Terry Kimball is born in Steamboat Springs.

Twenty-two years later, his brother Virgil will father Scott Kimball.

Terry Kimball in Georgia, 1998. (Courtesy Karen Johnson)

After four years in the Navy, Terry Kimball spends most of his adulthood working odd jobs and traveling the country.

From 1962 to 1966, he served “in the communications division aboard United States Navy Ships operation in the Pacific theater,” according to his resume.

He worked as an officer for the Colorado State Patrol from 1966 to 1970, then for the Longmont Fire Department until 1973.

He worked in a variety of jobs around the country after that, traveling around the South and West as a carpenter and truck driver.

Kimball had one daughter, Stephanie Pelster, who could not be reached for this project.

In 1993, he married Karen Johnson, who described him as a “happy-go-lucky person” who loved to work in the garden and cook elaborate meals.

Read Terry Kimball’s poetry. (PDF)

Scott Kimball at age 5 or 6. (Courtesy Ed Coet)

Scott Lee Kimball is born at Boulder Community Hospital to Virgil and Barb Kimball.

He would grow up in Old Town Lafayette, attending Lafayette Elementary and Lafayette Middle schools.

“He wasn’t one of the popular kids,” said Tina Goeden, 42, who went to elementary school with Kimball. “He was pretty quiet.”

But police knew early on that Scott Kimball could be trouble.

Lafayette police Cmdr. Mark Battersby remembers responding to a call involving the adolescent Kimball within a few years of joining the force in 1976.

The boy had gotten a hold of one of his father’s guns and was shooting out of his home, hitting other houses, Battersby said.

“I knew he was going to be a handful.”

Kimball also attended Centaurus High School in 1981, but withdrew after one month and moved to Montana.

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.)

Main Street, Hamilton, Mont. (hamiltonmontana.com)

At the start of his freshman year, Scott Kimball moves to Hamilton, Mont., to live with his father and younger brother, Brett.

He attends Hamilton High School, in the town of 4,000 people an hour south of Missoula, but drops out as a senior.

(Date is approximate.)

Kaysi as a baby. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Kaysi McLeod is born in Westminster, Colo., to Rob and Lori McLeod.

She would grow up to love jewelry-making, drawing, dancing and music, especially Sarah McLachlan, said her mother.

“She didn’t ever talk back,” Lori McLeod said. “I got very lucky.”

But Kaysi tested her boundaries like any adolescent. She smoked, pierced her bellybutton, got tattoos — a four-leaf clover with the Virgo sign on her foot and a fairy on the small of her back.

Kaysi at age 6. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Kaysi moved to Phoenix at age 15 because she needed some time away from her parents, who divorced when she was 6 and didn’t agree on how to raise her, said her maternal aunt, Donna Harper.

“I gave her consistency,” Harper said.

In Arizona, Kaysi worked at a skating rink in her spare time, even driving the Zamboni around the ice.

Tabetha Blow, her best friend there, said Kaysi had a “passion for life” but ended up falling in with a bad crowd.

Kimball, 1988. (Courtesy of Boulder County DA's Office)

Scott Kimball lands his first felony conviction at age 21, after passing $1,139 in bad checks at motels in Beaverhead County, Mont.

His three-year prison sentence is deferred, meaning it will be dropped if he stays out of trouble.

Scott Kimball gets his second felony, for passing a bad check in Missoula County, Mont.

He is given a two-year deferred prison sentence. Because the crime occurred in a different jurisdiction, it never triggers the deferred sentence Kimball had been given for his first felony just a few months earlier.

Kimball, following his Broomfield arrest. (Courtesy of Boulder County DA's office)

Scott Kimball, 22, is convicted of his third felony, on one count of attempted theft in Broomfield, Colo.

He’d been arrested the previous October on charges of stealing a fishing pole, two rifles, a shotgun, golf clubs and tools from two Broomfield homes.

He is sentenced to one year of unsupervised probation and ordered to pay $232 in restitution.

On a hunting trip with his brother in western Montana, Scott Kimball puts the barrel of a .30-30 rifle against his forehead and pulls the trigger.

The bullet, which glances off his skull, combines with the backblast from the shot to tear a hole in his forehead.

He remained in critical condition for several days and remains visibly scarred to this day.

Kimball’s cousin Ed Coet says Kimball “was never the same” after the suicide attempt.

“It’s like he lost his conscience,” Coet said.

In the wake of the shooting, the truth about the sexual abuse he endured as a child emerges.

The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office investigates.

(Date is approximate.)

Theodore Peyton

Theodore Peyton is arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting Scott Kimball and another male when they were young boys.

Most of the assaults took place at Peyton’s Nederland cabin.

Some time in the 1980s, after his attacks on Kimball, Peyton became a volunteer Big Brother, but was ousted from the program because of contradictory reports about his activities with the child in his care, according to Daily Camera archives.

A Montana judge revokes Scott Kimball’s two-year suspended sentence in the 1988 Missoula County bad-check case.

He is given a new suspended sentence, this time for 10 years.

Two days later, a judge revokes Kimball’s sentence in the 1988 Beaverhead County case, as well. The new, five-year sentence is also suspended.

Theodore Peyton

Theodore Peyton is convicted of molesting Scott Kimball and another boy a decade earlier at his Nederland cabin.

A Boulder County jury deliberates less than three hours before finding Peyton guilty of six counts of sexual assault on a child.

“The effect of this defendant’s behavior haunted them for years and still haunts them,” the prosecutor says of the victims.

Theodore Peyton

Theodore Peyton is sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually assaulting Scott Kimball and another boy a decade earlier.

He would spend five years, three months and two weeks in prison before being released on Oct. 6, 1996.

Writing to a Boulder district judge considering a sentence reduction for Peyton in July 1992, Scott Kimball said the crimes “cost me and my family very dearly.”

“Ted Peyton denied me my right to a normal, healthy innocent childhood,” Kimball wrote. “Because of Ted Peyton’s selfishness and his need for sexual gratification he has damaged my life forever.”

Peyton, now 74, still lives in the Nederland cabin where he molested the boys in the early-1980s.

“That was a long time ago,” Peyton said when asked recently about the abuse.

Turning slowly, he walked back up the driveway to his home on the northern shore of Barker Reservoir.

Read Kimball’s letter to the court. (PDF)

Scott Kimball marries his second wife, Larissa Hentz.

Kimball had been married briefly once before, but few details of that union are available.

Kimball and Hentz met in Hamilton, Mont., in 1988. They moved in the early ’90s to Spokane, Wash., where Kimball got into the timber business.

(Date is approximate.)

Scott Kimball’s first son is born, to Kimball and his wife, Larissa Hentz.

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.

Scott Kimball’s youngest son is born, to Kimball and his wife, Larissa Hentz.

Scott Kimball and his wife, Larissa Hentz, file for bankruptcy.

Scott Kimball and Larissa Hentz, the mother of his two sons, get a divorce.

While Kimball largely managed to stay out of jail during the couple’s four-year marriage, he constantly had people chasing him down who felt cheated by him, Hentz said.

“It was not uncommon to have a process server on our porch every other week serving us papers,” she said. “He always had an excuse. It was never his fault.”

Hentz claims that Kimball slept with prostitutes, pulled off brazen logging scams, and swindled money from her dentist and the bishops at her church.

(Date is approximate.)

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.)

Scott Kimball starts a 27-day stint in Missoula County Jail, for reasons unclear.

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.)

LeAnn Emry marries Kevin Niner, an old high-school classmate who had asked for her help in bailing him out of jail.

The couple will live between Colorado and Dallas, Texas, for their first year.

LeAnn’s life spirals downward throughout their marriage, and she ends up stripping at private parties and being physically abused.

Larissa Hentz calls police in Spokane, Wash., to report that Scott Kimball, her ex-husband, kidnapped her at gunpoint, raped her and forced her to drive to Montana with him and their sons.

Several witnesses, however, say nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary, and police do not pursue a rape case for lack of evidence.

The couple had continued seeing each other after their divorce, and Kimball tells police his ex probably made the complaint because he wanted to end the relationship.

Hentz tells a detective that if Kimball took a lie-detector test he would pass, because “he knows how to beat those things,” according to a police report.

Excerpt from the Spokane police report.

Scott Kimball’s ex-wife, Larissa Hentz, makes a second rape report against him.

She tells Spokane, Wash., police that he broke into her house with the help of a locksmith friend, pressed a gun to her head while she lay sleeping, and raped her repeatedly.

Afterward, she says, he drew her a bubble bath to destroy any evidence, then stole $370 from her purse.

Police do not pursue the case, for lack of evidence.

Excerpt from Spokane police report.

LeAnn Emry pleads guilty to felony menacing in Arapahoe County District Court, after brandishing a gun and threatening to kill her husband and herself.

She is given a deferred two-year prison sentence, meaning she remains free if she stays out of trouble.

Scott Kimball lands back in Montana’s Missoula County Jail, this time for violating terms of his probation regarding travel, conduct and reporting.

He remains in the jail until April 18, 2000, when he is sent to prison.

Kimball's Montana mugshot. (Courtesy of Boulder County DA's Office)

Scott Kimball is sentenced to 10 years in Montana State Prison for violating his probation on the 1988 Missoula County conviction of issuing bad checks.

Five years of the sentence are suspended.

A judge writes that Kimball has been given three opportunities for rehabilitation since 1988, failing each time.

“The Defendant is impossible to supervise in a community setting,” District Judge John S. Henson writes.

He goes on to quote Kimball’s probation officer: “You’re irresponsible, untruthful and simply do what you want to do regardless of the rules and conditions imposed by this Court.”

Read the judge’s ruling against Kimball. (PDF)

Scott Kimball, 34, in the middle of his Montana prison term, is convicted of  three felony counts of forgery stemming from an October 1999 case in Spokane County, Wash. He had been charged with the crime just a few days earlier.

Kimball is sentenced to eight months in jail.

Kaysi and her father, Rob McLeod. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Kaysi McLeod graduates from high school in Phoenix, where she had been living with her aunt.

While she was there, Kaysi started dabbling with prescription drugs, then meth. Friends said she was losing weight fast and “wasn’t herself anymore.”

After graduation, Kaysi returned to Colorado to live with her mother, who’s convinced she was getting off drugs and turning a corner in her life.

[Show as slideshow]

After being moved to a pre-release prison camp in Helena, Mont., Kimball worked as a cashier at an EZ Stop gas station, reporting back to the center at the end of each shift.

While working at the station alone on July 29, 2001, he steals $677 and hits the road in a stolen work truck.

Authorities in Montana’s Lewis & Clark County issue a warrant for his arrest on felony escape charges.

Leo Gallagher, the county attorney there, would repeatedly push for Kimball’s arrest on the escape charge, but the FBI consistently asks for delayed hearings.

Read the police report for Kimball’s escape/theft. (PDF)

A picture of Steve Ennis, found in Jennifer Marcum's belongings. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Jennifer Marcum meets Steve Ennis, a high-level drug dealer later busted in an ecstasy ring that moved tens of thousands of MDMA tablets from Amsterdam into New York and Colorado.

(Date is approximate.)

Tom Wales (walesfoundation.org)

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Wales is shot to death in his Seattle home. Police believe an assailant fired through the prosecutor’s basement window while he was working on his computer.

Scott Kimball will later tell federal authorities that he has information on the murder, which remains unsolved.

It’s unclear what details Kimball claimed to have in the case.

Cordova, Alaska. (city-data.com)

Kimball is arrested in Cordova, Alaska, after writing nearly $25,000 in counterfeit checks using his brother’s name.

He went to Alaska after escaping from prison in Montana, and had gotten engaged to a woman who never knew him as anyone but Brett Kimball.

Police recovered $11,300 in hundred-dollar bills in a Cordova hotel where Kimball and his fiancee stayed.

A picture of Steve Ennis found in Jennifer Marcum’s belongings. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Steve Ennis is arrested in New York City after a sting operation catches him buying and selling ecstasy. His girlfriend, Jennifer Marcum, is with him at the time but not implicated in the drug ring.

