Alleged Con Artists Charged With Murder

NEW YORK — An alleged mother-and-son con artist team, suspected in a string of crimes nationwide, was indicted Wednesday on charges of murdering a wealthy Manhattan widow who disappeared in July, prosecutors said.

Sante Kimes and her son Kenneth Kimes were charged in the death of 82-year-old Irene Silverman, even though her body has never been found. Silverman had let a $6,000-a-month apartment in her mansion on the affluent East Side of Manhattan to 23-year-old Kenneth Kimes.

The pair had been held on fraud charges since Silverman’s disappearance.

“These are vicious, coldblooded killers,” Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert Morgenthau said in announcing the 84-count indictment with Police Commissioner Howard Safir.

Safir, calling it “as complex and wide-ranging a case as the NYPD has ever been involved in,” said 50 detectives had been assigned to the case full time since Silverman vanished.

“The fact that there happens to be no body should not give somebody immunity from prosecution for murder,” Morgenthau said.

Attorney Mel Sachs, who represents the pair, said he is “fully confident that the Kimeses will be acquitted of all charges.”

“The Kimeses have nothing to do with the disappearance of Irene Silverman. There are no eyewitnesses, or forensic evidence or a body. . . . In fact there’s no evidence that she’s deceased.”

Prosecutors said that in addition to second-degree murder charges, the Kimeses were indicted by a grand jury on charges of felony murder, conspiracy, robbery, attempted robbery, burglary, grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, possession of weapons and forged instruments, stealing property and eavesdropping.

Prosecutors claim the pair’s primary motive was to take Silverman’s $3-million East Side mansion.

When the Kimeses were arrested July 5 on charges related to a forged check in Utah, they were found with Silverman’s keys, Social Security card, passports and payroll stubs from the widow’s days as a ballerina at Radio City Music Hall, prosecutors said.

They also had the deed to her townhouse bearing a forged signature and purporting to transfer ownership to a corporation set up by the defendants with an Antigua charter, as well as guns, ammunition, handcuffs, a stun gun, pepper spray, syringes, brass knuckles, a knife and a liquid sedative.

According to the indictment, the pair used false identities, installed listening devices in the mansion, tried to hire a superintendent to clear out and manage the building and averted their faces from security cameras in the house.

They are suspected of committing a string of crimes from Los Angeles to Florida and the Bahamas.

Police in Mississippi, Hawaii and Nevada have said they also want to question the pair about the disappearances of other people.

Their alleged crimes range from passing bad checks to insurance scams to several possible murders, including that of David Kazdin, 63, of Granada Hills, whose body was found in a trash bin at Los Angeles International Airport on March 14. He had been an acquaintance of Sante Kimes for more than 20 years, investigators said.

Prosecutors say Sante Kimes, 64, has an arrest record dating back more than 30 years with charges ranging from stealing a fur coat to involuntary servitude.