On the evening of July 5, 1998, federal fugitive agents arrested a woman of 63 and her 23-year-old son at a Manhattan hotel on a warrant from Utah. The charge was minor: the pair were accused of buying a used Lincoln Town Car with a check that bounced. But the son carried the house keys of Irene Silverman, an 82-year-old widow who had gone missing from her Upper East Side townhouse that afternoon, and in the car and in the mother's luggage police found papers in Silverman's name, guns, restraints, and a deed to her house that a document examiner later said was forged.
The woman was Sante Kimes. She had a long record of theft and fraud and a federal conviction for holding young women from Mexico as household servants. She and her son, Kenneth Kimes, were convicted of Silverman's murder in 2000 although her body was never found. In 2004 a Los Angeles jury convicted Sante Kimes of the earlier murder of David Kazdin, a businessman her son admitted shooting on her orders. She denied every killing until her death in prison in 2014. Two other deaths, one in the Bahamas in 1996 and one in California in 1991, were never charged against her and remain suspected.
Little reliable detail about Sante Kimes's childhood or birth has been reported. The Nevada Appeal's archives, as reported in 2000 and 2014, show that she moved from Los Angeles to Carson City, Nevada, in 1947, was adopted that year by a local couple, and graduated from Carson High School in 1952 under the name Sandy Chambers.
When she was arrested in 1998, an Associated Press report described a long list of earlier arrests for petty and grand theft and forged credit cards. Fox News reported in 2023 that she was often compared to Elizabeth Taylor and sometimes impersonated her.
She had an elder son, Kent Walker. With her husband Kenneth Kimes Sr., a general contractor, she had a younger son, Kenneth, who later described a childhood spent partly in a motor home while his parents moved around. Over about a dozen years from the early 1970s, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the couple lived partly in Hawaii, in a house in the Hawaii Kai area of Oahu, and partly in Las Vegas.
Twice the family's Hawaii Kai home burned. A fire in 1978 badly damaged it, and a fire in September 1990 destroyed it. Investigators said both were set deliberately, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported. The 1990 fire broke out at about 1 a.m. on September 16, according to records described by NBC News in 2025. Fire investigators found several points of origin and classed the fire as intentionally set. The property was then the subject of a dispute: a buyer from Colorado had paid $1.7 million into escrow, and a trial over the sale was set for January 1991. An insurance claim of $1.4 million followed, filed by a homeowner whose name is redacted in the records. No one was charged. A Justice Department log seen by NBC News says nearly all of the evidence held by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in its Honolulu and Las Vegas arson cases was destroyed in the attacks of September 11, 2001, and that the rest was returned to representatives of the Kimes family in 2003.
The crime that first sent Sante Kimes to prison involved the young women who worked in her homes. In 1985 an 18-year-old woman sued the couple, saying she had been held as a slave at their Hawaii home; the suit was settled out of court, according to the Honolulu attorney Jeffrey Portnoy, who represented an insurer in the Hawaii cases.
Federal prosecutors went further. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later summarized the government's evidence: the couple recruited young women from Mexico who were in the country illegally to work as maids, and Sante Kimes kept them isolated from their families, from mail and from the telephone, used locks, fences and threats of deportation to keep them from leaving, and physically abused some of them. Her younger son later told CNN that when he was about 10 he watched FBI agents raid the family's home near San Diego and arrest his parents, and that the family had been on the move in a motor home to avoid the bureau.
A federal jury in Nevada convicted her of five counts of involuntary servitude, and of transporting undocumented immigrants, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and escape. The Star-Bulletin reported that she was sentenced in 1986 to five years in prison. Her husband pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, according to CNN. Accounts differ on how long she served: NBC News reported in 2025 that she served three years; a 2023 Fox News account said five.
From prison she challenged the conviction. She argued that a 1988 Supreme Court decision, United States v. Kozminski, which held that involuntary servitude requires physical or legal coercion rather than psychological pressure, meant her conduct was no longer a crime. She also said a juror who lived in her neighborhood was biased and that her lawyer should have objected. On July 24, 1991, the Ninth Circuit rejected every claim. It agreed that the jury instruction had been inconsistent with Kozminski, but found that the government had never argued a psychological theory, so the jury must have found physical or legal coercion. The juror, the court noted, testified that she had never met Kimes and was not biased, and the trial judge believed her.
