Irene Silverman was suspicious of the lanky young man renting an apartment in her limestone townhome in New York City.
The 6-foot-1 tenant with dark hair and green eyes barely spoke. Every time he went through the foyer and up the marble stairs, he shielded his face from the security camera. Some days, he’d sneak in an older woman who spent the night and was just as evasive.
Turns out, Silverman had every reason to be wary. The duo was in fact a mother and son, Sante and Kenneth Kimes, and they were on the run after a rash of financial scams and violence that stretched from Los Angeles to the Bahamas. With police on their trail, they had used an alias to move into the 82-year-old socialite’s apartment.
A few weeks after they started living there, Silverman vanished, never to be seen again. She was reported missing on July 5, 1998, setting off a series of events that unraveled the Kimes’ twisted history of arson, fraud and murders.
In a rare interview with CNN this week, Kenneth Kimes recalled his years as his mother’s accomplice — a turbulent period that landed him in prison without the possibility of parole. Now 49, Kimes spoke candidly about his family’s history of violence and instability, and the bad choices that turned him into a notorious killer.
He also remembered his wealthy father who adored him and tried to give him a normal childhood while his mother was in federal prison for keeping maids in expensive homes in three different states without paying them — one of her many crimes. After she was released, she gradually ensnared her devoted son in her web of lawlessness.
“If I could only have an hour with my younger self, I would say, ‘buddy … you have to file for emancipation from your parents, ‘” Kenneth Kimes told CNN from prison outside San Diego.
“You have to save yourself. And it’s going to be rough because you’re going to have to be very independent … and learn how to make a buck. And when you emancipate from your parents and establish yourself, you need to go back and help them.”
The pair’s arrests revealed a dark history of crimes
Sante and Kenneth Kimes were 64 and 23 respectively when they moved into Silverman’s large townhouse on New York City’s Upper East Side. Silverman, an elderly and vivacious former Radio City ballerina, lived alone after the death of her banker husband. She had no children, but her close circle of friends constantly checked on her.
Silverman had turned some rooms in her townhouse into rental apartments — “Not so much as to make money but to have company,” said Thomas Ryan, a retired detective for the New York City Police Department.
In the summer of 1998, Silverman had no way of knowing that her tenant and his mysterious older companion were wanted for questioning on theft, arson and murder charges in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Nassau, Bahamas.
She was unaware that the pair had moved into her home with one goal: to seize her fortune and property, authorities said. But she had become mistrustful of Kimes and had spoken about evicting him before she disappeared.
On the day Silverman was reported missing, the mother and son vanished, too. They were arrested in New York City later that day on an unrelated warrant for writing a bad check to a car dealer who’d sold them a green Lincoln Town Car. Police found incriminating items in the car, including guns, wigs, a date rape drug, a notebook detailing their plans and several personal items belonging to Silverman, including her keys and a forged deed to her townhouse.
As investigators dug deeper they learned that “Manny Guerrin,” the name Kenneth Kimes gave Silverman when he rented the apartment, did not exist. And they discovered Sante Kimes’ exhaustive criminal record, which included a mid-1980s prison sentence for smuggling women from Central America to serve as maids in her mansions in Las Vegas, Hawaii and San Diego, then enslaving them without pay.
Police also learned the pair was wanted in several states. In Nevada, they were suspected of arson and insurance fraud. In California, they were suspected of shooting a businessman in the back of the head and stashing his body in a Dumpster near Los Angeles International Airport. And in the Bahamas, they were suspects in the 1996 disappearance of a banker who was last seen having dinner with them in Nassau.
Kent Walker, Sante Kimes’ son from her first marriage, told CNN that his mother’s charisma and ruthlessness made her a dangerous grifter.
“My mother could make every man in the room feel like the most important person in the planet,” he said.
But the Kimes denied they had anything to do with Silverman’s disappearance. In a 2000 interview with CNN’s Larry King, Sante Kimes called their arrest a witch hunt, saying they were victims of mistaken identity.
“There is no crime. There is no body,” she said, fighting back tears. “I used to believe in this country. I don’t believe in this country anymore.”
He says he confessed to spare his mother the death penalty
Sante and Kenneth Kimes in an undated photo. When she was younger, people used to mistake Sante for actress Elizabeth Taylor.(CNN via CNN Newsource)
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In May 2000, a New York jury convicted the Kimes of killing Silverman and sentenced them to 120 years to life in prison.
