Mother, Son Convicted of Murder of N.Y. Landlady

In a Manhattan murder mystery, a jury on Thursday convicted a mother and son of slaying their wealthy landlady so that they could steal her $8-million mansion--even though her body has never been found.

Sante Kimes, 65, and Kenneth Kimes, 25, were convicted of the second-degree murder of 82-year-old Irene Silverman. The jury, which deliberated for four days, also found the pair guilty of criminal possession of a weapon, conspiracy, forgery, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and eavesdropping.

Mother and son sat quietly in New York State Supreme Court while the forewoman read the verdicts, intoning “guilty” 118 times.

They each face 25 years to life in prison when they are sentenced June 27.

Defense attorney Jose Muniz said Sante Kimes, whose criminal record dates to 1961, asked him: “What’s next? Is this the end of everything for us?”

The bizarre case, which stretched from New York to California, drew widespread notoriety.

During the 15-week trial, jurors were told that the plot began in 1996, when Sante Kimes attended an anti-aging seminar in Las Vegas. There she met Ralph Pellecchia, an insurance salesman who knew Silverman, a widow who charged as much as $10,000 a month to rent apartments in the luxury building she owned.

That description, prosecutors said, piqued Sante Kimes’ interest. In March 1998, Pellecchia testified, Kimes again asked about Silverman, a former ballet dancer who had married a rich real-estate agent.

Pellecchia said that when Kimes pressed for details, he mentioned the name of Rudy Vaccari, Silverman’s butcher and friend.

Prosecutors said that two months later, Kimes phoned one of Silverman’s employees. Dropping Vaccari’s name, she identified herself as Eva Guerrin and said she was the secretary to Manny Guerrin, whom she identified as a Mexican designer.

The ruse worked and she reserved an apartment for Guerrin--an alias prosecutors charged Kimes’ son used.

Meanwhile the Kimeses, who at that point were in Florida, continued their research. Using a stolen Social Security number, prosecutors said, the pair set up a dummy corporation to be used to eventually steal the townhouse.

In June 1998, posing as designer and secretary, the Kimeses moved into apartment 1-B for $6,000 a month.

Three weeks later, Silverman was nowhere to be found.

Prosecutors charged that she had been slain, stuffed inside a duffel bag and spirited from the building by the Kimeses, who presumably placed the body in the trunk of their car and took it to an unknown location.

“Do not reward these defendants because they were clever enough to dispose of her body,” Assistant Dist. Atty. Connie Fernandez told the jury.

“There is no body, no witnesses,” countered Michael Hardy, a member of the defense team.

Without a corpse, the Manhattan district attorney’s office introduced a huge amount of circumstantial evidence.

It included 14 notebooks the Kimeses kept allegedly containing minute details of the scheme, tape-recordings prosecutors charge the mother and son made of wiretaps they placed on Silverman’s phone, handcuffs, knockout drugs, a black bag Sante Kimes stored at the Plaza Hotel, two guns and an empty box for a stun gun.

What was in the bag? Masks and a bogus deed to the townhouse.

In all, 430 exhibits--including Silverman’s keys, her old passports and blank checks--were presented during the trial. The jury heard 130 witnesses.

Defense lawyers argued that the notebooks were forgeries or were changed by police.

Testifying for the prosecution, Antonio Alvarez, who cooked and cleaned for the Kimeses while they were in Florida, told the court that during a drive to New York, Kenneth Kimes stopped the car in New Jersey to point out a field he said would be the perfect place to dump a body.

Alvarez could not identify the precise location. During their investigation, detectives conducted several fruitless searches.

Prosecutors argued that after hiding the body the Kimeses returned to the townhouse and stole items that included $10,000 and Silverman’s Social Security card.

When they were arrested July 5, 1998, the Kimeses were suspects in a series of other crimes--including the killing of David Kazdin, a former business associate whose body was found March 14, 1998, in a trash bin near Los Angeles International Airport.

After their sentencing for Silverman’s murder, the pair are expected to be extradited to Los Angeles.