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.”

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.

“He’s implicated every criminal gang,” she said. “Anyone who was a remote possibility, they were run down back and forth.”

What is clear, Booth said, is that Kimball is looking for his next con — even from behind bars.

A search of Kimball’s cell late last month uncovered several fraudulent FBI documents that Kimball created to convince the media of his conspiracy theories.

The fakes, which Kimball is thought to have made on county jail computers before being sentenced to prison, prompted Booth to ask a judge to prevent the inmate from getting any more hard copies of evidence from his case.

Her request is pending.

“He will go to whatever lengths to fabricate stories, documents and witnesses to support himself and hold himself harmless,” Booth said. “He’ll do anything to avoid the truth.”

Power and money

There’s one thing Kimball and investigators agree on: that power and money drove Kimball.

“If anybody wants to know why I did what I did, my answer is that I always did it for the money, huge amounts of money,” Kimball wrote.

Jennifer Marcum and LeAnn Emry had to be killed because they worked as drug mules, smuggling contraband into prison through their boyfriends, and stole money from the gang, Kimball said. He said he helped arrange for their executions — and watched them happen — but was not the triggerman.

Sterling Correctional Facility, the maximum-security prison in northeast Colorado where Kimball is held. (Courtesy photo)

A previous story he told a fellow inmate, though — the account of hiking LeAnn up a Utah canyon, making her strip naked, then shooting her — matches the forensic evidence.

In Kaysi McLeod’s case, Kimball said he saw the 19-year-old overdose on meth and fall into a campfire in the Colorado mountains.

But the same inmate told investigators that Kimball said he strangled Kaysi with a dog collar and smashed her head with a rock because she was a potential witness against the leader of a powerful drug gang.

No evidence of a skull fracture showed up in an autopsy of Kaysi’s remains, and her manner of death is undetermined.

Kimball, an FBI informant at the time, said his handler — Special Agent Carle Schlaff — knew about the women’s disappearances but allowed him to engage in lucrative criminal activities, including an Internet sex video business.

“The one agent was driven by greed,” Kimball wrote. “It’s always about power and money.”

Kimball admits that he shot his uncle, but he claims he did it to protect his sons from potential sexual molestation.

Amy Okubo, Booth’s colleague in the District Attorney’s Office, said Kimball’s motives were probably a lot less grandiose. He liked to control people, she said.

“I think he thrived more on the ability to manipulate and control the relationship even while they were still alive for awhile — to have that power — and use them for what he could use them for while he could until he just didn’t need it anymore,” she said.

Terry Kimball’s murder was probably driven by money, since Scott Kimball used his uncle’s name and credit card after his death, Okubo said. She said it’s also possible that Terry knew too much about his nephew’s check scams.

He used LeAnn for financial gain, too, Okubo said, helping her drain her bank account before killing her, then giving her credit card to a hooker a few days later as payment for sex.

Okubo said sexual sadism — as evidenced by hundreds of explicit rape simulation and bondage photos found on Kimball’s computer — probably contributed to the women’s murders as well.

The condition of the victims’ remains — found after years of exposure and deterioration — makes it impossible to tell whether Kimball raped them.

Life in prison

Today, Kimball spends 22 hours and 45 minutes of every day alone in a 6½-by-13-foot cell at the Sterling Correctional Facility, a 2,500-bed prison surrounded by a high-voltage “lethal fence.”

The discovery of the fake FBI documents prompted prison officials to move Kimball to administrative segregation at the start of this month.

He has no interaction with other inmates, and he’s shackled and escorted by two armed guards for his 1¼-hour breaks to take a shower or visit the exercise room.

Department of Corrections spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti said she doesn’t know how long Kimball will be kept in segregation.

Once he’s out, he’ll be returned to the “close-custody” unit where he’d been housed since arriving at Sterling in October.

There, inmates have one cellmate and get a few hours every other day in the exercise yard or common room. They can also find a variety of jobs, earning 30 to 60 cents a day.

Kimball has worked at Sterling upholstering chairs in a workshop and filing books at the prison library, Sanguinetti said. He hasn’t had access to computers there, she said.

Kimball could be eligible for parole in 38½ years — at age 81.

“I won’t spend the rest of my life in prison,” he wrote to the Camera in December.

But in order to be considered for release, his behavior and conduct behind bars must be exemplary over the next four decades. Even then, there’s no guarantee he would receive parole.

Asked whether Kimball could try to shave time off his sentence by revealing the whereabouts of Jennifer’s body sometime down the road, Okubo said it’s unlikely but not entirely out of the question.

That would require a “huge process” of consulting the victims’ families and gauging the societal danger of potentially releasing Kimball earlier, Okubo said.

“We never foreclosed on the option of getting more information from him,” she said. “We always expected that he would use that as a carrot to dangle in front of us, but whether it would be successful is anybody’s guess. You never say never.”

Booth said she fully expects Kimball to reach out from behind bars and attempt to trade information for a deal on his sentence.

“He holds his trump cards close to his chest until he’s in a desperate spot,” she said. “Then he’ll play them.”

But Booth said she’s confident Kimball won’t be able to take advantage of the system again.

“We are convinced that he will die in prison,” she said.

Go back to Chapter 15 »

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.

They also plan to leave a heavy stone plaque, with inlaid marble, bearing the phrase “Forever Loved Never Forgotten,” at the spot in the desolate canyon where Scott Kimball killed LeAnn in January 2003.

“We want to change the site from being a murder site to being a memorial site,” Howard Emry said. “I regret she had to go through so much pain up to her death, but she’s in a peaceful place now.”

Kaysi McLeod’s parents buried their daughter last weekend.

The 19-year-old’s headstone had sat above empty ground in Wheat Ridge’s Crown Hill Cemetery for a year and a half, as the family waited for the FBI to return her remains.

Lori McLeod found herself wondering if Kaysi might still be alive. Maybe the FBI wasn’t being truthful, she thought. Maybe the bones found in the northern Colorado mountains in the fall of 2007 belonged to someone else. She found herself looking twice at young women who resembled her daughter.

“Then I had a horrible thought: Would I even recognize her?” McLeod said.

Lori McLeod sits next to her daughter’s headstone in Wheat Ridge’s Crown Hill Cemetery in December. The family buried Kaysi last Saturday, after waiting 18 months for the FBI to return her remains. (Mark Leffingwell / Camera)

Kaysi’s father, Rob McLeod, said he still feels “broken” by his daughter’s untimely death.

“There isn’t a single day where a part of me isn’t hurt,” he said.

The parents, divorced when Kaysi was a young girl, finally received the remains at the start of this month.

On March 13, about 200 people gathered to watch Kaysi’s wooden casket lowered into the earth.

Pastor Mike Harmon, Kaysi’s uncle, remembered her as a forgiving and spirited person “even in the midst of her rebellious escape.”

“Life was not always easy, but her glass was always half full,” Harmon said. “She knew the Lord. She’s with him today.”

Howard Emry — as well as Bob Marcum, whose daughter Jennifer was also killed by Scott Kimball — flew in from out of state to attend the ceremony.

Missing Jennifer

Jennifer’s family has no plans for a memorial service, no headstone to etch and polish.

Their daughter’s body has never been found.

Jennifer’s mother can do little but try to talk to her daughter through her dreams.

“There’s not a day I wake up where I don’t think of Jenny, not a day where I don’t wait for her to call me,” Mary Willis said, sobbing. “I remember how much me and her were alike, how much we loved each other, how much — no matter what — I just want her to come home.”

Theories abound as to why Kimball hasn’t revealed where he left Jennifer’s body.

FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing said Kimball may be hanging on to the information as leverage, as a way of extracting something of value from someone down the road.

Jennifer Marcum’s parents, Bob Marcum and Mary Willis, hug during Scott Kimball’s sentencing hearing in October 2009. Jennifer’s body has never been found. (Mark Leffingwell / Camera)

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

Bob Marcum, Jennifer’s father, believes it’s because he and his ex-wife refused to follow Kimball to the Colorado mountains four-and-a-half years ago when he offered to lead them to their daughter’s body.

In a phone conversation recorded by Willis less than two weeks after their 2005 meeting in Broomfield, Kimball told Willis he had already given her the opportunity to find Jennifer.

“You had your chance,” Kimball told the weeping mother.

Kimball, now housed in the maximum-security Sterling Correctional Facility in northeast Colorado, said he wants to help the FBI find Jennifer’s remains, but the bureau won’t provide him resources to do so.

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

And Bob Marcum is willing to keep waiting — for any sign of Jennifer. Until that day, he said, he takes solace in the belief that his daughter is in heaven. He won’t dwell on the idea that only Kimball knows where she is.

“Scott’s got no hold on me,” Marcum said.

FBI: Case a ‘tragedy’

Still, one question remains for all of the victims’ families.

None of them can comprehend why the FBI let Scott Kimball out of prison and didn’t keep a tighter leash on the informant as he turned into a serial killer.

Mary Willis and Lori McLeod are both considering wrongful-death lawsuits against the FBI.

“With all of his prior offenses, why would they let him out to be an informant?” Willis said.

McLeod, who married Kimball a week after her daughter went missing in August 2003, said that as much as she was “manipulated” by her former husband, she also feels used by the FBI.

The Kimball family plot in Lafayette Cemetery, where Terry Kimball will be laid to rest next to his parents. The Kimball family, who declined to comment for this series, received Terry’s remains in recent weeks, said Ed Coet, Scott Kimball’s cousin. (Paul Aiken / Camera)

“I just feel that something is being covered up,” she said.

FBI Special Agent in Charge James Davis acknowledges that the case is a “tragedy” for the families who lost loved ones.

“But the important thing to remember is that the man responsible is sitting in prison,” Davis said during an interview last month in the bureau’s downtown Denver office.

Davis said he can’t speak about confidential informants or cooperating witnesses involved in specific cases, including Kimball’s, but he said the use of people who have access to certain suspects and situations is vital to investigative work.

“We absolutely need informants to do our business,” he said. “We can’t do it without them.”

Davis said the FBI hasn’t changed its confidential informant program as a result of its experience with Kimball. The bureau, he said, already follows a rigid set of protocols to guard against abuse.

That’s especially true, he said, if an informant is going to be considered for release from prison, a decision made in concert with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and approved by a federal judge.