Elmer Holmgren was a lawyer who had struggled to find work after his employer in Florida died. He moved to Las Vegas to work for Kenneth and Sante Kimes, according to his son, who spoke to NBC News's Dateline in 2025.
His son told NBC that, months after the 1990 Hawaii fire, his father began to sound guarded on the phone. In early February 1991 Holmgren gave his son the names of two ATF agents in Honolulu and asked him to call them if he did not hear back. When the son could not reach his father, he contacted the ATF. An agent later told him that Holmgren had been cooperating in the arson case and was supposed to be in protective custody, but that the bureau had lost track of him, and that agents had been meeting him in Las Vegas about two weeks before he vanished when the Kimeses walked in. The son recalled the agent saying, "We dropped the ball."
In his 2001 memoir, Son of a Grifter, Sante Kimes's elder son wrote that in the summer of 1992 he overheard his mother and stepfather arguing in Las Vegas. His stepfather, he wrote, accused her of killing a man, and she blamed him for holding the man. He told NBC that police did not act on what he reported and that he believed the man was Holmgren. The ATF never interviewed him, NBC reported.
On February 19, 1991, at about 6:30 a.m., the body of an unidentified man was found in a dumpster in an alley behind an apartment complex in Inglewood, California. He had no identification. Authorities found that he died of blunt-force injuries, and the death was ruled a homicide. For more than three decades he was known only as the Inglewood John Doe. In September 2024 the Inglewood Police Department sent evidence to the private laboratory Othram, which built a DNA profile, and the FBI's genetic genealogy team searched for relatives. In June 2026 Othram announced that the man had been identified as Elmer Holmgren, aged 59. Investigators traveled to Houston to tell his son. The homicide investigation remains open, the announcement said. No one has been charged, and no court has examined who killed him.
Kenneth Kimes Sr. died in 1994. His son told CNN in 2024 that the cause was an aneurysm, and that his mother hid the death from him for about three months while she forged checks and tried to take control of the family's bank accounts. The son was then a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He left school and joined his mother in pursuing his father's money. He told CNN she said she was suicidal, which made him sympathetic, and that she could "just get people to do things."
The Appellate Division later recorded that after her husband's death the pair recruited employees and stole their identification documents. Prosecutors in New York said the two used more than 30 aliases, some invented and some belonging to people they knew, and that they offered strangers jobs, money and, in at least three cases, trips to the Bahamas in return for favors.
From about 1992 to 1996 Sante Kimes lived in Nassau, the Bahamas, according to The Tribune of Nassau. Syed Bilal Ahmed was a banker based in the Cayman Islands, described in later reports as a Bahraini officer of a Cayman bank. The Tribune reported that he had come to Nassau to look into banking irregularities, and that Kimes was alleged to have been draining accounts belonging to her late husband.
Ahmed disappeared in 1996 after meeting the mother and son in the Bahamas; CNN later reported that he was last seen dining with them in Nassau. Within days of the 1998 arrests, a Bahamas police inspector, Douglas Hanna, told the Associated Press that his department had information linking the Kimeses to the missing banker.
In 2004, testifying in Los Angeles, Kenneth Kimes said that he had drowned Ahmed and disposed of his body, and that his mother wanted Ahmed dead because he had refused to help her obtain a loan from his bank. Sante Kimes denied that she or her son had killed anyone. No charges in the Bahamas against either of them were reported. The account rests on his testimony alone; Ahmed's body has not been reported found.
David Kazdin, 63, lived in Granada Hills, in Los Angeles. He was described in court coverage as a longtime friend of Sante Kimes.
According to Kenneth Kimes's later testimony, Kazdin discovered that Sante Kimes had taken out a loan of $280,000 in his name by forging his signature. Some earlier Associated Press reports put the loan at $200,000. Kenneth Kimes testified that his mother decided Kazdin had to die, planned the killing and sent him to carry it out. When he pleaded guilty in November 2003, he admitted going to Kazdin's home on March 13, 1998, under a plan with his mother, shooting him, and disposing of the body to hide a fraud against him. He said he recruited a man from a homeless shelter to help move the body.
