In the spring of 2003 an FBI agent named Carle Schlaff asked his informant whether he had heard anything about Jennifer Marcum, a twenty-five-year-old dancer who had stopped answering her phone. Scott Lee Kimball said he had heard she was dead. Schlaff was surprised. Marcum was the girlfriend of an imprisoned drug dealer the Bureau hoped to build a case against, and Kimball, released from federal custody on the strength of his tips, was supposed to be using her to reach the dealer's partner. Later that spring Kimball told Schlaff the partner had confessed to killing her and dumping her body in a creek near Rifle. A DEA agent on the case told Schlaff she thought Kimball had killed Marcum himself. Kimball passed a lie detector test. Marcum's body has never been found, and Kimball has admitted he killed her.
Kimball was born in Boulder, Colorado, on September 21, 1966. When he was ten his mother came out as a lesbian and his parents divorced, and his father moved out of state. In his early adolescence the police were called to the house after he fired a gun out of a window at the neighbors' houses. He and his younger brother were sexually abused for years by a neighbor of their grandmother's, a man named Theodore Peyton, at a cabin in Nederland; the abuse ended when Kimball, at twenty-three, shot himself in the head. The bullet glanced off his skull and left a scar on his forehead. A cousin said he came out of it as if he had "lost his conscience." Kimball and other boys then reported Peyton, who was convicted of seven counts of sexually assaulting a child.
By then Kimball was already a criminal. At twenty-two he was convicted in Montana of passing bad checks, and he went on to burglaries, an illegal hunting-outfitter business and scams in the logging trade. His second wife, whom he married in 1993 and with whom he had two sons in Spokane, later accused him of rape, and after he absconded from a Montana halfway house in 2001 she said he broke into her house, kidnapped her and raped her again; a warrant was issued. He fled to Alaska, posed as his brother, wrote $25,000 in forged checks and was caught. In federal prison he told the FBI that a fellow inmate, Arnold Flowers, was arranging to have a federal judge, a prosecutor and a witness killed, and the Bureau recorded Flowers making the arrangements. Kimball offered more. Transferred to the Englewood federal prison near Littleton, Colorado, he told Schlaff that another inmate, Steve Ennis, was plotting to kill witnesses in his ecstasy case. Schlaff, who had wanted a case that would put his career back on track, saw a reliable witness in him. Kimball was released on a $10,000 bond in 2002, the Spokane rape charges never followed him, and he moved in with his mother near Denver and set up an organic beef business that took him all over the state.
LeAnn Emry, twenty-four, was the girlfriend of another Englewood inmate, Steve Holley, whom Kimball had helped plan an escape and then reported. Holley told her to do what Kimball said. On January 16, 2003, she packed her car at her parents' home in Centennial for what she called a caving trip to Mexico. Instead she and Kimball spent a week in four Western states stealing checks worth $15,000. From a hotel in Grand Junction she spent two hours on the phone to a cousin, afraid, calling Kimball Hannibal. On January 29 she checked out. By Kimball's later account he drove her into Bryson Canyon in Utah's Book Cliffs, walked her up a dead-end box canyon and a cliff face, told her to kneel and shot her in the head with a handgun she had bought for him. Her car was found near Moab the next day. Her father tracked her credit card, found signatures on receipts that were not hers, and got little interest from the police.
Jennifer Marcum had moved to the Denver area from Illinois with her young son. Kimball told her he owned coffee shops in Seattle and wanted her to manage one. She moved her belongings into his house. The next day her phone went silent for good and his went silent for three days, and on February 18, 2003, her green Saturn was left at Denver International Airport. That weekend Schlaff had been unable to reach his informant. When he asked about her furniture in Kimball's house, Kimball produced a lease agreement apparently signed by Marcum. In March 2003 Kimball pleaded guilty to the Alaska fraud charges in a sealed deal signed off by the U.S. Attorney for Colorado, and in December he was given three months, already served, and three years' probation, with prosecutors asking for leniency because he might still help solve Marcum's case.