“We have to ask before they are recruited, ‘Is it worth the risk that this guy could break bad on us?’” Davis said.

Davis said the FBI looks at a potential informant’s criminal history, the “seriousness of the underlying offense” and the remaining prison sentence, then weighs those factors against “the potential benefit of what we hope to accomplish through the release.”

In Kimball’s case, although he already had four felonies on his record, he had never been convicted of a violent crime when he was released as a cooperating witness in 2002.

Once an informant is working for the bureau, an agent is required to contact that individual every 30 days, Davis said. Every 60 to 90 days, a supervisor at the FBI reviews the informant’s case file to determine his or her value as a source.

“Is this a guy we need to continue our relationship with?” Davis said. “We are continually testing our sources.”

Kimball said he saw little oversight from the FBI, and was “amazed” at how easily his plan worked.

“They were completely conned,” he said in a prepared statement read after his sentencing in Boulder last fall. “They released me early as planned.”

While free as an informant, Kimball said, he and his associates — whom he won’t identify — were “free to oversee our own profitable criminal enterprise.”

In his later correspondence with the Camera, Kimball wrote that one particular agent — his handler, Carle Schlaff — allowed him to pursue his own illegal activities right under the bureau’s nose.

“I used the trust the FBI had in me for my own agenda,” he wrote.

Schlaff, who remains with the bureau and is currently working undercover, declined to comment for this story.

Unaccounted for

Bob Marcum keeps a three-ring binder of news stories about human remains unearthed across several states in the West.

Maybe one of them will be his daughter, Jennifer.

Or maybe one of them will be another victim that investigators end up linking to Kimball.

“I’m just waiting,” Marcum said. “I’m waiting for the fifth person.”

He isn’t alone in suspecting that Kimball was involved in more murders.

“If we got a call today that said we got another case associated with Scott Kimball, I wouldn’t be surprised a bit — not a bit,” Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher said.

Kimball spent a lot of time driving through barren stretches of the American West. Thatcher wonders whether others crossed his path, only to be killed and disposed of in the wilderness.

Brett Gamblin, one of Kimball’s former friends, told the detective that he and Kimball once passed a hitchhiker while driving across the desert to California.

Too bad the man wasn’t a woman, whom they could “turn into a sex slave, beat for a few days and then kill,” Kimball told Gamblin.

“There’s a lot of time when Scott was out there that’s unaccounted for,” Thatcher said. “We may have stumbled onto the tail end of what he’s been up to.”

Investigators initially suspected that dozens of suggestive photos found on Kimball’s computers might be of other missing women, but they later determined that Kimball downloaded most of the pictures from the Internet.

The FBI won’t say whether it’s investigating Kimball in connection with any other missing people.

“That being said,” spokeswoman Kathleen Wright wrote in an e-mail, “the book is not closed on Scott Kimball.”

Click here to read more about Kimball’s life in prison, where he is still trying to work his next con »

Click here to read the previous chapter »

 

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 »

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 »

 

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.

Thatcher, who wears crisply starched shirts and has a neatly trimmed goatee, said he had no idea in January 2006 just how serious and complicated a criminal case he had been handed.

“When you’re assigned a check-fraud case, you never suspect you are going to work a case that will turn up four dead bodies,” he said.

Thatcher’s boss, Chief Paul Schultz, called the Kimball probe “the most extensive investigation we’ve ever undertaken.”

Schultz freed up Thatcher, then with just two years of detective work under his belt, for months at a time to pursue Kimball full-time. The detective, barely 30, worked alongside FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing, flying to Texas and Montana to conduct jailhouse interviews and scouring mountains and canyons for victims’ remains.

In all, the case generated nine thick binders of evidence.

“I think he did an outstanding job from the beginning to the end,” Schultz said. “Detective Thatcher played the leading role in bringing this case to a successful conclusion.”

Lori McLeod, who first spoke with Thatcher about her missing daughter, Kaysi, shortly after he began investigating Kimball for check fraud, said the detective’s determination to solve the case even after it transcended his jurisdiction is a testament to his dedication to the victims’ families.

“He did not have to do this,” McLeod said. “He chose to help us.”

Thatcher returned the praise, saying the families were critical in putting a human face on the case.

“They were good about personalizing the case,” he said. “You get to truly know your victims. They help you keep in mind that what you’re doing is important.”

Both the Lafayette Police Department and the Veterans of Foreign Wars awarded Thatcher with Officer of the Year awards last year for his work on the Kimball case.

Thatcher said the experience has made him a better investigator, and a more cynical one.

“It’s made me better at reading people when they’re lying,” he said.

Go back to Chapter 13 »

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.

The jailhouse account gave Grusing and Thatcher one more piece of evidence that they were on the trail of a serial murderer.

But they needed proof.

They needed bodies.

Sept. 29, 2007

Deep in the backcountry with rifle in hand, the hunter bushwhacked through a dense section of Routt National Forest several miles south of Walden.

He had been hunting in these parts — in the shadow of Little Haystack Mountain — since he was a kid and was comfortable being miles from the nearest road.

The hunter, a Brighton resident who asked that his name not be used, saw what looked like an elk skull up ahead. He approached slowly — 30 yards, 20 yards, 15 yards. The undergrowth thinned enough for him to see a bit more clearly.

“I put away the scope, and I knew exactly what it was,” he remembers. “It was an undisturbed skeleton, or parts of a skeleton, that was probably dumped there.”

A human skeleton.

With snow in the forecast, the hunter tied a rope to a tree to mark the location. Carefully, he picked up the skull and placed it in his pack.

He continued his trek through the northern Colorado woods.

Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher, left, and FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing near the remote area of Routt National Forest where a hunter discovered Kaysi McLeod’s body. Investigators went to the site in the summer of 2008 to look for evidence. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

The hunter brought the discovery to his two buddies back at camp that evening, and they called 911 the next day.

In the weeks that followed, he realized the unlikeliness of his find.

“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,” he says. “Something happened. Somebody wanted me to find it.”

The Jackson County coroner took possession of the remains. The Sheriff’s Office wrote up a full report. And the Colorado Bureau of Investigation was notified.

But news of the find wouldn’t reach the FBI for six months.

April 7, 2008

Agent Grusing had interviewed Kimball in prison, matching wits with the suspect at the interrogation table eight to 10 times.

Where were the missing women? Grusing asked. What about Uncle Terry?

Kimball dodged and swerved around the questions. He twisted the agent’s words and tried to use them against him.

“It was very taxing — what are we going to give away, what’s he going to be asking, is there a double meaning?” Grusing remembers. “He’s demanding, inquisitive and intelligent.”

But Kimball let one detail slip. Kaysi, he said, might have overdosed on drugs. Maybe on national forest land.

Grusing remembered the receipt from Walden.

Found among Kimball’s belongings the year before, it showed he had purchased pasta, meat and lighter fluid at a grocery store there a day after Kaysi’s disappearance.

The receipt that led FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing to Kaysi's body. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Walden was surrounded by Routt National Forest.

The agent made his fateful call, to ask the Forest Service for a map of the area. He was transferred to a supervisor, who told him about the human remains — probably female — found the previous fall.

He and Thatcher raced to Fort Collins, to the forensic anthropologist’s lab that had the unidentified remains. They shipped the bones to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Va., where a DNA analysis matched Kaysi’s parents.

It had been nearly five years since the 19-year-old girl remembered as fun-loving and artistic had left for her Saturday-night shift at Subway.

“My personal belief is that it was divine intervention,” Grusing says. “You can work as hard as you want on a case, but you need a break in a case like this to make it work.”

Scott Kimball was incredulous when he heard the news.

From that point forward, he became more willing to play ball with his adversaries.

“I think that’s the little crack that formed in his stone wall that told him maybe these bodies are findable,” Grusing says.

Fall 2008

Prosecutors drew up a deal.

If Kimball didn’t cooperate, they would pursue the missing-persons case full-bore.

They had collected a considerable amount of evidence against him.

A digital photo of LeAnn Emry, dated 11 days before her death, had been found on Kimball’s laptop.

Kaysi’s work hat and schedule had been found among his belongings.

And there was still plenty of circumstantial evidence linking him to the disappearances of Jennifer Marcum and Terry Kimball.

If convicted of first-degree murder, Scott Kimball would face life in prison without parole, if not the death penalty.

The other option: Admit to stealing $55,000 from Lafayette optometrist Cleve Armstrong, and take a 48-year sentence as a habitual offender. Then, if he led investigators to the other three bodies, he would only face a single count of second-degree murder.

For prosecutors, the deal represented their only chance of finding the missing victims.

Rather than pursuing a shaky first-degree murder case, they could secure Kimball behind bars for decades, still tag him with a murder conviction and give closure to the victims’ families.

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t do that without his help,” Boulder County Chief Deputy District Attorney Katharina Booth says. “It was a deal with the devil.”

Dec. 17, 2008

Kimball pleaded guilty in Boulder County District Court to one count of theft as a habitual offender and was sentenced to 48 years in prison.

Immediately after the hearing, Kimball and his lawyers met with prosecutors and investigators to take the next step. They laid out a memorandum of understanding stipulating that Kimball would show them where he’d buried his victims.

Kimball picked up a pen and signed the agreement.

Then he told everyone to pack their bags for Utah.

Click here to read more about Lafayette Detective Gary Thatcher’s role in the investigation »

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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.”

“He ended up with a very complex case where the stakes are very high,” Conner said.

Grusing, a 13-year FBI veteran who has worked bank robberies and terrorism cases out of the bureau’s Denver office, called the Kimball case an “elaborate puzzle.”

It required him to be especially thorough and prepared when questioning his suspect, who deftly fished for information and seamlessly switched topics in an effort to direct interrogations.

“He has the ability to quickly assess whoever is interviewing him and find out what makes them tick,” Grusing said. “I knew we weren’t going to get straight answers from him.”

The unflappable agent did his homework by talking to dozens of Kimball’s associates, family members, lovers, ex-wives, friends and fellow inmates and by scouring Kimball’s computers and financial records.

Because Kimball sees knowledge as power, Grusing said he leveraged the information he held to extract what concessions or admissions he could from his subject.

“We needed to build a case so solid that he could not knock down walls,” Grusing said.