Ennis would eventually be sent to the federal prison in Littleton, FCI-Englewood, where he ends up sharing a cell with Scott Kimball.

Scott Kimball, locked up in the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility in Alaska, tells a U.S. Secret Service agent that his cellmate, Arnold Flowers, and Flowers’ girlfriend, Sompong Khamsomphou, asked him to hire a hit man to kill a federal judge, federal prosecutor, and two witnesses.

Flowers and Khamsomphou are indicted by a grand jury the next month on charges of murder-for-hire, witness tampering and attempted murder of federal officials.

Steven Holley

Having returned to Colorado from Dallas, LeAnn Emry files for a divorce from Kevin Niner.

She becomes romantically involved with Steven Holley, an FCI-Englewood prisoner whom she met through Niner.

Holley, facing a life sentence on charges that he shot at an officer during a Lakewood bank robbery, is held in the same prison unit as Scott Kimball.

FCI-Englewood, in Littleton, Colo. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

Scott Kimball is transferred from the Alaska prison system to FCI-Englewood, a federal penitentiary in Littleton, Colo.

He had told federal authorities that seven Alaska inmates wanted to kill him for cooperating with the government.

The FBI activates Scott Kimball as a “cooperating witness” while he is an inmate at FCI-Englewood.

He tells an agent that his cellmate, Steve Ennis, asked him to kill a fellow drug dealer, and that Ennis’ girlfriend, Jennifer Marcum, would help.

A fake birth certificate, later found among Kimball's belongings, listed the alias he used as an FBI informant. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

After claiming that his cellmate, Steve Ennis, asked him to kill a fellow drug dealer, Scott Kimball is released from FCI-Englewood “to actively cooperate with the FBI on the Steven Ennis matter.”

Ennis, Kimball claims, told him his girlfriend — Jennifer Marcum — would help carry out the hit.

As a paid FBI informant, Kimball is given the name Joe Scott and told to keep an eye on Marcum.

His contact at the bureau is Special Agent Carle Schlaff.

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)

Jennifer Marcum at 23 or 24. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Wearing a wire, Scott Kimball meets with Jennifer Marcum and secretly records their conversation in his role as an FBI informant.

He claims Jennifer and her boyfriend, federal prisoner Steve Ennis, are plotting to kill a member of Ennis’ drug ring.

Jennifer doesn’t solicit Kimball to kill anyone, but she does say the drug dealer is a “scumbag” who “deserves to die.”

In the first six weeks of 2003, Kimball meets with Jennifer a dozen times and speaks with her on the phone daily.

He convinces her that he can help her stop stripping by setting her up in an espresso-cart business in Seattle.

Ennis tells his girlfriend she should trust Kimball and try a career change.

Read More >>

LeAnn, in a photo found on Kimball's laptop. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

LeAnn Emry uses her debit card to buy Scott Kimball a $1,685 Toshiba laptop computer at Best Buy in Lakewood, Colo.

When investigators search the laptop years later, they find a photo of LeAnn, dated 11 days before her death.

E-mailing her cousin, LeAnn Emry wrote that "Hannibal" was a major blessing in her life. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

In e-mails to her cousin, LeAnn Emry writes about her relationship with “Hannibal,” the alias Scott Kimball used with her. She claims they’re having sex, and makes vague references to criminal activity they’re involved in.

“I need him to get what I want and desperately need,” LeAnn writes. “He doesn’t ask much in return, and he never abuses the situation that I am in, even though he could very easily.”

“He’s a major blessing in my life. Major.”

But she knew he had a dangerous side, too.

“Hell, if Hanable knew I was talking to you, he’d fucking have me killed in a second,” she wrote the same cousin four days earlier. “Plus, he’d have you killed too.”

Read more of LeAnn’s emails to her cousin (PDF).

LeAnn, in a photo later found on Kimball's computer.

LeAnn Emry leaves her home in Centennial, where she lives with her parents, Howard and Darlene Emry.

She tells them she is going on a caving trip to Mexico with friends.

Instead, she secretly leaves on a whirlwind voyage through five states, intermittently meeting up with Scott Kimball, aka “Hannibal.”

Before heading out, LeAnn called her younger sister, Michelle, with a message: If anything bad should happen, Michelle should know her sister loved her.

LeAnn's Super 8 receipt (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

During a two-week trip across the West, LeAnn Emry writes a cascade of bad checks, overdrawing her account by $4,000.

She bounces checks in Laramie, Wyo., Baker City, Ore., Vancouver, Wash., and Reno, Nev., leaving a paper trail that her father will piece together after her disappearance.

Investigators later place Kimball in some of the same spots at the same time, but he also goes to Seattle on FBI business.

At a pawnshop in Hermiston, Ore., Emry buys the .40-caliber Firestar handgun that will become her murder weapon.

She is back in Colorado by Jan. 27, when she checks into a Super 8 motel in Grand Junction.

She checks out two days later.

Scott Kimball’s cell phone records no activity from 8:15 p.m. Jan. 28 until 1:13 a.m. Jan. 30.

Kimball tells FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff that he’s going to California to see his brother.

Utah’s Bryson Canyon, where Scott Kimball killed LeAnn Emry. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

After checking out of the Super 8 motel in Grand Junction, Colo., LeAnn Emry is never heard from again.

Kimball later told a fellow inmate that he killed LeAnn after telling her they were going for a hike in Bryson Canyon in eastern Utah.

According to that account, Kimball told her to strip nude and to kneel down before shooting her in the head.

Kimball has since claimed that members of a drug gang executed LeAnn and he was only a witness.

LeAnn, 24, was shot with the gun she bought a few days earlier.

LeAnn Emry's abandoned car. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

A Grand County, Utah, sheriff’s deputy finds LeAnn Emry’s Toyota Corolla abandoned in the remote Harley Dome area off of Interstate 70.

Her belongings — camping and caving equipment, a cell phone, a purse — are still in the car.

“Everything was there, except her,” said her father, Howard Emry.

There are footprints outside the vehicle, but no sign of a struggle or fight.

(moneywalks.com)

Scott Kimball hires a prostitute in Indian Wells, Calif., a golf-resort town in the Coachella Valley.

Police believe he paid for her services by giving her LeAnn Emry’s credit card.

The card is soon used fraudulently in the Los Angeles area.

The Lodge Casino at Black Hawk. (blackhawkcolorado.com)

Scott Kimball meets Lori McLeod at the Lodge Casino at Black Hawk, where the 39-year-old mother is a regular at Boston 5-card poker.

McLeod  is taken with Kimball, who is pushing his mother around in a wheelchair and attending to her every need. He has an easy smile, and pleasant demeanor.

McLeod, who lives in Westminster with her 19-year-old daughter, Kaysi, gives Kimball her number at the end of the night. “Wait,” she jokes, “You’re not a felon or anything, are you?”

Scott Kimball and Lori McLeod go on their first date on Valentine’s Day. They meet at a Bennigan’s in Westminster, and Kimball brings flowers.

“He was funny. He was fun. He was smooth,” McLeod remembers.

Within a matter of days, McLeod introduces her new boyfriend to her 19-year-old daughter, Kaysi.

LeAnn Emry’s boyfriend, FCI-Englewood inmate Steven Holley, writes a letter to her father, telling him he’s worried because he hasn’t heard from LeAnn in more than a month.

“So have you heard from her and is she alright?” he asks Howard Emry.

Holley's letter to Howard Emry. (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.

At 9:30 p.m. the night before her planned trip to Seattle with Scott Kimball, Jennifer Marcum has a last conversation with her boyfriend, federal inmate Steve Ennis. The call was recorded by the prison:

Jennifer at 24. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

“You OK?” Ennis asked.
“Yeah.”
“You all ready to go?”
“Packin’.”
“Are you? Cool. Are you excited?”
“No, not really.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should be, you’ll have a nice time. … You taking a cab out to the airport?”
“Um, I’m not sure yet. I think I’m taking my car.”
“You’re gonna have fun up there. … What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I’ll see you next Thursday, huh?”

Marcum is never heard from again.

Jennifer Marcum, in 2001. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

After a final evening call to Jennifer Marcum, Scott Kimball’s cell phone goes inactive until Feb. 20. Kimball says later that he had gone to the mountains for several days and turned his cell phone off.

Phone records will reveal that Jennifer’s phone is inactive for the same three-day period of time.

After that, however, occasional calls will be made from Jennifer’s phone — to Kimball and others — before the service is disconnected.

Investigators believe Kimball was using Jennifer’s phone “for the purpose of misdirecting law enforcement in an attempt to make it appear as if she was still alive.”

Scott Kimball consults with the FBI for three days in Seattle concerning the unsolved murder case of Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Wales, who was gunned down in his Seattle home in October 2001.

Frantic, Steven Holley writes another letter to Howard Emry from FCI-Englewood.

LeAnn is in “real trouble,” he warns.

“I don’t fully understand what the hell she thought she was doing, but I know she is way out of her league!”

Holley asks Howard Emry to call the FBI and have an agent come talk to him in prison.

An excerpt of Holley's letter. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

Read Holley’s full Feb. 24, 2003, letter to Howard Emry. (PDF)

Howard Emry (Matthew Cilley / for the Camera)

Howard Emry contacts the FBI in Denver, and talks to an agent about the alarming letter he received from Steven Holley, his daughter’s boyfriend.

The agent calls Holley a liar, and says he will not waste his time visiting him in prison to talk.

(Date is approximate.)

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)

Denver International Airport

Jennifer Marcum’s 1996 Saturn, abandoned in a parking garage at Denver International Airport, is impounded.

The car had been parked since Feb. 18, but surveillance video doesn’t show who was driving it.

Two certified letters were sent to Marcum’s last address, but they went unanswered.

New York City. (photos4travel.com)

Scott Kimball’s FBI handler, Carle Schlaff, starts asking questions about Jennifer Marcum, who disappeared while Kimball was supposed to be keeping an eye on her in his role as an informant.

Kimball tells Schlaff that Jennifer bought a $600 gun and flew to New York City to kill a member of her boyfriend Steve Ennis’ drug ring.

Airline records show that Marcum never flew out of town the weekend her car was abandoned at Denver International Airport.

(Date is approximate.)

Statement from Alderman to FBI Agent Jonathan Grusing, reprinted in a Lafayette police report.

Scott Kimball absconds with $7,300 and a pickup truck and trailer from his former FCI-Englewood cellmate John Alderman.

Alderman, a doctor convicted of tax evasion, said he had just been released from prison and needed help getting on his feet. He asked Kimball to pick up the truck and trailer, which he planned to live in, and to cash his $7,300 check since he had no bank account.

Alderman, 69, never saw Kimball again.

No charges were pressed.

Kaysi's driver's license photo, copied by Westminster police

Kaysi McLeod is charged with felony theft and forgery after admitting to buying more than $3,400 worth of merchandise with a stolen credit card, according to Westminster police.

She went on her alleged week-long shopping spree starting in late February 2003.

Scott Kimball, according to the victim in the case, took Kaysi into a room for 45 minutes when she was first accused of the theft. She emerged from the room and admitted to using the card fraudulently.

Scott Kimball receives his first recorded payment from the FBI: $600 for services.

Spokane County Superior Court in Washington issues a warrant for Scott Kimball’s arrest on probation violations.

Kimball, who’d been convicted of three felony counts of forgery in 2001 stemming from a 1999 case, failed to report to a supervisor with Washington’s prison system.

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.

Arnold Flowers and girlfriend Sompong Khamsomphou are convicted by a jury in Anchorage of criminal tampering with a witness. They are acquitted of the more serious charges of plotting a murder-for-hire, which Scott Kimball had accused them of orchestrating 15 months earlier.

Kimball testifies at the trial.

A month later, Flowers is sentenced to eight years in prison and Khamsomphou gets five years behind bars.

(Date is approximate)

Kimball's Denver mugshot. (Courtesy of Denver police)

At the behest of FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff, Scott Kimball is arrested in Denver on suspicion of violating his probation from his 1999 forgery case in Spokane, Wash.

A warrant had been issued three weeks earlier, accusing Kimball of failing to report to a supervisor with the Washington Department of Corrections.