Kazdin's body was found in a construction trash bin near Los Angeles International Airport, with his car nearby, according to an Associated Press report that July. His assets had been stolen. Los Angeles detectives wanted to question the Kimeses about his death within days of their arrest in New York.
By early 1998 the pair were on the move across the West. In March, the Appellate Division found, they passed a bad check to obtain a Lincoln Town Car in Utah. Associated Press reports put the check at about $14,000 and the purchase in Salt Lake City; the Star-Bulletin gave $14,900. That check produced the Utah warrant on which they were later arrested. They also bought guns, including a 9mm Glock and a .22 Beretta pistol, from a man who later became a cooperating witness.
In April 1998 they moved to Florida. There, the appeals court found, they planned to kill Irene Silverman in order to take her house. Sante Kimes, using an alias, called a title company and confirmed that Silverman owned her townhouse free of any mortgage.
Irene Silverman was 82 in the summer of 1998. She had been a professional dancer in her youth; the Associated Press described her as a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette, and other reports called her a former Radio City ballerina. She was the widow of a businessman, Sam Silverman, and lived in the five-story townhouse they had shared on the Upper East Side, a building reported to be worth between $4 million and $10 million.
She ran part of the house as a business. About 10 employees worked in the building, and she rented apartments on its lower floors to short-term visitors. The Appellate Division described her as in good physical and mental health. She rarely went out without members of her staff, had not slept away from home in more than 15 years, and planned to leave the townhouse to an arts foundation named for her mother.
In May 1998 a woman calling herself "Ava Guerra" telephoned Silverman and mentioned the name of one of Silverman's friends. Her son, using the name "Manny Guerrin," arranged to lease a ground-floor apartment, the court found. He arrived on June 13, earlier than agreed, with his mother and an employee, in the Lincoln. While they were driving through New Jersey, the court recorded, he remarked that a grassy spot would be a "perfect place to dump a body." He moved in the next day, paying $6,000 in cash for a month's rent, according to the prosecution's opening statement.
Silverman soon distrusted him. She told people that "Manny" smelled "like jail." Meanwhile, the court found, the Kimeses installed eavesdropping devices on her telephone and questioned her staff about her habits. Silverman began planning to evict him.
In late June and early July the pair forged Silverman's signature on a deed transferring the townhouse. A first notary who came to the apartment refused to notarize it after finding Sante Kimes in a nightcap, posing as a bedridden Silverman. On July 2 her son brought a second notary, and Sante Kimes again posed as an infirm Silverman, in a nightgown, nightcap and red wig. The second notary notarized the signature without watching it being signed, the appeals court found. Police later recovered the deed, which purported to sell the house to the Kimeses for $395,000.
On July 3 and 4, "Manny" confirmed that only Silverman and one member of her staff would be in the house on Sunday, July 5. On July 4 Silverman told her building manager to serve "Manny" with an eviction letter on Monday morning.
The staff member last saw Silverman at 11:45 a.m. on Sunday, July 5. Between 2:30 and 4 p.m. she received two "odd" calls from "Manny," and then a call from a woman who told her to go home and take Silverman's dog. At 4:42 p.m. she knocked on Silverman's door and got no answer. Police were called. Silverman was gone, and so was the cash she kept in a closet in her office.
The ground-floor apartment had been cleared of the son's belongings. Investigators found an opened roll of duct tape, a box of heavy-duty garbage bags with four missing, and a shower curtain without its liner. Cell phone records later placed the mother and son at or near the townhouse that morning, the Appellate Division noted.
Unknown to the pair, the man who had sold them guns was cooperating with federal agents, who were waiting to arrest them on the Utah warrant at a Manhattan hotel. Sante Kimes called him at about 11:30 that morning, saying she had car trouble. Before the meeting she checked a black duffel bag at a second hotel. At 5 p.m. she met the informant and gave him instructions about managing the townhouse. Her son parked the Lincoln in a nearby garage at 6:40 p.m., and at 7:20 p.m. agents arrested them both.
