Scott Lee Kimball
Scott Lee Kimball is a convicted serial killer, con man and fraudster from Boulder County, Colorado, who murdered at least four people over a two-year period; investigators strongly suspect him in as many as 21 other unsolved killings. For the first year of his murder activity, he worked as an informant for the FBI, which both paid him and protected him from facing justice over some of his fraud schemes. Almost none of the information he gave the bureau was of any use in prosecuting other crimes, and much of it later proved false; the case greatly embarrassed the bureau. The agent who oversaw him during this period was disciplined; he insists he was not the only one responsible for enabling Kimball.
Kimball was sexually abused in his teens, which led to a suicide attempt. He is a skilled forger who, while he ran a legitimate business buying and selling organic beef, primarily enriched himself by passing bad checks on the accounts of others and using forged documents; by 2003 he had faced criminal charges in four Western states. These white-collar crimes also enabled his murders, by allowing him to create evidence that his victims were still alive after he had killed them; he also used their bank accounts and credit cards to further his schemes once they were dead.
Two of Kimball's victims were people close to him: the daughter of his third wife, and his own uncle. His second wife, who bore his two sons, claims he twice kidnapped and raped her; there was an open arrest warrant for him from the second assault, which occurred after he absconded from work release, at the time the FBI hired him as an informant. Members of Kimball's family and some investigators believe that a 2004 motor vehicle accident which severely injured his oldest son was in fact an attempt to kill the boy for insurance money; charges were never brought, due to conflicts between the jurisdictions where it could have been prosecuted.
An investigation into a 2006 check fraud scheme eventually led law enforcement to discover the murders. Kimball, having violated the terms of his plea agreement when he could not lead police to the still-missing body of one of the four victims, faced murder charges in all four cases, in addition to the fraud charges that had prompted the investigation. Three of the missing murder victims had been found in remote areas of Colorado and neighboring Utah. Under Colorado laws which quadruple sentences for those found to be habitual offenders, he was sentenced to a combined 70 years for the frauds and the murders after pleading guilty. While in state prison, he additionally pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted escape. He is currently serving his sentence in federal prison, at the United States Penitentiary, Florence High in Colorado, a high-security facility immediately adjacent to ADX Florence.
Early life
Kimball was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1966. When he was 10 his mother, Barb, came out as a lesbian, leading to his parents' divorce; his father, Virgil, left the state and remarried. Kimball was strongly affected by the divorce. In his early adolescence he had his first encounter with law enforcement when police were called to the house after he fired a gun out the window at neighboring houses.Kimball and his younger brother Brett took refuge at their grandmother's mobile home. A neighbor of hers, Theodore Peyton, took advantage of their situation and began sexually abusing both of them at a cabin he owned in Nederland, Colorado. Peyton's abuse progressed from having Kimball touch him and photographing the boy naked to tying Kimball up and raping him, recording the episode on film. Peyton threatened to kill his father, who lived in Montana, if he told anyone. Peyton continued abusing Kimball when Kimball would return to Boulder on weekends, after he had moved to Hamilton, Montana to attend high school and live with his father and brother.
The abuse ended when Kimball was 23 and shot himself in the head in a suicide attempt. The bullet glanced off his skull, but the wound, which left a visible scar on his forehead, was severe enough that he was in critical condition for several days. A cousin, Ed Coet, remarked that Kimball came out of the experience changed, as if he had "lost his conscience".
Afterwards, Kimball and several other boys whom Peyton had molested reported him to Boulder police. Peyton was arrested, convicted of seven counts of sexually assaulting a child, and imprisoned. Kimball continued to feel a deep sense of shame, "less of a man" for it, according to a former girlfriend.
Kimball wrote a letter to the judge, begging him to sentence Peyton to additional prison time, stating, " denied me my right to a normal, healthy innocent childhood. e has damaged my life forever." When asked about the abuse and its effect on Kimball in 2010, Peyton said only was a long time ago."
Criminal career
Kimball had already turned to nonviolent crime, usually fraud. At the age of 22 he was convicted of passing bad checks, his first felony, in Montana. Back in Colorado, he burglarized houses. Montana also charged him with running an illegal hunting outfitting business.After a brief first marriage failed, Kimball married Larissa Hentz in 1993 and moved with her to Spokane, Washington, where they had two sons before divorcing in 1997. She recalls that process servers were frequent visitors to their house, as Kimball was running scams in the logging industry, and those who partnered with him and were cheated would often use legal means to recover their money. "He always had an excuse", Hentz recalls. "It was never his fault". Among those Kimball victimized in his schemes were her dentists and the bishops at her church.