Lori McLeod, then Kimball’s girlfriend, says Schlaff deliberately disabled Kimball’s Jeep so Denver police could swoop in on him and arrest him. She says it was Schlaff’s way of reminding Kimball who was boss in their agent-informant relationship.

Kimball was taken to Denver County Jail.

Jennifer Marcum in 2001. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Behind bars at Denver County Jail, Scott Kimball tells his FBI handler, Carle Schlaff, that a drug dealer had strangled Jennifer Marcum, who’d been missing for four months.

Kimball had even seen pictures of her body — hands and legs bound, mouth taped shut — on the drug dealer’s laptop, he says. In fact, the killer offered to pay Kimball to find Jennifer’s corpse and remove her breast implants and IUD so the serial numbers couldn’t be used to identify her remains.

Kimball tells Schlaff he can help catch the killer.

Scott Kimball, in a photo found on his computer. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

After a polygraph test determines Kimball is being truthful about seeing photos of Jennifer Marcum dead on a drug dealer’s computer, FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff contacts prison officials in Washington state and requests that they quash their warrant for Kimball.

Kimball, Schlaff says, is a valuable informant in the disappearance of Jennifer Marcum and needs to be freed to help figure out where she might be.

A judge in Spokane agrees to quash the warrant, and Kimball is released from Denver County Jail.

Read the motion and order to dismiss charges against Kimball. (PDF)

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

Steven Holley

LeAnn Emry’s father, Howard Emry, meets with Steven Holley in prison.

Holley, who was dating LeAnn when she disappeared, again asks Emry to contact the FBI.

He tells Howard that LeAnn was under the care of “Hannibal,” but he won’t say who that is.

Emry calls the FBI again but never hears back.

(Date is approximate.)

Carle Schlaff, from his Facebook page. (Facebook.com)

FBI Agent Carle Schlaff files an affidavit in federal court in Denver seeking a warrant to search Jennifer Marcum’s car, which was found abandoned at DIA earlier in the year.

“The whereabouts of Jennifer Marcum cannot be determined and there is probable cause to believe that she is a victim of a homicide,” Schlaff concludes.

He notes that Scott Kimball had contact with Jennifer before her disappearance but doesn’t finger him as a suspect.

Read Carle Schlaff’s affidavit here. (PDF)

Kimball's rental property in Adams County. (Lafayette police)

The FBI pays Scott Kimball $2,000 in relocation expenses so he can move from his Lakewood condo to a home in rural Adams County, at 14701 Huron St.

Kimball moves into the new property with his girlfriend, Lori McLeod, and her daughter, Kaysi.

Three weeks later, the FBI pays Kimball another $500 to cover expenses at his new house.

Scott Kimball is issued a Colorado driver’s license under the name Joseph Lee Scott, his FBI alias.

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.

Kaysi McLeod, pictured on a memorial Web site. (respectance.com)

Scott Kimball comes by the Motel 6 in Thornton, Colo., where Kaysi McLeod is staying with her boyfriend, Celestino Bovill.

After chatting with the couple in their room, Kimball offers to take Kaysi to her 6 p.m. shift at a Subway in Broomfield.

Kaysi leaves with Kimball in a pickup truck, with trailer attached, that he had stolen from fellow federal prison inmate John Alderman the previous spring.

Kaysi McLeod is never heard from again.

Scott Kimball, an avid outdoorsman and hunter, insisted he’d been alone in the mountains scouting out bow-hunting grounds the night Kaysi McLeod disappeared. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Scott Kimball’s cell phone goes dead from 8:15 p.m. Aug. 23 through 4:38 p.m. Aug. 24.

When he turns his phone back on, its signal is picked up by a tower near Walden, Colo. A receipt later found in his belongings also shows that he bought pasta, meat, lighter fluid and spaghetti sauce at the North Park Supers market in Walden on Aug. 24.

When Kimball’s girlfriend Lori McLeod — frantic that her daughter Kaysi never showed up for work the night before — finally gets a hold of Kimball, he insists he’d been in the mountains alone, scouting out bow-hunting grounds.

He denies picking Kaysi up from her motel the night before, but he pledges to help McLeod track down her daughter.

The FBI pays Scott Kimball $18,000 for cooperating as a witness in the Alaska murder-for-hire case against Arnold Flowers and Sompong Khamsomphou.

The boyfriend-girlfriend team was convicted of criminal tampering with a witness, but acquitted of plotting to have four people killed.

Scott Kimball and Lori McLeod get married in Las Vegas, in a “drive-through” wedding devoid of romance.

McLeod says she married Kimball because she saw him as the only link to her daughter, Kaysi, who had been missing for eight days.

The frantic mother thought her new husband might be involved in the disappearance, but she also knew he worked for the FBI in some capacity and hoped he might help find Kaysi.

Throughout their marriage, Kimball kept McLeod’s hope alive by fabricating signs that Kaysi had been at the house but wasn’t ready to talk to her mother.

He looped Kaysi’s necklace – the one she was wearing the day she went missing – around her bedroom doorknob one day. He took her makeup box out of the bedroom. And he asked their landlord to lie about having seen Kaysi driving nearby.

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.

A federal judge in Denver sentences Scott Kimball to three years of supervised release as part of his plea deal in the 2001 Alaska check-fraud case.

Judge Marcia S. Krieger agrees to give Kimball a minimal sentence on his fifth felony, recognizing that he has been helpful in his cooperation with the government.

She orders him to pay Wells Fargo $8,287.94 in restitution, and chastises him for failing to be forthcoming about his personal finances even as he accepts “substantial funds” from the FBI.

Krieger says Kimball’s actions smack of an attitude of “I’m happy to turn other people in, but I don’t want to be held fully accountable for my own behavior.”

He is also barred from owning firearms.

Read a transcript of the sentencing hearing. (PDF)

Scott Kimball gave this lease to his FBI handler to explain why he had Jennifer Marcum’s belongings. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Hoping that his missing daughter might be in jail somewhere, Bob Marcum asks a cop friend to run Jennifer Marcum’s name through a national criminal database.

The next day, he gets a call from FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff, who’d been alerted of the database search.

Scott Kimball had passed a lie-detector test after telling his FBI handler that a drug-dealer killed Jennifer. And when asked why he had Jennifer’s furniture, Kimball had given the agent a lease showing that he paid $400 to rent it for a year.

But Schlaff doesn’t share those details with Bob Marcum. He says there are few leads in the case, and that Jennifer “just dropped off the map” after leasing her furniture to a man.

(Date is approximate.)

(Camera file photo)

Jennifer Marcum is listed as a missing person in the National Crime Information Center database.

The trailer that Scott Kimball stole from his former fellow FCI-Englewood inmate John Alderman burns to the ground on Kimball’s Adams County property.

It was the same trailer that Kimball picked Kaysi McLeod up on the day she disappeared, according to her boyfriend.

Emergency officials deem the trailer fire accidental, but years later a witness — one of Kimball’s business associates — tells police Kimball intentionally burned it to destroy any evidence that Kaysi might have been in it and also to collect insurance money.

Kimball's Adams County rental property, where his 10-year-old son was hurt. (Paul Aiken/Camera)

Scott Kimball’s 10-year-old son is severely injured when a 200-pound metal grate falls on him while playing on Kimball’s rural Adams County property.

Rather than waiting for paramedics, Kimball rushes his son to Louisville’s Avista Adventist hospital, but the boy falls from the Jeep en route, Kimball tells doctors.

Read More >>

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.)

Terry Kimball at Montana's Lake Como, 1996. (Courtesy of Karen Johnson)

Someone begins kiting checks on Terry Kimball’s account.

The activity continues through Nov. 18, 2004, and totals $23,083 in the end.

Terry Kimball’s bank, MBNA America, filed a suspicious activity report with the FBI’s Denver office, but it’s unclear when the report was made or whether the bureau did anything about it.

Scott Kimball was not charged in the theft, but a teller identified him as the person who presented the last check on Nov. 18, according to police records.

(Camera file photo)

“Uncle Terry” Kimball goes missing a few weeks after moving in with his nephew, Scott Kimball.

Scott Kimball’s wife, Lori McLeod, recalls coming home one day in late August or early September to find her couch sitting outside, drenched in what looked like vomit.

Scott Kimball says one of the dogs threw up on the couch, but McLeod suspects “Uncle Terry” and asks where he is.

Scott Kimball claims his uncle won the Ohio lottery and cruised down to Mexico with a stripper named Ginger.

(Posting date is approximate.)

Terry Kimball at Christmas dinner in 2000. (Courtesy of Karen Johnson)

By Labor Day, Terry Kimball’s wife, Karen Johnson, hasn’t seen her husband for six weeks.

Knowing that he’s taken off on his own before, she begins to suspect he’s run off with another woman.

Johnson calls Scott Kimball’s house and hears the story that “Uncle Terry” won the lottery and left the country.

She tries to corroborate the story, but eventually files for divorce.

No one reports Terry Kimball missing.

(moneywalks.com)

Scott Kimball uses his uncle Terry Kimball’s credit cards at a hotel and gas station in Helena, Mont.

He will use them again Sept. 25-27 for a hotel and rental car in Alaska.

When investigators discover the usage years later, they talk to Lori McLeod, who says she accompanied her husband on both trips, but hadn’t seen Terry Kimball for weeks.

Scott Kimball starts Rocky Mountain All Natural Beef with his mother, Barb Kimball, and brother, Brett Kimball. It is headquartered at 801 S. Public Road in Lafayette.

(Date is approximate.)

Posing as his missing uncle Terry Kimball, Scott Kimball buys 21 head of cattle from High Plains Livestock Exchange in Brush, Colo., for $11,617.50.

The check bounces.

High Plains filed a complaint against Terry Kimball with the Department of Agriculture two months later.

High Plains' complaint against 'Terry Kimball.' (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Read the full complaint (PDF).

Scott Kimball pleads guilty to one count of theft and escape in his 2001 case from Helena, Mont. Prosecutors drop one count of theft in exchange.

Kimball remains out of prison pending sentencing.

Kaysi as a teenager. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Scott Kimball tells Lori McLeod that he’ll take a polygraph test to show that he’s not lying when he says he didn’t kill Kaysi McLeod or take her to the mountains back in August 2003.

He is tested at a private polygraph business in Englewood and passes.

Lori McLeod (Mark Leffingwell/Camera)

Adams County authorities arrest Lori McLeod on suspicion of third-degree assault, criminal mischief and domestic violence after her husband, Scott Kimball, claims she threw a vacuum cleaner at him and threatened to kill him.

Kimball gets a restraining order against her.

McLeod says he lied about the incident.

Read Lori McLeod’s arrest report (PDF).

Still married to Lori McLeod, Scott Kimball starts dating 25-year-old Melissa Anderson, a waitress at a Perkins restaurant in Westminster.

Anderson later described Kimball as “gentleman-like” but also said he had an appetite for rough sex, including bondage.

(Date is approximate.)

(mexicobeachresorts.com)

Nearly a year after Terry Kimball’s disappearance, Scott Kimball’s father, Virgil Kimball, receives an e-mail at his Idaho home from terrylkimball@yahoo.com.

“In the e-mail, Terry claimed to be living in old Mexico with a woman named Ginger and added that Ginger liked living in Mexico,” FBI agent Johnny Grusing would later write in an affidavit. “Virgil recalled that supposedly Ginger never wanted to return to the United States, so Terry probably would not either.”

Police would trace the account to Scott Kimball’s computer two years later.

(Date is approximate.)

Lori McLeod is arrested in Adams County for violating a restraining order that her husband, Scott Kimball, got against her after claiming she hit him with a vacuum cleaner.

McLeod says Kimball lied about the attack and wanted her in jail so he could bring his new girlfriend, Melissa Anderson, over to the house.

Read Lori McLeod’s arrest report (PDF).

Bob Marcum holds a picture of his daughter at age 8. (Kristen Schmid Schurter/for the Camera)

After trying for more than a year to find the man with their daughter’s belongings, Bob Marcum and Mary Willis fly to Denver and put up fliers of Jennifer Marcum all over town.

Bob Marcum talks again with FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff, pushing for information about the man with Jennifer’s furniture.

