you are responsible for how you treat other people. Yeah. And, you know, when people say, oh, somebody had a bad childhood or whatever, well, lots of people have bad childhoods and end up growing up to be lovely people who give back and who don't treat other people like garbage.

So, you know, it really. It, to me, stigmatizes victims of abuse if you're going to say it absolves you of responsibility. It stigmatizes people that were victims of abuse. It stigmatizes people with mental illnesses. Right, exactly. Because, again, at the end of the day, everybody is responsible for their own actions. Yeah. That's the only thing you can take home at the end of the day.

Yeah. You're not what happened to you. Right. Kenny was not what happened to him. Right. but yeah I agree with you some sympathy for who he was when he was a kid because apparently he was a really sweet loving kid and she just worked on him and worked on him and actively prevented other people from teaching him good values you know just really scary so scary and as for Sante I think she's one of the scariest people I've ever come across in true crime and y'all know that's saying something coming for me I mean Sante makes Tracy Richter look like a kindergarten teacher and I'd encourage you to watch some of her interviews, and there are a ton of them on YouTube. You'll roll your eyes a lot because you know the story already, but you can also see how she was able to charm and con so many people. I mean, she has this very like, oh, I'm nobody special. I'm just a mom kind of vibe. And I could see how it might draw people in, especially back when she also had the gorgeous looks on top of everything else. But underneath at all, that woman was pure, uncut self-interest. No more human than a black widow spider or a spitting cobra. And,

and that's all Kenny had for her mother, you know? So, all told, it looks like they most likely killed at least four people. Possibly five, if you think Sante killed Kenneth Senior, too. So we have the insurance adjuster, Elmer Holmgren, who set the fire for Sante and was working with the ATF against her later. We have Sayed Ahmed, the auditor at the Gulf Union Bank in the Bahamas, who was uncovering Sante's fraudulent use of Ken's accounts. We have David Kaston, who she thought might rat her out about the insurance.

fraud, and then there's Irene, the last victim. And I think it's very likely that there others will never find out about. And that homeless guy was totally going to be number five slash six, for sure. So, who, anybody else just feel a little chill? Yep. Yeah, me too. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a shout out to a few of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Taylor, Kayla, Thalia, and Dawn. And Thalia, please tell me if I mispronounced your name, and I will fix it next week. We appreciate you all to the moon and

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