Scott Lee Kimball was a check forger and escape artist with four felony convictions when the FBI asked a federal magistrate to release him on December 18, 2002. He had told agents that a fellow inmate was plotting to have witnesses killed, and he was to help them prove it. Over the next 21 months, four people who knew him disappeared: LeAnn Emry, 24, who had been writing to an inmate he knew; Jennifer Marcum, 25, the girlfriend of the man he was informing on; Kaysi McLeod, 19, the daughter of the woman he married; and his uncle, Terry Kimball, 60.
Investigators did not connect the cases until 2006, when a Lafayette police detective working a check-fraud complaint called the FBI and learned that his suspect was one of the Bureau's own informants. In October 2009, in Boulder County District Court, Kimball pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and admitted responsibility for all four deaths. He was sentenced to 70 years. He led investigators to the remains of Emry and his uncle. Jennifer Marcum has never been found.
The case caused a political dispute in Colorado, because the U.S. Attorney who had approved part of the arrangement that freed him was by then the state's Attorney General, running for reelection against the district attorney who had prosecuted him. It also cost the FBI agent who handled him a suspension, according to a 2021 account in The Atavist Magazine.
Kimball was born in Boulder in 1966. His parents divorced when he was about ten, and he and his brother later said a neighbor mistreated them when they were boys; that man was later sent to prison, according to The Atavist Magazine's 2021 account by Jordan Michael Smith. A suicide attempt in his youth left a scar on his forehead, the same account says.
His criminal record began in his early twenties. A timeline released in 2010 by the campaign of Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett, and published by Westword, lists convictions in Montana and Colorado in 1988 and 1989 for bad checks and attempted theft. The Atavist adds that he was charged in Montana with running an illegal outfitting business for elk, bear, moose and deer hunts.
He married in 1993, moved to Spokane, Washington, and had two sons; the marriage ended in divorce in 1997, according to The Atavist. In December 1999 he was twice accused of sexual assault in Spokane. No charges were filed on those reports, according to the Garnett timeline; The Atavist says he denied the accusations. A Montana judge sent him to prison for ten years on April 18, 2000, for violating probation, calling him "impossible to supervise in a community setting," the timeline says. On April 4, 2001, he was convicted of three counts of forgery in the Spokane case, his fourth felony.
On July 29, 2001, he walked away from a pre-release center in Helena, Montana, and robbed the gas station where he had been working of cash and a truck, according to the timeline. Spokane police later issued a further warrant against him, The Atavist reports. He was arrested on November 8, 2001, in Cordova, Alaska, accused of writing nearly $25,000 in counterfeit checks.
In jail in Alaska, Kimball found that information was currency. He told federal authorities that a cellmate was planning to have a federal judge, a prosecutor and a witness killed. The FBI used Kimball and an undercover agent to record the man, and the cellmate and his girlfriend were charged in March 2002, according to The Atavist. Westword, reporting in 2010, wrote that the tip led to indictments but no convictions. Kimball also claimed that another cellmate had confessed to the October 2001 killing of Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Wales. Seattle agents later concluded he was unreliable after he failed a polygraph examination on that claim, The Atavist reports.
On June 1, 2002, he was moved to the federal prison at Englewood, Colorado, after claiming that inmates in Alaska wanted him dead, the Garnett timeline says. In August 2002 an FBI agent from Denver, Carle Schlaff, met him there. Kimball told Schlaff that his cellmate, Steven Ennis, who was facing a drug case, wanted witnesses killed. He was activated as a cooperating witness on September 4, 2002. The plan, according to The Atavist, was for him to pose as a hit man.
On December 18, 2002, a federal magistrate released him on a $10,000 unsecured bond to work the Ennis case, as 9News later reported from court documents. Six days later, on December 24, the U.S. Attorney for Colorado, John Suthers, signed a form transferring Kimball's Alaska counterfeiting case to Colorado, with the understanding that he would receive a plea bargain in return for his work as an informant, the Garnett timeline says. The kidnapping and assault charges pending in Spokane were dropped after he became an informant; the FBI told The Atavist it had not asked for that.
How much the government paid him is reported differently. Prosecutors said in December 2003 that he had been paid $20,000, according to the Garnett timeline and Westword; The Atavist puts the total FBI payments at $50,000. He and his brother used money from that period to start a natural beef business, The Atavist reports, a venture that took him around the state.