Her son was carrying identification in the name "Manuel Guerrero," documents in Silverman's name, a knife, brass knuckles and Silverman's own keys to the townhouse. Sante Kimes's bag held more than $10,000 in cash, papers bearing Silverman's name and a surgical glove. In the Lincoln police found more documents in Silverman's name, blank will and quitclaim deed forms, notebooks, Mace, handcuffs, sedatives, rubber gloves, garbage bags, an empty stun gun box, a handgun, and in the trunk an empty duffel bag large enough to hold a person six feet tall. News reports also listed wigs and masks, about $30,000 in cash, syringes, a pink liquid like a "date rape" drug, and cassette tapes of Silverman's telephone calls.
On July 7 a detective questioned Sante Kimes. She denied knowing Silverman and suggested the missing woman might be "out walking her dog," the court record shows. Her lawyer told reporters she said investigators had hit her with a telephone book during the questioning. Police searched trash bins, the car and Central Park, half a block from the house, and brought a police dog through the townhouse. Silverman was not found.
Police Commissioner Howard Safir told reporters, "They appear to be a very violent couple," and said police were very concerned for Silverman's welfare. Within days, Los Angeles detectives asked to question the pair about Kazdin, and police in the Bahamas said they had information linking them to the missing banker.
The bag Sante Kimes had checked became central. An investigator hired by her lawyer collected it on her instructions and stored it at his brother's business; detectives obtained it by subpoena. Inside were a loaded .22 Beretta, notebooks, and a folder titled "The Final Dynasty" containing the notarized deed and a transfer tax form. A forensic document examiner concluded that the signatures were not genuine and appeared to have been traced from a rent receipt Silverman had signed for "Manny" on June 14. Sante Kimes's notebooks held a to-do list that included getting Silverman's signature, checking the building's exits, and finding out who worked there, the prosecution told the jury. Fingerprints of both defendants were found in and around the apartment and on documents from the car. Witnesses viewed lineups on July 24 and September 10, 1998.
The pair were indicted for Silverman's murder in 1998. The indictment had 84 counts, including second-degree murder, conspiracy, robbery and forgery.
The trial opened in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan in 2000 before Justice Rena K. Uviller. Assistant District Attorney Consuelo Fernandez acknowledged in her opening that there would be no hair, blood or DNA evidence and no body, but told the jury there would be strong proof of greed. "Irene Silverman is dead," she said. Justice Uviller told jurors the case was largely circumstantial.
Several disputes from the trial later went to the appeals court. During jury selection, Sante Kimes used peremptory challenges against every white panelist in the first round and the next two in the second. The judge found her reasons for two of the challenges to be a pretext and seated those jurors. The judge allowed prosecutors, if she testified, to question her about her prior convictions, including the 1986 servitude case and its facts, but not about threats or disappearances. She did not testify.
The judge also admitted Silverman's own statements to staff and friends about her fear of "Manny," her plan to evict him, and the fact that she had no plans to travel or to sell the house, as evidence of her state of mind. After Sante Kimes repeatedly telephoned The New York Times from jail, the judge cut off her telephone privileges on May 4, 2000; her lawyers' calls were restored the next day. One juror was hospitalized with pneumonia on May 15 and replaced by an alternate.
On May 18, 2000, the jury convicted both defendants. The forewoman said "guilty" 118 times, 58 times for Sante Kimes and 60 times for her son, the Star-Bulletin reported. Her convictions included three counts of murder in the second degree, robbery and burglary in the first degree, criminal possession of a weapon, criminal possession of stolen property, 16 counts of forgery in the second degree, criminal possession of a forged instrument, 29 counts of eavesdropping, conspiracy in the fourth degree and attempted grand larceny in the first degree.
On June 27, 2000, Justice Uviller sentenced Sante Kimes to an aggregate term of 120 years to life; news reports put the minimum at 120 years and four months. Her son received about 125 years to life. The judge indicated neither would ever be paroled. Sante Kimes maintained her innocence. "There is no crime," she said.