Their relationship continued for another two years after the divorce, ending when Hentz accused him of rape. Kimball told police she was trying to secure full custody of their sons, and after she failed a lie detector test, no charges were filed. Prosecutors also saw the case as "complicated", since the couple had continued to have consensual sex after the incident.
The following year, 2000, Kimball's violation of probation for an earlier fraud conviction revoked his earlier suspended sentence and put him back in prison in Montana. A year later, he absconded from a halfway house and stole a truck, along with the till from his employer, a gas station, where he was on work release. Hentz reported that, shortly afterward, he returned to Spokane, where he broke into her house, kidnapped her, and raped her again. She filed charges, and an arrest warrant was issued.
Cooperation with FBI
Kimball fled to Alaska, where he posed as his brother, got engaged to another woman, and resumed his career in check fraud, writing $25,000 in forged checks. He was again arrested and convicted. In federal prison, he convinced FBI agents that he would work for them as an informant, and he was never brought to trial on the Spokane charges. The FBI denies this resulted from any intervention on its part. The agent who handled Kimball in Alaska says he never knew about those charges.Kimball told the FBI that a fellow inmate, Arnold Flowers, was planning to have the federal judge and prosecutor in his case, along with a witness who had testified in the fraud case against him, killed. With his help and that of an undercover agent, the bureau recorded Flowers and his girlfriend making the arrangements with persons whom they believed to be the killers. They were arrested on several felony charges in March 2002.
Kimball told the FBI he could help them with more cases. Another fellow inmate, he said, had boasted of having killed another federal prosecutor, Thomas Wales, in his Seattle-area home the year before. For his safety, Kimball was transferred to the low-security Englewood federal prison in Littleton, Colorado. He discreetly let it be known that he had information about planned crimes that FBI agents might want to know about, and soon the bureau's liaison to the prison, Carle Schlaff, came to visit him. Kimball told Schlaff that fellow convict Steve Ennis, whom he had befriended, was allegedly plotting to kill witnesses expected to testify in an important trial about Ennis's ecstasy distribution ring.
Schlaff had resented being assigned to Englewood after earlier working on organized crime investigations. He considered the work more suited to a less experienced agent. In Kimball he saw the possibility for breaking the kind of case that could put him back on the career path he had been hoping for. He viewed Kimball as someone who, while he "had an answer for everything", was not a violent man and could still earn the trust of a jury as a witness. Due to Kimball's earlier service as an informant, there was still nothing in his file about the rape and kidnapping charges.
In March 2003, shortly after Jennifer Marcum, the first of four people Kimball later admitted killing, disappeared, he pleaded guilty in a Colorado federal court to the Alaska fraud charges. The prosecution and defense agreed that the records would be sealed to protect Kimball's work as an informant, an agreement signed off on by John Suthers, U.S. Attorney for Colorado. The following day, the FBI flew him to Seattle for a monitored conversation with the man he had identified to Schlaff as Wales's killer. However, the conversation yielded no useful information, as Kimball did not say what the FBI had wanted him to do, and it seemed as if the man barely knew him. Afterwards, Kimball failed a lie detector test in which he was asked if the man had confessed the Wales killing to him. Federal prosecutors later told Schlaff they were putting the Ennis case on hold.
When Schlaff drove Kimball to the airport the following month for a flight to Alaska to consult with prosecutors on the Flowers case, he noticed Kimball seemed less relaxed than usual.
When Schlaff later checked Kimball's online file at the FBI office, he saw a new warrant from Spokane that did not specify a charge. Angry at not just Kimball but the prosecutors in the Ennis case and the Seattle agents who had doubted Kimball's reliability, Schlaff decided to end Kimball's service as an informant.
Schlaff had Denver police arrest Kimball upon his return from Alaska. The Spokane charge turned out to be a minor violation of his probation there related to his reporting of his address. Just after Schlaff told him he would no longer be an informant, Kimball told him he had information in the Jennifer Marcum disappearance, which, he later explained, was evidence that Ennis's partner had killed Marcum and told him about it in detail.
A DEA investigator on the case was not sure Kimball was telling the truth, but he passed a lie detector test this time. At Kimball's sentencing in December, prosecutors told the judge that he might yet be able to help the bureau solve that case, and asked for the lightest sentence possible. Kimball was fined $5,000 and ordered to pay almost $8,300 in restitution to the Wells Fargo bank branch in Cordova, Alaska. Judge Marcia Krieger sentenced him to three months in prison, which was more than accounted for by the time Kimball served. He was also put on probation for three years, ending his formal service as an FBI informant, although he could still work with the bureau voluntarily.