Lori McLeod, whose daughter died in August 2003, said she might sue the FBI for wrongful death, but her fury doesn’t extend to Grusing, who still keeps in touch with the victims’ families.

“They sent him in to fix all the shit they dumped on us,” McLeod said. “I think he was passionate about it.”

Boulder County Deputy District Attorney Katharina Booth said she sympathizes with the families for the difficulty they had getting information from the FBI. But she said the bureau went a long way toward redeeming itself when it finally opened an investigation and put Grusing in charge.

“To the extent that they had felt ignored before, the opposite happened with Agent Grusing,” she said.

Go back to Chapter 12 »

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.

He had lived in the same house as Kaysi when the 19-year-old vanished.

McLeod had long suspected Kimball in Kaysi’s disappearance but had no evidence to prove it.

He knew he had to get in touch with Bob Marcum right away.

Marcum had simmering suspicions of his own. He had learned Kimball’s real name shortly after his bizarre meeting with “Joe Snitch” the year before, and he made a point of getting it into the Westword story.

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

Early October 2006

Bob Marcum flew from Illinois to Colorado to stay with Rob McLeod in Wheat Ridge.

Rob McLeod, with his wife, Michelle, outside the Broomfield Subway where his daughter, Kaysi McLeod, worked when she disappeared. (Mark Leffingwell / Camera)

The two men met up with Lori Kimball and searched for clues about her now-estranged husband, who was still in prison following his March arrest in California for violating the terms of his probation in an Alaska check-fraud case.

They drove to Scott Kimball’s former condo in Lakewood — where Jennifer had moved her furniture in February 2003 — and talked to the manager there.

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

Marcum became convinced that the man he’d met the previous summer — who had offered to show him where his daughter was buried — had claimed more victims. But how many?

“Is there anyone else Scott Kimball has been around who you’ve never seen again?” he remembers asking the others.

In fact, Lori Kimball responded, 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 recalls.

Mid-October through November 2006

The revelation about Terry Kimball jolted Marcum and made him realize he couldn’t go back to Illinois just yet. Too many elements pointed to Scott Kimball being a serial killer.

If there was ever a time to put pressure on law enforcement, that time was now.

Bob Marcum holds masks that belonged to his daughter, Jennifer, and were found among Scott Kimball’s possessions. (Kristen Schmid Schurter / For the Camera)

“I told my boss I didn’t know when I’d be back,” Marcum says.

He and Rob McLeod met with Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher, who was already investigating Kimball for check fraud.

They asked to have the bone pit on Kimball’s cattle pasture searched for human remains.

Police found nothing.

Detectives also dug up a swimming pool that Kimball had filled in on the Adams County property.

Nothing.

The two fathers met with the FBI at the bureau’s Denver office and explained the similarities in their daughters’ cases.

They said they knew Kimball had been a paid informant for the FBI.

They said they didn’t believe the story about his uncle moving to Mexico.

McLeod ended the conversation with a simple, but poignant, appeal for help.

“You can look into this and see if it goes anywhere, or you can choose not to,” he remembers saying. “It’s your choice.”

Within weeks, the FBI assigned Special Agent Jonathan Grusing, a 10-year veteran of the agency, to investigate Kimball in connection with the missing-persons cases.

Late 2006 to mid-2007

Known simply as “Jonny,” Grusing launched an exhaustive investigation, looking for any and all clues that Kimball had transitioned from a garden-variety fraudster to a cold-blooded killer.

Working together, he and Thatcher interviewed dozens of family members, friends, associates and inmates.

They subpoenaed cell-phone records, and they plunged deep into Kimball’s criminal and family history.

They searched boxes of Kimball’s belongings, trailers that had been associated with his beef business, and the truck he’d driven during the California chase. They analyzed hard drives and company ledgers.

They found Kaysi’s date book in a box of old documents and receipts.

They found evidence of the fake e-mail account set up for Terry Kimball.

They found Scott Kimball’s handgun and rifle at a friend’s house in Indio, Calif.

As incriminating as some of the evidence was, it didn’t confirm Kimball as a serial murderer.

“We knew what Scott was about, but we didn’t know how to prove it,” Thatcher says.

The investigators, it turned out, didn’t have the whole story.

Oct. 11, 2007

They wouldn’t glimpse the next chapter until they headed down to Texas to talk with federal inmate Steve Ennis — Jennifer Marcum’s former boyfriend and Kimball’s former cellmate.

As the interview drew to a close, Ennis told them about another inmate who knew Kimball from FCI-Englewood. 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.

So many years earlier, the same appeal — from Holley himself — had fallen on deaf ears.

It wouldn’t this time.

“Here’s another one,” Thatcher recalls telling himself, as he and Grusing boarded a plane back to Colorado.

Click here to read more about FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing »

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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.

Pierce told Kimball to pull over and turn himself in. Kimball refused, insisting the cops would kill him if he stopped. He knew things, he told her, and police kill people who know things.

He blasted south through the valley, past Indio and Thermal and toward the pungent shores of the Salton Sea. Deputies, equipped with assault rifles and body armor, stayed on his heels.

“I’m gonna trade this life for fortune and fame,
I’d even cut my hair and change my name.”

Mid-afternoon slipped into evening. Kimball turned off on dirt roads, careened through orchards and rolled over irrigation pipes in a farmer’s field.

Finally, out of gas, he rolled to a stop in a field on the western outskirts of Mecca, an agricultural community largely made up of migrant farm workers.

Dressed in a black T-shirt and sunglasses, Kimball emerged from the truck a couple of times — phone pinned to his ear — only to return to the driver’s seat within a few seconds.

He stayed in his truck. The officers waited. Darkness fell.

Scott Kimball surrenders in a field on the western outskirts of Mecca, Calif. He has not been out of prison since. (Courtesy of KESQ)

Around 7 p.m., Kimball got out of the truck, knelt on the ground, put his hands to his head and surrendered.

“Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar.”

Spring 2006

A lot of people wanted a word with Scott Kimball.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Denver was seeking him on several federal probation violations.

Lafayette police wanted to know what happened to $55,000 Kimball appeared to have swindled from an optometrist and family friend, Cleve Armstrong. They were also curious about the trailer found at Kimball’s former home after he reported it stolen and collected a $10,000 insurance claim.

And the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office hoped to find out more about the missing daughter of Kimball’s wife. Lori Kimball had reported 19-year-old Kaysi McLeod’s disappearance to the detective who questioned her in the Armstrong case.

FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff had also told Lafayette Detective Gary Thatcher that Kimball was likely connected to the disappearance of Jennifer Marcum, who had gone missing half a year before Kaysi.

“It couldn’t be a coincidence,” says Amy Okubo, the veteran Boulder deputy district attorney assigned to Kimball’s case. “There were too many people missing that he was last known to be with.”

But coincidences, even compelling ones, don’t amount to much in court, and Okubo knew it. She had no bodies and no witnesses and, as such, not much of a murder case.

She did, however, have fellow prosecutor Katharina Booth, who had watched with frustration as Kimball beat an attempted-murder rap involving his son a year and a half earlier.

May 2, 2006

Together, Booth and Okubo would methodically build a case against Kimball, starting with his lesser offenses and moving on to the missing-persons case, as the evidence allowed.

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)

But if they were ever going to open up an aggressive murder investigation that reached beyond Boulder County, they would need added firepower.

In downtown Denver, the Boulder prosecutors met with several FBI agents, federal prosecutors and members of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and laid out what they knew about Kaysi and Jennifer.

They hoped the feds would jump into the fray.

But neither the U.S. Attorney’s Office nor the FBI launched a missing-persons probe.

“We called them a couple more times, but we couldn’t get anywhere,” Okubo says.

Summer 2006

Booth and Okubo had no time to lose. Building a case, even a white-collar one, would take months. With Kimball’s complicated criminal record, the women weren’t sure how much prison time he owed on any of his outstanding crimes.

“We didn’t know if we could keep him locked up for as long as we felt society needed him locked up,” Okubo says.

They homed in first on Kimball’s check and insurance scams in Lafayette, where they had a clear paper trail.

They painstakingly worked through the evidence coming in from Detective Thatcher, who had interviewed tellers and managers at various banks where Kimball had cashed forged checks.

Then, they got a warrant for Kimball’s arrest on charges of theft, forgery and false reporting.

2007

Transferred to Colorado months after his California car chase and arrest, Kimball sized up his Boulder-based opposition. He figured he didn’t owe much time on the Lafayette case and would soon be rid of this prosecutorial pair.

But Okubo and Booth had studied Kimball’s skills of persuasion. Booth copped an attitude with Kimball, refusing to look at him during meetings and rolling her eyes when he spoke.

“The first time I met him, he could sense my disdain for him,” she says.

As time wore on, it became clear to Kimball that waving Okubo and Booth away wouldn’t be easy.

They were tenacious, dogged and smart. They planned to use Kimball’s six previous felony convictions to paint him as a habitual offender, allowing for a quadrupling of prison time when it came to sentencing him on the new white-collar charges.

Kimball grew frustrated. In jailhouse phone conversations, he labeled the pair with a name that would stick through the rest of the case. A name the prosecutors came to wear as a badge of honor: the Boulder bitches.

“He realized that Katharina and I were not going away,” Okubo recalls proudly. “The Boulder bitches weren’t going away.”

Click here to read the previous chapter »

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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.

The optometrist said Scott Kimball had impersonated him on the phone and moved money between his accounts, then forged Armstrong’s signature on a string of checks.

Thatcher went looking for Kimball, but to no avail.

The suspect had fled the state.

Late 2005

Kimball’s comfortable Colorado life had unraveled fairly quickly.

Scott Kimball cashing a forged check Dec. 28, 2005, at the former Heritage Bank on 95th Street in Lafayette. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

His FBI protection vanished when the bureau reassigned Special Agent Carle Schlaff, who had vouched for Kimball since his 2002 release from prison as a paid informant.

The FBI won’t say when or why it removed Schlaff from Kimball’s case, but by late fall the relationship had ended.

Kimball’s marriage had imploded, too.

Over the summer, Scott Kimball had twice called the cops on his wife, Lori Kimball, first claiming she hit him with a vacuum cleaner and threatened to kill him, and a month later saying she violated the resulting restraining order.

