Scott Lee Kimball

Kimball was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1966. When he was 10 his mother, Barb, came out as a lesbian, leading to his parents' divorce; his father, Virgil, left the state and remarried. Kimball was strongly affected by the divorce. In his early adolescence he had his first encounter with law enforcement when police were called to the house after he fired a gun out the window at neighboring houses. Kimball and his younger brother Brett took refuge at their grandmother's mobile home. A neighbor of hers, Theodore Peyton, took advantage of their situation and began sexually abusing both of them at a cabin he owned in Nederland, Colorado. Peyton's abuse progressed from having Kimball touch him and photographing the boy naked to tying Kimball up and raping him, recording the episode on film. Peyton threatened to kill his father, who lived in Montana, if he told anyone. Peyton continued abusing Kimball when Kimball would return to Boulder on weekends, after he had moved to Hamilton, Montana to attend high school and live with his father and brother. ==Criminal career==

Kimball had already turned to nonviolent crime, usually fraud. At the age of 22 he was convicted of passing bad checks, his first felony, in Montana. Back in Colorado, he burglarized houses. Montana also charged him with running an illegal hunting outfitting business. After a brief first marriage failed, Kimball married Larissa Hentz in 1993 and moved with her to Spokane, Washington, where they had two sons before divorcing in 1997. She recalls that process servers were frequent visitors to their house, as Kimball was running scams in the logging industry, and those who partnered with him and were cheated would often use legal means to recover their money. "He always had an excuse", Hentz recalls. "It was never his fault". Among those Kimball victimized in his schemes were her dentists and the bishops at her church. Their relationship continued for another two years after the divorce, ending when Hentz accused him of rape. Kimball told police she was trying to secure full custody of their sons, and after she failed a lie detector test, no charges were filed. Prosecutors also saw the case as "complicated", since the couple had continued to have consensual sex after the incident. The following year, 2000, Kimball's violation of probation for an earlier fraud conviction revoked his earlier suspended sentence and put him back in prison in Montana. A year later, he absconded from a halfway house and stole a truck, along with the till from his employer, a gas station, where he was on work release. Hentz reported that, shortly afterward, he returned to Spokane, where he broke into her house, kidnapped her, and raped her again. She filed charges, and an arrest warrant was issued. ==Cooperation with FBI==

Kimball fled to Alaska, where he posed as his brother, got engaged to another woman, and resumed his career in check fraud, writing $25,000 in forged checks. He was again arrested and convicted. Schlaff had resented being assigned to Englewood after earlier working on organized crime investigations. He considered the work more suited to a less experienced agent. In Kimball he saw the possibility for breaking the kind of case that could put him back on the career path he had been hoping for. He viewed Kimball as someone who, while he "had an answer for everything", was not a violent man and could still earn the trust of a jury as a witness. Due to Kimball's earlier service as an informant, there was still nothing in his file about the rape and kidnapping charges. The following day, the FBI flew him to Seattle for a monitored conversation with the man he had identified to Schlaff as Wales's killer. He was also put on probation for three years, ending his formal service as an FBI informant, although he could still work with the bureau voluntarily. ==Murders==