LeAnn Emry was 24 and living with her parents in Centennial, Colorado. Her father told KSL in 2009 that she had left an abusive marriage in 2002 and moved home. He described her as a straight-A student who graduated from high school early and worked as a veterinarian's assistant, CBS News's 48 Hours reported in 2011. "She had a very loving heart," he said. She had taken up caving.
She had also begun a relationship with an Englewood inmate who had planned an escape with Kimball's help, according to The Atavist and 48 Hours. The inmate told her that a man called "Hannibal" could protect her. Hannibal was Kimball's name for himself.
In January 2003 she told her family she was going caving in Mexico. She never went. Instead, according to 48 Hours and The Atavist, she and Kimball spent about two weeks in several Western states, writing bad checks and running up charges worth about $15,000, much of it on her father's credit card. In emails to a cousin she wrote about Hannibal, who she said was protecting her, and she called him dangerous to cross.
The Garnett timeline dates her death to January 29, 2003, in Grand County, Utah. Her car was found abandoned near Moab about two weeks after she was last seen, with her clothes still inside, 48 Hours reported; a Grand County investigator, Brent Pace, found signs that a second vehicle had waited at the spot. Her father pressed for answers for years. "Year after year, I kept hoping and waiting for that call, but it never came," he told KSL in 2009.
Kimball later admitted shooting her. For years he blamed others, and only in a 2011 letter to a cousin did he say he had shot her himself, according to Westword and The Gazette.
Jennifer Marcum, 25, was a single mother with a four-year-old son, ABC News reported. Her father lived in Illinois, and she worked as a dancer at a Colorado club. Her boyfriend was Steven Ennis, the inmate Kimball was informing on.
In late 2002 Kimball got in touch with her and told her, falsely, that he owned coffee shops in Seattle, according to The Atavist. Schlaff approved their first meeting, the magazine reports, but refused when Kimball asked to have a sexual relationship with her, because she was a witness and a possible suspect. Denver7 reported in 2023 that she had recently moved in with Kimball and was planning to move to Seattle with him for a job.
On February 17, 2003, she visited Ennis and told him she was meeting Kimball for dinner, The Atavist and 48 Hours report. She was never heard from again. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the FBI give her disappearance as February 16 or 17, 2003, and say she was last known to be heading to Denver International Airport, according to Denver7. Her car was found abandoned near the airport. There was no sign that she had taken a flight, and her phone was not used again, the Moab Sun News reported in 2018.
Kimball gave Schlaff a series of stories. First, according to the Moab Sun News, he said Ennis had asked her to kill a witness and that she had bought a gun and flown to New York. In April 2003, The Atavist reports, he told Schlaff she was dead, and later said a drug dealer connected to Ennis had strangled her and left her near Rifle, Colorado. Investigators found nothing to support that account. He later told her parents the same story and offered to show them where she was; they declined, 48 Hours reported.
His own legal case moved on in the meantime. On March 10, 2003, he pleaded guilty in Denver federal court to the Alaska fraud charges, in records that were sealed, according to The Atavist and the Garnett timeline. In May 2003, Schlaff found a new Spokane warrant against him for a minor probation violation, and Kimball was held until June 20, 2003, The Atavist reports. The Moab Sun News places his Rifle story in June 2003. Westword reported in 2010 that he won his release from jail that month by claiming to know something about her disappearance. The FBI opened an investigation into her disappearance on July 31, 2003, according to the Garnett timeline.
On December 1, 2003, he was sentenced to time served, three years of supervised probation and a $5,000 fine; The Atavist adds $8,287.94 in restitution to a bank. Prosecutors told the court Marcum was probably dead, the timeline says. The sentence ended his paid work as an informant, according to The Atavist.
In his 2011 letter, Kimball admitted giving Marcum a fatal dose of heroin, according to Westword. Her remains have never been found.
Early in 2003 Kimball met Kaysi McLeod's mother at a casino. He showed her a fake FBI badge and a laptop and told her he was an FBI agent, and their first date was on Valentine's Day 2003, according to The Atavist.
Kaysi was her parents' only child; they had separated when she was four. Her father remembered her as cheerful and eager to please, and her mother said she was always singing and dancing, 48 Hours reported. As a teenager she lived for a time with an aunt in Phoenix, where she made a lifelong best friend, and she came back to Colorado in late 2001. In 2003 she was living with her mother in Thornton and had recently started a job at a sandwich shop.
