[ambient street noise]
[menacing music playing]
Hello.
My name is Kenneth Kimes.
You don't really know me.
You may think you know me, but you do not.
You may think you know my mother, but you don't.
My son and I are innocent.
There is a huge, evil cover-up going on.
The police have made a terrible mistake.
[distressing music playing]
[man] With Sante and Kenny Kimes,
there's something more than a mother-and-son relationship here.
People who seem to come and go from the Kimeses' lives disappeared.
I got a call. My friend Irene is missing.
We had an 82-year-old socialite who disappeared from her town house.
Every day, without exception,
I'd get a call from the police commissioner's office
with a simple question.
"Where's Irene?"
[woman] We don't know where she is, but we pray for her.
I pray with my son at eleven o'clock every night.
We pray she's all right, but we don't know where she is.
We're innocent, and if just given our rights, we will prove it.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Mooney] Our job is to make sure you can go home and sleep at night.
[Rivera] It's so important for a family to know who murdered their relative.
[chief] Compassion for the victims, that's the most important thing.
[Parrino] I've always liked the peek behind the curtain.
What really happened?
[McNeely] You want to find out the truth. That's what detectives do.
[officer] Your instinct is to help people.
[Titus] In New York City, the NYPD…
this is it.
[suspenseful music trails off]
[detective] In 1997, I had 10 years as a New York City cop
when I got promoted to third-grade detective.
And I got transferred from the 34th Precinct in Washington Heights
to the 19th Precinct, which is the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
[bold, ritzy music playing]
It's probably the richest part of New York City.
We would get homicides,
but certainly not compared to other precincts.
Within a year of being in that precinct, there was a burglary on Fifth Avenue.
So we go up there, and it's Mary Tyler Moore's apartment.
That's the kind of case that we were working on.
The precinct covers from 59th to 95th Street,
from Fifth Avenue all the way to the East River.
Like a big square.
And there's all kinds of high-rises, so it's very densely populated.
When I got transferred, I had culture shock.
I went from the basement to the penthouse in one move.
[music halts]
In 1998, Fourth of July weekend,
the city was a ghost town, especially the Upper East Side.
Everyone goes to their Hamptons house out in Long Island.
On July 5th, it was myself and two other detectives working.
Everyone else took off.
[phone ringing]
A call comes in about a missing person
by a staff member of an 82-year-old woman named Irene Silverman.
I'm the junior detective,
so the two other guys were like, "Kid, this is yours. Here you go."
I was like, "Ah, shit."
No one really wants a missing persons case.
They're usually someone ran away or went somewhere for the weekend.
They didn't tell anybody.
They usually come back, and the case winds up being closed.
But we had to check on it.
So we went over to the town house.
It was on a great block on 65th Street, right off of Madison Avenue.
[detective] I was a second-grade detective
who grew up in the housing projects in East Harlem.
And the first thing I thought was,
"This is probably the first time I walked into a multimillion-dollar building."
It was a beautiful, five-story limestone with a penthouse deck on the roof.
I had not been in many, many buildings that took my breath away
as to, "Wow! This is really expensive. This is really a woman who's well-off."
[Hovagim] When we first get to the town house,
no one's there except Irene Silverman's housekeeper
and Jeff, her personal assistant.
The staff started to tell us,
"Last night, she threw a Fourth of July party."
"She had a lot of guests. They had a great time."
The next morning at about 11:45 a.m.
was the last time any of her staff saw her.
Irene was gonna go take a nap.
Later on at about 4:30, five o'clock in the afternoon,
Marta goes and knocks on Irene's door to her bedroom,
and Irene doesn't answer.
She goes into the room and realizes that Irene is not there.
[man] I'll never forget. It's one of the saddest days of my life.
The phone rang, and it was Jeff.
And from the tone of voice, I can sense that something very serious
and something wrong is going on.
So all Jeff says, "Is Irene with you?" I said, "No."
So, um, Jeff… The next thing Jeff said,
"We were all hoping that Irene is with you,"
because usually we spend Sunday together.
He said, "She has been missing since twelve o'clock."
I said, "What happened?" He said, "We don't know."
So I said, "I'll come over soon."
When I get to the house, the whole staff was there.
Suddenly, everybody was at a loss
that the lady of the home is gone.
[tense, mysterious music playing]
The staff said Irene would never leave the residence by herself.
