Kimes was born in 1934 in Oklahoma. She spent decades as a confidence trickster, insurance fraud, arson, stolen cars, forged documents, and served a federal sentence in the 1980s for holding domestic workers in involuntary servitude. Her son Kenneth, born 1975, worked with her from his teens, and the two were inseparable.
In 1996, in the Bahamas, Syed Bilal Ahmed, a banker who had been looking into their affairs, disappeared after dining with them; he is presumed drowned and no body was recovered. In March 1998, in California, they shot David Kazdin, a former business associate whose name had been used on a forged deed, and left his body in a rubbish bin at Los Angeles airport.
In July 1998 they moved into the Manhattan townhouse of Irene Silverman, eighty-two, under a false name, and set about acquiring the property by forgery. On July 5, 1998 Silverman disappeared. Her body has never been found.
They were arrested days later in a car containing forged deeds, a notary stamp in Silverman's name, and a handgun. They were convicted in New York in 2000 of Silverman's murder and of a long list of frauds, a conviction obtained without a body, and Sante was sentenced on June 27, 2000 to 125 years. Kenneth later testified against his mother in the Kazdin case in exchange for avoiding death, and both received life sentences in California in 2004.
Sante Kimes died in prison in New York on May 19, 2014, aged seventy-nine. The range of two to three or more is right: two convictions, the Bahamas death unresolved, and other disappearances suspected across decades of fraud.