Following his 2002 release on $10,000 bond, Kimball moved in with his mother and her partner near Denver, Colorado. He began to make money by flipping houses and set up an organic beef distribution company with $65,000 from his mother and brother. This enterprise required him to frequently travel around the state to ranches and cattle auctions in order to buy product. His ex-wife had also returned to Colorado. She still feared him but she let him see his sons. The FBI also paid him, the first installment in a total of $50,000, and gave him a cell phone with an earpiece for recording. Kimball reached out to her near the end of 2002. Around the same time, he was also meeting with Marcum, and began including her in scams involving the theft of credit card-related checks from mail thrown away by local post offices. Unable to confide in Holley since he had been put in solitary, she clung more and more to Kimball, whom she admitted in an email to a cousin was "dangerous ... but if you don't fuck with him he's your best friend." The day afterwards, her abandoned car was found near the nearby town of Moab, Utah, from Grand Junction. Her parents did not know anything was amiss until Holley wrote them two weeks later, worried that he had not heard from LeAnn in some time. Howard Emry, LeAnn's father, wrote back that he and his wife had not heard from her either, and began investigating. Holley told him of an FBI agent who had been in contact with LeAnn, but when Howard called the man, he said Holley was lying. Police were reluctant to investigate the case both because LeAnn was an adult who could make her own decisions, and, Howard Emry says, because of her background. Jennifer Marcum At another early meeting, Kimball told Schlaff that he had told Ennis that he would personally kill the witnesses against Ennis after his impending release. The next step, Kimball said, was for Ennis's girlfriend, Jennifer Marcum, to introduce him to Ennis's partner once he was out of prison. The partner would then give him the gun to kill the witnesses. It was the last time he, or anyone other than Kimball, ever heard from her. Shortly after their dinner, however, Marcum moved all her belongings to Kimball's home in preparation for the move to Seattle. Later that month, following Kimball's arrest at the airport upon his return from Alaska, Schlaff went to Kimball's jail cell to inform him that the FBI was done with him as an informant. But then Kimball told him that Price had confessed to him that he had killed Marcum. Price, he said, had shown him a photograph of her body, bound and gagged, before he put her in his trunk and drove to Rifle, Colorado, west of Denver, where he dumped it in a creek. Kimball added that Price asked him to go to the body and remove her breast implants, since he feared those could be used to identify her. and was recovering from methamphetamine addiction. At the time her mother met Kimball, Kaysi's life seemed to be improving. She had gotten clean, again living with Lori, making new friends, and had taken a part-time job at a Subway nearby. After two weeks in an induced coma, Justin survived. His first words once he could speak again were "Why did Dad do this to me?" He recalled his father dropping the grate on him, and then pushing him from the car. The neurosurgeon treating him said it was possible the injuries had affected his memory. Law enforcement investigated, but since the two injuries had occurred in different jurisdictions it was unclear which agency should take the lead, and no charges were filed, to the consternation of Justin's mother. McLeod did not have to deal with Terry for long. One day she came home from work and found that the furniture had been rearranged. Scott had taken a white leather couch with a visible stain outside. When McLeod asked what the stain was, he said that one of his uncle's dogs had vomited on it. She did not think the stain was dog vomit, and told her husband so. He suggested that perhaps Terry had vomited on it himself and blamed the dogs, but in any event it did not matter since Terry won some money in the Ohio state lottery, met a stripper, and decided to move to Mexico. Terry's bank likewise found that over $23,000 in bad checks had been drawn on his account over four months. They reported it to the FBI, but it is not known what action the bureau took, if any. ==Apprehension==

By the end of 2005, Kimball's marriage to McLeod had deteriorated. He was away from home more often, showed less interest in finding Kaysi, and according to Lori, "managed to make me feel like I was just not cutting the mustard." She suspected he was also having an affair with a woman in California, where his travels were increasingly taking him. and leading to her arrest both times; McLeod claimed both incidents were fabrications so that Kimball could move a waitress he was having a relationship with into their house. By the fall he had moved out and rented a small house in Lafayette. He persuaded his girlfriend to buy him a gun, as he was legally prohibited from doing so due to his felony conviction, on the grounds that he would teach her how to hunt with the rifle, but once she gave him the gun she never saw it again. ==Prosecution==

Kimball was taken back to Colorado briefly for arraignment on charges there, then back to Montana to serve time for his abscondment from the halfway house several years earlier. He was also sentenced to an additional two years in prison. In May, he was briefly taken back to Colorado where he pleaded guilty to the weapons charge that had led to his arrest, saying he wanted to "break this cycle that I'm in". He received ten months in prison followed by six months in another halfway house, to be served when his Montana sentence was concluded. a weekend when Schlaff had recalled being unable to reach Kimball, who told him afterwards that he was scouting some terrain for a future hunting trip. and the laptop Emry had bought for Kimball during their crime spree. On it they found many rape pornography images; similar material was on his desktop. Kimball had also kept a file of newspaper clippings about Dennis Rader, the "BTK Killer" in neighboring Kansas, who also tortured his victims. One of the photographs on the laptop that most disturbed them depicted a young woman who was not in any distress, just smiling. They believed it might be another potential victim they had not known about; Holley identified her as Emry and told the investigators he had not heard from her since shortly after Kimball's release, when he had told them both to get in touch with each other. where he showed them to LeAnn Emry's body outside Moab. On the way back towards Denver, he revealed where he had buried his uncle Terry in Vail Pass. But he was less certain of where Jennifer Marcum's body lay; after several locations he identified turned up empty, he concluded that he had forgotten where he had put her. Investigators were doubtful, believing he was holding the location back for future negotiations. Since only two of the three remaining bodies had been found, there was no deal. Kimball caused some disruption prior to his October 2009 sentencing when, through his lawyer, he circulated what appeared to be official FBI summaries of interviews with some of the other people he had been associated with. They suggested that Ennis had gotten immunity for telling the FBI he and Kimball ran a rape-porn business, and that Marcum, McLeod and Emry had been killed at the behest of drug dealers imprisoned at Englewood whose business they had cut into by smuggling drugs into the prison on visits. Coet read a statement from Kimball after his cousin pleaded guilty to all four murders and was sentenced to 70 years, blaming the FBI for pushing him into a criminal world more dangerous than anything he had previously encountered without any guidance or support. The FBI later determined that the summaries had been forged by Kimball during his confinement. ==Other crimes==