She always had someone escort her, to the store or wherever.
Someone always went with her.
But they also said that this woman is sharp as a tack.
There is no Alzheimer's, no dementia, nothing like that.
We searched the whole town house.
We started tracking down guests that were at the party,
getting their names so we can interview them also.
The staff told us that her keys were missing.
Not only that, they said that she always kept money on hand,
and they said that there was $10,000 missing.
And they showed us where she kept the money,
and that envelope was gone.
The people who she employed told us that she treated them just like family.
I remember being impressed with how much they cared for Irene.
[Toi] That says a lot about the character of Irene Silverman,
to have your workers that loved you, devoted to you, and want the best for you.
[Hovagim] They tell us that she doesn't have any family.
She was a socialite. So if she liked you, she automatically took you in as a friend,
would invite you to the parties, to the town house.
That was it. You were part of her family.
The more I got to know who she was, the more I really liked her,
and the more I'd like to hang out with her.
When she threw a party, she is the center of attention.
Just like in the movie, the Auntie Mame movie.
Alan, darling, I'm so glad to see-- Edna, I called you yesterday. Where--
-Hello, Mame. -Hello. I'll be with you in just a minute.
[Toi] She held court like no one else.
I first met Irene Silverman in 1994.
I was at the peak of my career.
I was the very first Asian designer that was championed by Anna Wintour.
I went to this very fancy Christmas Eve party.
My friend ran into the kitchen.
She said, "The grande dame just arrived. The grande dame just arrived."
"You must meet her. Everybody wants to meet her."
I was introduced to her.
Even though she's tiny, she's barely five foot tall,
but she's larger than life.
She's so glamorous looking, the way she dresses,
the way she holds herself.
She said, "You must come and have tea with me."
I was there until after midnight.
We had the best time ever.
And she had the best stories to tell.
At the age of 17, she was one of the ballerinas at Radio City.
During one of the performances, Samuel Silverman was in the audience,
was so smitten with Irene.
After a courtship, they got married.
Irene told me he's in finance.
And then Irene started to live this very, very glamorous life.
After her husband passed away,
she started to get a little lonely in this huge mansion.
So to entertain herself,
she rented all the beautiful rooms to very wealthy people,
for people who do not want to stay at a hotel.
The people who she employed told us that directly to the back,
as you come into the building, there's a door.
And that door was for an apartment on the first floor.
She rented that apartment to a white male named Manny Guerin.
[Hovagim] The staff told us that Irene Silverman
usually did background checks on her tenants.
However, in this case, she didn't.
A butcher who Irene used, that was a mutual friend,
recommended Irene's town house to Manny Guerin.
On June 14th, he paid $6,000 for one month upfront in cash.
The staff mentioned that from the moment he came into the building,
Irene felt that he was not a nice person.
He would often listen to Irene talking to the staff in the foyer.
And they knew that
because they would see his feet right by the front door.
We were told by staff
that Manny was also sneaking a woman into the building named Eva.
They described her as an older woman, well-dressed.
Eva is a person that Manny claims he worked with,
almost like an assistant.
When we go into Irene's office, there's papers on her desk,
and there's notes that she wrote about the tenant in 1B.
Some of the notes said he was very suspicious.
She didn't trust him and wanted him out.
[Vazquez] She actually drew a little sketch of him
and a description of his height.
She wrote, "He looks like jail."
[Toi] I remember the very first day Manny moved into the rental space.
I was having lunch with Irene at the basement.
And then we hear the elevator door open.
Immediately, Irene sent Marta, who's the maid, to the elevator.
Said, "Please tell Manny, the tenant, this is a private area."
"No tenants are allowed in this area."
When Marta finally came back to the dining table,
I'll never forget, Irene told me,
"You know what? I'm very suspicious of this guy."
I said, "Irene, why are you taking in someone that you suspected?"
She said, "I trusted my butcher,
so I did not ask for a background check,
and then I agreed to rent them the apartment for a month."
[uneasy music playing]
When we find out about the guy in 1B,
that's when I was like, "Oh, this is not good."
So all these flags are going up, saying, "Hey, This guy's a shithead."
We do a physical check of the apartment that Manny rented
to make sure that she was not in there laying wounded or maybe even dead.
The apartment was dimly lit.
It wasn't a mess, but it wasn't tidy.
The bed was unmade.
There was boxes of food on the counter.
