Sante Kimes dies at 79; grifter and murderer was convicted with son

Sante Kimes was a con artist who made insurance claims on suspicious fires, passed bad checks and forged signatures, even when she was married to a multimillionaire.

And then somewhere along the way, she went from con games to murder. And she took her son with her.

“They’ve been deemed these grifters or drifters,” said Det. Dennis English of the Los Angeles Police Department, in a 2002 Los Angeles Times article on Kimes and her son Kenneth.

“But a true grifter is in it for the con, not for the kill. What makes somebody jump from just fraud to murder, I don’t know.”

Kimes, 79, who was convicted along with Kenneth in the murders of a Granada Hills businessman and New York socialite, was found dead in her cell Monday at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York.

Kimes died of natural causes, according to prison official Linda Foglia, who said regulations prohibited releasing more information on the cause. Kimes was serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

The mother-and-son duo, whose crimes spanned the country and possibly included other murders, were the subject of several books and the 2001 TV movie “Like Mother Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes,” with Mary Tyler Moore as Sante Kimes.

The local murder victim was David Kazdin, who discovered Sante Kimes had forged his signature to take out a loan in his name. In 1998 he was shot in the head and his body was found, wrapped in trash bags, in a garbage bin near LAX.

That same year, when Kimes and her son were arrested in New York on an unrelated warrant for passing a bad check, they were carrying a passport and other papers belonging to Irene Silverman, an 82-year-old widow who had disappeared. The pair were convicted for the murder of Silverman, even though the victim’s body was never found.

Kenneth Kimes, who testified against his mother in the Kazdin trial to avoid a possible death sentence, said their motto was: “No body, no crime.” At sensational trials on both coasts, prosectors said that it was the son who had pulled the trigger in the murders for which they were convicted, but it was the mother who had orchestrated the crimes.

Sante Kimes has been portrayed as a flamboyant figure who favored wigs, ample jewelry, heavy doses of perfume, and fur coats, including one she stole by slipping it on under another coat she was wearing. She could turn on the charm when it suited her purposes.

Apparently, she was hoping to go that route at least one more time. The syndicated news magazine TV show “Inside Edition” said in a statement Wednesday that it had been planning an interview with Kimes, who still professed her innocence. Kimes had requested that beauty products be sent to her — including pink lipstick, Max Factor pancake makeup, eyeliner and a curling iron — so that she could prepare.

“It’s important how I look in the interview,” Kimes said in a note to the show. “First impressions mean everything.”

Sante Kimes was born July 24, 1934, according to New York prison records. Court documents, reported by the New York Times, indicated she was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Nevada. Her early arrest records, beginning in the 1960s, were for petty theft, auto theft, larceny and other crimes.

Much about her early life is unclear, including her first marriage. Her second marriage was to a Sacramento contractor with whom she had a son, Kent Walker. As an adult he wrote a book, “Son of a Grifter,” about his life with his mother, including being pressed into service as her shoplifting accomplice while still a child.

In 1970, she met a multimillionaire Newport Beach developer, Kenneth Kimes, and they moved in together. He was her “biggest score ever,” Walker said in a 2003 Los Angeles Times interview. In 1975, the couple had their only child together, Kenneth Jr.

Although they lived a high-end life, with homes in Hawaii and elsewhere, Kimes was still pulling scams and thefts. Charles Catterlin, a lawyer interviewed by the New York Times for a 1998 article, said she stole a car from an auto dealership in Hawaii and made a false claim of $100,000 to an insurance company for a lost quilt. She also refused to pay $12,000 she owed the lawyer for his work. In preparing a case against her, he found she was using at least 22 aliases.

In 1986 she was convicted of keeping Mexican girls, lured to the U.S. with the promise of work, in her Las Vegas home as slave workers, without pay or contact with the outside world. She was sentenced to five years in prison, and served three. Once released, suspicious incidents continued, including attempts to collect insurance on mysterious home fires. Kenneth Sr. died in 1994.

The crimes grew violent, according to police. Two men who had dealings with Sante Kimes disappeared. One was a Caribbean bank official and the other said he had started one of the suspicious fires.

Kazdin, the local murder victim, had been friendly with the Kimeses in the 1970s and let them put his name on the deed of a Las Vegas home. In 1997, she had his name forged on a $280,000 loan on the house, according to court testimony. When he found out, he called the bank to report the loan as fraudulent and an investigation began. That halted a $500,000 insurance payment she was expecting from one of the fires.

Kenneth Jr., who pleaded guilty to murdering Kazdin, testified that his mother had planned it. “We’re going to have to kill him,” he said she told him.

After the Kazdin murder, Kimes and her son moved on to New York, where they sought Silverman, whom they had heard about at a Las Vegas conference. According to the New York Times account, Kenneth rented an apartment at her townhouse.

Silverman disappeared from her home in July 1998. When the Kimeses were arrested shortly thereafter on an unrelated forged check warrant, they had not only Silverman’s passport, but also a forged deed selling the townhouse to an off-shore corporation.

Without a body or witness, prosecutors might have had a tough case. But Kimes did herself in: She had filled 14 notebooks with detailed notes while planning the crime and its aftermath.

Kenneth Kimes Jr., now 39, is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.

david.colker@latimes.com