On the evening of July 5, 1998, Sante Kimes sat in the New York Hilton waiting for a man named Stan Patterson, who she believed was coming to help with the paperwork on an expensive Manhattan townhouse she wanted to sell. Patterson had sold her son a handgun. He had also, facing charges of his own, agreed to cooperate with the police, and had told the FBI about the meeting before he flew east. At about seven her son Kenneth arrived and walked over to her, and FBI agents and New York police officers arrested them both. That same day Irene Silverman, a former ballerina of eighty-two, had last been seen at her townhouse on East 65th Street. Kenneth had been living in one of her apartments under an alias since June. When he was arrested he had her keys, cassettes of her recorded phone calls, loaded guns, wigs, masks, plastic handcuffs, $30,000 in cash, an empty stun-gun box, a substance like a date-rape drug, and a forged deed transferring her $7.7 million house to one of his mother's shell companies for $395,000.
She was born Sante Louise Singhrs in Oklahoma City on July 24, 1934, the third of four children of Mary Van Horn and Prama Mahendra Singhrs, an herbalist from the Punjab who died of heart disease when she was five. She later claimed her father had abandoned the family and her mother had turned to prostitution; neither was true. Her younger sister said she tortured animals on the family farm and held lit matches under her sister's fingers. As a teenager she moved to Los Angeles with her mother and was reportedly taken in by a couple named Chambers, graduating from Carson High School in Carson City, Nevada, in 1952.
She married a high school boyfriend, Edward Walker, in 1957 and had a son, Kent. In December 1960 she set fire to a house her husband had built and collected $10,000 in insurance, and over the marriage dozens of houses he had supervised burned. In 1971 she met Kenneth Kimes, a motel owner seventeen years older and worth about $20 million, after reading about his divorce in a magazine; their son Kenneth Jr. was born on March 24, 1975, and they married in 1981. For years she lived by arson, insurance fraud, forgery and theft, introduced her husband as an ambassador, which got the couple into a White House reception in the Ford years, and sometimes passed herself off as Elizabeth Taylor. She took in young undocumented women as maids and kept them as virtual prisoners with threats of deportation. She was arrested in August 1985 and sentenced to five years for violating federal anti-slavery laws, and was released in 1989. Her husband died in 1994.
In September 1990 she hired a fifty-year-old lawyer, Elmer Holmgren, to burn her Honolulu house; he admitted his part to insurance investigators, and she burned his office. Holmgren told his family he was going to Costa Rica with the Kimeses on August 2, 1991, and was not seen again. Her son Kent wrote in his memoir, Son of a Grifter, that his mother and stepfather admitted in 1992 that they had killed him with a hammer in a car. A body found in a dumpster in Inglewood, California, in 1991 was identified as Holmgren's only in 2026; the published dates for the discovery and his trip do not agree. On September 4, 1996, in Nassau, Syed Bilal Ahmed, forty-six, the banker who handled her offshore accounts, disappeared; Kenneth Jr. later confessed that the two of them drugged him, drowned him in a bathtub and dumped his body at sea. No charges were brought for either death.
David Kazdin, sixty-three, had let her put his name on the deed of a Las Vegas house she and her husband lived in during the 1970s. Years later she had a notary forge his signature on a $280,000 loan against it. When his bank's letter told him about the loan and he threatened to expose her, she ordered her son to kill him. On March 9, 1998, Kenneth Jr. shot Kazdin in the back of the head in his Los Angeles home, and the body was found on March 14 in a dumpster near Los Angeles International Airport. The gun was taken apart and dropped into a storm drain. The Las Vegas house had been partly burned in an attempted arson, and its nominal owner turned out to be a homeless man who said the Kimeses had set the fire and kept him in the house. The police investigation of Kazdin's death led them to Patterson, and Patterson led them to the Hilton.
They were charged with Silverman's murder in December 1998. At the trial in New York in 2000 there was no body. In their car and possessions were fifteen notebooks in which Sante had set out mortgage fraud schemes against many intended victims, Silverman and Kazdin among them. She did not testify, after the judge ruled that prosecutors could question her about her past convictions; he also ordered her not to speak to the press after she passed a note to a New York Times reporter in court. The jury convicted mother and son unanimously on its first vote of murder and 117 other counts, including robbery, burglary, conspiracy, grand larceny, weapons possession, forgery and eavesdropping. At sentencing she compared the case to the Salem witch trials and said the prosecutors were "murdering the Constitution"; the judge called her a sociopath and a degenerate and gave her 120 years, and her son 124.
In October 2000 Kenneth Jr. held a Court TV reporter hostage for four hours with a ballpoint pen to her throat, demanding that his mother not be sent to California, where both faced a possible death sentence. They were extradited anyway in 2001. At the Kazdin trial in June 2004 he pleaded guilty and testified against his mother in exchange for neither of them facing death, described how she had raised him to be her accomplice, and confessed that after she had used a stun gun on Irene Silverman he strangled her, put her body in a bag and left it in a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey. Sante denied everything and said he was lying to save himself. She was convicted of Kazdin's murder and sentenced to life; the judge called her one of the most evil people she had encountered on the bench.
She was returned to New York and spent most of her imprisonment in solitary confinement, working through a family friend on a motion for a retrial. She died of natural causes at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women on May 19, 2014, at seventy-nine. Kenneth Jr. is held in California. The case was filmed twice for television, as A Most Deadly Family in 2001, with Mary Tyler Moore, and A Little Thing Called Murder in 2006, with Judy Davis.