Kenneth Kimes Jr. was 23 when he and his mother, Sante Kimes, were arrested in a Manhattan hotel on July 5, 1998. That same day Irene Silverman, the 82-year-old owner of the townhouse where he had been renting an apartment under a false name, disappeared. She has never been found. In May 2000 a Manhattan jury convicted mother and son of her murder on circumstantial evidence. In November 2003 he pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to the March 1998 shooting of David Kazdin, a businessman who had known his parents for about twenty years, and in 2004 he testified against his mother at her trial for that killing. During that trial he also confessed to drowning Syed Bilal Ahmed, a banker who vanished in the Bahamas in 1996. He was never charged in Ahmed's death.
Most accounts of the case are written around Sante Kimes, who has her own page on this site ("Sante Kimes: The Dragon Lady"). This page follows her son: how he grew up, what he did and admitted, how the cases against him were built, and what has happened to him since.
Kenneth Kimes Jr. was born in 1975 to Sante Kimes and Kenneth Kimes Sr., a self-made businessman who built motels and worked as a contractor and land developer. The family's main home was a two-story house at 2121 Geronimo Way in Las Vegas, bought around 1980 next to a golf course and screened from the street by brambles and a high fence, the Las Vegas Sun reported in 1998. The family also lived for years in Hawaii and spent time in California.
In the early 1980s the boy was taught by tutors while the family traveled. He told CNN in 2024 that what he had believed were cross-country vacations in a motor home were in fact his parents staying ahead of the FBI. In 1985, when he was about 10, federal agents arrested his parents. Sante Kimes was convicted the next year of federal charges of holding young women from Mexico as unpaid domestic servants, and she served about three years of a five-year sentence. His father pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. Kenneth Jr. later described the years he spent alone with his father, while his mother was in prison, as the most stable of his childhood.
The Las Vegas Sun traced his schooling from a Catholic elementary school to Bishop Gorman High School in 1988, then Green Valley High School, then home tutoring in Montecito, California. He enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the fall of 1993. A Nassau newspaper reported in 2019 that he also attended St Andrew's School during the family's years in the Bahamas, which it put at 1992 to 1996.
Accounts from the time describe a troubled young man. A neighbor told the Las Vegas Sun he had attacked his mother when he was 15; a rocket he launched on the Fourth of July set a neighbor's house on fire and led to a lawsuit that was settled. Court papers from his college years described fights and threats, and one student obtained a restraining order against him, which he denied. Friends said he had resented and been ashamed of his mother as a teenager. After his arrest, police and the Associated Press reported that he had an arrest record for assaulting a police officer and for "con games." He told Larry King in 2000 that he had no criminal history and that an incident in Florida had been "over three lipsticks."
Kenneth Kimes Sr. died in 1994. His son told CNN that the cause was an aneurysm and that his mother kept the death from him for about three months, telling callers that his father was traveling or in the shower or had lost his voice. When he learned the truth he "felt annihilated," he said. His mother told him she was suicidal, and he left college to stay with her and help her look for his father's money. Friends who spoke to the Las Vegas Sun in 1998 said he changed after the death and grew close to the mother he had once avoided. "If his mother was never allowed out, I don't believe these events would have occurred," a childhood friend said.
From that point he traveled with his mother between Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Florida and the Bahamas, where the family had a house near Cable Beach in Nassau. The Guardian's 1999 account of the case described him as his mother's partner in crime from 1994 on.
Syed Bilal Ahmed was a bank officer, described in 1998 reporting as a 55-year-old native of Bahrain and an officer of First Cayman Bank. In September 1996 he was in Nassau looking into irregularities at a subsidiary, Gulf Union Bank, the Las Vegas Sun reported. He agreed to have dinner with Sante Kimes one evening. His luggage then disappeared from his hotel, and he was never seen again. The Guardian reported that he had told relatives he was dining with the Kimeses, and that mother and son had left the Bahamas for Los Angeles before police connected them to the meeting. Bahamian investigators told reporters in 1998 that they had no proof linking the Kimeses to his disappearance, and TIME reported only that Bahamas police had "unanswered questions."
Nassau's Tribune, citing the work of its former managing editor John Marquis, later described Ahmed as an Indian banker who had come to the Bahamas to examine irregularities in the account of Kenneth Kimes Sr. Accounts of his nationality, age and errand therefore differ, and they are set out in the section on disputed points below.