In August 2003, after an argument at home over drugs found in the house, she left on her bicycle, and two days later she missed a shift at work, according to 48 Hours. Her mother later came to believe Kimball had planted the drugs to drive the two apart. Her boyfriend said Kimball had picked her up the night she disappeared; Kimball denied it, The Atavist reports. The Garnett timeline gives the date of her death as August 23, 2003.
Police told her mother that Kaysi was an adult who had chosen to leave, 48 Hours reported. Kimball, meanwhile, found her necklace hanging on a bedroom doorknob, a sign the family was meant to read as proof she had come home. After she disappeared, her mother married Kimball at a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas and took out a life insurance policy that named him as beneficiary, according to The Atavist. On their honeymoon they went camping and off-roading in the area where her daughter's body lay, ABC News reported in 2009.
In his 2011 letter Kimball wrote that he had been the only person present when Kaysi died of an overdose of alcohol, methamphetamine and OxyContin that he had given her, and that he had not meant for her to die, according to Westword and The Gazette. He had earlier claimed that other people were there.
On July 15, 2004, Kimball's older son, then ten, was critically injured, according to the Garnett timeline; The Atavist gives the date as July 14. Kimball first said a metal grate had fallen on the boy in the yard, and then that he had fallen from Kimball's moving Jeep on the way to the hospital. The boy, who spent two weeks in a coma, later said his father pushed the grate onto him and then pushed him out of the vehicle, The Atavist reports.
The Louisville Police Department and the Adams County Sheriff's Office investigated, and attempted murder charges were considered, Westword reported in 2010, citing Kimball's second cousin Ed Coet, who wrote a book about him. Because the events happened in two jurisdictions, both the Boulder and Adams County district attorneys reviewed the case, and both concluded that it could not be prosecuted on the evidence then available. A Boulder prosecutor, Katharina Booth, later told the Boulder Daily Camera that she believed the boy, according to Westword. No charges were ever filed.
Terry Kimball, 60, Scott's uncle, came from Alabama to help the family while the boy was in the hospital, and stayed with them for a few weeks, according to The Atavist and 48 Hours. He had money from a divorce settlement with him in a briefcase, which investigators came to see as the motive, 48 Hours reported.
Then he was gone. Kimball told the family that his uncle had won the Ohio lottery and gone to Mexico with a woman he had met. Investigators found that he had never won any lottery, according to 48 Hours. The Garnett timeline dates his death to September 1, 2004; 9News reported that Kimball shot and killed him in mid-2004. Kimball later admitted the killing, and at his sentencing it was the only one of the four he fully owned, according to 48 Hours.
By 2006, the families of the missing women were doing much of the work themselves. Jennifer Marcum's father put up a billboard near the club where she had worked, and it led to the link between Kimball and the McLeod family, 48 Hours reported. In 2006 the fathers of Marcum and Kaysi McLeod pressed the FBI to look harder at Kimball, according to 9News and Denver7, and Fox News Digital reported in 2025, from an interview with a retired FBI agent, that the two fathers went to the FBI office together.
The break came from a fraud complaint. In January 2006, Detective Gary Thatcher of the Lafayette Police Department began investigating $83,000 in forged checks drawn on an optometrist's account and deposited into Kimball's beef company account, according to The Atavist. The optometrist shared office space with Kimball's mother, Law Week Colorado reported. Thatcher learned that Kimball had also stolen from a business partner and from his own mother.
On March 8, 2006, Thatcher called the FBI. Schlaff confirmed that Kimball was an informant and mentioned Marcum's disappearance, and as Kaysi McLeod's disappearance and the boy's injury came up, he told Thatcher he might have "a serial killer on your hands," The Atavist reports. Schlaff, who had defended Kimball for years, became the agent the families blamed for leaving him free, 48 Hours reported.
A Denver warrant for violating probation had been issued on February 6, 2006, according to the Garnett timeline. Kimball was found in Riverside, California. Federal marshals chased him for about three hours and more than 260 miles down the Coachella Valley until he stopped in a farm field; he held a gun to his head and asked to speak to Schlaff, who talked him into surrendering by phone, according to The Atavist and 48 Hours. The Atavist dates the arrest March 14, 2006, and the Garnett timeline March 16.
He was sent to Montana and given two years for absconding from probation, and on May 22, 2006, he received ten months in jail and six months in a halfway house on a weapons charge, The Atavist reports. Later reports describe his federal gun sentence as 70 months (The Gazette, 2017; Denver7, 2023).