He moved out of the couple’s Adams County home sometime in the fall and rented a small house at 12632 Flagg Drive in Lafayette.

Kimball soon took up with a 25-year-old waitress, Melissa Anderson, who worked at Perkins in Westminster. Anderson described him as “gentleman-like,” even if he did have a proclivity for rough sex, bondage and snapping photos of her partially dressed.

Prohibited from purchasing firearms as a felon, Kimball used his new girlfriend to buy a .22-caliber Winchester rifle Dec. 28 at a Walmart in Thornton. He told Anderson he would teach her how to hunt, but once she bought him the gun she never heard from him again.

Jan. 20, 2006

Thatcher descended the stairs into the cluttered basement at 801 S. Public Road.

Several full-sized freezers lined the floor, a Dell computer occupied a table, and a white board with the words “Buy 2 steaks, get half off a roast” leaned against a roll-top desk.

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)

In a trash can, Thatcher found sheets of practice signatures and several bogus subpoenas regarding the assault case against Kimball’s wife.

He found a counterfeit lien release for a Jeep — complete with company letterhead and an altered seal from Barb Kimball’s notary stamp — which Scott Kimball used to cash in on insurance proceeds after wrecking the vehicle the previous month.

The detective also found mail addressed to Kimball’s former home in Adams County, now sub-leased to another tenant. He visited the property and found a trailer that Kimball had reported stolen in December.

Kimball had already received a $10,000 insurance payout for it.

Thatcher could see he had a brazen scam artist on his hands — one with a notable level of chutzpah and sophistication.

In interviews with the bank tellers and managers Kimball had charmed and deceived, Thatcher put together the picture of a supremely confident man who wore a big smile and spread an infectious optimism wherever he went.

“He had a presence about him when he walked into the room,” the detective says. “He would always offer (the tellers) steaks from his cattle business. Scott knew what people wanted to hear from him. He had the gift of gab.”

But once Thatcher began talking to Kimball’s estranged wife, whose daughter had gone missing more than two years earlier, he realized this cattleman with a penchant for schmoozing and shams might be hiding a far more sinister secret.

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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.”

In the letter, Kimball accused Peyton of not taking responsibility for his crimes, which “cost me and my family very dearly.”

“Ted Peyton has shown no remorse,” he wrote.

One of Kimball’s girlfriends, Denise Pierce, told police that Kimball “felt like his own mother sent him to be with the molester” and still harbors a fierce anger toward her.

Barb Kimball declined to comment for this series. But according to police reports from Peyton’s arrest, she said she didn’t suspect anything at first, and once she did start asking questions around 1980, her son denied being abused.

Rob McLeod, whose daughter Kaysi died at Kimball’s hands, said he sympathizes with Kimball for the abuse suffered as a child, but it doesn’t absolve him of guilt.

“It has some explaining power, but it doesn’t excuse anything,” McLeod said. “A victim should empathize with other victims.”

Howard Emry, the father of another of Kimball’s victims, echoed McLeod’s thoughts.

“A lot of people have gone through terrible things, and they’re not out there murdering people,” Emry said. “We are accountable for our actions in life. We all have tough situations in our lives.”

Peyton, now 74, still lives in the Nederland cabin where he molested the boys.

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

With that, Peyton turned slowly and walked back up the driveway to his cabin on the northern shore of Barker Reservoir.

Go back to Chapter 9 »

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.

1976 to 1983

The get-togethers began innocently enough — games at a bowling alley and trips to the mountains.

Theodore Peyton gave 10-year-old Kimball gifts and attention. He drove him to his cabin on the shores of Nederland’s Barker Reservoir, where they’d spend hours playing video games and goofing around.

But Peyton wanted more.

One night, he walked in on Kimball taking a bath and asked if the boy wanted his back washed. He told Kimball he wanted to give him a massage.

Peyton began leafing through pornographic magazines and pleasuring himself in front of the boy. He asked Kimball to touch him. Soon, he had Kimball pose for naked photos.

As Kimball entered his teen years, the visits to “Ted’s cabin” became increasingly sadistic.

Peyton plied Kimball with alcohol-spiked orange juice, engaged him in sexually charged games of “Truth or Dare” and snapped hundreds of Polaroid photos of him naked and tied up. Touching and fondling progressed to oral and anal sex.

Peyton warned Kimball not to tell his parents, brandishing a gun on one occasion and threatening to kill his father if he squealed.

Even after Kimball joined his father and brother to start high school in Hamilton, Mont. — a town of 4,000 south of Missoula — Peyton continued to molest him on trips back to Colorado.

The abuse wouldn’t end for seven years — just before Kimball dropped out of school and made a life of his own, hunting and guiding clients on big-game expeditions in the Bitterroot Mountains surrounding Hamilton.

October 1989

The dark secret in Nederland went unreported until Kimball turned 23 and shot himself in the head.

On a hunting trip with his brother in western Montana, Kimball had just returned to their motel. In the room alone, he put the barrel of a .30-30 rifle against his forehead and pulled the trigger.

The Camera covered Theodore Peyton's 1991 trial. (Camera archives)

The bullet, which glanced off his skull, combined with the backblast from the shot to tear a hole in his forehead. Kimball, in critical condition, lay in the hospital for several days.

His cousin Ed Coet remembers noticing a dramatic change in Kimball — whose forehead remains visibly scarred to this day — once he recovered.

“It’s like he lost his conscience,” Coet recalls. “He was never the same after that.”

In the aftermath of the suicide attempt, Kimball and several other young men told Boulder County sheriff’s investigators what Peyton did to them.

Peyton would be arrested after several months of investigation, convicted by a jury on six counts of sexual assault on a child and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Adulthood

Scott Kimball “blames everything on the abuse,” his mother told police years later. The episodes in Nederland made Kimball feel “ashamed as a man,” according to one of his girlfriends.

After high school, Kimball drifted from job to job and was married and divorced twice by his early 30s. He also began finding himself increasingly on the wrong side of the law.

He earned his first felony in 1988, for writing bad checks at Montana hotels. The same year, he got busted for passing a bad check in Missoula County, Mont., and breaking into two Broomfield homes and stealing a fishing pole, two rifles and a shotgun.

Scott Kimball and his mother, Barb, at the Blue Parrot restaurant in Louisville, two weeks after Kimball's release from prison as an FBI informant. (Courtesy of Ed Coet)

While he largely managed to avoid jail time, Kimball constantly had someone chasing him down who felt stiffed or cheated.

“It was not uncommon to have a process server on our porch every other week serving us papers,” remembers Larissa Hentz, his second wife, with whom he had two sons. “He always had an excuse. It was never his fault.”

The couple moved to Spokane, Wash., in the early ’90s, and Kimball got into the timber business.

He pulled off brazen logging scams, Hentz said, and swindled money from her dentist and the bishops at her church.

Two years after Kimball and Hentz divorced in 1997, she told Spokane police he kidnapped her at gunpoint and raped her repeatedly. Because the couple had continued having consensual sex after their split, prosecutors felt they couldn’t bring a case.

Even so, Kimball was winding up in court — and jail — on a more regular basis.

Spokane police started investigating him for three counts of check forgery. He landed in a Montana prison in 2000, following the revocation of a suspended sentence from his 1988 Missoula County case.

After being moved to a pre-release prison center in Helena, Mont., Kimball worked as a cashier at an E-Z Stop gas station, reporting back to the camp at the end of each shift. On July 29, 2001, while working at the station alone, he stole $677 and hit the road in a stolen truck.

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

Kimball made his way to Alaska and kept a low profile for several months. Using his brother’s name, he got engaged to a woman, Catherine Curtiss, who never knew him as anyone but Brett Kimball.

Kimball escaped from the Helena, Mont., prison pre-release center in July 2001, stealing a truck and $677. (Courtesy photo)

By November, he needed cash.

Using a computer and blank check stock purchased at an office supply store, Scott Kimball forged nearly $25,000 in checks using his brother’s name.

Alaska authorities caught up with him, recovering $11,300 in hundred-dollar bills in a Cordova hotel where he stayed with Curtiss.

Held in an Anchorage prison, with old warrants stacking up, Kimball started making himself useful.

He told the FBI his cellmate was plotting to kill a federal judge, a federal prosecutor and two witnesses. Kimball would also provide information about the October 2001 assassination of Tom Wales, a federal prosecutor in Seattle whose murder remains unsolved.

Keying in on this white-collar criminal with a gift for gaining people’s confidence, federal authorities took custody of Kimball and overlooked his outstanding warrants. They transferred him to FCI-Englewood prison in Colorado on June 1, 2002.

Six months later, he was released as an FBI informant.

“I was extremely angry that the bureau had essentially ignored my request for extradition,” said Leo Gallagher, the Lewis & Clark County attorney who wanted to prosecute Kimball on the Montana theft and escape charges. “They never got a hold of me. They just put him on the street in Colorado.”

And back on the street, Kimball did what he knew best. Check fraud and forgery had become his stock and trade, and he wasn’t going to stop even as an FBI informant.

But Kimball’s ability to play the justice system would falter a few years later in the basement of a small rose-colored office building in downtown Lafayette, as he tried to pull off his greatest theft of all.

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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.

The next day

Alerted of the search on Jennifer Marcum, FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff called Bob Marcum from his Denver office.

Schlaff had been Scott Kimball’s primary FBI contact since Kimball’s release from prison in December 2002 as a paid informant. Kimball was supposed to keep an eye on Jennifer and tell Schlaff about a murder-for-hire plot he said she was involved in.

Instead, she wound up dead — murdered by a drug dealer, according to Kimball. Schlaff had been suspicious of Kimball, who’d been out of touch the weekend Jennifer went missing and had all of her furniture at his Lakewood house, but the informant allayed those concerns with a successful lie-detector test.

Kimball also provided Schlaff with a lease showing that he had paid Jennifer $400 to rent the furniture for a year.

But Schlaff didn’t share those details with Bob Marcum. He said Jennifer had “just dropped off the map” after leasing her furniture to a man. There had been few leads in the case.

“They were concerned that something had happened to her,” Bob Marcum remembers.

Scott Kimball gave this lease to his FBI handler to explain why he had Jennifer Marcum’s belongings. She moved her furniture to his house just before disappearing in February 2003. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Marcum didn’t believe the furniture lease could be legitimate, but he couldn’t get more information out of Schlaff.