In the garbage can in the apartment, there was a wad of duct tape.
Also recovered was a spool of rope or string.
One of the staff members notices a comforter from the room is missing.
And we find an empty shower curtain box with just the rings in it.
Why would you need a shower curtain in an apartment with glass sliding doors?
You don't need a shower curtain.
At that point, we were thinking we might have an abduction of some kind.
We bring her staff back to the precinct to do a sketch of Manny Guerin,
the person in 1B that was acting suspicious.
I was assigned to stay in the town house that night.
That was my "oh shit" moment.
I'm a junior detective.
This is my ball of wax.
We thought maybe there'd be a knock at the door of a witness.
Maybe Irene would walk through the door, a phone call, could've been anything.
The only one who was with me was George, Irene's dog.
[chief] In July of 1998, I had the rank of deputy inspector.
I was also in charge of Manhattan North detective operations,
which oversaw the 12 precincts in Manhattan North
from 59th Street up to the tip of Manhattan.
We have what we call "special category missing persons."
Irene fit at least two of them.
One was that she was 82 years old at the time.
And the second was she seems to have disappeared involuntarily
and something drastic has happened to her.
Special category missing person prompts
a temporary headquarters to be established.
[sergeant] I get a phone call from Inspector Reznick saying,
"Was, you're gonna have to go to the 19th Precinct with your team."
Joe wanted to have the best guys
or the guys that were attention-to-detail guys.
[Hovagim] Joe Reznick is a tough boss to work for, I'm not gonna lie.
He's a no-nonsense kind of guy,
but if I had a relative that was missing or murdered,
I'd want him running this investigation.
[Reznick] We immediately had cards made up
with Irene Silverman's picture on it.
[officer over PA] If you have information regarding the disappearance
or whereabouts of Mrs. Irene Silverman,
please contact Crime Stoppers.
Detectives would literally stand out on the corner
and hand out flyers and ask people if they saw anything strange.
Now the press gets ahold of it, and that's it. It just explodes.
[reporter 1] The 82-year-old woman vanished from her mansion.
[reporter 2] Silverman was last seen alive July 5th.
[Reznick] We have a elderly female who has disappeared very mysteriously.
We have a occupant of an apartment who she rented to
less than three weeks ago, who has also disappeared mysteriously.
We also mentioned that we were looking for the person
in the composite sketch known as "Manny Guerin."
We're looking for him in connection with Ms. Silverman's disappearance.
[Vazquez] The day after this press conference…
[phone ringing]
…the 19th squad gets a call
from an NYPD detective who's part of a joint fugitive task force
where FBI agents and NYPD detectives
are assigned to locate fugitives wanted not only in New York,
but from around the country.
[Reznick] He said that on July 5th, when Irene Silverman was reported missing,
he had arrested two people, a mother and a son,
at about 55th Street and 6th Avenue
on a warrant that they had from Utah
for buying a car with a stolen check that they drove to New York City.
The detective from the fugitive task force told us that
they both had on their possession
identification that belonged to Irene Silverman.
[Vazquez] They were identified as Kenny Kimes and his mother, Sante Kimes.
[Wasielewski] In her pocketbook was $10,000 in cash.
When questioned about why she had $10,000 cash,
she said, "You need a lot of cash to visit New York,"
which didn't make any sense.
I don't know who carries $10,000 cash in their pocketbook.
I have a gun, and I wouldn't go to New York
with $10,000 cash in my pocket.
But also there's a ring of keys with red nail polish, which were Irene's.
[Reznick] I thought we were looking for Manny Guerin,
but when I heard about that,
I says, "Are you fucking kidding me?"
With this new information, we grab a car, and we go down
to Manhattan Central Booking to interview Kenny.
When I first walked in, I thought, "Holy shit."
Kenny matched the sketch of Manny Guerin pretty dead-on.
I was convinced we had Manny Guerin, for sure.
We asked him, "Why do you have Irene's ID? Do you know Irene?"
"Yes, I… I know her."
"Um, I think my mother was friends with her."
We said, "Kenny, think of Irene. She could be alive somewhere."
"Maybe she's missing."
"Maybe you could help us find her. Why don't you talk to us?"
"What if that was your mother? How would you feel?"
There was a glimmer of light.
There were tears in his eyes. I remember it.
And I thought that he would start talking to us
and he was gonna fall on the sword.
