He moved in one of her apartments a month before she was last seen. It's believed that he and his mother, Sante Kimes, were con artists who monitored Silverman's accounts before Kenneth moved in. It's believed that Kenneth and Sante devised a scheme to steal her mansion. Evidence indicates that they wiretapped Silverman's phone and taped her conversations.
It's believed that they smothered Silverman, smuggled her body out of her house and buried her remains by driving in their Lincoln car. They were convicted in Sante was given year sentence, Kenneth's sentence was for years. Kenneth confessed to wrapping her body in a plastic bag and dumping her remains in a ditch in New Jersey but he continues to maintain that his mother was not involved in her murder.
NYPD investigators still remember, with pride, how back in they avenged Irene Silverman, by crafting an airtight, yet entirely circumstantial case, with no eyewitness, no confession, no murder weapon save for an empty stun gun box, no forensics, and most notably no body. In , over the course of three months, Manhattan prosecutors would present witnesses and exhibits to a jury who convicted the evil pair in just four days.
I must say, I breathed a sigh of relief,. Kenneth, who was sentenced to years for Silverman, remains in a California prison serving life without parole on the LA murder. Did your wife pick that out? She was deeply intelligent. In her day, I imagine to some people, she was attractive.
She looked exactly like Elizabeth Taylor,. Silverman had hoped to turn the first level of her townhouse into a museum and foundation honoring the textile arts, in memory of her mother, also named Irene and a master dressmaker. Contact The Author Name required. Email required. Silverman asked her to walk her dog in the roof garden and to attend to several other chores.
The rest of the staff had the weekend off for the Independence Day holiday. About 4 pm, the house seeming eerily quiet and empty, and unable to find Silverman anywhere, Aricella became alarmed and called Menji and Jeff Feig. An hour later, with still no sign of her, they called the police. Guerrin, too, appeared to have vanished — no-one was at home in apartment 1B.
On Monday evening, we had exhausted all initial procedures. By now we knew we had a problem. Resnick soon found out that the FBI, in tandem with police teams elsewhere in the US, was working on an entirely separate case that would dramatically alter the thrust of his own investigation. Early in , police in California, Nevada, Florida, Hawaii and Utah, as welt as in the Bahamas, had been attempting to trace a middle-aged woman and a man allegedly connected with a tangled web of crimes, including several cases of suspected murder The most serious and recent investigation followed the discovery in Los Angeles on March 14, of the body of year-old businessman David Kazdin, who had been shot and dumped in a rubbish container near the airport.
The couple suspected of being behind each of these crimes had disappeared. By May, the FBI had been called in to help track down the missing couple. Their investigations eventually led to a small-time criminal, Stan Patterson, who lived in a caravan park in Las Vegas. He had done odd jobs for the Kimeses over the years, including selling them firearms, for which he was now taken into custody.
When Patterson received a call on July 3 from the couple, asking him to come to New York to discuss a job, he agreed. Then he phoned the FBI, who briefed him on setting up the meeting. In , after a sensational trial in a Las Vegas Federal court, she received a five-year prison sentence for holding at least eight young illegal Mexican immigrant maids against their will while she terrorised and assaulted them at her homes in La Jolla, Las Vegas and Honolulu.
Incredibly, Kimes was no trailer trash or inner-city fugitive, but the apparently well-off widow of a self-made, if crooked, millionaire businessman, Kenneth Kimes, owner of a construction company and a chain of motels in California. However, with her capacity for slithering out of the path of creditors and police, moving from one town or State to another, and impersonating other people, she had avoided paying a cent.
In , Sante Kimes was wanted for questioning about the disappearance of Elmer Holmgren, a former insurance company employee believed to have helped her carry out an arson attack on her house in Hawaii.
At the same time, both the Kimeses were being sought by Bahamas police as suspects in the disappearance of Syed Bilal Ahmed, a Bahraini banker and vice-president of the First Cayman Bank — after telling relatives he was going to discuss business over dinner with the Kimeses, Bilal Ahmed was never seen again.
By the time police learned of the meeting, the Kineses had left the Bahamas for LA, where they had business to conclude with their partner, David Kardin. Nearby Central Park and adjacent streets were swarming with police, while press and TV crews converged on the area.
Loudspeaker vans blared announcements requesting eyewitness information. There were papers and notebooks containing details of her bank accounts and business affairs, and information as to which servant would be on duty the day she disappeared.
There was also a list of questions for lawyers about the transfer of Manhattan property, a calculation of the tax payable for such a transfer and a schedule of the aliases Sante Kimes had used in making these inquiries, together with directions for Patterson, the FBI informer, to fire employees, evict tenants and change the locks when he took over the management of 20 East 65th Street.
So the picture was complete. The search for the body continues to this day. How could you take the house without getting rid of the owner? In December , The Kineses, who had been held in custody since their arrest, were indicted on 84 charges, including the murder of Irene Silverman. Whatever the outcome, it is a story that is set to run indefinitely, as authorities in other States -attempt to tighten their own net around the couple.
What makes the Silverman case a real cliffhanger is that, unless things change very soon, it is that rarity: a murder without a corpse. Long before he moved in, they had obtained information about the house, its owner and its mortgage status, and had obtained a copy of the property deeds.
But without any forensic evidence connecting the Kimeses to the alleged murder, the lead defence lawyer, Mel Sachs, is confident the pair will be acquitted. The evidence is entirely circumstantial. With his beaming geniality, snappy three-piece suit, bow tie and watch chain, and his talent for conjuring tricks he once represented David Copperfield , Sachs has the raffish bonhomie of a theatrical producer. There was dissension between her and some business associates.
The prosecutors should be investigating them; we are. Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the case is that no-one knows how the Kimeses, in their shadowy netherworld, chose Silverman as their victim.
Their paths had never crossed, nor it seems, had they any concept of the complex fine-tuning of her business affairs. All that is certain is the grotesqueness of their plan was exceeded only by their stupidity in believing it could succeed. They clearly thought they were dealing with an old dithering fool, instead of someone so financially switched on and well known in New York.
Eighteen months later there is still intense anger and bewilderment at how such a tragedy happened; above all, how it could have happened to Irene Silverman. Her ex-tenant, Peter Duchin, finds it baffling that Kenny Kimes ever got past the front door.
Some ask why Silverman did not alert police earlier. Shkreli says that his guilt over not having stayed with Silverman on that last night has almost destroyed her. All are classic responses to horrific crime — a basic need to explain incomprehensible acts of evil in order to come to terms with them: the implication being that the evil could have been identified or foreseen, and so avoided.
And was her confidence so misplaced? Probably not. As she told friends, she knew something crooked was going on. But how could she ever imagine that it involved stealing her house and taking her life? First published in the Guardian, 20 November
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