“I know my daughter,” Marcum says. “My daughter would not lease her belongings and furniture to anyone.”

August 2005

After trying for more than a year to find the man with Jennifer’s belongings, Marcum and Willis booked a trip to Denver. They would put up fliers of their missing daughter all over town.

Marcum insisted that Schlaff give him the man’s name. Schlaff said he couldn’t. Marcum pushed.

“I told him I wanted my daughter’s belongings and furniture, and we were tired of waiting,” he remembers.

Schlaff relented.

He wouldn’t give a name, but he did give Marcum a cell-phone number for Kimball.

Ask for Joe Snitch, the agent said.

Aug. 23, 2005

Joe Snitch showed up at North Midway Park in Broomfield an hour and 15 minutes late. His words, chilling and surreal, rose above the afternoon traffic on West Midway Boulevard.

“The reason we’re all having this meeting is because Jennifer deserves a Christian burial,” Marcum remembers the man telling him and his ex-wife.

Jennifer Marcum’s parents met "Joe Snitch" at Broomfield’s North Midway Park in August 2005. They got the man’s phone number from FBI agent Carle Schlaff. (Paul Aiken / Camera)

The night before, Jennifer Marcum’s parents had met for the first time the man who had their daughter’s furniture. Over a bowl of chips and salsa at a nearby Mexican restaurant, Joe Snitch had seemed like a friendly guy.

Now he seemed a bit unhinged.

Pulling Bob Marcum aside, Joe Snitch told him Jennifer had been murdered, and he knew who did it. The killers, he said, told him where they left her body and asked him to remove her IUD and breast implants.

“If you stay tomorrow, I’ll take you up to the mountains and show you where she is,” Marcum remembers Joe Snitch saying.

Marcum, beginning to feel more uncomfortable as the minutes went by, refused the macabre offer. But Joe Snitch, stocky and powerfully built, wasn’t easily deterred.

He pulled Mary Willis aside. Let me into your hotel room tonight, he proposed, and I will demonstrate on you what the killer did to Jennifer.

“He told me he could show me exactly how my daughter died,” Willis remembers.

That night

A contract found among Scott Kimball’s belongings was intended for Jennifer Marcum’s mother, Mary Willis, according to investigators. Kimball was known to Willis only as "Joe Snitch" but used his FBI handle in the contract. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Joe Snitch showed up at Willis’ Lakewood hotel room at midnight. He had a contract for her to sign, giving him permission to bind, gag and have sex with her.

“I am a willing participant and I expect to engage in bondage and sexual activity,” the agreement read.

Willis refused to open the door.

The man noisily circled the parking lot, laid down hot rubber and peeled out into the night.

“He was so angry because he wanted in my room,” Willis remembers. “I wouldn’t be here today had I let him in.”

Both parents came away from the bizarre encounters with the certainty that they had just looked into the eyes of their daughter’s killer.

“There were no maybes,” Bob Marcum said.

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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.

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.

But for most of his life, he traveled the country as a jack-of-all-trades, working as a maintenance man on a Texas oil well, groundskeeper at a Kansas retail outlet and construction foreman on several job sites in California.

“He was very good at building things and fixing things,” said Johnson, 64, who lived with Terry in Georgia, Indiana and Alabama. “He was a carpenter.”

But her husband also had a soft touch around the house, Johnson said, and was generally a “happy-go-lucky person.”

An amateur chef and a green thumb, Terry made his own jams and canned peaches, elderberries and blackberries. He threw together a memorable dish of spicy nachos and cooked gumbo with rice and shrimp.

“He liked to concoct some very elaborate dishes,” Johnson said. “I did the eating, and he did the cooking.”

Terry had a daughter, Stephanie Pelster, who could not be reached by the Camera.

In a police report, Scott Kimball’s brother, Brett Kimball, called their uncle a “drifter” who “was not able to keep employment.”

But Terry loved his grand-nephews, and he ended up at Scott Kimball’s home in Colorado because he wanted to be with Kimball’s 10-year-old son as the boy lay in a coma after suffering a severe head injury.

When Terry never returned home, Johnson filed for divorce, figuring he had once again hit the road.

Terry Kimball's poetry, found by his former wife, Karen Johnson. (Courtesy of Karen Johnson)

She found out about his death two years later, and she got official word last summer that his body had been found. Once the remains are returned to his family, Terry will be buried in Lafayette Cemetery, next to his parents, Everett and Ruth, Johnson said.

Terry’s death — and knowing one of their own caused it — has been difficult for the whole family, Johnson said.

“I’m just kind of sad for everybody,” she said.

Although Terry never wanted a funeral, his own words — found by Johnson on a floppy disk at their home — provide a fitting epitaph.

I’ll keep moving around,
To those far away places.
I’ll keep falling in love,
With all those friendly faces.
I guess I’m just a drifter,
Drifting from town to town,
Looking for new experiences,
New places to lay me down.

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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.

She remembered that her husband hadn’t gotten along with his nephew years earlier when they worked together in Washington, felling trees. Terry had left after a blow-out argument.

Waiting at home in Alabama, Johnson wanted her husband back. She wanted to resume their domestic routine, with Terry gardening and cooking elaborate meals.

“I was really perturbed about him going into business with Scott,” remembers Johnson, 64. “I was thinking, ‘This isn’t what we need to be doing at this point in our lives.’”

But Terry had an independent streak. He’d been off for extended trips on his own before, and he wouldn’t be stopped this time.

August 2004

Johnson heard less and less from her husband as the summer wore on, but she didn’t think much of it at first.

“I had it in the back of my mind that he’ll call me on the phone when it doesn’t work out for him (in Colorado),” she remembers. “That call never came.”

Johnson started to wonder if he’d run off with another woman.

Tired of Terry’s taciturn ways, Johnson decided to get his attention. She would ask for a divorce.

Late August/Early September 2004

Lori Kimball returned from work one afternoon to find her white leather sofa sitting outside, drenched in what looked like vomit.

Her husband told her one of the dogs had thrown up, but she suspected Terry, her house guest, had drunk too much and gotten sick on the couch.

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

Terry’s truck and dogs were gone, but his clothes were still in his room and his tools remained in the shed. Lori Kimball asked her husband where “Uncle Terry” had gone.

He had won the Ohio lottery and run off to Mexico with a stripper named Ginger, Scott Kimball responded. He wouldn’t be back.

Lori Kimball didn’t question her husband. She had always found Terry peculiar and didn’t particularly like having him in the house. Even if Scott Kimball’s story seemed far-fetched, she didn’t really care.

“Scott said he left, and I believed it,” she remembers.

September 2004

Johnson called the Kimball home over Labor Day weekend and asked to speak with her husband.

He isn’t here, Scott Kimball replied.

“You go find him and tell him to call me,” Johnson remembers insisting.

Kimball said he’d have his uncle get back to her.

He didn’t, so Johnson called again, reaching Lori Kimball this time.

Terry had won the jackpot in Ohio and left town, Lori Kimball told her.

Suspicious, Johnson wrote the Ohio State Lottery for confirmation but never heard back.

She had her lawyer send divorce papers to the Kimballs’ home. The papers were returned.

Johnson never heard from Terry again; nor did she find out what happened to their dogs.

Slowly, she got on with her life. Her divorce went through the following year, and she eventually moved out of the Alabama home she had shared with her husband.

“I just sort of gave up,” Johnson recalls.

Scott Kimball used his uncle’s name in the months after Terry Kimball’s death. This is from a November 2004 complaint, claiming that Terry Kimball bought 21 head of cattle with a fraudulent $11,617.50 check. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

Nobody reported Terry Kimball missing.

August 2005

Scott Kimball’s father, Virgil Kimball, received an e-mail from terrylkimball@yahoo.com.

It had been nearly a year since Virgil Kimball had heard from his brother. He was having a great time in Mexico and probably wouldn’t be back, the e-mail said.

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

They would also discover that Scott Kimball used his uncle’s name and credit card in the weeks after his disappearance, and that someone had written $23,083 in bad checks on Terry’s account from July 19 to Nov. 18, 2004.

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

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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.”

A court has since stripped Kimball of his parental rights, and Hentz won’t allow her boys to visit their father.

Kimball denies trying to kill his son.

“If I have any regrets, it’s that I let my kids down,” he told Fox 31 News in an interview broadcast earlier this month.

Hentz said the 2004 accident shocked her because Kimball had always been a good father and never physically abused their sons.

Even after Hentz got a restraining order against Kimball in 1998, she wrote a Spokane, Wash., court in support of his right to continue seeing their children.

“He has shown great enthusiasm towards the boys and has been an active part of their lives,” she wrote. “The boys thoroughly enjoy having their father around on a more regular basis and I know he loves spending time with them.”

Kimball, in arguing for “unfettered” access to his sons, wrote to the court that he was an attentive father. He said he rose early in the morning to take his boys to day care, took them on family trips to Utah and Idaho, and stayed home with them when they were sick with ear infections or the chicken pox.

He recalled the family’s latest Easter together.

Both parents “stayed up to late in the evening, dying Easter eggs for the boys and hiding them,” Kimball wrote. “We spent the night together and did the Easter egg hunt the following morning.”

Now, Hentz said, their older son is an avid reader of John Grisham novels and has developed an interest in becoming a lawyer. Their younger son is rowdy and loves to play football.

Both boys still think of their father, Hentz said.

“But they don’t talk about him much anymore,” she said.

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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.”

Life had taken on a rhythm of normalcy at the Kimballs’ rural rental property in Adams County, with Scott Kimball spending his days buying cattle on the Eastern Plains and selling them at auction as part of a beef business he started in late 2003.

At night, he’d relax in front of the TV, watching a steady fare of crime dramas.

But Kimball devoted most of his spare time to outdoor activities — hunting, camping and four-wheeling. He’d crank up heavy metal or country music and drive off to a favorite spot in the Colorado wilderness.

During his years as a paid FBI informant, Scott Kimball spent much of his spare time hunting, camping and four-wheeling in the Colorado wilderness. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

“He liked being out,” Lori McLeod recalls.