But seconds later, it's like a switch went off inside of him.
He just became very stoic,
turned to stone, and asked for an attorney.
When I was leaving, I was 100% convinced
that he had a big part of Irene's disappearance.
His mother, Sante Kimes, was at the FBI building downtown
waiting to be arraigned for the stolen car case.
And I was hoping that the detectives who were interviewing her
were having more success than we were.
But she requested an attorney, and the, uh, interview was shut down.
So we do a background check on them.
See what they were arrested for in the past.
We saw that Kenny never had any major run-ins with the law.
Then we looked at Sante, and…
You couldn't believe the horrific things that they say.
[producer] At one point, I was assigned the story of
what happened here to Irene Silverman in New York.
And I found out that Sante Kimes was orphaned when she was younger,
and she sort of bounced around from house to house,
whether it was an orphanage or a friend of a friend.
She was very poor.
She met Kenneth Kimes Sr. in 1970.
He was in the construction business and owned a chain of motels.
They had houses in the Bahamas,
oceanfront property in Honolulu,
a house in Las Vegas.
They were living the high life.
A couple of years after they met each other,
she and her husband had Kenneth Kimes Jr.
Sante Kimes definitely considered Kenneth her little prince,
but Sante would control everything that Kenneth did,
to the point where she decided to homeschool him, not send him to school.
Kenny did what Mommy said. He… If Mommy said to jump, he jumped.
[Reznick] She knew how to manipulate things to her needs.
Sante was a con artist.
Don't tape me when I can't, like…
She had, I think, 11 different aliases listed on her arrest histories,
which included insurance fraud, some larcenies.
[Zone] Sante Kimes, I think, loved danger.
She liked to see how much she could get away with.
She claimed that her husband was an ambassador
and somehow got invited to a reception being thrown for Gerald Ford.
There's a picture of her and Kenneth Kimes shaking President Ford's hand.
To this day, no one knows how she got through Secret Service.
She had a way of entering a room,
and everybody would look over and say, "Look how she's dressed!"
"Oh my God! Look at her jewelry! She must belong here."
[Reznick] Another one of the things that stood out
was a slavery charge back in 1985.
Sante Kimes would hire help from Mexico to clean her big homes.
She would treat them really badly.
[Reznick] She would lock maids in their rooms.
One of them subsequently testified at that trial
that she was burned by an iron.
They gave her the name "the Dragon Lady."
It's a different crazy, is what it is.
She's a psychopath.
Sante was sentenced to five years in prison.
However, her husband was never prosecuted for that case.
[Zone] She served three years out of a five-year term.
Then Kenneth Kimes Sr. died in 1994 of a brain aneurysm.
And when he died, this threw Sante's life in a tailspin.
She was like, "How am I going to continue my lifestyle?"
As long as Sante ended up on top, that's all she cared about.
[Reznick] After his father's death, mother and son were hooked hip to hip.
Whatever ventures they got involved with, they did it together.
Befriending the Kimes was a very dangerous proposition.
People they knew seemed to disappear out of the blue.
[Hovagim] One of them was David Kazdin.
David Kazdin was, uh, an associate of Sante and Kenneth Kimes,
a business partner in some sense.
[Vazquez] She took out a fraudulent loan against David Kazdin's home.
He gets, I believe it was, a coupon book for payments
on a $250,000, $300,000 loan that he was totally unaware of.
And he went to the authorities.
[Hovagim] Shortly after that,
they found Kazdin's body in a dumpster by LAX airport.
But at that point, the LAPD didn't have enough
to arrest Sante and Kenneth Kimes for the murder of David Kazdin.
And at that point, Sante and Kenny
drove all the way across country in the stolen car
so they could rent the apartment in Irene's town house.
[Reznick] There were discussions about whether they should be extradited to LA
to face the David Kazdin murder,
or leave 'em here in New York.
Well, I got news for you.
If someone is killed here in New York City,
the case should stay here in New York City until it's totally resolved.
And, trust me, there was just a voluminous amount of work
that had to be accomplished yet.
[tense, mysterious music playing]
[reporter] News Channel 4 took these exclusive pictures
of the K9 police dog unit
and the crime scene technicians going to the basement garage
where the car Kenneth Kimes drove was being held.
The search warrant was conducted on the green Lincoln Town Car.
[Hovagim] We open up the trunk.
Nothing, just garbage.
