Sante Kimes
Sante Kimes, also known as the Dragon Lady, was an American murderer, con artist, robber, fraudster, serial arsonist and suspected serial killer. Her decades-long crime spreeincluding throughout her marriage to her second husband, millionaire Kenneth Kimes Sr.ended with her arrest for the 1998 murder of Irene Silverman in New York City. Many of these crimes were committed with the assistance of her son, Kenneth Kimes Jr. Both were tried and convicted together on 118 charges, including the murder of Silverman.
Kenneth Jr. made a plea deal in the 1998 murder of David Kazdin in Los Angeles, agreeing to testify against his mother in exchange for neither facing the death penalty. Sante was subsequently convicted of the Kazdin murder. The pair were also suspected of but never charged in a third murder in the Bahamas, to which Kenneth Jr. later confessed. Sante also admitted to her son that she murdered the partner in one of her arsons, Elmer Ambrose Holmgren, who had disappeared in Costa Rica; no charges were brought in this crime.
Early life and criminal history
Sante Kimes was born Sante Louise Singhrs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on July 24, 1934, the third of four children born to Illinois native Mary Gertrude and herbalist Prama Mahendra "Doc" Singhrs. Sante's father had emigrated from the Indian region of Punjab by way of Canada. She had three siblings: an older brother and sister, and one younger sister. As a teenager, Sante would go by the name "Sandra."Sante would later falsely claim that her father left the family when she was three years old and that her mother became a prostitute. In reality, Sante's father died from heart disease when she was five years old. According to her younger sister, Retha, Sante had an incestuous relationship with their brother, Carl, and was a pyromaniac who held lit matches underneath Retha's fingers against her will. As a child, Sante would tie up the goats and dogs on her family's farm and use hatpins to mutilate and torture them.
When she was a teenager, Sante moved with her mother and younger sister to Los Angeles. There she was allegedly adopted by Edwin and Mary Chambers, along with another boy. She moved with her new family to Carson City, Nevada, where she graduated from Carson High School in 1952. At school, Sante earned a reputation as a bully who frequently belittled and intimidated younger students.
In 1956, Sante reunited with a former boyfriend from high school, Edward Walker. They married the following year and had one son, Kent Walker. After a 1961 shoplifting conviction in Sacramento, Sante separated and reconciled intermittently with Walker, but their divorce was not finalized until 1969.
Walker was a general contractor who built houses in the Sacramento area; in December 1960, Sante set fire to a house he had built in order to fraudulently collect insurance. She only destroyed the kitchen and received . Over the course of their marriage, dozens of houses that Walker had supervised burned down, and Sante had a number of affairs with his wealthy business associates. After her first divorce, Sante and Kent travelled to Palm Springs, California.
In 1971, Sante met Kenneth Keith Kimes Sr., a motel tycoon seventeen years her senior, after reading about his divorce in a magazine article and learning that he had a net worth of approximately $20million. The couple would eventually marry in Clark County, Nevada, on April 5, 1981. They had one son, Kenneth Kimes Jr., who was born on March 24, 1975.
Sante spent the better part of her life fleecing people of money, expensive merchandise and real estate, either through arson, elaborate con games, forgery or outright theft. She committed insurance fraud on numerous occasions, frequently by committing arson and then collecting money for property damage. She also frequently introduced Kenneth Sr. as an ambassador, a ploy that even gained the couple access to a White House reception during the Ford Administration. She sometimes impersonated Elizabeth Taylor, whom she resembled slightly.
Sante committed many acts of fraud that were not even financially necessary, such as enslaving maids when she could easily afford to pay them. She frequently offered young, homeless undocumented immigrants housing and employment, then kept them as virtual prisoners by threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they did not follow her orders. As a result, Sante and Kenneth Sr. spent years squandering his fortune on lawyers' fees, defending themselves against charges of slavery.
Sante was eventually arrested in August 1985 and was sentenced by the United States District Court to five years' imprisonment for violating federal anti-slavery laws, and was successfully sued by Honolulu civil attorney David Schutter in civil court. Kenneth Sr. took a plea bargain and agreed to complete an alcohol treatment program. He and Kenneth Jr. lived a reasonably normal life until Sante was released from prison in 1989. Kenneth Sr. died of a brain aneurysm in 1994.