And he remained out of prison with the help of the federal government. Kimball’s contact at the FBI, Special Agent Carle Schlaff, made repeated calls to a Montana prosecutor to delay Kimball’s court hearings in a 2001 escape and theft case.

Federal prosecutors had spent the previous year vouching for Kimball, too, successfully arguing that he should get a minimal sentence on an Alaska check-fraud case so he could continue in his role as an informant. He had been given credit for time served and sentenced to three years of supervised probation.

Kimball’s two sons from a previous marriage visited their father regularly, playing on the five-acre lot surrounding his Huron Street home.

As the sun set on a scorching July day, the boys, ages 10 and 8, were digging holes in a pasture to catch mice when, prosecutors believe, Kimball nearly claimed another victim.

July 15, 2004

Scott Kimball raced to the door of his home, carrying his older son in his arms. He shouted at his wife to call 911.

Moments after Kimball had sent the younger boy inside to fetch some sodas, a 200-pound metal grate, propped against the back of a truck, had toppled onto the 10-year-old, Kimball told his wife.

With the boy bleeding profusely from the back of his head, Kimball wasn’t going to wait for paramedics to arrive. He’d take his son to the hospital himself.

Kimball tore off toward his Jeep, leaving behind a 5-inch puddle of his son’s blood at the front door.

As father and son sped west on Dillon Road at up to 70 mph, the injured boy — gyrating in pain and heaving for breath — fell from the Jeep, smacking his head on the pavement as he rolled. Kimball stopped, scooped up his son and put him back in the vehicle.

The boy had tried to open the window, but in his delirium hit the door instead, Kimball would tell doctors when he arrived at Louisville’s Avista Hospital.

In critical condition, the child was airlifted to Children’s Hospital in Denver, where he underwent emergency surgery on his brain and fractured skull and lapsed into a coma.

Later that night

As soon as Kimball’s mother heard of her grandson’s condition, she dashed to her Lafayette insurance office and changed the beneficiary of the boy’s $60,000 life-insurance policy — from Scott Kimball to herself.

Barb Kimball, who ran the American Family Insurance office at 801 S. Public Road, later told one of her employees she feared her son tried to kill his own child to cash in on the insurance. A few weeks earlier, Barb Kimball told the employee, Scott Kimball had asked if he was the listed beneficiary on the policy.

August 2004

Scott Kimball’s son spent two weeks in a coma and two weeks in rehabilitation.

When he recovered enough to talk, he told police a story starkly different from his father’s.

Just before the accident, his father told him “to dig a hole next to the grate and to not turn around,” the boy told police.

In the Jeep, the boy remembered his father “reaching over him, opening the door, and pushing him out by the face.”

Prosecutor Katharina Booth, in her office at the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office, said she believed Kimball’s son, who said his father tried to kill him. (Paul Aiken / Camera)

Louisville police and the Adams County Sheriff’s Office, after a joint investigation, readied a case of attempted murder against Scott Kimball.

Late 2004

The severity of the boy’s head injury made him an unreliable witness.

Doctors said his recollections would be “convoluted” at best, leaving prosecutors with a case too flimsy to pursue.

Making matters worse, agencies in Adams County, where the accident occurred, and Boulder County, where the child was first hospitalized, couldn’t agree on how to proceed. Their wrangling continued for years, and the case floundered.

“There was a little bit of pointing of fingers between law-enforcement agencies,” recalls Katharina Booth, an 11-year veteran of the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office. “I think he got away with that one.”

But Booth would remember the name Scott Kimball.

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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.

“I used to be kind of a happy, easygoing person,” he said. “That person’s gone.”

Rob McLeod takes a 100-mile bike ride on Kaysi’s birthday every year. He thinks back on the hopes he had for his daughter.

He wanted to see Kaysi clean up her life, get a career, become a mother one day.

He saw how much she adored her half-sisters — his two daughters with his second wife.

Both of Kaysi’s parents — divorced when she was 4 — think the 19-year-old might have been turning a corner, ready to grow up and take on more responsibilities as an adult.

Lori McLeod said her daughter tested the boundaries like any adolescent. She smoked, pierced her belly button, got tattoos — a four-leaf clover with the Virgo sign on her foot and a fairy on the small of her back.

Kaysi as a girl. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

But she was also a kind and respectful daughter with a love for jewelry-making, drawing, dancing and music, Lori McLeod said.

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

At 15, Kaysi needed some time away from her parents, who didn’t see eye to eye on how to raise her, said her maternal aunt, Donna Harper. The teen moved in with Harper in Phoenix and finished high school there.

“I gave her consistency,” Harper said.

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

Tabetha Blow, her best friend in Arizona, said Kaysi had a “passion for life” but fell in with a bad crowd and started messing around with prescription medications.

Then meth.

“She started losing weight rapidly, and she wasn’t herself anymore,” Blow said. “I was really concerned about her at that point.”

When Kaysi moved back to Colorado after graduating in 2001, she looked “strung out,” said Rob McLeod.

Kaysi with her half-sister. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

“She was definitely not firing on all cylinders,” he said. “I was just sad for her.”

Kaysi lived with her father in the summer of 2002 and held a customer-service job at Echostar. Rob McLeod told his daughter she needed to clean up her act.

“I love you. I support you,” he remembers telling her. “But if you’re doing that stuff, you can’t be here.”

She moved in with her mother, who started dating Scott Kimball that winter.

The same month Kimball entered her life, Kaysi stole a credit card and charged more than $3,400 worth of fraudulent purchases on it, according to police reports. Kimball has never been implicated in that case, but he met with Kaysi privately for nearly an hour just before she confessed to police.

Lori McLeod said she sensed that Kimball tried to drive a wedge between Kaysi and herself, exploiting her daughter’s history of drug use to raise her level of alarm.

That culminated, she said, in August 2003, when Kimball implied Kaysi was using drugs again. McLeod said she’s “thoroughly convinced” Kimball planted the drugs, egging on the ensuing fight and helping Kaysi get set up at the motel where he later picked her up.

“He needed to separate us because he couldn’t take her otherwise,” Lori McLeod said. “Obviously, I blame myself because I’m the one who brought Scott into our lives. I would give anything for a do-over. Life doesn’t offer that.”

Go back to Chapter 5 »

 

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.

Kaysi’s box of makeup went missing as well, more proof that her daughter had been by but wasn’t yet ready to talk to Mom.

That wasn’t all.

The landlord assured McLeod he had seen Kaysi and her boyfriend driving around the Adams County property that Kimball and McLeod had rented together that summer.

Kimball told McLeod that her daughter needed some time alone, to sort through the normal issues of being a 19-year-old girl.

The worried mother believed it all.

“It brought me a lot of peace, knowing she had been in the house,” she remembers.

Summer 2003

Trouble had been brewing in the McLeod home for awhile.

During high school, Kaysi had moved in with her aunt in Phoenix and started dabbling with drugs. Experimentation with prescription pills turned into full-blown meth use.

A friend said she was losing weight fast and “wasn’t herself anymore.”

After Kaysi graduated in 2001 and returned to Colorado to live with her mother, she was still hanging out with an unsavory crowd. In March 2003, she was accused of stealing a credit card and racking up more than $3,400 worth of fraudulent purchases.

By summertime, Lori McLeod felt certain her daughter was kicking the meth habit and turning a corner in her life. She was putting weight back on and had gotten a job at the Subway restaurant on 144th Avenue in Broomfield.

Still, with Kaysi facing felony theft and forgery charges, tensions between mother and daughter remained high.

Kimball saw an opportunity.

Aug. 21 or 22, 2003

Kimball showed up at his girlfriend’s work with a vial filled with white crystals that looked like rock salt.

“I found this at the house,” Lori McLeod remembers him telling her.

Despite Kaysi’s insistence that she wasn’t back on drugs, McLeod decided to get serious with her daughter. She went home to confront Kaysi — it was time for her to have a chat with police.

Kaysi and Kimball went out front to wait in the Jeep. By the time McLeod joined them, Kaysi had taken off on her bike. Kimball assured McLeod her daughter just needed time on her own, to wait for things to calm down so she could return home.

Kaysi ended up at a Motel 6 in Thornton and got a room with her boyfriend, Celestino Bovill.

Aug. 23, 2003

Kimball arrived at the motel around 5 p.m.

Chatting with Kaysi and Bovill in their room, Kimball offered to drive Kaysi to her Saturday-night shift at Subway.

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)

She climbed into his pickup truck with an attached camper — one he had stolen from a former cellmate at the federal pen several months earlier — and they drove off together.

McLeod soon learned that Kaysi never showed up for work.

Frantic, she called Kimball, but his phone was off.

Aug. 24, 2003

When Kimball finally answered his phone, he denied Bovill’s story that he’d picked Kaysi up the night before.

He insisted he’d been in the mountains alone, scouting out bow-hunting grounds.

But he pledged to help McLeod track down her daughter.

Unable to get traction with Broomfield and Northglenn police regarding Kaysi’s disappearance, McLeod decided to put her faith in Kimball. After all, he worked for the FBI in some capacity. She had seen him bring home wads of cash — $600 in May, $2,000 in July, $500 in early August — as compensation for his duties with the bureau. He even had a Colorado driver’s license under his FBI alias, Joseph Lee Scott.

It might be good to have him on her side.

“I needed someone to help me,” McLeod remembers tearfully. “He was my only link to her.”

Aug. 31, 2003

Lori McLeod. (Mark Leffingwell / Camera)

McLeod’s desperate need for answers transcended practicality. Overcome with emotion, she hoped a special partnership could change everything.

Eight days after her only child went missing, McLeod drove with Kimball to Las Vegas and tied the knot. They paid for the trip with $18,000 given to Kimball by the FBI three days earlier, payment for his help foiling an alleged 2002 plot to kill a federal judge and prosecutor in Alaska.

It was a drive-through wedding, devoid of romance, but it was official.

Lori McLeod was now Lori Kimball.

Sept. 14, 2003

It was Kaysi’s birthday.

Scott and Lori Kimball were camping at Kremmling’s Red Mountain RV Park to celebrate their marriage, but the new bride couldn’t get her mind off her daughter.

“Happy 20th birthday sweet love,” Lori Kimball wrote 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.”