Everything is piled in the backseat of the car.
And there was a lot of shit, man.
It took eight hours to go through that car.
We recovered a box, uh, from a Taser gun.
We found a clear liquid
that was later identified as a knockout drug, like a roofie.
We found Irene Silverman's Social Security card
with some other papers that had Irene's name on it.
We recovered all kinds of wigs, eavesdropping equipment.
Sitting in the car were 15 notebooks
that had notes meticulously detailing Irene's movements.
When you look at the big picture, what's going on,
those are pretty telling things.
Also in those notebooks was how to take possession of Irene's house.
"Get notary, get title, get deed."
Also recovered from the car was a microcassette
with some cassette tapes.
And we listened to them.
And one of them had Sante posing
as a person calling Irene,
saying that she won a trip to go to Las Vegas to stay at Circus Circus.
[Sante] You better sit down.
[Irene] Okay.
[Sante] I have a wonderful surprise for you.
[Irene] What?
[Sante] You have won a free trip.
All expenses, airfare, hotel.
The whole gist of the call was to try to get Irene Silverman
to divulge over the phone her Social Security number.
[Sante] So, are you sitting down?
[Irene] I am. I'm sitting down. I'm also wondering what the catch is.
[Sante] There's no catch.
Can I have a Social Security?
[Wasielewski] She was trying to get info
she could use on the deeds, and the forged papers, and stuff.
[Irene] Mm-hmm. I don't know my number, to tell you the truth.
[Sante] I have to have the number to send you the information.
She tried every which way to get that number out of Irene,
and Irene was not fucking having it, man.
[Irene] Well, you send me whatever you have there,
and if I like it, the idea,
then I'll give you my Social Security number.
[Vazquez] With all the information that we had recovered,
we weren't dealing with a missing person.
We knew we were looking for a homicide victim.
I have a great reader, or fortune teller, whatever you call.
So as soon as I sat down, he looked at me. He said, "I'm so sorry for your loss."
And he said, "Your great friend is no longer with us."
Immense sadness and emotion came immediately then.
And also then I immediately went into denial.
I said, "Maybe he's wrong. I hope this time he's wrong."
[Hovagim] Knowing this is gonna be a homicide case,
we still felt we needed a body to put these people away.
We knew they did it, but without a body,
there was a good chance that they might get off.
Personally, I was pissed off.
I wanted to go back and punch Kenny in the face
and get the information out of him.
[Vazquez] There was a tip line for a person to call
with information as to the sightings of the green Lincoln Town Car.
[multiple phones ringing]
We were following up on every lead that we got.
[Hovagim] We searched the Meadowlands out in Jersey.
Meadowlands is no picnic.
It's a swampy, tall grass area.
It sucks. It sucks.
It's just a smelly, dirty place to… to search,
but perfect to dump a body.
We find all kinds of garbage, all kinds of discarded containers,
luggage, and what I call "Coney Island whitefish,"
meaning used condoms, used tampons.
We were desperate to find Irene Silverman's body.
Every tip that came in on this case, or any case, has to be investigated.
As crazy as it may sound, one particular day,
I recall being in the office.
Someone's come to our office with a dead chicken.
What brought my attention to it was the fucking smell.
It reeked, and it permeated the office.
[Vazquez] We were all told inside the anus of the dead chicken
there is a note, and in that note, it says where Irene Silverman's body is.
I says, "Get the fuck out of here."
And I made them get her out of the office.
But they took the chicken and her down to 126th Street, Amsterdam Avenue,
where there was a chicken poultry farm, factory, whatever you want to call it,
and they examined the chicken.
As far as that chicken was concerned,
there was no note in the chicken's ass.
It was one of the lighter moments that we had during this investigation,
but that's how much pressure we were under.
Each and every lead that came in had to be answered.
[Hovagim] The Kimes were still in jail for the stolen car,
and we were listening to their calls.
And we intercepted a call from Sante Kimes
talking to a private investigator hired by the defense.
She was advising him to go to The Plaza Hotel to retrieve a bag.
With that, myself and another detective got into a car…
[sirens wailing]
…and rode, lights and sirens, down to The Plaza Hotel.
A retired detective captain was the head of security there.
He said, "A private investigator just came in and got the bag."
Gave us his name.
We have another detective looking up his private investigator's license.
The PI's office was down by City Hall, so we went over there.