Schlaff won’t give up the man’s name, but eventually gives Marcum a cell-phone number for Scott Kimball.

Ask for Joe Snitch, the agent says.

(Date is approximate.)

The contract found in Scott Kimball's possession, apparently meant for Jennifer Marcum's mother, Mary Willis. He used his FBI alias, Joe Scott, although his handler at the bureau introduced him as Joe Snitch. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Hoping to find out more from the man who has their daughter’s furniture, Jennifer Marcum’s parents meet with Scott Kimball, whom they know only as ‘Joe Snitch,’ at Broomfield’s North Midway Park.

Joe Snitch tells Bob Marcum and Mary Willis that Jennifer had been murdered, and he knows who did it and where they left her body. He tells Willis that if she’ll let him into her hotel room that night, he can demonstrate how Jennifer was killed.

Read More >>

Jennifer Marcum. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Jason Price, an alleged associate in Steve Ennis’ drug ring, tells the FBI that he suspects Scott Kimball was involved in the disappearance of Jennifer Marcum.

Two years earlier, Kimball had told the FBI that Price killed Jennifer and showed him pictures of her dead body.

Price says he only recently realized that Jennifer had gone missing.

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 >>

In its final recorded payment to Scott Kimball, the FBI gives him $50 to cover expenses.

In another polygraph test about Jennifer Marcum, this one administered by the FBI, Scott Kimball is asked if he caused the disappearance of Jennifer Marcum.

His answers are categorized as deceptive.

Scott Kimball rented this Lafayette house, at 12632 Flagg Drive, in the fall of 2005. (Cliff Grassmick / Camera)

Scott Kimball moves from the Adams County home he shared with Lori McLeod to a small rental at 12632 Flagg Drive in Lafayette.

His landlord, Wendy Phillips, said Kimball was “adorable” and a “perfect tenant,” until his rent checks started to bounce.

(Date is approximate.)

Scott Kimball, when he returned Jennifer Marcum's furniture. (Photo by Bob Marcum)

In a second face-to-face meeting, Scott Kimball returns Jennifer Marcum’s furniture and belongings to her parents, Bob Marcum and Mary Willis.

Kimball, who’s had Jennifer’s items since she disappeared in February 2003, is accompanied by FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff.

They all convene in a strip mall parking lot in Broomfield for the exchange.

Scott Kimball is sentenced to three years in prison for escaping from a pre-release center in Helena, Mont., in 2001 and stealing $677 from the gas station where he worked.

The prison sentence is suspended, and Kimball goes free on supervised release.

Scott Kimball meets Denise Pierce, then 30, while visiting his brother, Brett Kimball, in California’s Coachella Valley. They begin dating.

(Date is approximate.)

Investigators later found this fake lien release in Kimball's office. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Scott Kimball wrecks his 1999 Jeep Cherokee and receives $10,799.16 in insurance proceeds 11 days later.

Investigators would later discover fake lien-release documents Kimball used to fool the insurance company into believing that he owned the vehicle outright.

And Lori McLeod would tell police that she heard her husband talking about purposely wrecking the vehicle to collect insurance money.

A trailer reported stolen by Scott Kimball. (Courtesy Lafayette police)

Scott Kimball goes to the Lafayette Police Department to report that his white box trailer — filled with grilling equipment and coolers — has been stolen from outside his office at 801 S. Public Road.

He later collects $10,000 in insurance claims on the trailer.

[Show as slideshow]

Using pilfered personal financial information from family friend and Lafayette optometrist Cleve Armstrong, Scott Kimball begins moving thousands of dollars over the phone from Armstrong’s money market account to Armstrong’s checking account.

Over the next three weeks, he transfers $83,000 between accounts, then uses several accomplices to forge nearly $55,000 worth of checks to Kimball’s companies: Rocky Mountain All Natural Beef and Rocky Mountain Cattle Company.

When Armstrong returns from vacation in mid-January, he will immediately point police in the direction of Kimball, who had an office in the basement of the 801 S. Public Road building shared by Armstrong and Kimball’s mother.

Melissa Anderson, Scott Kimball’s 25-year-old girlfriend, buys him a .22-caliber Winchester Model 70 rifle at a Wal-Mart in Thornton for $437.

Anderson, of Thornton, fills out the paperwork, and Kimball lays out the cash.

He told Anderson he would teach her how to hunt, but once she buys the gun she never hears from him again.

Once Lafayette optometrist Cleve Armstrong calls police about his missing money, Scott Kimball leaves the state.

He ends up in California’s Coachella Valley, where he stays in a rented casita with Denise Pierce, his 31-year-old girlfriend.

Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher stands in front of the 801 S. Public Road building that in 2005 housed the offices of Cleve Armstrong, Barb Kimball and Scott Kimball. (Kasia Broussalian/Camera)

Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher is assigned to investigate the Cleve Armstrong check-fraud case.

He starts looking for Kimball, but to no avail.

Scott Kimball’s basement office at 801 S. Public Road. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher searches the basement of 801 S. Public Road in Lafayette, where Scott Kimball had been running a beef business.

He finds sheets of practice signatures; bogus subpoenas regarding the assault case against Kimball’s wife; and a counterfeit lien release for a Jeep — complete with company letterhead and an altered seal from his mother’s notary stamp — that Kimball had used to cash in on insurance proceeds after wrecking the vehicle the previous month.

Kaysi McLeod, at 16. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

In investigating Scott Kimball for stealing $55,000 from optometrist Cleve Armstrong, Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher interviews Kimball’s now-estranged wife, Lori McLeod, and learns that her daughter has been missing for more than two years.

Lori McLeod says she has long suspected that her husband played a role in Kaysi’s disappearance.

Scott Kimball is officially deactivated by the FBI as an informant.

It’s not clear exactly when or why, but at some point in the fall of 2005, Special Agent Carle Schlaff had been removed from the case.

A federal arrest warrant is issued for Scott Kimball for violating his supervised release on his 2001 Alaska check-fraud case.

Kimball’s probation officer says he failed to check in and had left Colorado on unauthorized trips.

Bryce Canyon National Park. (earthdocumentary.com)

Scott Kimball and his girlfriend, Denise Pierce, go to Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah to shoot guns.

Pierce would later identify the handgun they used as part of a federal firearms case against Kimball.

Equipment reported stolen along with the trailer. (Courtesy Lafayette police)

Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher finds the trailer reported stolen by Scott Kimball the previous December hidden at Kimball’s former Adams County home.

Kimball had already collected $10,000 in insurance claims.

Scott Kimball leads a contingent of U.S. marshals and Riverside County sheriff’s deputies on a high-speed chase through California’s Coachella Valley.

Reaching speeds up to 80 mph, he cranked Nickelback’s “Rockstar” through the speakers of the Ford F-350 and called his girlfriend, Denise Pierce.

She told Kimball to stop and turn himself in, but he refused, insisting the cops would kill him because he knew too much.

Kimball drove the full length of the valley in a televised chase, eventually turning onto dirt roads, careening through orchards and rolling over irrigation pipes in a farmer’s field in Mecca, Calif., just north of the Salton Sea.

Low on gas, he finally stopped but wouldn’t surrender for several hours.

He has not been out of prison since.

Read the lyrics to Nickelback’s “Rockstar.”

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.

(Camera file photo)

Kaysi McLeod is entered into the missing persons database by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

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 >>

Scott Kimball is sentenced in federal court in Denver to 10 months in jail and six months in a halfway house for violating his supervised release in the 2001 Alaska check-fraud case.

He’d been arrested on a federal warrant in the case after a car chase and standoff in California two months earlier.

Boulder County Jail. (Camera file photo)

Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher interviews Scott Kimball for the first time, while Kimball is held in Boulder County Jail for a brief period.

The conversation centers on optometrist Cleve Armstrong’s check-fraud case.

A billboard of Jennifer Marcum outside Shotgun Willie's. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Jennifer Marcum’s parents unveil a billboard outside of Shotgun Willie’s, the Glendale strip club where their missing daughter worked.

The billboard attracts media coverage, and in an interview with Denver’s Westword newspaper, Bob Marcum intentionally mentions Scott Kimball as an acquaintance of Jennifer’s.

Marcum had learned Kimball’s real name shortly after his surreal meeting with “Joe Snitch.”

Rob McLeod (Mark Leffingwell / Camera)

Reading a Westword article about a billboard erected for Jennifer Marcum, Rob McLeod spots Scott Kimball’s name.

McLeod’s ex-wife is still married to Kimball, who lived with their 19-year-old daughter, Kaysi McLeod, when she went missing three years earlier.

McLeod calls Jennifer’s father, Bob Marcum, who mentioned Kimball’s name to the Westword reporter as an acquaintance she stayed with before vanishing.

“Now we’ve got two people missing, and there’s only one commonality — Scott Kimball,” McLeod said.

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.

Still in jail after his California car chase, Scott Kimball’s suspended sentence in his 2001 Montana theft and escape case is revoked and he is ordered to serve his remaining time — nearly two years — behind bars.

Terry Kimball in 2002. (Courtesy of Karen Johnson)

Bob Marcum, who has flown out to Colorado, meets with Rob and Lori McLeod to search for clues to their daughters’ whereabouts.

They drive to Scott Kimball’s former condo in Lakewood, where Jennifer had left her furniture, and talk to the manager there.

They scope out his former Adams County property, and a nearby field where Kimball had run cattle. A pit on the property contains the bones of slaughtered cows.

Convinced that Kimball has claimed more victims, Marcum asks the others: “Is there anyone else Scott Kimball has been around who you’ve never seen again?”

In fact, Lori McLeod responds, Scott’s uncle Terry had vanished a couple of years ago after living with them for several weeks.

“She said it like she had never thought about it before,” Marcum said.

(Date is approximate.)

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.”

FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing. (Marty Caivano/Camera)

After Bob Marcum and Rob McLeod meet with the FBI about their missing daughters, Special Agent Jonathan Grusing is assigned to investigate the missing-persons cases surrounding Scott Kimball.

Working with Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher, Grusing launches an exhaustive investigation, looking for clues that Kimball had transitioned from a white-collar criminal to a serial killer.

A rifle and handgun belonging to Scott Kimball are recovered at a friend’s house in Indio, Calif.

His girlfriend, Denise Pierce, identifies the handgun as one she saw Kimball shooting recreationally on an outing. The rifle was purchased for Kimball at a Thornton Wal-Mart by another girlfriend, Melissa Anderson, in December 2005.

The receipt. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing and Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher find a receipt from North Park Supers grocery store, dated Aug. 24, 2003 — the day after Kaysi McLeod vanished — in boxes of old documents and receipts belonging to Scott Kimball.

They also find Kaysi’s date book and a map of the North Park area.

Kaysi McLeod, 2001. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Dale Stewart, Scott Kimball’s former Adams County landlord, admits to investigators that he lied when he told Lori McLeod he had seen her daughter driving around the property after she disappeared in August 2003.

Stewart said Kimball asked him to lie.

Scott Kimball is indicted in federal court in Denver on a charge of Felon in Possession of a Firearm.

Earlier in 2007, two guns belonging to Kimball had been found at a friend’s house in California. Kimball was prohibited from owning firearms according to the terms of his federal probation on an earlier check fraud case.

Investigators found this photo of LeAnn Emry on Kimball's laptop but did not yet know who it was. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

In a search of Scott Kimball’s Toshiba laptop, the FBI finds a search of the term “Jennifer Marcum missing” and pictures of various women, including LeAnn Emry, although investigators don’t yet know who she is.

They also find 291 graphic images “depicting women clothed and unclothed, being assaulted, forced into violent sexual activities or raped, bound and gagged, feigning or posing as being dead and threatened at gunpoint or knife point.”

The search finds that Kimball logged into Internet sex sites as “Beefman1996″ and visited multiple rape video Web sites, including “Brutally Raped Young Girls,” “Rape Island TGP,” and “Japanese Girl Rape.”

Read the search-warrant affidavit. (PDF)

Kimball's Montana Department of Corrections mug.

Scott Kimball is interviewed by FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing and Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher at the Cascade County Detention Facility in Great Falls, Mont.