An FBI agent, Jonathan Grusing, was assigned in 2006. In April 2007 Thatcher found, among boxes of Kimball's belongings, a grocery receipt placing Kimball in Walden, Colorado, the day after Kaysi disappeared, according to The Atavist. Remains had been found in that area, and Grusing ordered the DNA test that matched them to Kaysi, 48 Hours reported. The Garnett timeline dates the recovery of her remains near Walden to September 29, 2007; 48 Hours and the Moab Sun News place the identification in 2008.
In 2008 ABC's 20/20 broadcast a story by John Quinones on the families' search, ABC News reported in 2009. A former cellmate told police that Kimball had asked him whether breast implants could be traced, according to the same report.
On December 17, 2008, Kimball pleaded guilty in Boulder District Court to theft as a habitual offender and was sentenced to 48 years, according to the Garnett timeline and 48 Hours. As part of the agreement he also agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder if he helped investigators find three bodies: those of Marcum, Emry and his uncle. In exchange, 48 Hours reported, he would not face first-degree murder charges.
Early in 2009 he told investigators he knew where the remains of two women were, KSL reported. A first search with the FBI and the Grand County Sheriff's Office in Utah found nothing. On a later search he led them to remains in Grand County, and by March 14, 2009, the remains had been confirmed as human; the Utah Medical Examiner's Office was working to identify them, and they were believed to be LeAnn Emry's. "We just kept interviewing him and getting more and more details that made sense," said Brent Pace of the Grand County Sheriff's Office. A 2017 court affidavit dates Emry's recovery to February 2009. In July 2009, according to the same affidavit, Terry Kimball's body was found near Vail, Colorado, after Kimball led investigators there.
He never found Jennifer Marcum. On May 11, 2009, Garnett notified Kimball's lawyers that the agreement was void, according to the Garnett timeline. The Grand County sheriff later said Kimball told investigators only that he had driven "20 minutes" into Utah, and that he acknowledged she might be as far as 60 miles from where he took them, the Moab Sun News reported in 2018.
An arrest affidavit released in Boulder in October 2009 accused Kimball of murdering Emry, Marcum, McLeod and Terry Kimball, and he was held on $2 million bail, ABC News reported on October 7, 2009. Marcum's father said he would believe a guilty plea when he saw it. "This guy has buffaloed people for so many years," he told ABC.
On October 8, 2009, in Boulder District Court, Kimball pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and admitted responsibility for all four deaths, according to the Garnett timeline, 9News and a 2017 court affidavit. Some news reports described the plea as covering four murders (KSL, 2009; CBS Colorado, 2017). He was sentenced to 70 years. The timeline says the families of all four victims approved the agreement in advance. Katharina Booth was the lead prosecutor, 48 Hours reported.
The families spoke in court. "Scott Kimball has destroyed our lives," Marcum's father said, according to KSL, and her sister asked him to say where she was so the family could bury her. Kaysi's father said, "Scott Kimball was there to take her last," and Emry's father called Kimball a liar, a deceiver and a murderer, 48 Hours reported.
Even then, Kimball admitted personally killing only his uncle. He described himself as a "mechanism" in the other three deaths and would not name anyone else, according to 48 Hours.
Reports of when he could first be considered for parole vary: 2044 (CBS Colorado, 2017), 2053 (Law Week Colorado, 2020) and 2054 (The Atavist, 2021).
Kimball's cousin, the Texas author Ed Coet, published a novel about him, SLK: Serial Killer, according to Westword. Coet said he spoke to Kimball about once a week. In early 2011 Kimball sent Coet a 147-page letter, dated January 28, in which he took responsibility for all four deaths, Westword reported. The Boulder Daily Camera obtained a summary of the letter, and a law enforcement source confirmed it was genuine, according to The Gazette. Coet himself said nobody could be confident that Kimball was telling the complete truth, "because of his long history of lying."
Before that, Coet had obtained what appeared to be FBI interview reports suggesting that the Bureau had protected Kimball. The FBI said they were forgeries Kimball made in prison, according to The Atavist.
In a 2010 prison interview with KDVR-TV, Kimball said he thought of himself as someone who makes "bad situations go away," the Associated Press reported. He said he was not a serial killer like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy: "There was a reason behind every death."