Since Kimball's sentencing, prosecutors and investigators expressed to the media their belief that the four murders he pled to were not the only ones he had committed. Boulder County DA Stan Garnett said Kimball reportedly bragged to others that he had killed "dozens." "It's hard to imagine we caught him on everything he did," declared Katharina Booth, one of the assistant DAs who prosecuted him, observing that his four victims were people on society's margins, who would not be quickly missed. Kaysi McLeod's father noted that over the decade and a half from his first arrest to his ultimate capture, there was a lot of time during which he is unaccounted for. Grusing further noted the speed and ease with which Kimball committed the murders he is serving time for suggest he had previous experience. Three months later, Kimball told a cousin that he had been proposed as a suspect in the West Mesa murders in New Mexico, which were committed during the same period that he was living in the Denver area. He denied involvement. Five years later, a former cellmate of Kimball's at Sterling Correctional Facility in northeastern Colorado told the FBI that Kimball and another inmate had solicited him to plan a helicopter escape and murder two people on the outside, in Kimball's case a former business associate. After the inmate's parole in 2017, he continued working with the FBI to get evidence against the two. In September, on the day the escape was to happen, Kimball and the other inmate, waiting in the prison yard for the expected helicopter, were instead arrested and charged with attempted escape and solicitation to commit murder. The latter charge was eventually dropped after the local district attorney was herself indicted on drug charges, but Kimball pleaded guilty to the attempted escape in 2020 and was sentenced to four years to be served concurrently, and transferred to the maximum security Colorado State Penitentiary outside Cañon City. Once there he was placed on 20-hour lockdown. ==Aftermath==

Lori McLeod had her marriage to Kimball annulled in 2008. At his sentencing, she said that she felt Kaysi had forgiven him, and thus she was also willing to forgive him. Kimball has since remarried, to a woman similarly incarcerated in a Kansas prison for child abuse. They have never met physically. 2010 state Attorney General election A year after Kimball's sentencing, Garnett became the Democratic nominee for Colorado Attorney General, running against Republican John Suthers, the incumbent. Garnett ran campaign ads contrasting his office's successful prosecution of Kimball with Suthers having, as U.S. Attorney in 2003, signed the documents authorizing the plea deal that allowed Kimball to work as an FBI informant. Coet, Kimball's cousin, at the time writing SLK, a fictionalized depiction of Kimball, said that while that criticism was legitimate Garnett should also not rule out blaming some of his own prosecutors in Boulder. Coet argued that after Justin Kimball's suspicious 2004 head injury, Garnett's assistant DAs could have tried harder to find a second neurologist to examine the boy and determine whether his memory had been affected (in the years since, he had continued to recall the incident vividly). Had another doctor been willing to vouch for the accuracy of Justin's recollections of the event, neighboring Adams County might have been able to develop a case and try Kimball for assault or attempted murder. Kimball took responsibility for Emry's death, which he had previously attributed to someone else, saying he had shot her twice when she tried to escape. While he had earlier simply claimed to have merely made it possible for someone else to kill Marcum but had been present at her death, he now said he had prepared a fatal heroin "hot shot" for her. Kimball again attributed Kaysi McLeod's death to drugs, saying she had taken a combination of alcohol, meth and Oxycodone and then overdosed in his presence near where her body was found. He repeated his earlier confession to killing Terry Kimball. Coet believed Kimball had had some sort of religious awakening and was seeking redemption. As of July 2023, he has been moved back to Colorado, at the United States Penitentiary, Florence High. ==Popular culture==

The CBS News series 48 Hours outlines Kimball's case in an episode titled "Hannibal Unmasked", originally aired April 2010. The NBC News series Dateline NBC aired another telling of the Kimball story on September 21, 2018, with updates since the CBS version. ID Channel series Evil Lives Here Season 5 Episode 3 (Evil Undercover), originally aired January 13, 2019. On The Case with Paula Zahn - Season 26 EP. 3 On January 26, 2025, the true crime TV series Very Scary People first aired the episode, "The Real Hannibal" about the life of Scott Kimball. == See also ==