No one has ever been charged with harming Ahmed, and his body has not been found. Kenneth Kimes Jr. did not speak about him until the summer of 2004, and what he then said is described in the section on the Los Angeles trial.
David Kazdin was a 63-year-old businessman from Granada Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, who had known the Kimes family for about two decades. As a favor to Kenneth Kimes Sr., he had allowed his name to be put on the deed of the family's Las Vegas house, which made him its nominal owner. Reporters in 1998 described him as afraid of Sante Kimes. Prosecutors later said that she took out a loan against the Las Vegas house by forging his signature; the amount is given as $200,000, $260,000 and $280,000 in different reports. When the lender contacted Kazdin, he said he had never applied for it. He had a family: his son Steven Kazdin attended the 2004 trial, and relatives were in court when Kenneth Kimes pleaded guilty.
In his 2003 plea Kenneth Kimes admitted going to Kazdin's home on March 13, 1998, and shooting him under a plan he had made with his mother. At her trial the following year he gave the jury his account. He said that when his mother learned that Kazdin knew about the loan, she said, "We're going to have to kill him." She suggested he bring plastic bags and wished him good luck as he left. He said he talked with Kazdin in his kitchen and then shot him once in the back of the head as he stood at the sink. A man he had recruited from a homeless shelter, who had waited outside, helped him move the body into Kazdin's Jaguar and clean the house. He said the two of them went to a movie, ate, and bought clothes to replace their bloodied ones before leaving the body in a trash bin after dark. On the way home he bought his mother flowers. "In my mindset, I thought I had completed a great duty for my mom," he told the jury.
Kazdin's body was found on March 14, 1998, in a trash bin near Los Angeles International Airport. Los Angeles police soon wanted to question the Kimeses about his death, but by then mother and son had gone east.
Irene Silverman was born Irene Zambelli in New Orleans, the daughter of an Italian fishmonger and a Greek seamstress, according to the Guardian's 1999 profile. After her father left the family in 1933, her mother took her to New York, where she studied ballet and danced in the ballet company that shared the bill with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, earning $36 a week. She married Sam Silverman, a banker who became a successful mortgage broker, in 1941. He died in 1980 and left her his fortune.
By 1998 she was a small woman of 82, about 4 feet 8 inches tall, and in good health. She owned a landmark townhouse at 20 East 65th Street, off Madison Avenue, where she lived on the first floor and rented furnished apartments to executives, artists and visitors, many of whom became friends. A retired detective told CNN that she rented rooms "not so much as to make money but to have company." She went back to school at Columbia University in her late fifties, held salon-style evenings that mixed society figures with tradespeople and academics, and created an arts foundation in memory of her mother, to which she planned to leave the house. Friends described her to CBS News as outspoken and tough. She rarely left home, and for years she did not go out without a friend or an employee. She had not slept away from the house in more than 15 years, the appeals court later noted.
In mid-June 1998 a young man calling himself Manny Guerin arrived, mentioned the name of a friend of a friend, and paid the first month's $6,000 rent in cash for Apartment 1B on the ground floor. He drove a 1997 Lincoln Town Car and had no visible job. He kept promising references and identification that never came. Silverman's staff noticed that he turned his face away from the security camera, would not let the maids into his apartment, lingered near her office, and was seen with a middle-aged woman whom he also shielded from the camera. The appeals court found that a woman calling Silverman's office in this period used the name "Ava Guerra," and that he carried identification in the name Manuel Guerrero. Silverman sketched a portrait of her new tenant. According to TIME, staff heard the two of them in a shouting match.
What Silverman did not know was that the tenant and his mother were preparing to take her house. The trial evidence, as summarized by the Appellate Division, showed that they set up equipment to record her telephone calls, gathered information about her finances and staff, and forged her signature on a deed. One notary refused to certify the deed after Sante Kimes posed as a bedridden Silverman; a second notarized the forged signature on July 2, 1998. The deed transferred the townhouse, then valued at several million dollars, to a company controlled by the Kimeses for a small fraction of its worth. Notebooks later recovered held to-do lists and details of Silverman's life, her house and her employees.
At one point, the court recorded, Kenneth Kimes pointed out a grassy spot beside a New Jersey highway and told his mother it would be a "perfect place to dump a body."
On July 4, Silverman told the building manager to serve the tenant with an eviction letter on Monday morning. That evening she hosted a dinner party and told her friends she planned to have him out the next day, with staff present.