In the 2010 election for Colorado Attorney General, Garnett, the Boulder district attorney whose office had prosecuted Kimball, challenged the incumbent, John Suthers, who had been the U.S. Attorney for Colorado when Kimball was freed. Garnett's campaign pointed to the December 24, 2002, transfer form Suthers had signed and to repeated efforts by the U.S. Attorney's office to close hearings and seal records, according to Westword. Suthers said he did not remember signing the document and had had no meetings about the case. A Fox 31 report said at least four assistant U.S. attorneys attended a 2003 meeting about continuing to use Kimball as an informant, Westword reported. Garnett said he was criticizing Suthers for how he managed the office, and quoted Suthers telling The Denver Post that it was "a shame" the matter had not reached its upper levels.
Coet told Westword that Suthers bore some responsibility, but argued that the Boulder district attorney's office could have put Kimball away sooner by pursuing the case of his injured son.
The FBI, for its part, defended its practices. The head of the Denver office, Jim Davis, said the Bureau could not watch informants around the clock, 48 Hours reported. In 2012 the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility found fault with Schlaff's handling of Kimball and suspended him for three weeks without pay, reduced to two weeks on appeal. He left the Bureau in 2013 after 23 years, The Atavist reports.
Kimball's former wife, Kaysi's mother, had the marriage annulled. She died of breast cancer in 2019, The Atavist reported.
Kimball was held at the Sterling Correctional Facility, the state's largest prison, Denver7 reported. In April 2017 a man who had shared a cell with him for two years, and who had been paroled, went to a Drug Enforcement Administration agent with a story. The case passed to the FBI and to Grusing, and the former cellmate became a confidential source, according to 9News.
Court documents filed in Logan County District Court in Sterling described the plan. Kimball and his new cellmate, a convicted killer, were accused of recruiting the former inmate to carry out two contract killings and to hijack a helicopter rented at the small airport in Erie, overpower the pilot, land in the Sterling prison yard and fly them out, with a rental car waiting about 20 miles away and a route north to Alaska, 9News reported. Kimball claimed $1 million was buried near a Montana ranch to pay for it. His intended target was a former business partner whose cattle venture with Kimball had collapsed amid Kimball's financial schemes. The partner told 9News he would have thought he was "at the bottom of the list."
The escape was set for September 22, 2017. Prison video showed Kimball and the other inmate in the yard that day in sweatpants, caps and sunglasses, sitting at tables for about an hour and 45 minutes while Kimball kept checking his watch, until they went back for the count, 9News reported. The helicopter never came. "Scott Kimball is a master manipulator," Grusing told 9News.
Kimball, then 51, was arrested on suspicion of soliciting first-degree murder and attempted escape, The Gazette reported on October 19, 2017; court documents placed the planning between May 6 and September 22. At his first appearance, bail was set at $1 million at the request of District Attorney Brittny Lewton, 9News reported. In January 2020 he pleaded guilty to attempted escape and received four more years; the solicitation charges were dropped, according to The Atavist and CBS Colorado.
In June 2021 CBS Colorado reported that Kimball had been moved out of the state. A Colorado Department of Corrections spokesperson confirmed only that he had been "transferred to another facility via interstate compact," and the department's website showed no record of him. CBS Colorado found him at the United States Penitentiary at Coleman, Florida, a high-security federal prison, with a listed release date of January 7, 2082.
As of October 22, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator lists Scott Kimball, register number 14444-006, at USP Coleman II, Florida, with a projected release date of January 7, 2082. He is serving the 70-year Colorado sentence for second-degree murder, together with his other sentences.
Kimball has said many things about other killings, and none of them has been proven or charged.
In August 2010 the FBI said, while trying to keep The Denver Post from obtaining records about the case, that it was investigating Kimball in connection with "several missing persons," the Associated Press reported. The Bureau did not say whether the cases were in Colorado or other states. Westword reported in 2010 that the FBI was reportedly looking at whether he was involved in the 2004 killing of a woman in Westminster, Colorado; no charge followed. The Moab Sun News, citing a 2010 Denver Post report, wrote that authorities had found photos of the four victims and of four unidentified women on his computer.
In 2011, according to a court affidavit filed in Logan County in late 2017, Kimball told Colorado investigators that he had killed 21 people, one of them a hitchhiker near Hite, Utah, in 1998 or 1999; Utah authorities could not verify that killing. Grusing told Fox News Digital in 2025 that Kimball later told his attorneys he was responsible for 45 to 50 deaths, and that Kimball called himself "The Opportunity Killer." Law Week Colorado, writing in 2020, said he had boasted to friends about other killings but had not been tied to any.