Asked about the disappearances of Jennifer Marcum, Kaysi McLeod and Terry Kimball, he offers to provide information about Jennifer and his uncle if given immunity for his white-collar crimes. Kaysi, he tells the investigators, is still alive.

During the six-hour interview, Kimball makes statements like: “I can’t incriminate myself any further” and “I wish I could be honest with you.”

Routt National Forest, where a hunter found a human skeleton in September 2007. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Bushwhacking through a dense section of Routt National Forest in the shadow of Little Haystack Mountain, a hunter finds a human skeleton.

“If I hadn’t been at that exact spot at that time of the morning with the sun glinting off the skull, I would not have seen it,” said the hunter, a Brighton resident who asked that his name not be used. “Something happened. Somebody wanted me to find it.”

With snow in the forecast, the hunter ties a rope to a tree to mark his find, packs the skull carefully in his backpack, and continues his trek.

He calls 911 the next day, and the Jackson County coroner takes possession of the remains, thought to belong to a young woman.

The Sheriff’s Office writes up a full report, and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation is notified, but news of the find doesn’t reach the FBI for six months.

Investigating Jennifer Marcum’s disappearance, FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing and Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher interview Steve Ennis, who shared a cell with Scott Kimball at FCI-Englewood while dating Jennifer.

Ennis — being held at a federal prison in Seagoville, Texas — tells the investigators of another former FCI-Englewood inmate with an eerily similar story.

Steven Holley

Like Ennis, this inmate had become friends with Kimball behind bars in 2002. Like Ennis, he had put Kimball in touch with a girlfriend upon his release.

Both women went missing within weeks.

Talk to Steven Holley, Ennis told the investigators.

Holley, the inmate who had dated LeAnn Emry, had never had his own plea for an FBI interview granted.

Howard and Darlene Emry, with a photo of their daughter LeAnn.

FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing calls Howard Emry at home in Payette, Idaho, and asks to speak to his daughter, LeAnn.

“She’s been missing for nearly five years now,” Emry replies.

He tells the agent he fears LeAnn was killed back in January 2003.

Find “Hannibal,” he says. “That’s who murdered my daughter.”

Steven Holley

FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing and Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher interview Steven Holley at the federal prison in Florence, Colo.

They learn that his girlfriend, LeAnn Emry, had been with Scott Kimball in the month before she disappeared on Jan. 29, 2003.

Holley, who spent time in the same unit as Kimball at FCI-Englewood in 2002, said Kimball went by the name “Hannibal.”

Investigators find Kaysi McLeod’s Subway hat in a trailer owned by Scott Kimball. It is found in a black bag containing six zip ties, two rolls of electrical tape, and women’s shoes.

Scott Kimball pleads guilty in federal court in Denver to one count of possessing a firearm as a felon. He is scheduled for sentencing five months later.

The receipt, found in a box of Kimball's belongings. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Nagged by a $17.95 grocery store receipt found in Scott Kimball’s possessions, FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing decides to take a closer look around Walden, Colo.

The receipt — dated Aug. 24, 2003, one day after the disappearance of Kaysi McLeod. — came from the North Park Supers store in the tiny northern Colorado mountain town.

Scott Kimball, who said he was alone in the mountains the day Kaysi disappeared, had later told Grusing that she might have overdosed on drugs somewhere on national forest land.

Grusing calls the Routt National Forest district office in Walden to ask for a map of the area, and a receptionist tells him it costs $8.

In no mood to fill out an expense sheet, Grusing asks to talk to someone higher up the chain of command.

He tells supervisor Sue Yeager he’s with the FBI and is searching for human remains. She says she’ll get some maps out right away.

Then, almost as an afterthought, she tells him to talk to the coroner. A skull, likely belonging to a young female, had been discovered by a hunter six months earlier in a remote area southwest of town.

“When she told me that, I pretty much knew it was Kaysi,” Grusing recalls.

An initial DNA analysis 2 1/2 weeks later will point to the same conclusion.

Lafayette police detective Gary Thatcher, left, and FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing, near the site where a hunter discovered Kaysi McLeod's body. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

A final DNA analysis at the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Va., identifies the remains found in Routt National Forest the previous fall as those of Kaysi McLeod.

Investigators, along with Kaysi’s family, will return to the site looking for evidence, but nothing is uncovered.

The vacant Adams County home where Kimball once lived. (Paul Aiken / Camera)

In a search of Scott Kimball’s former Adams County home, at 14701 Huron St., investigators find bloodstains in the living-room carpet, carpet pad and floorboards. They cut out samples and sent them to the FBI lab for analysis.

Lori McLeod sits near her daughter's headstone at Crown Hill Cemetery in Wheat Ridge in December 2009. (Mark Leffingwell / Camera)

Lori McLeod’s marriage to Scott Kimball is declared invalid.

Married since Aug. 31, 2003, the couple had separated years earlier.

Kimball's mug shot. (Rocky Mountain News)

Boulder County prosecutors make a deal with Scott Kimball.

He pleads guilty to stealing $55,000 from Lafayette optometrist Cleve Armstrong as a habitual offender, and is sentenced to 48 years in prison.

In exchange, prosecutors draw up a memorandum of understanding in the missing-persons case. If he will lead investigators to the bodies of Jennifer Marcum, LeAnn Emry and Terry Kimball, he will only face a single count of second-degree murder.

They will otherwise pursue a first-degree murder conviction, punishable by life in prison without parole or the death penalty. But that will be difficult with only one set of remains — Kaysi McLeod’s — that show no evidence of the cause or manner of death.

For prosecutors Amy Okubo and Katharina Booth, the deal represents their only chance of finding the missing victims.

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t do that without his help,” Booth said. “It was a deal with the devil.”

Read the Rocky Mountain News article.

Vail Pass. (colorado-counties.com)

Scott Kimball draws authorities a detailed map to the spot near Vail Pass where he left his uncle Terry Kimball’s body. But a search will have to be postponed until the snow melts in the high country.

Kimball later tells FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing that Uncle Terry’s body — stashed in the woods in his clothing, tennis shoes and eyeglasses — is wrapped in a grey tarp bound by about 100 feet of nylon rope.

Scott Kimball leads investigators and FBI agents on a hunt for bodies in eastern Utah, where he claims LeAnn Emry and Jennifer Marcum are buried.

Kimball and investigators pore over computer-generated maps and satellite photos in an effort to narrow down the search field. No remains are found.

The Utah site where LeAnn Emry's remains were found. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

During a second hunt for bodies, Scott Kimball leads investigators to a wash in Bryson Canyon.

FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing is the first to find a bone and then additional remains. They are later determined to be LeAnn Emry’s, based on DNA from her parents, Darlene and Howard Emry.

Boulder County prosecutor Katharina Booth said coming upon Emry’s bones was extremely emotional and moving.

A fragment of a brass-jacketed bullet is found the next day in the area where LeAnn’s skull would have been located when she was killed.

In a separate search for Jennifer Marcum’s remains, which Kimball insists are nearby, nothing is found.

Amy Okubo, also a chief deputy with the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office, said Kimball knows exactly where Marcum is and was simply “messing with us.”

Jennifer Marcum, at age 24. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Scott Kimball participates in a third search for bodies, insisting that Jennifer Marcum is buried in the same area of eastern Utah that LeAnn Emry’s remains had been found the previous month.

But no new discoveries are made, and Kimball tells the FBI that Jennifer may be buried as far as 60 miles away from the site being searched.

Jennifer’s body has still never been found.

Investigators suspect that Kimball may be hanging on to the information as leverage, as a way of extracting something of value from someone somewhere down the road.

“If he thought giving up Jennifer’s remains would benefit him, he would say where they are,” FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing said.

Kimball says the FBI won’t provide him the resources to find Jennifer.

“From day one I told the FBI that finding Jennifer would be the hardest to find,” he wrote in response to questions from the Camera. “I’m willing to keep looking.”

Boulder County DA Stan Garnett. (Camera file photo)

Without Jennifer Marcum’s body, Boulder County prosecutors revoke their deal with Kimball.

In a December 2008 “memorandum of understanding,” Kimball had agreed to lead investigators to the bodies of LeAnn Emry, Jennifer Marcum and Terry Kimball. In return, he would face only one count of second-degree murder.

In a letter to Kimball’s public defenders, Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett writes that Kimball is considered “in breach” of the deal.

Read More >>

A fragment from a brass-jacketed bullet found near LeAnn Emry’s remains in Utah’s Bryson Canyon is determined to be consistent with the .40-caliber Firestar handgun Scott Kimball owned.

The bullet fragment is found right where Emry’s skull would have been located, according to authorities.

Terry Kimball. (Courtesy photo)

Bloodstains found the previous summer in the carpet of Scott Kimball’s former  Adams County homes test positive as a match for his “Uncle Terry,” based on a DNA sample from Terry Kimball’s daughter.

Lafayette optometrist Cleve Armstrong, who had been a Kimball family friend, succumbs to cancer.

Scott Kimball’s attempt to steal tens of thousands of dollars from Armstrong four years earlier led to an investigation that eventually brought Kimball to justice.

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

When Terry Kimball's body is returned to his family, he will be buried next to his parents in Lafayette Cemetery. (Paul Aiken / Camera)

With the snow melted in Colorado’s high country, a search party follows a map drawn by Scott Kimball to a logging road near Vail Pass.

There, Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher finds Terry Kimball’s body wrapped in a gray tarp. He appears to have been shot through the head.

A bullet fragment found at the scene is later found to be consistent with Scott Kimball’s .40-caliber Firestar handgun.

Scott Kimball at his sentencing hearing in the Boulder County Justice Center. Camera file photo

Scott Kimball pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of LeAnn Emry, Jennifer Marcum, Kaysi McLeod and Terry Kimball, and is sentenced to 70 years in prison.

In an emotional hearing at the Boulder County Justice Center, the victims’ families finally have a chance to face the man who killed their loved ones.

LeAnn Emry’s mother said her daughter was “no more important to him than the carcass of a dead animal.”

“He made the deliberate choice to murder, and he made that choice at least four times,” Darlene Emry said through tears.

Read More >>

Kimball's DOC mugshot

Scott Kimball is sent to Sterling Correctional Facility to start serving his 70-year prison term.

He could first be eligible for parole in 38.5 years, at age 81, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections.

“I won’t spend the rest of my life in prison, ” Kimball later told the Camera through his cousin. (See story.)

Those are the desperate words of a man with nothing left to do but “sit in prison and rationalize his sentence and minimize his crimes,” Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett responded.

Garnett said he’s confident Kimball will die in prison.

Kimball's DOC mugshot

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver upholds Scott Kimball’s 70-month prison sentence for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Kimball had challenged the June 11, 2009, sentence, claiming that his ownership of a rifle was legal under the “sporting exception” in federal law because he used the weapon to ward off coyotes targeting his cattle on his Adams County property.

But the appeals court found that Kimball had lied during his testimony at the sentencing hearing and that the evidence indicated he wasn’t using the rifle solely for sporting purposes.

[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)

Katharina Booth, in her Boulder office. (Paul Aiken / Camera)

In a search of Scott Kimball’s cell in the Sterling Correctional Facility, an FBI agent finds several fraudulent documents.

Claiming that Kimball used discovery from his own case to create the fake FBI papers from behind bars, Boulder County prosecutor Katharina Booth files a motion trying to prevent Kimball from accessing anymore hard-copy files.

She contends Kimball disseminated the doctored reports to the media in an effort to show that other people were involved in the deaths of his four victims.

The Camera received several of Kimball’s bogus documents in late 2009. One had the plural header “Federal Bureau of Investigations.” It featured a February 2006 interview with Steve Ennis at the federal prison in Beaumont, Texas. However, U.S. Bureau of Prisons officials said Ennis was never housed at the Beaumont facility. FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing, who purportedly conducted the interview, was still nine months away from being assigned to the case.

Read one of the fake documents. (PDF)

In his first televised interview from prison, Scott Kimball tells Fox 31 News in Denver that he’s not a traditional serial killer, and there were reasons for every murder.