On October 10, 2000, Kenneth Kimes, held at Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York, was giving his second interview to a freelance producer working for Court TV. He held a pen to her neck and kept her hostage for about four hours, demanding that his mother not be extradited to California, where both could face the death penalty. The standoff ended with the producer unharmed; one account says guards subdued him, while the producer said he put the pen down after the two of them recited the Lord's Prayer. He was later found guilty of assault and weapon possession and given eight years in disciplinary housing, locked in his cell 23 hours a day. Sante Kimes, for her part, was given six months in disciplinary housing after guards found a pen she had turned into a weapon in her cell, the Nevada Appeal reported in December 2001. Governor George Pataki said both would be extradited.
In November 2000, Kenneth Kimes told police that he had killed Silverman and left her body at a construction site in New Jersey. He did not implicate his mother then; he said she had been at a Manhattan hotel when the body was disposed of, according to the Star-Bulletin.
A Los Angeles County grand jury indicted mother and son for Kazdin's murder in May 2002. Both pleaded not guilty to murder with special circumstances. In November 2003 Kenneth Kimes pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his mother, in exchange for a sentence of life without parole rather than a possible death sentence. In January 2004 the judge announced in court that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty against Sante Kimes either. Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell presided.
At the trial in 2004 Kenneth Kimes testified that his mother planned Kazdin's killing and sent him to do it, and that she had wanted Kazdin dead because he had discovered the forged loan. He also told of Ahmed's death. Years later he told CNN that during his testimony his mother, slumped in a wheelchair in the courtroom, began to cry. He said he confessed out of fear of execution, not to betray her.
He described the Silverman killing to CNN in 2024 in greater detail than before: he said that his mother was present, that she told him to "do it," and that he strangled Silverman and took her body to New Jersey. These are his accounts; Sante Kimes denied them, and Silverman's remains have never been recovered.
On July 7, 2004, the jury found Sante Kimes, then 71, guilty of first-degree murder. Jurors found true the special allegations that the killing was committed for financial gain and that Kazdin was killed because he was a witness to a crime. They later found that she had a prior conviction for murder. Testifying in that phase, she said her New York conviction was invalid, that she had been framed and badly represented, and that she was appealing it. Kazdin's son told reporters he was satisfied with the verdict but wished she faced the death penalty.
At sentencing, Judge Kennedy-Powell gave both mother and son life without parole. She called Sante Kimes "one of the most evil individuals" she had encountered, and said that Kenneth Kimes had been brutalized and manipulated by his mother but still had to take responsibility; by testifying, she said, he had "finally stepped up to the plate." California and New York agreed that Sante Kimes would be returned to New York to serve her sentences.
Kenneth Kimes waived his appeal in the Silverman case in exchange for serving his sentence in California. Sante Kimes appealed. On December 7, 2006, the Appellate Division, First Department, in an opinion by Justice Catterson for a unanimous five-judge panel, affirmed her conviction.
The court held that the evidence of murder was legally sufficient even without a body. It pointed to motive (the pair wanted the townhouse, Silverman would never have given it up, and they could not control it while she lived), opportunity (cell phone records placed them at the house that morning, when only one staff member was there, busy with chores and loud music), and means (guns, drugs, syringes, duct tape, masks and a duffel bag). Silverman stood four feet eight inches tall and weighed 115 pounds, the court noted. Her keys, Social Security card and documents were in the defendants' possession.
The court rejected each of her other claims: that her statements to the detective should have been suppressed (it applied New York's emergency exception, since Silverman's life was at stake); that Silverman's own statements were inadmissible hearsay; that the notebooks from the checked bag were protected by the Fifth Amendment or attorney-client privilege; that her lawyers had a conflict of interest because the investigator testified; that the jury selection rulings, the replacement of the sick juror, and an inquiry into reported juror remarks were wrong; that limits on cross-examination were harmful; that the one-night telephone ban denied her counsel; and that a police report about fingerprints of another man had been withheld. The court found that she had received the report before trial and used it.
Sante Kimes served her New York sentence at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County. In a 2011 prison interview with the Bahamian author John Marquis, she again denied the two murders and blamed a police conspiracy, The Tribune of Nassau reported.
On the night of Monday, May 19, 2014, she was found unresponsive in her cell, Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Corrections, told the Associated Press. She was 79. The Associated Press reports did not give a cause of death. Her New York sentence would not have made her eligible for parole until 2119, the AP noted.