Earlier that January he had met Lori McLeod at a poker table in a Black Hawk casino, told her he was an FBI agent and showed her a fake badge. Her daughter Kaysi, nineteen, was off methamphetamine, living at home and working at a Subway. In August 2003, while Kimball was away on what he called a hunting trip, Kaysi missed a shift and disappeared; her boyfriend said Kimball had picked her up that night. Kimball consoled her mother, arranged signs that Kaysi was still alive, a necklace on a doorknob and a missing makeup kit, and then married her at a drive-through chapel in Las Vegas. His mother helped them take out life insurance with Kimball as beneficiary, and they honeymooned near Kremmling, not far from where Kaysi's remains would be found.
In July 2004 his older son was badly hurt, first, the boy later said, by a metal grate his father dropped on him in the yard, and then by a fall from Kimball's car at sixty miles an hour on the way to the hospital. He spent two weeks in an induced coma, and when he could speak asked, "Why did Dad do this to me?" Kimball's mother changed the beneficiary on the boy's life insurance policy away from her son. Because the injuries happened in different jurisdictions, no charges were filed. Kimball's uncle, Terry Kimball, came from Alabama with his two dogs and a briefcase of cash to help while the boy was in the hospital. Soon afterward Lori McLeod came home to find a stained white leather couch carried outside. Kimball said a dog had vomited on it, and that Terry had won the Ohio lottery, met a stripper and gone to Mexico. Terry's credit card and bank account were used after he vanished, and a year later his brother received an email from a "terrykimball" address saying he was enjoying Mexico.
In January 2006 a Lafayette optometrist found $83,000 run through his business account in three weeks, most of it into Kimball's beef company. Detective Gary Thatcher of the Lafayette police, told by McLeod that her husband worked for the FBI, called the Bureau in March and reached Schlaff, and between them they realized Kimball might be a killer. On March 14, 2006, traced to Riverside, California, he led federal marshals on a three-hour, 260-mile chase down the Coachella Valley until his truck ran out of gas in a field near Mecca, threatened suicide on the phone to Schlaff, and surrendered. Among his boxed possessions McLeod found Kaysi's last work schedule, and police found the hat from her uniform, her date book, a Walden grocery receipt from the day after she vanished, the Yahoo account in his dead uncle's name and the laptop Emry had bought him. In April 2007 an FBI agent, Jonny Grusing, mentioned the case while buying a map in Routt National Forest, and rangers told him a hunter had found a young woman's skull. DNA showed it was Kaysi McLeod's.
Prosecutors offered a single second-degree murder count, concurrent with a forty-eight-year fraud sentence, if he led them to the other three bodies. He took them to LeAnn Emry's remains outside Moab and to his uncle's grave on Vail Pass, where Terry Kimball's mummified body was found in 2009, but could not, or would not, find Jennifer Marcum, so the deal fell apart. In October 2009 in Boulder County he pleaded guilty to all four murders as second-degree murder and was sentenced to seventy years, Colorado's habitual-offender law quadrupling the terms. His cousin read a statement blaming the FBI. Before sentencing he had circulated what looked like FBI interview summaries blaming drug dealers for the killings; the Bureau found he had forged them in custody. Schlaff was disciplined.
Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett said Kimball had bragged of killing dozens, and investigators suspect him in as many as twenty-one other deaths, among them the killing and mutilation of a young woman found in Westminster in October 2004, while he was living in the area under FBI supervision. He told a cousin he had been named as a possible suspect in the West Mesa murders in New Mexico, and denied any part in them. None has been charged. In 2017, at the Sterling Correctional Facility, he and another inmate were arrested in the prison yard waiting for a helicopter that a former cellmate, working with the FBI, had been recruited to arrange; a solicitation charge was dropped, and in 2020 he pleaded guilty to attempted escape and got four more years. He is held at the United States Penitentiary, Florence High.