Silverman was last seen at about 11:45 a.m. on Sunday, July 5, by an employee, Martha Rivera. That afternoon her staff reported her missing. Cell phone records later showed two calls from the Kimeses' phone to the Plaza Hotel, at 11:06 and 11:26 that morning, placed from in or near the townhouse.
The same evening an FBI fugitive team arrested Kenneth and Sante Kimes at a Manhattan hotel. The arrest had nothing to do with Silverman: Utah had issued a warrant over a bad check, about $14,000, used in April to buy the Lincoln Town Car in Salt Lake City. When they were taken into custody Kenneth was carrying the keys to Silverman's townhouse, and the pair had her passport and other papers in her name. His mother's bag held more than $10,000 in cash, documents about Silverman and a surgical glove.
At the townhouse, police of the 19th Precinct treated Silverman's disappearance as a priority missing-person case. They searched her house, the neighborhood, trash bins and nearby Central Park, and used a police dog. They noticed that the tenant in 1B was gone. A sketch based on the staff's descriptions was shown on television, and an investigator who saw it recognized Kenneth Kimes, already in custody. TIME credited an NYPD detective; a later Fox News report credited an FBI agent who had worked on the fugitive arrest.
The Lincoln held the material that defined the case in the press. Investigators found loaded pistols, plastic handcuffs, Mace, sedatives, syringes, gloves, garbage bags, wigs and masks, an empty box for a stun gun, blank legal forms, and about $30,000 in cash; the trunk held an empty duffel bag big enough for a person six feet tall. A pink liquid in the car was reported to resemble a so-called date-rape drug. Microcassette tapes held recordings of Silverman's telephone calls. Sante Kimes had checked a bag at the Plaza Hotel; police obtained it by subpoena and found a loaded Beretta and a folder labeled "The Final Dynasty" containing the notarized deed and transfer papers. A document examiner concluded that the Silverman signatures on them were not genuine.
The papers also named other people, including Kazdin and Ahmed, which drew in investigators from Los Angeles and the Bahamas. Police Commissioner Howard Safir called the pair "a very violent couple." In the apartment, investigators found the bed stripped and black trash bags and duct tape.
Kenneth Kimes was ordered held without bail within days. His lawyer, Matthew Weissman, said he would fight extradition to Utah. Searches for Silverman continued for months. The Guardian reported that blood and hair samples from the car and the house did not match her, that body parts found at a Bronx recycling plant were not hers, and that a package recovered from the Meadowlands in New Jersey held only animal remains. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani offered a reward. Nothing was found.
In December 1998 a Manhattan grand jury indicted mother and son on a long list of charges; the Guardian put the total at 84, including murder. Among the witnesses before the grand jury were notaries the Kimeses had approached and four of Silverman's associates or employees whose names were kept confidential before trial. District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office prosecuted the case as second-degree murder. Kenneth Kimes and his mother pleaded not guilty and stayed in custody, he at Rikers Island.
The trial opened on February 15, 2000, before Justice Rena K. Uviller in New York County Supreme Court. The judge refused to try mother and son separately. The prosecutors named in the Gale trial history were Connie Fernandez and Owen Heimer; the Associated Press also quoted Assistant District Attorney John Carter. Mel Sachs led Kenneth's defense, and Michael Hardy represented his mother.
The prosecution had no body, no confession, no witness to the killing, and no blood or DNA of Silverman's. It built the case from circumstances, a method the defense itself accepted as lawful in principle: under New York law a homicide may be proved by circumstantial evidence alone. The People showed that the Kimeses wanted the house and could get it only if Silverman was gone, since she meant to leave it to her foundation and would never have sold it. They showed the deed, the notary, the wiretap tapes and the notebooks. They showed that the Kimeses' phone was used near the townhouse during the hour she vanished, while her employee was busy elsewhere in the building. They showed the restraints, weapons, sedatives and bags in the car, the remark about a place to dump a body, the size and strength of a young man against a woman of 82, and the keys and papers in the son's pockets that evening. They argued that a woman who had not spent a night away from home in fifteen years did not leave on her own on the morning she planned to evict a tenant. The prosecution's theory was that Kenneth pulled her into his apartment that morning and strangled her, and that he and his mother wrapped her body in garbage bags and carried it out in the trunk.
Witnesses included the notary who had been deceived into approving the forged deed, a fraud investigator who testified that a Social Security card used by Sante Kimes had been issued to an infant, and a former employee who learned he had been made head of a Florida company set up for the scheme. Mel Sachs called the case speculation. Neither defendant testified.