“I’m a cleaner,” he says. “I clean up somebody else’s mess. I make bad situations go away.”

He hints that he was involved in a vast criminal conspiracy that led to his victims’ deaths — a theory debunked by investigators — but insists he’s still a good person.

“Even a good guy can have a bad side,” he says. “We all make choices. I chose to be an outlaw.”

His only regret: “That I let my kids down.”

Conning the feds into releasing him from prison, Scott Kimball sets himself up for killing spree

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Scott Kimball, shown in a photo found on his computer, was released from federal prison in late 2002 to act as a confidential informant for the FBI. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Investigators found the grocery store receipt — for $17.95 worth of spaghetti sauce, pasta, meat and lighter fluid — among dozens of papers in a box belonging to Scott Kimball.

The 5-year-old slip of paper nagged at FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing. Dated Aug. 24, 2003, one day after the disappearance of 19-year-old Kaysi McLeod, it came from the North Park Supers store in the tiny town of Walden in Colorado’s northern mountains.

Kimball, a career white-collar criminal released from prison as a paid FBI informant, had been the last person seen with Kaysi. He said he’d been alone in the high country the night Kaysi disappeared.

He had similar excuses in other cases, too.

Like the case of the veterinary assistant missing since she left on a cross-country spree with Kimball.

Like the case of the stripper whom Kimball had been assigned to keep an eye on for the FBI, but who vanished and was presumed murdered.

Like the case of Kimball’s own uncle, who went into business with him and was never seen again.

Read More >>

Using the alias ‘Hannibal,’ Kimball calls his first victim one week out of prison

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Police later found this photo of LeAnn Emry, dated 11 days before her death, on Scott Kimball’s computer. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Introducing himself as “Hannibal,” Scott Kimball first called LeAnn Emry on Christmas Day, 2002.

He’d been released seven days earlier from federal prison, where he’d met LeAnn’s boyfriend, a bank robber named Steven Holley.

Holley had hatched an escape plan and asked Kimball to find LeAnn upon his release to fill her in on the details.

Kimball called the 24-year-old veterinary technician up to 17 times a day and soon endeared himself to her enough to be seen as a protector. Holley told LeAnn to listen to Hannibal, that if everything went as planned, the couple would soon be able to unite in Mexico and start a new chapter in their lives.

LeAnn needed Hannibal — calling him a “blessing” — but she knew her new friend had a volatile side.

Read More >>

LeAnn as a girl. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

LeAnn Emry took pity on the powerless, whether abandoned animals or men behind bars.

As she struggled with bipolar disorder and depression, she fed her own sense of self-worth by helping the underdog, said her father, Howard Emry.

“She had a compassionate heart, but she didn’t know when to be cautious,” he said.

As a young girl, Emry remembers, LeAnn “kidnapped” four or five kittens from her grandparents’ farm in Idaho, hiding them in the back of the family pickup for the drive home to Colorado, because she thought the animals might not get the care they needed.

“Our place looked somewhat more like a zoo than a home,” said Emry, who counted two chinchillas, a rabbit, a ferret, three dogs, two cats, a turtle, a hamster and a goat among his daughter’s collection of pets over the years.

Read More >>

On the outside, Kimball has an assignment from the FBI: Keep an eye on Jennifer Marcum

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Jennifer Marcum in 2001. Scott Kimball met Jennifer’s boyfriend in prison and told the FBI she was involved in a plot to kill a drug dealer who might testify against him. The bureau let Kimball out so he could keep an eye on her. (Courtesy of Rob Marcum)

Jennifer Marcum felt like she was being watched.

Talking to her mother, Mary Willis, on the phone, Jennifer sounded afraid and said her phone was tapped. She talked about breaking up with her boyfriend, Steve Ennis, an accused drug dealer serving time at the FCI-Englewood federal prison.

In her last conversation with Ennis, on Feb. 17, 2003, the 25-year-old exotic dancer seemed hesitant and a little nervous. She told him over the phone that she’d be leaving for a few days.

She was going to Seattle with his former cellmate, Scott Kimball, who claimed he owned a coffee-cart business there. He would teach Jennifer how to manage the business — a job opportunity that could help the single mother get away from stripping at Shotgun Willie’s.

Read More >>

How Kimball gained the bureau’s trust and won his freedom

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

FCI-Englewood, the federal prison at U.S. 285 and Kipling Street in Littleton where Scott Kimball was held. (Associated Press)

By the time Scott Kimball left federal prison as an FBI informant in December 2002, he had gained the feds’ trust in at least three previous cases.

Although few details are public, it’s clear that Kimball — a career white-collar criminal who had served countless stints in jail and prison — gathered or fabricated information behind bars and shared it with authorities when it might benefit him.

He earned $1,865 as an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in 1999.

He fed authorities information about the still-unsolved murder of federal prosecutor Tom Wales, who was shot to death in his Seattle home in October 2001.

And in February 2002, while imprisoned in Alaska on suspicion of check fraud, he told a U.S. Secret Service agent that his cellmate wanted to take a hit out on four people, including a federal judge and prosecutor.

The case, which resulted in his transfer to Colorado for his own protection, bore a striking resemblance to the story he told the FBI several months later about Steve Ennis and Jennifer Marcum.

Read More >>

Back behind bars, Kimball tells the FBI he can help find Jennifer Marcum’s killer

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff had some questions for his informant, Scott Kimball.

Kimball had been released from prison to keep tabs on a 25-year-old woman, and she hadn’t been heard from in weeks.

Where is Jennifer Marcum? Schlaff asked.

She had flown to New York to kill the drug dealer scheduled to testify against her boyfriend, Kimball told the agent. She had even bought a $600 revolver for the job, he said.

Schlaff investigated the claims.

According to Denver International Airport parking records, Jennifer’s car had been abandoned there in the early-morning hours of Feb. 18, 2003. But Jennifer never flew out of town that weekend, according to airline records.

Read More >>

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Jennifer Marcum, at age 23 or 24. (Courtesy Bob Marcum)

Minutes before her first professional stripping gig, Jennifer Marcum felt sick.

Uncomfortable. Guilty. As if she were being unfaithful to the father of her son, then 1½.

“I probably will cry, to be honest,” she told a Fox News television crew covering her first day at Shotgun Willie’s 11 years ago. “It’s a very scary feeling for me. I’ve always had manager jobs and (been) looked at as a very respectable person.”

Using the name Francesca, Jennifer took the stage in front of a group of cash-toting men, trying to get lost in the music and flashing lights. She knew this job could provide her the financial security to pursue bigger dreams with her boyfriend.

“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 told the TV crew. “I’d like to go to school. He’d like to go to school.”

Jennifer didn’t reach those goals. She and her boyfriend, Jeff Wiggins, broke up a few years later, and she still worked at the Glendale strip club when she died in 2003.

Read More >>

After her daughter vanishes, Lori McLeod puts her hope with Kimball

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Kaysi McLeod, pictured on a memorial Web site, had been missing for eight days when Scott Kimball married her mother, Lori McLeod. (respectance.com)

Fleeting signs of her daughter, missing since August 2003, kept Lori McLeod from losing hope.

There was the gold necklace — the one Kaysi had been wearing the last time she left the house — found hanging from the teenager’s bedroom doorknob one day.

McLeod’s new love, Scott Kimball, had pointed it out. See? Kaysi was just here.

Read More >>

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Kaysi as a teenager. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Weeks before Kaysi McLeod disappeared, her father visited her at the Subway sandwich shop where she worked. They sat at a table together for a few minutes, and Kaysi started to cry.

She said she was “not doing anything to be proud of,” Rob McLeod remembers.

“I told her having an honest job and doing an honest day’s work is something to be proud of,” he said.

McLeod never saw his daughter again.

Read More >>

Prosecutors, mother question whether Kimball tried to kill his own son

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Scott Kimball and his younger son, sometime in the late 1990s. At age 10, Kimball’s older son suffered critical injuries when a 200-pound metal grate fell on him at his father’s property, then he fell out of the car racing to the hospital. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

Kaysi McLeod had been missing for nearly a year, but her mother remained hopeful the now-20-year-old would return.

Lori Kimball prayed that her new husband, Scott Kimball, might shed light on Kaysi’s whereabouts yet remained suspicious that he had something to do with her disappearance.

It made for an often-tense atmosphere between the couple.

“Scott is the most controlling person I have ever known in my life,” remembers Lori McLeod, who has since annulled her marriage and dropped Kimball’s last name. “As long as I kept my opinions to myself and didn’t question him, it was fine.”

Read More >>

Court has stripped father of parental rights

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Scott Kimball’s Adams County rental property, at 14701 Huron St., where his 10-year-old son suffered serious injuries. (Paul Aiken / Camera)

Other than slight vision problems in his left eye, Scott Kimball’s older son is perfectly healthy today.

The boy, now 16 and a sophomore in high school, has fully recovered from the critical injuries he suffered in the summer of 2004, though he stays off the athletic field so as to avoid another head injury.

“If you took a look at him today, you would never know,” said Larissa Hentz, Kimball’s ex-wife and the mother of his two sons.

What he hasn’t recovered from is the thought that his father tried to kill him to collect the life insurance, Hentz said.

“He’s been trying to grapple with that for years,” she said. “He was just part of his dad’s money-motivated sickness.”

Read More >>

Weeks after moving in with his nephew, Terry Kimball vanishes

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Terry Kimball with his dogs Badger, Dutch and Matilda in 1997. Dutch and Matilda, left, accompanied "Uncle Terry" on his trip to Colorado, but it’s unclear what happened to the dogs after his death. (Courtesy of Karen Johnson)

News of his 10-year-old grand-nephew’s accident reached Terry Kimball at his home in Lincoln, Ala., a few days after he returned home from a visit to Colorado.

He told his wife he needed to go back to be with his nephew Scott Kimball’s older son, who lay in a coma at Children’s Hospital in Denver.

Accompanied by two of the couple’s dogs, Terry packed up his Chevy Tahoe and headed back west.

Late July 2004

After several days at the boy’s bedside, “Uncle Terry” began talking to Scott Kimball about sticking around to work with him in his beef business.

Scott Kimball had helped launch Faith Farms the previous year and regularly drove to Brush and Fort Collins to buy and sell cows. The work suited Terry — a heavy-set 60-year-old who had labored as a truck driver, home renovator and oil rig maintenance man.

He moved into Scott and Lori Kimball’s Adams County home, staying in the room belonging to Lori Kimball’s daughter, Kaysi McLeod, who had been missing since the previous summer.

Terry’s decision to stay in Colorado didn’t sit well with Karen Johnson, his wife of 11 years. Scott Kimball had a criminal history, and she didn’t trust him.

Read More >>

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Terry Kimball, near Hamilton, Mont., in 1996. (Courtesy of Karen Johnson)

I’ve spent half a life time searching,
Wondering where it will end.
Looking beyond tomorrow,
Wondering if the scars I’ve left behind
Will ever mend.

The poetry of Terry Kimball rings true with Karen Johnson, his wife of 11 years.

Terry was a wanderer, said Johnson, who met him in 1992 on the shrimp boat docks in Brunswick, Ga.

The Navy veteran, 60 when he died, started his career in the late 1960s as an officer with the Colorado State Patrol. In the early 1970s, he worked for the Longmont Fire Department.

Read More >>

Kaysi McLeod is laid to rest in Wheat Ridge, 6 1/2 years after Scott Kimball murdered her, and a few weeks after the FBI returned her remains to her family.

About 200 friends and well-wishers — including Howard Emry and Bob Marcum, whose daughters Kimball also killed — attend a memorial service at Bethlehem Lutheran Church. Kaysi’s divorced parents, Lori and Rob McLeod, walk down the aisle together as their 19-year-old daughter’s flower-draped casket is wheeled toward the altar.

“Life was not always easy, but her glass was always half full,” says Mike Harmon, a Baptist pastor and Lori McLeod’s half-brother. “She knew the Lord. She’s with him today.”

Then, the congregation gathers graveside in Crown Hill Cemetery as Kaysi is placed in the ground.