Four years later, Kenneth Kimes made a stunning revelation. He confessed to killing the Los Angeles businessman and implicated his mother at her trial in exchange for a plea deal that would spare them both the death penalty.
“I want to make it clear that I did not confess because I wanted to rat my mom out. I confessed because I was afraid of the death penalty for me or her, “Kimes told CNN.
He also provided details on how they killed Silverman, saying he became her tenant primarily so he and his mother could swindle her out of her home.
Kimes told authorities he tackled the 5-foot, 115-pound Silverman in her bedroom while his mom turned on the TV to mask the noise. “Do it,” he said she told him. He then strangled Silverman, stuffed her body in the car and dumped it in a construction site in northern New Jersey. Her remains have never been found.
Kimes said the last time he saw his mother was at his 2004 confession in a Los Angeles courtroom. The graying convict sat slumped in a wheelchair — a far cry from the flamboyant woman who sometimes was mistaken for actress Elizabeth Taylor and who glided through rooms enveloped in the scent of gardenias, Kimes’ dad’s favorite scent.
“When I started confessing, she started crying,” he said. She died in a New York state prison in 2014.
He recalls a turbulent childhood filled with lies and uncertainty
Even as a child, Kimes said he remembers his life was anything but normal. The family would take what he thought were cross-country vacations in a motor home. He didn’t realize until later that his parents were on the run from the FBI for kidnapping and enslaving their maids.
A July 1998 police photo of Kenneth Kimes.(NYPD/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
When he was about 10, he said he witnessed the FBI raiding the family home near San Diego and arresting his parents. Looking back, he said, that experience made him view authorities as enemies who were hurting his family.
“It had a huge, damaging effect on my perspective,” he said.
Kenneth Kimes Sr. pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, but Sante Kimes went to prison in 1985. While she was behind bars, the younger Kimes said he lived a somewhat normal life with his father.
“It was the most stable period of my young life. My dad was a decent, nice and hard-working general contractor,” he told CNN. “I idolized my dad and did not want my mom back in my life. I wanted nothing to do with my mom.”
But five years after Sante Kimes was released from prison, his father died of an aneurysm. In characteristic fashion, his mother kept the death a secret while she was forging checks, withdrawing money and trying to seize his bank accounts.
Kenneth Kimes was a student at the University of California-Santa Barbara at the time and told CNN his mother hid the news of his father’s death from him for three months. When he or other people called for Kenneth Sr., Sante Kimes would say he was traveling, in the shower or had laryngitis, he said.
“I felt annihilated. Like the floor below me had collapsed,” he said about learning of his father’s death.
It also sealed his fate. Unmoored and bullied by his domineering mother, he gradually became an accomplice to her crimes.
His mother told him she was suicidal after the death of his father, which made him feel sympathetic toward her, he said. He withdrew from college and went on an excursion with her to find his father’s money.
“That was my mom. She could just get people to do things,” he said.
Years later, he remains conflicted about his mother
Kenneth Kimes is incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a state prison near San Diego that also houses infamous convicted killers Suge Knight and Lyle and Erik Menendez.
A decade after her death, he still struggles with bad-mouthing his mother.
Sante Kimes in a 1998 police mug shot.(NYPD/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
“I know a lot of people in my situation would say, ‘She destroyed my life.’ And that’s true to an extent. But I love my mom,” he said. “She had a lot of baggage, and she was a complicated person with criminal tendencies. But I would never hate my mom.”
Kimes said he’s had time to reflect and shift his perspective on his years of crime. In 2015, he started a romantic correspondence with a California author whom he described as the love of his life. She died three years later after a bout of pneumonia, but he remains devoted to her and said she inspired him to become a better person.
“With her, I knew true, selfless love. There was that from my parents to some extent, but with them, there was the complexity of alcohol and dysfunction and abuse,” he said.
“She made me understand that there’s beauty in life. I felt whole. I felt complete. And that’s what made me want to do better.”
Kimes has since turned to religion and said he believes he’ll meet her again someday in heaven.
These days, he thinks a lot about rehabilitation and education. He wonders what would have happened if someone had intervened when he was a child and taken him away from his parents.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have been a high-profile murderer,” he said. “My whole life and criminality is a study on the outcome of lack of prevention. There are many kids like me who are on the road to destruction.”
He said he understands why the families of his victims might hate him.
And he has a message for them: “To anyone I’ve harmed, I know it’s worthless, but I’m sorry.”
Editor’s note: Learn more about the dark saga of Sante and Kenneth Kimes in the latest episode of “How It Really Happened,” airing Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on CNN.
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