Murders
Elmer Holmgren
On September 18, 1990, Sante hired 50-year-old lawyer Elmer Ambrose Holmgren to burn her Honolulu home due to a lien on the property, and the fact it would have cost to sell it. Insurance investigators interviewed Holmgren, who admitted his involvement in the arson. On October 24, Sante burned Holmgren's office because he possessed a number of legal documents related to the case which would have incriminated her.Before a case could be brought to trial, Holmgren told his family that he was taking a trip to Costa Rica with Sante and Kenneth Sr. on August 2, 1991. He has not been seen since. In November 2000, Kenneth Jr. admitted that his mother had told him that she killed Holmgren by hitting him in the head with a hammer in a car, while she was riding in the backseat and he was riding in the front passenger's seat. Holmgren's body was never found, and no charges were brought against any member of the Kimes family.
Syed Bilal Ahmed
Kenneth Jr. also confessed to murdering 46-year-old banker Syed Bilal Ahmed, who was in charge of Sante's offshore bank accounts, in Nassau, Bahamas, on September 4, 1996, which had been suspected by Bahamian authorities at the time. He testified that the two acted together to drug Ahmed, drown him in a bathtub and dump his body offshore, but no charges were ever filed in that case. Sante denied any involvement in or knowledge of the murders, and she claimed that Kenneth Jr. confessed solely to avoid receiving the death penalty.David Kazdin
David Kazdin, aged 63, had allowed Sante to use his name on the deed of a home in Las Vegas that was actually occupied by her and Kenneth Sr. in the 1970s. Several years later, Sante convinced a notary to forge Kazdin's signature on a loan application for $280,000, with the house as collateral. When Kazdin discovered the forgery through a letter sent from his bank and threatened to expose Sante, she ordered Kenneth Jr. to kill him. On March 9, 1998, Kenneth Jr. murdered Kazdin in his Los Angeles home by shooting him in the back of the head. According to another accomplice's later testimony, all three participated in disposing of the evidence. Kazdin's body was found in a dumpster near Los Angeles International Airport in March 1998. The murder weapon was never recovered, having been disassembled and dropped into a storm sewer.Irene Silverman
Former ballerina and socialite Irene Zambelli Silverman, aged 82, was last seen at her townhouse on East 65th Street in New York City on July 5, 1998. Kenneth Jr. was a tenant in Silverman's mansion at the time she went missing, having moved into one of her apartments the previous month using an alias.Authorities arrested Sante and Kenneth Jr. on the day of Silverman's disappearance with the initial charges stemming from a fraudulent check written in Utah for $14,900 earlier in 1998; they were charged with Silverman's murder in December 1998 and convicted in 2000. Authorities believe mother and son devised a scheme whereby Sante would assume the identity of Silverman and appropriate ownership of her mansion, which was valued at $7.7million. The pair recorded Silverman's phone conversations and kept a set of fifteen notebooks on which Sante had written detailed descriptions of mortgage fraud schemes involving many intended victims, including both Silverman and Kazdin.
When he was arrested, Kenneth Jr. had in his possession Silverman's keys, cassettes of her tape-recorded calls, loaded firearms, wigs, masks, plastic handcuffs, $30,000 in cash, an empty stun gun box and a substance similar to a "date rape" drug. He also held a forged deed which approved the transfer of Silverman's multi-million dollar townhouse to Sante's shell corporation for $395,000. During the trial for Kazdin's murder, Kenneth Jr. confessed that after his mother had used a stun gun on Silverman, he strangled her, stuffed her corpse into a bag and deposited it in a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Investigation and arrest
The investigation into the Kimes family officially began on March 14, 1998, when Kazdin's remains were found in a dumpster near LAX. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Los Angeles Police Department detectives assigned to the investigation focused on the mortgage application with the forged signature that falsely linked Kazdin to a house in Las Vegas which had been partly burned down in an attempted arson. The supposed homeowner turned out to be David McCarran, a homeless man who said Sante and Kenneth Jr. had lit the arson fire. He also claimed to have been forced to stay in the house by the Kimes family, who hoped to collect the insurance money from the loss of the house.Investigators also located Stan Patterson, a second man who confessed to selling a handgun to Kenneth Jr. which he used to kill Kazdin. He was told of several potential felony charges stemming from the murder and mortgage fraud, and reluctantly agreed to cooperate with police in apprehending the pair to avoid prosecution. At the end of June 1998, Patterson got a call from Sante about an expensive townhouse in New York's Upper West Side she wanted to sell, and she needed his help with the paperwork. Patterson agreed to meet her in New York on July 5. He informed the FBI about the scheduled meeting before he left on July 3. Two days later, Patterson met Sante at the New York Hilton around 6 PM that evening. Around 7 PM, Kenneth Jr. arrived at the Hilton and approached Sante. Upon his appearance FBI and New York City Police Department officers arrested both of them.