Kaysi’s handwritten work schedule for the week she disappeared, found when police searched Kimball’s belongings years later. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

This was her little girl, her only child — the one who loved to draw, dance and belt out the words to Sarah McLachlan songs. She wanted her back.

Late 2003

Lori Kimball felt increasingly conflicted as the months went by, on the one hand suspecting her husband of having a role in Kaysi’s disappearance and on the other hoping he was only helping her hide.

“When your child is missing that long, every thought goes through your head,” she says.

She wanted to believe her husband was clean on this one. Maybe, just maybe, Scott Kimball could chip away at the mystery shrouding her daughter’s whereabouts.

It would be years before Lori Kimball realized it was her husband who planted Kaysi’s necklace on the doorknob after her disappearance, who removed her daughter’s makeup box, who asked their landlord to lie about seeing Kaysi.

It would be years before searches of Kimball’s belongings uncovered Kaysi’s Subway hat, her date book and her work schedule — handwritten in pink marker — for the week she disappeared.

And it would be years before the grieving mother found out her honeymoon camping trip took place less than 30 miles from the spot where her husband had murdered her daughter and left her to rot.

Click here to read more about Kaysi McLeod’s life »

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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.

Bob Marcum said his daughter worked as a stripper primarily to support her son — whom she called “little man.”

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

Shotgyn Willie's, where Jennifer worked. (John Aguilar / Camera)

Her mother, Mary Willis, said Jennifer wanted to move on from the adult-entertainment industry as soon as she could and spend more time with her son.

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

Both parents, who divorced when Jennifer was 6 months old, blame their own flawed marriage for giving their daughter a tough start in life.

The discord was so great that Jennifer and her sister ended up in foster homes for a couple of years, but neither of her parents would share details.

“My ex-wife and I had a very dysfunctional relationship, and the kids didn’t enjoy life because of it,” Bob Marcum said wistfully, from the living room of his home in Springfield, Ill.

“She had a screwed-up childhood, thanks to me and Bob,” said Willis, who now lives in a suburb of St. Louis.

Born in Aurora, while her father worked at Buckley Air Force Base, Jennifer moved to Springfield with her mother and older sister at age 4.

“I called her ‘munchkin,’” Willis said. “She was a mama’s girl. Her sister, Tammy, and her were very close.”

Jennifer’s interests ranged from Wiffle Ball and volleyball to reading and studying wildlife — especially lizards. As she got older, she also developed an appetite for mischief.

Jennifer at age 8. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

“She was a wildcat,” Willis said. “Sneaking out and being defiant. Testing the boundaries.”

When Jennifer crossed the line, her mother set out to teach her a lesson.

“She got caught stealing one time, and I went with her to the police station and I put the fear of God in her,” Willis said.

Jennifer ended up dropping out of high school, got her own place in Springfield and started working at Wendy’s and Pizza Hut. She married a former high school classmate and moved to Colorado Springs, but they divorced after a year.

She met Wiggins soon afterward, gave birth to their son at age 20, then got involved with Steve Ennis after that relationship soured.

Jennifer “wanted to spend her life” with Ennis, her father said, but he was soon arrested in New York City in an undercover sting operation for dealing Ecstasy.

“She called. She was crying and screaming,” Marcum said. “She couldn’t believe what just happened.”

Jennifer seemed lonely after that, her mother said.

“She called me up, and she wanted me to move to Colorado to be with her because she didn’t have anyone,” Willis said.

Jennifer visited her boyfriend in prison often and was always trying to figure out how to get him released, Marcum said.

Her photo hung in Ennis’ cell, which he shared with Scott Kimball.

Ennis would later tell police the photo went missing right around the time Kimball got out.

Go back to Chapter 4 »

 

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.

The agent also noted that both Jennifer’s and Kimball’s cell phones, usually busy with activity, went dead on Feb. 17. Neither had any incoming or outgoing calls in the next three days.

Fed up with Kimball’s stories, Schlaff revoked his informant’s protected status on May 30.

June 17-20, 2003

The agent alerted Denver police that Kimball was wanted on a probation violation in a forgery case in Washington state. Kimball was arrested June 17 and booked into Denver County Jail.

Denver police arrested Scott Kimball on June 17, 2003. (Courtesy of Denver police)

Behind bars, he vowed to come clean.

A drug dealer had strangled Jennifer to death, he told Schlaff.

Kimball had even seen pictures of her body — hands and legs bound, mouth taped shut — on the drug dealer’s laptop, he said. In fact, the dealer 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.

A polygraph test, administered by Denver police, showed he was telling the truth.

Kimball said he hadn’t told the agent earlier because he still had active criminal cases “and needed to hold this information until it was of direct benefit to him.”

He told Schlaff he could help catch the killer.

The agent, reassured that Kimball could still be a valuable informant, petitioned law-enforcement officials in Spokane, Wash., to drop their warrant so Kimball could continue assisting in the Jennifer Marcum investigation.

“Agent Schloff (sic) is requesting that the bench warrant issued be quashed so Mr. Kimball can re-establish contact with the individuals who informed him of the murder, in an attempt to get the body’s exact location,” a Washington Department of Corrections supervisor wrote to a Spokane County Superior Court judge.

Warrant dismissed, Kimball was released from jail June 20.

The FBI reactivated his status as a “cooperating witness” 10 days later.

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

July 10, 2003

Schlaff explained the case in an affidavit filed in federal court in Denver.

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

But no arrests were made, and nobody was charged in her death.

Meanwhile, Kimball had moved on.

February 2003

Lori McLeod, a 39-year-old regular at Boston Five Card poker, noticed the man with an easy smile and pleasant demeanor as he pushed his wheelchair-bound mother up to her table at the Lodge Casino at Black Hawk.

Scott Kimball was handsome and smooth-talking, secure in what he said and how he said it, McLeod thought. An attentive son, he treated his mother like an angel, catering to her every need.

The Lodge Casino at Black Hawk, where Kimball met Lori McLeod. (blackhawkcolorado.com)

Kimball was interested in McLeod, too.

Noticing their chemistry, the dealer told McLeod during a break in play that she should give the guy her number. Leaning into Kimball later, McLeod joked: “Wait, you’re not a felon or anything, are you?”

They laughed. They talked some more. Kimball asked her out.

Less than a week later — on Valentine’s Day — they began dating.

They met at a Bennigan’s. Kimball brought McLeod flowers. He held the door open for her.

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

Within a matter of days, McLeod introduced her new boyfriend to her daughter, Kaysi, an attractive 19-year-old whose life had taken some turbulent turns.

Click here to read about Jennifer Marcum’s life »

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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.

In the Alaska case, Kimball reported that his cellmate Arnold Flowers and Flowers’ girlfriend, Sompong Khamsomphou, asked him to hire a hitman to kill U.S. District Judge Russel Holland, U.S. Attorney Crandon Randell and two witnesses.

Kimball said Flowers, who faced bank-fraud charges, told him he wanted one of the witnesses put in a “crab pot” and thrown overboard “so no one would ever find the body.”

A federal grand jury indicted Flowers and Khamsomphou on charges of murder-for-hire, witness tampering and attempted murder of federal officials.

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

But in a trial held the following year, a jury found the couple guilty of the lesser charge of conspiracy to tamper with a witness. Kimball testified during the trial.

“The jury didn’t believe anything Mr. Kimball had to say,” said Hugh Fleischer, an Anchorage attorney who represented Flowers. “We think Kimball manufactured information about my client and took it to the federal government. We attacked his credibility, and the jury agreed that it was entrapment.”

Flowers and Khamsomphou were sentenced to eight years and five years in prison, respectively.

That case led FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff to believe Kimball when he said Ennis, his cellmate in Colorado, asked him to help Jennifer Marcum kill a fellow drug dealer.

Kimball had “previously provided information to law enforcement” that Schlaff believed was credible, the agent wrote in an affidavit.

“I think there was a particular FBI agent that was conned by a con,” said Leo Gallagher, a Montana county attorney who had been pushing for Kimball to be brought to trial on outstanding charges there.

He said Schlaff repeatedly asked him to delay the case, successfully keeping the informant on the street.

“Initially, I was furious,” Gallagher said. “Then they started to explain to me that he was a very important person and to delay dropping the hammer on him until he could get his work done.”

The feds “got played,” Gallagher said.

FBI Special Agent in Charge James Davis wouldn’t comment on any undercover assignments Kimball may have done for the bureau, but he said dealing with informants is an “unfortunate requirement of doing this kind of work.”

Agents are trained to evaluate potential sources for credibility and reliability, he said. And the bureau follows a rigid set of protocols to guard against outside sources abusing their positions.

That’s especially true, he said, if an informant is going to be considered for release from prison, a decision that is made in concert with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and approved by a federal judge.

“When you go out and identify for recruitment, the first thing you want to know is does he have access (to information),” Davis said. “And if he does, what’s the downside?”

Go back to Chapter 3 »

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.

“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?”

December 2002

Scott Kimball met Steve Ennis after landing in FCI-Englewood following a series of check-fraud and forgery convictions in the Pacific Northwest.

A picture of Steve Ennis found, among Jennifer Marcum’s belongings. After Scott Kimball’s release from prison as an FBI informant, Ennis told Jennifer, his girlfriend, that she should trust his ex-cellmate. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

Already a four-time felon, 36-year-old Kimball had been in and out of the can plenty but had always been given another chance.

Now, he faced several years behind bars.

His latest arrest, for passing thousands of dollars’ worth of bogus checks in Alaska, could trigger at least 15 years’ worth of suspended prison sentences.

To get out this time, he’d have to be creative.

Kimball told the FBI that Ennis, accused of running a massive Ecstasy distribution network, had asked him to kill a fellow drug dealer who might testify against Ennis. Ennis, Kimball said, told him his girlfriend — a hard-bodied Shotgun Willie’s stripper — would help carry out the hit.

Kimball had already been a source on two murder-for-hire plots — on an assistant U.S. district attorney shot to death in his Seattle home and on an alleged hit against a federal judge and prosecutor in Alaska. The FBI decided he was trustworthy enough to gather information outside prison walls.

Kimball was released Dec. 18, 2002, “to actively cooperate with the FBI on the Steven Ennis matter,” according to an agency affidavit. He was given the name Joe Scott and told to keep an eye on Jennifer Marcum.

January and February 2003

Kimball wasted no time.