FBI agent introduces Jennifer Marcum’s parents to their daughter’s killer

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Bob Marcum, pictured at his home in Springfield, Ill., holds a photograph of his daughter Jennifer at age 8. (Kristen Schmid Schurter / For the Camera)

Bob Marcum and Mary Willis hadn’t heard from their daughter in more than a year, and no one seemed to have the slightest idea where she had gone.

Jennifer Marcum had stopped calling her parents, who lived in the Midwest and were divorced when she was an infant. Her phone went dead in the spring of 2003, disconnected with no forwarding number.

Her parents’ concerns grew.

At 25, Jennifer had already been through a failed marriage, had a son with a former boyfriend and was in love with an accused drug dealer in federal prison.

“We kept hoping she’d been arrested and that she was in prison and didn’t want us to know,” remembers Bob Marcum, who lives in Springfield, Ill. “We thought maybe she was in the witness protection program.”

One day in May 2004, the worried father asked a cop friend in Springfield to run his daughter’s name through a federal criminal database.

Read More >>

Growing up in Lafayette, Scott Kimball meets the man who would scar him forever

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Police mugshots of Scott Kimball through the years, starting with his first felony conviction in Beaverhead County, Mont., in 1988, center. (Courtesy of Boulder County DA’s Office)

Police knew early on that Scott Kimball could be trouble.

Within a few years of joining the Lafayette police force in 1976, Mark Battersby responded to a call involving the adolescent Kimball, who grew up in Old Town.

The boy had gotten a hold of one of his father’s guns and was shooting out of his home, hitting other houses.

“I knew he was going to be a handful,” remembers Battersby, who’s now a commander with the department.

Born Sept. 21, 1966, Kimball attended Lafayette Elementary and Lafayette Middle schools, and he spent one month at Centaurus High before withdrawing as a freshman.

“He wasn’t one of the popular kids,” says Tina Goeden, 42, who went to elementary school with Kimball. “He was pretty quiet.”

Kimball’s parents divorced in 1976. His mother, Barb Kimball, would fall in love with another woman, and his father, Virgil Kimball, eventually moved out of the state and remarried.

Distressed by the breakup of his parents’ marriage, Kimball spent time with his grandmother at Lafayette’s Skylark Mobile Home Park, where he met a 41-year-old computer programmer who would scar him forever.

Read More >>

Ted Peyton, 74, returned to Nederland after serving time

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Theodore Peyton.

Theodore Peyton has done his time.

Sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually abusing Scott Kimball and another boy, Peyton spent five years, three months and two weeks behind bars before being released on Oct. 6, 1996.

But Kimball remains scarred, and relatives say the abuse contributed to his life of crime.

In a July 1992 letter Kimball wrote to a Boulder district judge, he pleaded that Peyton remain behind bars.

“Ted Peyton denied me my right to a normal, healthy innocent childhood,” Kimball wrote to the judge, who was considering a sentence reduction for Peyton. “Because of Ted Peyton’s selfishness and his need for sexual gratification he has damaged my life forever.”

Read More >>

Kimball flees as Lafayette police investigate check fraud

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

A surveillance photo shows Scott Kimball cashing a forged check on optometrist Cleve Armstrong’s account at the former Centennial Bank of the West on South Boulder Road in Lafayette. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Cleve Armstrong thumbed through his stack of mail. The Lafayette optometrist, just back from vacation, couldn’t find his most recent bank statement.

He walked next door to Heritage Bank, where he kept $140,000 in a money-market account. The manager informed him there had been activity in his account — major activity.

More than $83,000 had been moved to his checking account over the last three weeks. From there, $55,000 worth of checks had been written to just two companies: Rocky Mountain All Natural Beef and Rocky Mountain Cattle Co.

The check-fraud case landed on the desk of Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher a few days later, on Jan. 16, 2006. He met with the 60-year-old eye doctor at his optometry office at 801 S. Public Road.

Barb Kimball ran an insurance office in the same building. Her son had a desk, a computer and some meat freezers in the basement, near a poorly secured closet where Armstrong kept his most sensitive financial records.

Read More >>

Caught after California car chase, Kimball starts facing serious questions

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Barreling down a highway in California’s Coachella Valley, Scott Kimball grabbed his cell phone and called his girlfriend.

It was March 14, 2006, and he was racing up to 80 mph in a Ford F-350 as a contingent of U.S. marshals and sheriff’s deputies from Riverside County gave chase.

Nickelback’s “Rockstar” blasted through his truck’s speakers.

“I’m through with standin’ in line to clubs I’ll never get in,
It’s like the bottom of the ninth and I’m never gonna win,
This life hasn’t turned out quite the way I want it to be.”

Kimball had been living in a rented casita in the California desert and dating 31-year-old Denise Pierce since fleeing Colorado two months earlier. Federal authorities had finally issued a warrant for his arrest on multiple probation violations, and they’d used his cell phone to trace his location.

Read More >>

Families, detectives discover there’s one man linking the missing victims

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

The billboard put up by Jennifer Marcum’s parents outside of Shotgun Willie’s in the summer of 2006. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

The name stunned Rob McLeod. Twelve letters in black and white could be the key to his daughter’s disappearance.

Kaysi had been missing for three years, and her father was reading a June 29, 2006, Westword article online about another woman who had disappeared. The story profiled Bob Marcum’s search for his own daughter, 25-year-old Jennifer, who had gone missing six months before Kaysi.

Marcum and his ex-wife, Mary Willis, had erected a billboard two days earlier above Shotgun Willie’s, the Glendale strip club where Jennifer had worked. The sign asked plaintively: “Jennifer, where are you?”

News of the billboard caught McLeod’s attention. But the name Scott Kimball, mentioned in Westword as one of Jennifer’s acquaintances, made him sit straight up.

Kimball was married to McLeod’s ex-wife, Lori.

Read More >>

FBI Agent Jonny Grusing “the right person” for the case

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

The FBI assigned Special Agent Jonathan Grusing to investigate Kimball in connection with the missing-persons cases in late 2006. (Marty Caivano / Camera)

Although the families of Scott Kimball’s murder victims are furious at the FBI for keeping him out of prison as an informant, they make a clear exception for Special Agent Jonny Grusing.

“When they picked Jon Grusing, they picked the right person,” said Howard Emry, who spent months trying to get the FBI to investigate the January 2003 disappearance of his daughter LeAnn.

Only once Grusing took Kimball’s case in late 2006 did Emry and the other families start to feel like someone at the bureau cared.

Assistant U.S. District Attorney Dave Conner, who prosecuted Kimball on federal firearms charges, called Grusing “the best criminal investigator I’ve ever seen.”

Read More >>

Hunter’s discovery of first body forces Scott Kimball to deal with prosecutors

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

LeAnn Emry, whose January 2003 death was connected to Scott Kimball once investigators interviewed her imprisoned boyfriend in October 2007. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing called Howard Emry at home on Oct. 29, 2007, and asked to speak to his daughter, LeAnn.

“She’s been missing for nearly five years now,” Emry remembers replying.

He told the agent he feared LeAnn had been killed back in January 2003.

Find “Hannibal,” he remembers saying. “That’s who murdered my daughter.”

Two days later, Grusing and Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher visited LeAnn’s boyfriend, Steven Holley, in federal prison.

Scott Kimball was Hannibal, Holley told them.

He had murdered LeAnn after getting out of prison, promising he would help Holley with a scheme to escape.

A twisted, “sick fuck,” Kimball had fantasies of being a serial killer, Holley said.

Kimball once asked Holley to torture and kill his second wife, the mother of his children, and to make sure she knew Kimball ordered the hit, he said.

Read More >>

Young Lafayette detective ‘connected the dots’

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher stands in front of the 801 S. Public Road building that in 2005 housed the offices of Cleve Armstrong, Barb Kimball and Scott Kimball. (Kasia Broussalian / Camera)

Some of the strongest praise of Gary Thatcher’s efforts to put Scott Kimball behind bars comes from an unlikely source — the criminal himself.

“All credit goes to Detective Thatcher. He is from small hick town USA and he connected the dots,” Kimball wrote to the Camera, in response to a letter sent to him at the Sterling Correctional Facility. “Thatcher is the reason I was even looked at.”

Thatcher, an eight-year veteran of the Lafayette Police Department, shares credit with the FBI, the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office and the families who doggedly looked for answers about their loved ones’ disappearances.

“To me, it was a team effort,” Thatcher said.

But it was the young detective’s initial investigation into a $55,000 check-fraud scam that led to Kimball’s undoing.

Read More >>

After failing to find Jennifer’s body, Kimball gets two counts, 70 years

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

A sheriff’s deputy leads LeAnn Emry’s family to the site where investigators found her body in March 2009. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

A convoy of nine SUVs loaded with FBI agents, sheriff’s deputies, defense attorneys, a Lafayette police detective, two Boulder County prosecutors and Scott Kimball bounced and swayed down rutted roads in Utah’s desolate Book Cliffs country north of Moab.

Driving through pouring rain, the vehicles slid sideways as Kimball guided the cavalcade to the locations where he said he’d buried LeAnn Emry and Jennifer Marcum.

It was February 2009, and law-enforcement officials had pored over maps and satellite photos with Kimball before narrowing down the search area.

“It was huge country, and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” remembers Boulder County prosecutor Amy Okubo.

Two days of searching from sunup to sundown yielded nothing.

March 11, 2009

The contingent returned to the same area, and this time, Kimball pointed out a dirt road leading to a box canyon.

There, FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing found a bone. Then a hair clip.

A bullet fragment discovered at the site would match the ballistics of Kimball’s .40-caliber Firestar handgun, which had been tracked to an acquaintance’s house two years earlier.

Kimball had just led investigators to the remains of LeAnn Emry, six years and 41 days after shooting her in the head.

Investigators ushered Kimball back into a government SUV as the recovery proceeded.

Howard Emry holds a memorial stone that he plans to put at the Utah site where Scott Kimball killed his daughter. (Matthew Cilley / for the Camera)

“We didn’t want him to have any pleasure from reliving anything,” remembers Katharina Booth, Okubo’s colleague in the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office.

As Booth looked up the wash and watched agents and deputies uncover more bones from the cliff face, she was overcome.

She could envision LeAnn, curling into a fetal position in those last, defenseless moments. The memory still brings the prosecutor to tears.

“She knew what was happening to her,” Booth says. “It was incredibly moving.”

Kimball, on the other hand, seemed unfazed by the find.

Later that morning

The convoy rolled west as the search for Jennifer’s remains resumed.

Kimball perked up as he led the crew deeper into the desert.

He told them he had pulled Jennifer’s body from the back of a Jeep and buried her in a creek bed. He described landmarks in the area, the wash where her body lay and the rocks used to bury her.

“Merry Christmas!” Kimball exclaimed, as the group entered Spring Canyon.

Nothing.

“You can take this to the bank,” he shouted, as another indistinguishable wash turned out to be a dead end.

After several hours of searching, officials shut the operation down.

“We went from this canyon to that canyon to this canyon to that canyon,” Okubo remembers. “It felt more like he was messing with us.”

Over the next month, authorities excavated creek beds and used cadaver dogs in the search for Jennifer. They turned up no trace.

“It felt like failure,” Booth says softly.

Scott Kimball is wheled into a Boulder County courtroom before his sentencing hearing on Oct. 8, 2009. (Mark Leffingwell / Camera)

June 29, 2009

The search for “Uncle Terry” went more smoothly.

Scott Kimball drew a map to the spot high in the Colorado Rockies where he’d dumped his uncle’s body. As soon as the snow melted in the mountains, a search team headed to Vail Pass.

“Scott had told us Terry was wrapped up in a gray tarp with 100 feet of white rope,” Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher remembers.

The search team pulled off of logging road 713A in Eagle County and spread out to comb through the woods.

Shortly before noon, Thatcher spotted a tarp tucked into some trees in the distance.

“Got you that body, get up here,” Thatcher texted Booth down in Boulder.

An autopsy revealed that Terry Kimball had been shot through the back of the head with a .40-caliber handgun.

Fall 2009

Concluding that Scott Kimball had violated the agreement by failing to find Jennifer’s body, prosecutors ripped up their original deal with him.