First, he denied picking up the bag, and then we told him,
"Listen, we know that you went and picked up the bag."
"How do you think we got to your office, out of the blue?"
So then he decided to surrender the bag.
That was probably one of the biggest breaks in the case that we got.
In that bag, we found a .22-caliber handgun,
a power of attorney with Irene Silverman's signature on it.
And we recovered a copy of the deed
signed by Irene Silverman.
What was noted on the deed was that, in fact,
the house was being sold to the Atlantis Group, Incorporated,
which we subsequently learned
was a shell company created by Sante Kimes.
We had handwriting analysis done on them,
and sure enough, it came back that those documents were forged.
We can see that it was notarized, signed, and dated by a specific notary.
Once the notary was located, she was interviewed.
The notary states that she came to Irene Silverman's building.
She found herself in a room where it's dimly lit.
It was dark.
Sante Kimes was dressed up as Irene in a bed.
You know, with a red wig on and something covering her face.
The covers pulled up, just like Little Red Riding Hood.
She had some ID, which was forged ID or whatever,
and she notarized it, and that was it.
The notary was asked to view a lineup
of Sante and Kenny Kimes at the district attorney's office.
And I remember sitting with Sante Kimes, guarding her before the lineup.
She and I were the only ones in the room.
Knowing that she's a con artist, I just decided to not drop my guard
and not allow her to get me into any type of conversation.
Two minutes later, I'm telling her,
"Yeah, I'm separated. I live in Yonkers. My kids are ten and 12 years old."
I should have known better than to let her engage with me.
But she had the ability to just make you relax,
make you relax to a point
where you can just answer any and all questions that she asked.
That's how she got information from people…
…have to be-- Stop it! [Sante laughs]
…to go forward with some sort of scam or fraud that she was planning to do.
[Hovagim] The notary picked Sante right out of the lineup.
No problem at all.
Those forged documents became critical to the case
because it was the motive.
It painted a very persuasive picture
that the Kimeses were creating a fraudulent transaction
to make it look like Irene Silverman was turning over the town house to them.
[Hovagim] Though we didn't have a body,
we were convinced we could go forward with charging them with homicide.
Five months after Irene went missing, in December 1998,
Sante and Kenneth Kimes were finally indicted for murder in the second degree.
They were indicted for burglary, for robbery, for eavesdropping.
There were 84 counts of charges against them.
That's a hell of a lot of counts.
[reporter] From her jail cell, Kimes claims she's innocent.
[Sante] Please help.
I am pleading for our constitutional rights
to a fair judge, trial, and venue,
so that my wonderful young son's innocence can be proven to everyone.
What was strange is how many times Sante and Kenny Kimes
got to the media while waiting for their trial.
[Sante] My son and I are innocent.
There is a huge, evil cover-up going on.
The police have made a terrible mistake.
You have been led to think certain things about the both of us
which are completely untrue.
We are innocent.
[Hovagim] It was really some act.
Um, they were portrayed as being prosecuted for no good reason.
"Look at my son. Does he look like a killer to you?"
60 Minutes invited the Kimes to talk about what had happened.
It certainly didn't appear to be a mother-son relationship.
[Vazquez] They're holding hands, and Kenny, you know…
complimenting his mother's looks.
I think she's a beautiful person, spiritually and intellectually.
-And physically. -[both laughing]
[Vazquez] It was just the strangest thing to see
of a mother and son who are adults.
There was speculation that there was an incestuous relationship going on.
I personally don't believe that.
My belief is that
she was in control of every aspect of his life.
[Sante] Turn around, Kenny.
She groomed Kenny to be a killer.
The case goes to trial in January 2000,
about a year and a half after Irene's disappearance.
The main defense strategy was,
"How can you possibly convict if there's no body?"
I'm not sure there is another defense.
But we were able to put on a four-month trial,
and, uh, it went in quite smoothly.
[Vazquez] Both Sante and Kenny Kimes were found guilty
on every single charge.
Each one of them were gonna get a minimum of 125 years to life.
[Hovagim] Sante honestly thought she was smarter than everyone else.
These schemes were feeding her,
and she needed it like Dracula needs blood.
[Reznick] And I'll say this.
In their possession was a list of 16 other New Yorkers
targeted by the Kimes.
We checked with all them to make sure that they were okay.