On May 18, 2000, the jury convicted both. Kenneth was found guilty on 60 counts and his mother on 58, according to the Gale history, including murder in the second degree, robbery and burglary in the first degree, criminal possession of a weapon, forgery, conspiracy, eavesdropping and attempted grand larceny.
On June 27, 2000, Justice Uviller sentenced Kenneth Kimes to a term reported as 125 years and 4 months and his mother to 120 years and 8 months. Wire reports at the time gave slightly different figures, and the Appellate Division later described both as aggregate terms of 120 years to life. The judge indicated that neither would ever be paroled. At sentencing, Sante Kimes said, "There is no crime," and maintained that no one knew where Silverman was. The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office said that week that it would seek extradition to try both for Kazdin's murder.
Kenneth Kimes continued to protest his innocence. On CNN's Larry King Live on July 19, 2000, he said he had dealt with Silverman only two or three times, that he "wasn't even at the scene of the crime," and that he had "no idea" whether she was dead. He called his mother "a wonderful caring mother," said he had had "a great father," and blamed the judge and prosecutors for an unfair trial. He also gave interviews to Details magazine, which later published letters in which he pleaded for chances to prove his innocence on camera.
By October he had been moved to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, in far northern New York. On October 10, 2000, Maria Zone, a freelance producer for Court TV's "Crime Stories," came to interview him for the second time. A guard and a small crew were present, and he was not handcuffed. At about 2:20 p.m. he asked for something to eat and drink. When Zone came back with candy bars and water, he grabbed her around the neck and held a pen to her throat. "This is a hostage situation," she recalled him saying. His main demand, according to Court TV's chief executive and the Associated Press, was that his mother not be extradited to California, where both faced a possible death sentence.
Prison negotiators talked with him for about four hours. Zone later told the American Journalism Review that she recited the Lord's Prayer with him. At 6:41 p.m., after an official distracted him, guards tackled him and freed her. She told NBC's Today show the next day that she was sore from being grabbed but otherwise unharmed. Court TV said it had no video of the standoff, and the room had no surveillance camera. Kimes was placed in an observation cell and then in disciplinary housing; his mother was moved to a special housing unit as a precaution. His lawyer said, "He must've totally snapped or something." A prison disciplinary ruling reported later found him guilty of assault and weapon possession and imposed eight years in disciplinary housing, confined to his cell 23 hours a day.
In mid-November 2000, after 28 months of denials, Kenneth Kimes told New York police that he had put Silverman's body in a ditch at a construction site in New Jersey and covered it with a tarp, the New York Daily News reported, citing an unnamed source. He had trouble describing the place, which he said was close to water and about an hour's drive from the townhouse. In that account he did not implicate his mother and said she had been at a Manhattan hotel. Newspapers reported that he hoped to improve his prison conditions and avoid the extra years in solitary confinement. Mel Sachs said he was surprised, because his client had always "adamantly denied" involvement. The body was not found.
Kenneth and Sante Kimes were taken to Los Angeles to face the Kazdin case. In May 2002 a county grand jury indicted both on one count of murder with two special circumstances, murder for financial gain and the killing of a witness, which made both eligible for the death penalty. Both pleaded not guilty.
In August 2003 prosecutors interviewed Kenneth Kimes for three days; the transcript was sealed. On Tuesday, November 18, 2003, in what the Associated Press called a surprise, he pleaded guilty before Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell to Kazdin's murder. Asked by Deputy District Attorney Eleanor Hunter whether he had shot the victim, he answered "Yes." The terms, as reported by the Associated Press, were life in prison without the possibility of parole, sentencing to follow his mother's trial, and his testimony against her. He avoided a possible death sentence. A relative of the victim, Linda Kazdin, said outside court, "We're happy to know he will be in jail for life." His mother's lawyer said the plea was "not an unexpected thing."
In January 2004 prosecutors dropped their plan to seek the death penalty against Sante Kimes as well. Kenneth Kimes said twenty years later that this had been the point of his cooperation: "I confessed because I was afraid of the death penalty for me or her," he told CNN, adding that he had not wanted "to rat my mom out."
He took the witness stand at his mother's trial in June 2004, at the age of 29, and gave the account of Kazdin's killing described above. He also spoke about the other deaths. He told the jury that he had strangled Irene Silverman after his mother hit her with a stun gun, as the Las Vegas Sun later summarized it. In his 2024 CNN interview he gave more detail: he said he tackled Silverman in her bedroom while his mother turned on the television to cover the noise, that his mother told him "Do it," and that he strangled her, put her body in the car, and left it at a construction site in northern New Jersey.
