Scott Lee Kimball was born on September 21, 1966, and spent his adult life as a confidence man, moving between Colorado, Montana and Alaska with a long record of fraud, forged cheques and stolen vehicles.
In 2002, in federal custody on a cheque fraud charge, he offered the FBI information: that a fellow inmate was plotting to have a witness and a prosecutor killed. It was untrue, and the Bureau believed it. He was released to work as a paid informant, his supervised release conditions relaxed, his handler in regular contact. He called himself Hannibal.
Over the next two years he killed four people. LeAnn Emry, a young woman he had met, disappeared in December 2003. Jennifer Marcum, whom he had told the FBI he could get information from, disappeared in February 2004. Kaysi McLeod, nineteen, the daughter of his girlfriend, disappeared in August 2004. And in September 2004 he killed his own uncle, Terry Kimball. He told the families they had run away, and told the FBI he was pursuing leads on the very disappearances he had caused.
He was returned to custody in 2006 on unrelated charges and the case was made against him afterwards, largely by a Boulder County investigator, with remains recovered in Utah and Colorado. He pleaded guilty in 2009 to four counts of second degree murder and was sentenced to seventy years. He has since claimed as many as twenty-one killings, which is not corroborated.
The FBI's own accounting of how a man on its payroll was left free to kill four people, and how his reports on those disappearances were received, has never been made fully public.