Her younger son is serving life without parole in California. In November 2024 CNN reported that he was held at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego. He told CNN that he loved his mother and called her "a complicated person with criminal tendencies," and he apologized to the people he had harmed: "To anyone I've harmed, I know it's worthless, but I'm sorry."
The case drew wide attention. Mary Tyler Moore played Sante Kimes in a television film, Like Mother, Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes, with Gabriel Olds as her son. Her elder son published Son of a Grifter in 2001. John Marquis's book on her years in Nassau appeared in 2012, and her representatives told The Tribune they welcomed it. The private investigator Cici McNair, who dealt with Sante Kimes and her lawyers, told Fox News in 2023 that greed drove the crimes and that Sante Kimes denied everything until her death.
For Elmer Holmgren's family the 2026 identification ended decades of uncertainty about where he was, though not about who killed him. His son told NBC in 2025 that the disappearance had never been thoroughly investigated, and that an ATF agent had told him the bureau "dropped the ball."
Irene Silverman's death. No body has been found. The conviction rests on circumstantial evidence, which the appeals court found legally sufficient. The details of how she died and where her body was taken come only from Kenneth Kimes's statements, made in 2000, 2004 and 2024, and have not been confirmed by any recovery of remains. His accounts vary on detail; for example, in 2000 he said his mother was not present at the disposal of the body.
Syed Bilal Ahmed. Never charged. The claim that he was drowned at Sante Kimes's direction rests on her son's 2004 testimony. She denied it.
Elmer Holmgren. Never charged. His body was identified in 2026, and the investigation is open. The link to the Kimeses rests on his son's account of the ATF agent's statements, on Holmgren's employment by the couple, and on Kent Walker's memory of an argument he overheard in 1992. No official has publicly named a suspect.
The Hawaii fires. Investigators said both fires were set deliberately, but no one was charged, and most of the federal evidence was destroyed in 2001.
"The Dragon Lady." The Associated Press reported in 1998 that she was known by this name.
The number of killings. Reports at the time of the 2000 verdict said the pair were suspected in three other deaths, including one of a drifter who had worked with them; that third suspected death was not identified in those reports.
1947: moves from Los Angeles to Carson City, Nevada.
1952: graduates from Carson High School as Sandy Chambers.
1978: fire badly damages the family's Hawaii Kai home; investigators call it deliberate.
1985: an 18-year-old domestic worker sues over her treatment in the Hawaii home; Sante Kimes and her husband are arrested on federal servitude charges.
1986: convicted in federal court in Nevada of involuntary servitude and related counts; sentenced to five years.
September 16, 1990: fire destroys the Hawaii Kai home.
February 1991: Elmer Holmgren, who worked for the couple and was cooperating with the ATF, stops contacting his son.
February 19, 1991: an unidentified man is found dead in Inglewood, California.
July 24, 1991: the Ninth Circuit rejects her challenge to the servitude convictions.
1994: Kenneth Kimes Sr. dies.
1996: Syed Bilal Ahmed disappears in the Bahamas.
March 1998: a Lincoln Town Car is obtained in Utah with a bad check.
March 13, 1998: David Kazdin is shot at his Los Angeles home, by Kenneth Kimes's later admission.
June 14, 1998: Kenneth Kimes moves into Irene Silverman's townhouse as "Manny Guerrin."
July 2, 1998: a notary notarizes the forged deed.
July 5, 1998: Silverman disappears; mother and son are arrested in Manhattan.
1998: indicted for Silverman's murder (84 counts).
May 18, 2000: convicted in Manhattan.
June 27, 2000: sentenced to 120 years to life.
October 10, 2000: Kenneth Kimes takes a Court TV producer hostage.
November 2000: Kenneth Kimes tells police he killed Silverman.
May 2002: indicted in Los Angeles for Kazdin's murder.
November 2003: Kenneth Kimes pleads guilty and agrees to testify.
January 2004: prosecutors drop the death penalty.
July 7, 2004: convicted of Kazdin's murder.
December 7, 2006: Appellate Division affirms the New York conviction.
May 19, 2014: dies at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, aged 79.
June 2026: the Inglewood John Doe is identified as Elmer Holmgren; investigation open.