Theodore Peyton

Theodore Peyton, 41, a Lafayette neighbor of Kimball’s grandmother, begins hanging out with 10-year-old Scott and another boy, inviting them to his cabin in Nederland.

Over a seven-year period, he plies the boys with booze, takes pictures of them naked and tied up, and forces oral and anal sex on them.

Peyton warns Scott not to tell, even brandishing a gun on one occasion and threatening to kill his father if he squealed.

(For database purposes, this post is dated Sept. 21, 1976, Scott Kimball’s 10th birthday. It’s unclear exactly when Peyton and Kimball met, but the boy was 10 at the time.)

LeAnn Emry graduates. (Courtesy Howard Emry)

LeAnn Emry, a straight-A student, graduates one year early from Eaglecrest High School in Centennial, Colo., and earns a community service award from President Clinton for her volunteer work at the University of Colorado Medical Center and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

She will go on to become a veterinary technician, and her love of animals — Dalmations in particular —  will prompt her specialized license plates: DAL-GAL.

She is diagnosed as bipolar, though, and lives with nearly constant back pain after cracking a vertebra while play-wrestling with her father.

Jennifer in an undated photo. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Jennifer Marcum gives birth to a son, fathered by her boyfriend, Jeff Wiggins.

The parents break up within a few years.

Jennifer called her son “little man,” said her father, Bob Marcum.

“When she was with him, he was the center of her world,” Marcum said.

(Date is approximate.)

Shotgun Willie's, in Glendale. (John Aguilar / Camera)

Jennifer Marcum starts stripping at Shotgun Willie’s, in Glendale, Colo.

A FoxNews television crew captures her first night, documenting her motivation and nervousness before taking the stage.

“I probably will cry, to be honest,” she says. “It’s a very scary feeling for me. I’ve always had manager jobs and (been) looked at as a very respectable person.”

She hopes the job will provide her the financial security to pursue bigger dreams with the father of her son, introduced on TV as her husband although the two never legally married.

“I could probably make more in a week than he can in two, and I’d like to live in a house, and so I have higher goals,” she tells the TV crew.

Jennifer’s father, Bob Marcum, said his daughter worked as a stripper primarily to support her son. She kept the job until her death, but Mary Willis, Jennifer’s mother, said she was anxious to get out at the end.

“She was wanting away from there real bad,” Willis said.

Read a transcript of the Fox News show. (PDF)

Scott Kimball works with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as an informant on a stolen-gun investigation. Kimball points to several suspects, but investigators are never able to make a case.

His relationship with the ATF, for which he’s paid $1,865, ends in November 1999.

(Dates are approximate.)

After his release from FCI-Englewood as an FBI informant, Scott Kimball calls LeAnn Emry for the first time. He introduces himself as “Hannibal.”

Emry’s boyfriend, federal inmate Steven Holley, knew Kimball behind bars, and asked him to connect with LeAnn to share the details of a plan to help him escape prison.

Holley told LeAnn to listen to Hannibal, that if everything went off as it should, the couple would soon be able to unite in Mexico and start a new chapter in their lives.

Holley writes LeAnn: "You can trust Hannible." (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

Kimball's Lakewood condo, 8210 W. Eastman Place. (John Aguilar / Camera)

Two days before their planned trip to Seattle, Jennifer Marcum moves all of her furniture into Scott Kimball’s condo in Lakewood.

She had been staying in Colorado Springs with the father of her 4-year-old son, and commuting to Glendale, where she worked as an exotic dancer at Shotgun Willie’s.

But Kimball convinced her that he could help her quit stripping for a living. He claimed he ran an espresso-cart operation in Seattle and would help her learn the business.

Scott Kimball signs a plea deal with federal prosecutors in Denver on the theft and fraud charges stemming from his 2001 arrest in Alaska.

Kimball pleads guilty to two counts of counterfeiting a check, and agrees to continue cooperating with the government.

In exchange, prosecutors recommend that he get the lowest sentencing range, which could include probation rather than prison time.

Read Kimball’s plea deal, March 10, 2003. (PDF)

FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff revokes Scott Kimball’s protected status as a paid informant.

Reasons for the revocation are unclear, but a warrant for Kimball had been issued three days earlier. Plus Schlaff had questions for his informant about continued check-counterfeiting and Jennifer Marcum’s disappearance.

The FBI reactivates Kimball’s status as a “cooperating witness” 10 days after his release from Denver County Jail.

The Motel 6 in Thornton, where Kaysi McLeod stayed. (John Aguilar/Camera)

Scott Kimball shows up at his girlfriend Lori McLeod’s work with a vial filled with white crystals, claiming he found it at their home.