During the trial he also confessed to the killing of Syed Bilal Ahmed. According to the Associated Press, he said that he drowned Ahmed in a bathtub and put his weighted body in the ocean, and that his mother wanted the banker dead because he had refused to help her get a loan from his bank. The Nassau Tribune's later account added that, by his description, Ahmed was drugged first. Sante Kimes denied that she or her son had killed anyone, and said he had confessed only to escape the death penalty. Bahamian authorities never brought charges.
His mother cried as he testified, he later said. It was the last time he saw her.
On July 7, 2004, the jury convicted Sante Kimes of first-degree murder and found both special circumstances true. Kazdin's son Steven said, "This trial is about justice for my father."
Judge Kennedy-Powell sentenced mother and son to life in prison without the possibility of parole in March 2005; NBC News, reporting on March 22, put the hearing on the Monday, which was March 21. She called Sante Kimes one of the most evil people she had encountered. Of Kenneth she said that his mother had brutalized and manipulated him but that he must take responsibility for his crimes: "At least he finally stepped up to the plate." Under the agreement, prosecutors did not oppose his request to serve his sentences in California, and the two states agreed that his mother would go back to New York. He had waived his appeal in the New York case in exchange for being allowed to serve his time in California, the Appellate Division recorded. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation lists his admission date as May 17, 2005.
Sante Kimes did appeal the Silverman conviction. On December 7, 2006, the Appellate Division, First Department, unanimously affirmed it in People v. Kimes. The court found the circumstantial evidence legally sufficient: the Kimeses had a motive to kill Silverman, whose house they could not otherwise obtain; they had the opportunity, shown by the phone records and the timing; they had the means, in the weapons and restraints they carried; and they were found with her keys and papers hours after she disappeared. The court also upheld the admission of the notebooks and of Silverman's own statements about her plan to evict the tenant. Because Kenneth had waived his appeal, the decision concerned only his mother, but it set out the evidence against both.
Sante Kimes was found unresponsive in her cell at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York, on the night of May 19, 2014, and was pronounced dead at 79, the state prisons spokeswoman told the Associated Press. No cause was reported in the coverage. She had denied every accusation to the end.
Kenneth Kimes has spent his adult life in prison. In November 2024 he gave CNN a long interview from Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego. He described his childhood and the effect of his parents' arrests: "It had a huge, damaging effect on my perspective." He said he still loved his mother and would never hate her, while calling her "a complicated person with criminal tendencies." He spoke of turning to religion and of a correspondence that began in 2015 with a woman who died in 2018. He said he thought about what intervention in his childhood might have changed, and he offered an apology: "To anyone I've harmed, I know it's worthless, but I'm sorry."
The case was revisited in NBC's Dateline in early 2025 and in other television programs; Sante Kimes's elder son, Kent Walker, took part in the Dateline coverage.
As of October 16, 2026, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's public locator lists Kenneth Kimes, age 51, CDCR number V80313, at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, committed from Los Angeles County, serving life without the possibility of parole and not eligible for parole consideration. No Board of Parole Hearings actions are listed. The New York term remains on the record but has no practical effect while the California life term runs.
Irene Silverman had left her estate, reported in 1999 to be worth up to $20 million, to the foundation she created in her mother's memory. Her body has never been recovered. David Kazdin's family attended the Los Angeles proceedings; his son said after the 2004 verdict that he was satisfied but had wished for a death sentence. No court has ever heard a case over the death of Syed Bilal Ahmed.
The case produced several books. Kent Walker, Sante Kimes's son from her first marriage, wrote "Son of a Grifter" (2001) with Mark Schone, describing the household in which his half-brother grew up. Adrian Havill's "The Mother, the Son, and the Socialite," Alice McQuillan's "They Call Them Grifters" and Jeanne King's "Dead End" followed the New York investigation and trial, and John Marquis, a former Nassau newspaper editor, later wrote "Evil and Son." In 2001 CBS broadcast the television film "Like Mother, Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes," with Mary Tyler Moore as Sante and Gabriel Olds as Kenneth.
The family's Las Vegas house on Geronimo Way, the property behind the Kazdin loan, was later burned in an arson and demolished; Clark County issued a demolition permit for a "burned residence" in late 2000, and the empty lot was put up for sale in 2016.