They hammered out a new one: Plead guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and go to prison for 70 years.

Kimball agreed.

“I’m a gambler. I know a great deal when I see one,” he later wrote in response to questions the Camera sent to him at Sterling Correctional Facility. “I was already doing 48 years for fraud. Why take a chance of receiving four death sentences or life without parole when I could put four potential murder cases to rest?”

Jennifer Marcum’s sister, Tammy Marcum, hugs father Bob Marcum after a Boulder County district judge sentenced Scott Kimball to 70 years in prison on Oct. 8, 2009. (Mark Leffingwell / Camera)

Oct. 8, 2009

In front of a packed Boulder County district courtroom, Kimball pleaded guilty to two counts of murder for the deaths of LeAnn Emry, Jennifer Marcum, Kaysi McLeod and Terry Kimball.

Sitting in a wheelchair and looking much older than his 43 years, Kimball glanced at the standing-room-only crowd as he was wheeled into the courtroom.

The victims’ grief-stricken parents and siblings — most of them facing Kimball for the first time — lambasted the defendant for his crimes.

“He made the deliberate choice to murder, and he made that choice at least four times,” LeAnn’s mother, Darlene Emry, said through tears.

Howard Emry, LeAnn’s father, said his daughter had a bright future that ended with Kimball.

“If LeAnn had lived, I am certain that many people would have benefited from her life,” he said.

Rob McLeod told the court his daughter, Kaysi, had gone through a “prodigal season” in her life, using drugs for a time and running away from home. But he said she was turning her life around when she met Kimball.

“I was present, right there, the very moment that Kaysi took her first breath in this world,” he said. “Scott Kimball was there to take her last.”

Through a cascade of tears, Lori McLeod faced her former husband in court and said God had received her only child.

“I believe that Kaysi has forgiven Scott Kimball,” she said. “I choose to forgive Scott Kimball.”

Bob Marcum, still without a daughter to bury, told the court that Kimball “has destroyed our lives,” and questioned whom else he had hurt.

“How many other people are missing as a result of his life?” he said.

Tammy Marcum demanded that Kimball say where he’d dumped her sister’s body so the family could give Jennifer a Christian burial.

“There is not going to be any place for your soul until you truly repent and you tell me where my sister is,” Tammy Marcum said, her voice strained by anger.

Family members lifted Kleenexes to their faces, as sounds of sobbing swept the courtroom.

Kimball, dressed in a red jail uniform, looked straight ahead in silence.

Click here to read more about Boulder prosecutors Katharina Booth and Amy Okubo »

Click here to read the previous chapter »

[Show as slideshow]

Veteran prosecutors still touched by Kimball case

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Prosecutors Katharina Booth, left, and Amy Okubo, tagged by Kimball as "the Boulder bitches," pose for a photo in Courtroom Q of the Boulder County Justice Center. (Marty Caivano / Camera)

Katharina Booth, Boulder County chief deputy district attorney, has kept the text message Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher sent last summer after finding Terry Kimball’s body near Vail Pass.

Her colleague, Chief Deputy DA Amy Okubo, hasn’t erased her iPhone photos of the Utah desert where she spent several days with a search team last March looking for human bones or signs of a makeshift grave.

These are some of the grim relics of the Scott Kimball serial murder case, which contained no shortage of twists and turns for those trying to get to the bottom of it.

“From beginning to end, everything about this case has been amazing,” said Okubo, a 16-year veteran of the office. “Who could have known we would end up here?”

Here being a 70-year prison sentence for a homegrown killer who four years ago amounted to little more than a white-collar nuisance in the eyes of investigators.

Okubo, 50, and Booth, 37, got to the heart of Kimball’s misdeeds by tirelessly boring into and disarming their suspect. Booth, who already had her suspicions about Kimball from a 2004 incident in which he was suspected of trying to kill his son, insisted that then-DA Mary Lacy let her take the case.

“When Katharina gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go,” Okubo said.

Dubbed by Kimball as “the Boulder bitches,” the two spent countless hours gathering and analyzing evidence, starting with check-fraud allegations in Lafayette and then the murders of four people across two states. They negotiated with Kimball, cajoled him, leaned on him. They finally got a two-count murder conviction and returned the remains of three of his victims to the families.

“They are remarkable, tough prosecutors, and if I were Scott Kimball I would come up with some names for them as well,” Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett said.

Both women continued working other cases throughout.

Each successfully tried a first-degree murder case last year — Okubo prosecuted Diego Alcalde in the decade-old beating death of University of Colorado student Susannah Chase, and Booth prosecuted Joseph Abeyta for shooting William Andrews in Boulder in January 2009.

Whether Kimball’s case ends up as a defining moment in Booth’s and Okubo’s careers, there is no question his crimes have touched them forever.

Booth, with 11 years as a prosecutor under her belt, still breaks down when recounting how Howard and Darlene Emry laid flowers at the spot where Kimball killed their daughter more than seven years ago.

And Okubo marvels at the extraordinary combination of determination and luck that finally put Kimball away.

“I don’t think we’ll ever see something like that again,” she said.

Go back to Chapter 14 »

Some of the victims’ families find closure, but many questions remain unanswered

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Howard and Darlene Emry sit together at the Church of the Nazarene in Payette, Idaho, during a memorial service last month for their murdered daughter, LeAnn. The recovered remains of Scott Kimball’s victims have only been returned to their families in the last few weeks. (Matt Cilley / for the Camera)

Last month, inside the Church of the Nazarene in Payette, Idaho, Howard Emry delivered the eulogy that he and his wife, Darlene, had waited seven years to give.

“LeAnn had a compassionate heart, especially toward those less fortunate than herself,” Emry said from behind a wooden lectern adorned with a cross, bouquet and two photos of his daughter, forever 24. “If she had lived today, I believe her life would have benefited many people.”

Although the FBI still had LeAnn’s remains, awaiting last-minute corrections to her death certificate, the Emrys decided to finally hold her memorial service Feb. 9.

“It helped an awful lot,” Howard Emry said. “It helped me in the fact that I was able to tell people who LeAnn was.”

The FBI has since returned LeAnn’s remains. When the weather gets warmer, the Emrys will scatter her ashes at a secret spot in Wyoming where their animal-loving daughter laid to rest her favorite Dalmatian years ago.

Read More >>

Describing himself as a ‘cleaner,’ Kimball claims he isn’t solely responsible for murders

By John Aguilar
Camera Staff Writer

Scott Kimball, in his first televised interview from prison, told Fox 31 news that “even a good guy can have a bad side.” (Courtesy of Fox 31 News)

Scott Kimball likes to describe himself not as a serial killer, but as a “cleaner.”

“You have a problem that you need cleaned up, call a cleaner,” Kimball wrote from the Sterling Correctional Facility in response to questions sent to him by the Camera.

His meaning is vague at best, but Kimball claims the killings of three women in 2003 stemmed from a vast criminal enterprise in which he played only a small part. The FBI, he said, was complicit.

Kimball’s stories are pure fantasy, and they have changed to fit the evidence before him, Boulder County prosecutor Katharina Booth said.

Each of his claims has been investigated and discounted, she said.

Read More >>

Ted Peyton's sex offender registry photo, taken March 29, 2010

Ted Peyton, who was convicted of sexually abusing Scott Kimball in the 1970s and 1980s, registers with Boulder County as a sex offender after concerned mothers in Nederland contact the Sheriff’s Office about the fact that he is not registered.

Cmdr. Rick Brough, with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, said he wasn’t certain why Peyton wasn’t made to register in 1996, when he finished his prison sentence in the sex abuse case.

“I’m thinking that when he was released, a lot of the rules that are in place now weren’t in place then,” Brough said. “That’s why he slipped through. Things have tightened up over the years.”

The Denver Post reported that Scott Kimball is a potential suspect in “several” unsolved disappearances.

The FBI disclosed the fact that investigators are looking at specific cases after the paper tried to obtain a memorandum dissecting the bureau’s handling of Kimball as an informant. The bureau refused to release the internal report.

Several law enforcement sources had told the Camera they believed Kimball was likely involved in other missing-persons cases, but they did not confirm that any investigations were ongoing.

An advance copy of a book written by Scott Kimball’s cousin, Ed Coet, includes an excerpt of a jailhouse interview that appears to directly tie Kimball to the brutal 2004 murder of a woman whose dismembered body was dumped in Westminster.

Cover of SLK: Serial Killer (PublishAmerica)

In “SLK: Serial Killer,” Kimball is quoted telling a fellow inmate that he “picked up a hooker” off Colfax Avenue, gave her drugs, strangled her and “used chemicals on her to test what the acid did to her skin.”

Catrina Renee Powell, who was last seen alive on East Colfax Avenue in Denver on Oct. 24, 2004, was found dead the next day behind a strip mall at 7530 Sheridan Blvd. in Westminster.

Her hands had been cut off, and she had severe head injuries.

An autopsy report from the Adams County Coroner’s Office, which became public in September 2010, revealed that Powell had chemical burns on her body and that her cause of death included strangulation. Prior to the autopsy report becoming public, investigators working on the case hadn’t disclosed the existence of chemical burns and hadn’t revealed the exact cause of her death.

Kimball’s account comes from a May 2009 interview that FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing conducted with an inmate who was housed with Kimball in Park County, according to the book.

Catrina Powell (Denver Post)

Powell’s sister-in-law, Dachelle Powell, confirms to the Camera that investigators have told her Kimball is being investigated for the murder.

The FBI refuses to comment.

 

Investigators who have been looking into the unsolved murder of Seattle federal prosecutor Tom Wales for nine years — a case for which Scott Kimball had once been an informant — turn their attention to Kimball himself as a possible suspect.

Tom Wales (walesfoundation.org)

An anonymous law enforcement source tells the Camera that Kimball is under investigation in the Oct. 11, 2001 murder, in which someone standing in Wales’ backyard in Seattle fatally shot him through his basement window.

This becomes the fourth known cold case into which authorities are looking that involves Kimball as a possible suspect.

A timeline the Camera assembled of Kimball’s whereabouts in the latter part of 2001 is incomplete, but shows that he spent time in Seattle around the time Wales was killed.

An arrest report from Nov. 7, 2001, shows that Kimball was picked up by Cordova, Alaska, police on suspicion of forging thousands of dollars of checks in his brother’s name. The report states that Kimball had opened a Wells Fargo bank account in Seattle into which he attempted to cash bogus checks that appeared to come from his employer, a Seattle-based fishing company.

Investigators also reported that Kimball admitted he had “hypothetically” purchased blank check stock at an Office Depot in Seattle before his arrest.

In a book about Kimball, titled “SLK: Serial Killer,” his cousin Ed Coet wrote that Kimball spent a period of time in Seattle recuperating from an injury he sustained on a fishing boat.

Coet wrote that Kimball’s mother, Barb, visited her son in Seattle and stayed with him in a hotel as he recovered from his fishing injury. She doesn’t recall the exact dates she was there, Coet said Thursday, but she remembered that it was fall of 2001.

Seattle skyline (Wikimedia Commons)

Kimball told Coet that after he was arrested in Alaska in early November 2001, he used information about the Wales murder to play the FBI. Gleaning whatever information he could about the case off the Internet, he convinced authorities that he had overheard a couple of inmates talking about Wales. He said solving the murder of a federal prosecutor was a top priority for the FBI and they listened eagerly to what he had to say.

The most significant clue the FBI has gotten on the Wales murder case over the last decade came in 2006, when the bureau’s office in Seattle received an anonymous letter from the purported killer. The writer said a woman had hired him to shoot Wales and that he took the job because he was broke.

The letter was sent from Las Vegas and was postmarked Jan. 23, 2006. Kimball had left Lafayette about a week earlier, when he realized authorities were going to launch an investigation into a massive check fraud scam he had committed. He was bound for southern California, but it’s unclear whether he stopped in Las Vegas on the way.

When Coet asked his cousin if he had killed Wales, Kimball denied it.

“If I did, do you think I’d tell you?” Kimball is quoted in Coet’s book. “You don’t just go to jail for killing a federal prosecutor. You get executed for that sort of thing. But if anybody ever asks you, my answer is no.”