In October 2018 Utah investigators reopened the case of an unidentified woman found dead in April 1998 in Garfield County, Utah, saying circumstantial evidence pointed to Kimball, the Associated Press reported. A Logan County court had authorized a DNA sample from Kimball in December 2017, according to the court order, which Utah's Department of Public Safety published. Kimball has denied involvement in other cold cases, the AP reported. No result linking him to that death has been made public.
The search for Jennifer Marcum continued. Grand County Sheriff Steven White said in 2018 that there had been 20 to 30 searches over about 12 years, and the FBI brought a specially trained dog to Grand County that September. Nothing was found. "I hope we find her some day," White told the Moab Sun News. Her case remained open with the FBI in 2023, according to Denver7.
How the four died. Kimball's accounts have changed. At his 2009 sentencing he admitted personally killing only his uncle and called himself a "mechanism" in the other deaths (48 Hours). In his 2011 letter he took responsibility for all four, admitting he shot Emry and gave Marcum and McLeod the drugs that killed them (Westword; The Gazette). His cousin said nobody could be sure Kimball was telling the whole truth.
What he pleaded to. The court affidavit, the Garnett timeline and 9News say two counts of second-degree murder with an admission of responsibility for four deaths; other outlets describe it as a plea to four murders.
The number of victims. Four deaths are the subject of his conviction. His claim of 21 killings (2011) and the 45 to 50 figure reported by a retired agent (2025) are his own claims, not established facts. The 1998 Utah case is a suspicion, not a charge.
The FBI's role. Families and Garnett's campaign argued that the Bureau and the U.S. Attorney's office kept a dangerous man free; Suthers said he had no involvement in the decisions; the FBI said informants cannot be watched around the clock. The documents Kimball's cousin obtained suggesting FBI protection were called forgeries by the Bureau.
His son's injury. The boy said his father hurt him on purpose; two district attorneys found the evidence insufficient, and Kimball was never charged.
1966: Born in Boulder, Colorado.
1988 to 1989: First felony convictions, in Montana and Colorado, for bad checks and attempted theft.
December 1999: Twice accused of sexual assault in Spokane; no charges filed.
April 18, 2000: Sent to prison in Montana for ten years for violating probation.
April 4, 2001: Convicted of three counts of forgery (Spokane).
July 29, 2001: Escapes from a pre-release center in Helena, Montana.
November 8, 2001: Arrested in Cordova, Alaska, on counterfeit-check charges.
June 1, 2002: Moved to the federal prison at Englewood, Colorado.
September 4, 2002: Activated as an FBI cooperating witness.
December 18, 2002: Released by a federal magistrate to work as an informant.
December 24, 2002: U.S. Attorney John Suthers signs the transfer of the Alaska case to Colorado.
January 2003: LeAnn Emry leaves home; date of death given as January 29, 2003.
February 16 or 17, 2003: Jennifer Marcum disappears.
March 10, 2003: Pleads guilty to the Alaska fraud charges in Denver federal court.
August 2003: Kaysi McLeod disappears; date of death given as August 23, 2003.
December 1, 2003: Sentenced to time served and probation on the federal fraud case.
July 2004: His ten-year-old son is critically injured; no charges.
2004: Terry Kimball disappears; date of death given as September 1, 2004.
January 2006: Lafayette police open a check-fraud investigation.
March 8, 2006: Detective Thatcher contacts the FBI.
March 2006: Arrested in California's Coachella Valley after a long chase.
September 29, 2007: Kaysi McLeod's remains found near Walden, Colorado (later identified by DNA).
December 17, 2008: Pleads guilty to habitual-offender theft; 48 years.
February to March 2009: Leads investigators to LeAnn Emry's remains in Grand County, Utah.
May 11, 2009: Plea agreement declared void after Marcum is not found.
July 2009: Terry Kimball's remains found near Vail, Colorado.
October 8, 2009: Pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, admitting four deaths; 70 years.
2010: Kimball case becomes an issue in the Colorado Attorney General race.
2011: Writes a 147-page letter taking responsibility for all four deaths; tells investigators he killed 21 people.
2012: FBI suspends his former handler.
September 22, 2017: Planned helicopter escape from Sterling fails; charged in October.
October 2018: Utah reopens a 1998 death, naming him as a suspect.
January 2020: Pleads guilty to attempted escape; four more years.
June 2021: Reported moved to USP Coleman, Florida.
October 22, 2026: Federal Bureau of Prisons lists him at USP Coleman II, projected release January 7, 2082.