[Zone] In October 2000, when Sante and Kenny
were awaiting extradition to the State of California
where they faced the murder trial of David Kazdin,
I was assigned to produce a documentary for Court TV.
Kenny agreed, ultimately, to do an interview with me on camera.
He walked in, and he looked scary.
He had the darkest, blackest eyes
that just seared right through me.
Cameraman, audio person start rolling.
Within 40 minutes, he had asked me for three breaks.
If I may ask, uh, could we take a break in maybe five or ten minutes?
The last break, he asked, "Would you mind getting me something to eat?"
So I went to the vending machines.
I reach out to give him these items.
And before I know it, he's around my back with his right arm across my… my neck.
And he said to me, "This is a hostage situation."
Sirens are going off.
Kenny notices that the cameraman has the camera still rolling.
And he said, "Stop the fucking camera!"
Cameraman, back!
Being that close to him was disgusting.
I could feel his heart pounding against my back.
-Um… -[rhythmic thumping]
I, uh, could feel his sweat.
I remember him flicking this pen.
And right away, I'm thinking, "He's gonna stab me with this pen."
The prison officials that had come into the room were saying,
"Kenneth, calm down."
"You're not gonna accomplish anything by doing this."
I said to him, "Why are you doing this?"
And right away, he said,
"My mother is old. She cannot handle another trial."
"I want my mother and I to be extradited to Canada."
It was really terrifying.
Five long hours had gone by.
And I said to him, "Kenneth, you know… do you know how to pray?"
"Let's pray together."
And he said, "Yes, I do."
And, like, this calmness came across his face.
After we prayed together, a hostage negotiator said to Kenny,
"Kenny, it's been long enough."
He said, "This is my business card. Let me help you."
Kenny went to grab it, which means he let me go.
And that was my opportunity to just storm out of that room.
There was at least a half dozen guys in there.
They jumped him.
And I didn't look back. I just kept on going.
But I was just, um, so grateful to be alive.
[reporter] Kenneth Kimes helped his mother kill a wealthy widow.
Now he's admitting to another murder.
He surprised a courtroom in Los Angeles
by pleading guilty to killing a businessman, David Kazdin.
He made a cooperation agreement
with the LA County district attorney's office
in which he testified against his mother.
He confessed to the murder of David Kazdin…
and the murder of Irene Silverman
in exchange for a sentence that did not include the death penalty
for himself and his mother.
Kenny said that Irene Silverman knocked on his door.
He pulled her into the apartment.
He stun-gunned her. She dropped to the floor.
He choked her to death.
Then took a shower curtain, wrapped her up,
taped her up with the duct tape.
Put her in a duffel bag.
Put her in the trunk of his car.
Drove downtown through the Lincoln Tunnel.
He goes, "I saw a dumpster."
"I put her body in the dumpster, and that was it."
Justice was served.
But we didn't have Irene's body.
You know, it'll haunt me to my death.
That a… a great woman like that,
who actually contributed something to society,
doesn't even have closure in her life where her body was never laid to rest.
[somber music playing]
It's still an open case in my mind.
I'm hoping one day her remains are found, and there's DNA,
and I get a phone call saying, "Hey, we found Irene."
Do I think that's gonna happen? No, I don't.
But do I hope it happens? 100%.
I'd love to get that phone call. I really would.
[Toi] It took at least ten years for me to come to terms
that someone really, really killed her.
I had that fantasy that they were keeping Irene somewhere,
put her away somewhere, a little town somewhere.
Maybe she'll reappear.
But, sadly, the last few years, I came to terms.
I came to terms that… I know she's no longer with us,
but she's smiling down at me every day.
Every time I cross 65th Street, I always look up to the beautiful home.
I say a quiet hello to her.
And tell her quietly that I miss her.
[music trailing off]
[phone ringing]
[man] I get a call that a guest is experiencing
a heavy leak of water into their room.
[Panuccio] Soho House is a very exclusive, high-end club,
and we have a young woman dead in the bathtub.
The identity of the victim was Sylvie Cachay, female, 33 years old.
She was a fashion designer, swimsuit designer.
She was just the perfect member to be a part of Soho House.
[Moller] She checked in with her boyfriend,
and he's no longer there.
So, yeah, it is suspicious.
And then we find the "fuck you" email.
A picture's starting to emerge.
There are situations you hope to never be in.
What happened in that room, it's not something you can forget about.
[dramatic outro music pulsing] s not something you can forget about.