The Ahmed killing. The only account that Ahmed was killed comes from Kenneth Kimes's own 2004 testimony. He was never charged, no court tested the confession, and Ahmed's body has not been found. His mother called the confession a device to avoid execution. Reports also differ on who Ahmed was: a 55-year-old Bahraini officer of First Cayman Bank in 1998 reporting (Las Vegas Sun, and the Guardian in 1999), an Indian banker in later Nassau reporting. The motive is given as his refusal to arrange a loan (Associated Press, 2004) or his inquiry into irregularities in Kenneth Kimes Sr.'s account (Tribune, 2019 and 2025). Neighbors were reported to claim the body was buried at the Cable Beach house rather than put into the sea.
Where Silverman's body went. Kenneth Kimes has given versions in 2000 (a ditch at a New Jersey construction site near water), in 2004 testimony, and in 2024 (a construction site in northern New Jersey). Police at one point thought the Meadowlands likely. None of these leads produced remains.
How Silverman was killed. The prosecution's 2000 theory was that Kenneth pulled her into his apartment and strangled her. His later accounts place the attack in her bedroom and add a stun gun used by his mother. His November 2000 statement said his mother was at a hotel; his 2004 and 2024 accounts put her in the house and directing him.
A third person. A private investigator hired by a friend of Silverman's suggested in 1999 that a third man may have helped the Kimeses; no proof was found, and no one else was charged.
Why he confessed. In 2000 the press reported he was trying to improve his prison conditions; in 2003 his plea spared him a possible death sentence; in 2024 he said he confessed to protect himself and his mother from execution, not to betray her.
Holmgren. Elmer Holmgren, a former associate of the Kimes family who disappeared in 1991 while cooperating with federal investigators about an arson in Hawaii, is linked in reporting to Sante Kimes and her husband. NBC News reported in 2025 that Kenneth Jr., then a teenager, is not suspected. He is not connected to that case here.
The hostage tape. Some later program notes refer to footage of the Clinton hostage incident. Court TV said at the time that it had no video of the standoff and that the room had no camera.
1975: Kenneth Kimes Jr. born to Sante Kimes and Kenneth Kimes Sr.
1985: His parents are arrested by federal agents; his mother is convicted in 1986 of holding domestic workers in servitude and serves about three years.
1988: Enters Bishop Gorman High School, Las Vegas.
Fall 1993: Enrolls at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
1994: Kenneth Kimes Sr. dies; his son leaves college and joins his mother.
September 1996: Syed Bilal Ahmed disappears in Nassau, Bahamas, after agreeing to dine with Sante Kimes.
March 13, 1998: David Kazdin is shot at his home in Los Angeles; his body is found March 14 near Los Angeles International Airport.
Mid-June 1998: Kenneth Kimes, as "Manny Guerin," rents Apartment 1B at 20 East 65th Street.
July 2, 1998: A notary certifies the forged signature on a deed to Silverman's house.
July 4, 1998: Silverman orders an eviction letter for her tenant.
July 5, 1998: Silverman is last seen at about 11:45 a.m.; that evening Kenneth and Sante Kimes are arrested at a Manhattan hotel on a Utah warrant.
December 1998: Manhattan grand jury indictment, including murder.
February 15, 2000: Trial opens before Justice Rena K. Uviller.
May 18, 2000: Both convicted; Kenneth on 60 counts.
June 27, 2000: Kenneth sentenced to a term reported as 125 years and 4 months.
July 19, 2000: Protests his innocence on Larry King Live.
October 10, 2000: Holds Court TV producer Maria Zone hostage with a pen at Clinton Correctional Facility for about four hours.
November 2000: Tells police he left Silverman's body at a New Jersey construction site.
May 2002: Los Angeles County grand jury indicts him and his mother for Kazdin's murder.
November 18, 2003: Pleads guilty to Kazdin's murder; agrees to testify against his mother.
January 2004: Prosecutors drop the death penalty against Sante Kimes.
June 2004: Testifies against his mother; confesses to drowning Syed Bilal Ahmed in 1996.
July 7, 2004: Sante Kimes convicted of Kazdin's murder.
March 2005: Both sentenced to life without parole in Los Angeles.
May 17, 2005: Admitted to California state prison.
December 7, 2006: Appellate Division affirms his mother's New York conviction; he had waived his own appeal.
May 19, 2014: Sante Kimes dies at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
November 2024: Interviewed by CNN at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
October 16, 2026: CDCR lists him at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, serving life without parole.