McLeod decides that her 19-year-old daughter, Kaysi McLeod, who has struggled with meth addiction, needs to talk to police.

After a fight at home, Kaysi goes outside with Kimball and ends up leaving on her bike. She ends up at a Motel 6 in Thornton, where she gets a room with her boyfriend.

Kimball assures McLeod that her daughter just needs time on her own.

Red Mountain RV Park. (struck.us/bikepics)

On Kaysi McLeod’s birthday, her mother is honeymooning with Scott Kimball at Red Mountain RV Park in Kremmling, Colo. But the new bride can’t get her mind off her daughter, missing for three weeks.

“Happy 20th birthday sweet love,” Lori McLeod writes in her diary. “I hope wherever you are, you are enjoying your day. I miss you and wish I could celebrate with you. Anticipating your arrival 20 years ago today, I was in the most severe pain I thought I would ever feel. That would also not be the last time I would be wrong in my life.”

McLeod would later learn that her new husband had murdered her daughter, and that their honeymoon camping trip took place less than 30 miles from the spot where she was left to rot.

Scott Kimball starts Faith Farms, a Westminster-based beef company. He buys cattle on Colorado’s Eastern Plains and sells them at auction.

Terry Kimball with his dogs Badger, Dutch and Matilda in 1997. Dutch and Matilda, left, accompanied “Uncle Terry” on his trip to Colorado. (Courtesy of Karen Johnson)

Upon hearing that his nephew Scott Kimball’s eldest son has been critically injured, Terry Kimball, 60, comes to Colorado to visit.

He ends up staying to work with Scott Kimball’s beef business, Faith Farms, and moves into his nephew’s Adams County home. 

(Date is approximate.)

Less than two weeks after meeting “Joe Snitch” in a Broomfield park, Jennifer Marcum’s mother, Mary Willis, records a phone conversation with Scott Kimball, referring to him as Joe.

Willis demands to know more about Jennifer but says she won’t strip naked and let Kimball demonstrate how her daughter was killed.

“You had your chance,” says Kimball, who wanted Willis to sign a contract allowing him to have sex with her in an effort to re-create Jennifer’s murder.

Read More >>

Kaysi's schedule. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

In a box belonging to her estranged husband, Lori McLeod find her daughter’s hand-written work schedule for the week she went missing.

McLeod takes it to the Lafayette Police Department, which is already investigating Scott Kimball for check fraud.

Boulder County prosecutors Katharina Booth, left, and Amy Okubo, dubbed by Scott Kimball as "the Boulder bitches," pose in Courtroom Q at the Boulder County Justice Center. (Marty Caivano / Camera)

Boulder County prosecutors Amy Okubo and Katharina Booth, assigned to the Lafayette check-fraud case against Scott Kimball, meet with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI in Denver, asking for a wider investigation.

Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher had found out about Kaysi McLeod’s disappearance, and had also been told by FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff that Kimball might be connected to the disappearance of Jennifer Marcum.

But neither federal agency launched a missing-persons probe.

Read More >>

A check forged on Cleve Armstrong's account. (Courtesy Lafayette police)

Boulder County issues a warrant for Scott Kimball’s arrest on suspicion of theft, forgery and false reporting.

The charges stemmed from the theft of $55,000 from Lafayette optometrist Cleve Armstrong.

In the course of that investigation, police also found a trailer on Kimball’s former property that he had reported stolen two months earlier.

Kimball had already collected a $10,000 insurance claim for the trailer.

Bob Marcum.

Rob McLeod.

Bob Marcum and Rob McLeod meet with Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher, who is investigating Kimball for check fraud, about their missing daughters.

They ask to have a bone pit on Kimball’s cattle pasture searched for human remains, but police find nothing.

The two fathers also meet with the FBI at the bureau’s Denver office and explain the similarities in their daughters’ cases. They tell the FBI about Terry Kimball, too, saying they don’t buy that he ran off to Mexico.

“You can look into this and see if it goes anywhere, or you can choose not to,” McLeod tells the bureau. “It’s your choice.”

Scott Kimball is sentenced in federal court in Denver to 70 months in prison for possessing a firearm as a felon.

[Show as slideshow]

LeAnn Emry’s family holds her memorial service at Payette Church of the Nazarene in Payette, Idaho, just a few weeks before getting her remains back from the FBI.

Howard Emry remembers his daughter as a smart student who loved animals.

He says LeAnn’s murder “taught me the lesson of forgiveness.”

“I still have moments of sadness for what happened to LeAnn because I will always miss her, but God has given me the strength to forgive the man who caused this grief,” he says.

Read Howard Emry’s eulogy of his daughter. (PDF)