He met with Jennifer a dozen times and spoke with her on the phone daily during the first six weeks of the year. She was staying in Colorado Springs with the father of her 5-year-old son, and longing to get off the stripper pole.

Kimball used his considerable charm to convince her he could get her into a legitimate enterprise selling coffee from espresso carts. The money would be good, with the potential to earn a few thousand dollars a day.

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

She moved all of her furniture from the Springs to Kimball’s condo in Lakewood on Feb. 16, two days before their planned trip to Seattle.

Meanwhile, Kimball wore a wire for the FBI trying to elicit information on the supposed hit. In a conversation caught on tape, Jennifer didn’t solicit Kimball to kill anyone, but she did describe one member of Ennis’ drug ring as a “scumbag” who “deserves to die.”

In interviews with investigators years later, Ennis denied ever asking Kimball or Jennifer to kill anyone.

March 10, 2003

Out of prison, Kimball wasn’t exactly home free.

The theft and fraud charges in Alaska hadn’t been dropped and still could put him back in the pen for years.

Interested in his continued cooperation, federal prosecutors offered Kimball a plea agreement. If he pleaded guilty to two counts of counterfeiting a check and continued working as an informant, they would recommend the lowest sentence.

Carle Schlaff, in a picture from his Facebook page. (Facebook.com)

Kimball saw the distinct possibility of spending no time behind bars on this one.

He signed the deal.

March 27, 2003

Jennifer Marcum’s green 1996 Saturn had been sitting in a Denver International Airport parking garage for 37 days when police impounded it.

Two certified letters concerning the abandoned car, sent to Jennifer’s previous address in Colorado Springs, went unanswered.

Her son’s father told investigators Jennifer hadn’t been by to see the boy since moving out Feb. 16.

FBI Special Agent Carle Schlaff was himself starting to wonder what had happened to Jennifer Marcum. Assigned to handle Kimball in his role as a paid informant keeping tabs on Jennifer, Schlaff hadn’t heard anything about her in weeks.

Now he wanted answers.

Click here to read more about Kimball’s history as an informant »

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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.

Her compassion, he said, would later shift to male inmates.

“They were down-and-outers that nobody else cared about,” Emry said. “Here she is again — this compulsion to help someone that nobody else wants to help.”

LeAnn Emry graduating from Eaglecrest High School at age 17. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

Born in Weiser, Idaho, LeAnn moved to Colorado at age 7, where she took an interest in music and science and was an A student at Eagle Crest High School in Aurora. She became a Christian, graduated a year early and won 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.

But fellow students teased her reliance on a backboard — which she carried from age 14, after cracking a vertebra while play-wrestling with her father.

As a result, LeAnn’s loyalties lay with unpopular classmates and kids who came from tough family circumstances.

She suffered further setbacks after high school. Her failure to get into a physical therapy program at Arapahoe Community College “totally devastated her,” Emry said, and LeAnn postponed her career at age 19, after her mother, Darlene, developed a brain aneurysm that hospitalized her for two months.

“That changed the entire dynamics of the family. Before that, Darlene was the glue,” said Jennifer Howland, a neighbor of the Emrys at the time. “LeAnn sort of had to pick up all the pieces.”

LeAnn stocked shelves part-time at Walmart while caring for her mother and younger sister for nearly a year.

She then turned back to her love of animals, volunteered at a no-kill shelter and became a veterinary technician. When she lost that job in early 1999, she began to lose all hope.

Her back pain — exacerbated by a car accident — combined with career troubles to plunge LeAnn into a dark place.

The program from LeAnn Emry's funeral.

“Her life spiraled like you wouldn’t believe,” Howard Emry said. “She fell into a terrible depression.”

When an old high school classmate, Kevin Niner, asked for her help in bailing him out of jail, LeAnn obliged and soon eloped with him.

But the relationship quickly soured.

LeAnn was arrested on felony menacing charges in the fall of 1999 after brandishing a gun and threatening to kill her husband and herself.

After the couple moved to Dallas, LeAnn started stripping at private parties and was being physically abused, Howard Emry said.

“She called me one evening and said, ‘Dad, I can’t take this anymore. My life is hell,’” he said.

Emry drove to Dallas in the spring of 2002 and brought his daughter back to Colorado, where she filed for a divorce.

But by then, LeAnn had begun a romantic relationship by letter with another man behind bars. Steven Holley, who once shared a cell with her ex-husband, would soon introduce her to Scott Kimball.

Click here to go back to Chapter 2 »

 

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.

Shortly before secretly leaving with Kimball on a whirlwind voyage through five states, LeAnn called her younger sister, Michelle, with a message.

Utah’s Bryson Canyon, where Scott Kimball killed LeAnn Emry on Jan. 29, 2003. (Courtesy of Howard Emry)

If anything bad should happen, Michelle should know her sister loved her.

Jan. 29, 2003

LeAnn stepped out of the Jeep and into the red dust of Bryson Canyon, a barren stretch of eastern Utah’s Book Cliffs 15 miles off of Interstate 70.

They were going for a hike, Kimball told her. The two had been on the road for weeks, passing thousands of dollars’ worth of bad checks, and LeAnn’s long, blonde hair was newly shorn and dyed brown.

They wound their way into a box canyon and up a desert wash. They walked sharply uphill, moving up a cliff face. Then they stopped. The air was chilly, the rock walls silent.

“Scott, your face just changed,” LeAnn said.

Kimball told her to take off her clothes, turn around and kneel on the red rock. She did as he ordered. Then he pulled out a .40-caliber Firestar handgun that LeAnn had bought a few days earlier and shot her through the head.

LeAnn died in the desolate wash, two months before she would have turned 25.

Feb. 1, 2003

Howard Emry got the sheriff’s deputy’s message just before midnight, after returning to his Centennial home from a visit with friends. His daughter’s Toyota Corolla had been found in the remote Harley Dome area of eastern Utah. Her belongings — camping and caving equipment, a cell phone, a purse — were still in the car.

“Everything was there, except her,” Howard Emry remembers.

LeAnn had been gone for a little more than two weeks, after telling her father she was going caving in Mexico with friends.

It would be a few days before the first clues to her recent whereabouts emerged.

First, a cascade of bad checks — passed in Laramie, Wyo.; Baker City, Ore.; Vancouver, Wash.; Reno, Nev. — came in from her bank. LeAnn had been moving across the West at a furious pace, overdrawing her account by $4,000.

Howard and Darlene Emry hold a photo of their daughter, LeAnn Emry, inside their Payette, Idaho, home last fall. (Matthew Cilley / for the Camera)

Howard Emry’s bank also reported fraudulent activity on his account, with someone in California charging up a credit card he had co-signed for his daughter. When Emry got a copy of the receipts, he could tell the signature on them wasn’t hers.

Emry called the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, which said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to pursue a missing-person case.

“They didn’t take it seriously at all,” remembers Emry, a 63-year-old retired telecom data specialist.

He began to think his daughter might be missing on purpose.

After all, she wasn’t perfect.

LeAnn had been diagnosed as bipolar and lived with nearly constant back pain. She had stripped at private parties and been convicted once of felony menacing. She had been in an abusive marriage with a man who was constantly in and out of jail. And now she was romantically involved with a bank robber in federal prison.

“As a parent, you always want to believe the best-case scenario — maybe LeAnn is just on the run,” Howard Emry says. “I kept hoping that someday I would get a call from her saying, ‘I’m OK.’”

February 2003

Steven Holley, LeAnn Emry’s boyfriend and Scott Kimball’s fellow inmate. (Courtesy of Lakewood police)

Howard Emry never got that call.

But he did get a letter from Steven Holley, the Federal Correctional Institution-Englewood inmate his daughter had been seeing for the last several months.

“I am not going to lie to you and say she is not in real trouble!” Holley wrote in the letter, dated Feb. 24. “I don’t fully understand what the hell she thought she was doing, but I know she is way out of her league!”

LeAnn was with some “very dangerous people,” he warned. Holley wouldn’t give details, but he implored Emry to call the FBI and have an agent come talk to him right away.

Emry called, but an agent said Holley was a liar and that the prison visit would be a waste of time. Emry visited Holley himself, and made further appeals to the FBI and Arapahoe County authorities, but without success.

“I was at a dead-end street,” he says. “So I gave up.”

Whatever information Holley had about LeAnn Emry would remain a secret — at least for the next 4½ years.

Click here to read about LeAnn Emry’s life »

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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.

Grusing knew he had a serial killer on his hands.

But without a body, there would be no murder case.

The agent took a shot in the dark.

The receipt, found in a box belonging to Scott Kimball. (Courtesy of Lafayette police)

With the receipt in hand, he called the Routt National Forest district office in Walden to ask for a map of the area. He needed to at least take a look around.

A receptionist told him that if he wanted a topographical map, he’d have to pay for it. Eight bucks. No exceptions.

In no mood to start filling out FBI expense sheets, Grusing asked to talk to someone higher up the chain of command.

Grusing told supervisor Sue Yeager he was with the FBI and was searching for human remains. She told the agent she’d get some maps out to him right away.

Then, almost as an afterthought, she told him to talk to the coroner. A skull, likely belonging to a young woman, 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.

Now it was time to back Kimball into a corner.

Operation Snowball

The case against one of Colorado’s most conniving killers spans seven years and leaves behind shattered lives, aborted dreams and unanswered questions.

It’s a saga filled with a dizzying series of detours, oversights and close calls, red flags unnoticed, leads never pursued, questionable deals made.

Kaysi McLeod, 19, was found dead in the Routt National Forest near Walden in 2007. Hers was the first body to be connected to Scott Kimball, who went on to plead guilty to killing four people. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

At its center is a man, raised in Old Town Lafayette, who spun a web of lies and deceit so thick that almost everyone around him fell into it.

Scott Kimball, now 43, conned wives and girlfriends, victims and associates. He gained their trust and wove himself into their worlds. He even married the mother of one of his victims — eight days after killing her daughter.

Kimball got the FBI on his side and lived within its shadow, as he went about snuffing out the lives of three young women and his uncle during a frenetic 20-month period.

“They were paying him while he was killing our children,” said Mary Willis, whose daughter Jennifer Marcum died at Kimball’s hands.

Kimball preyed on the vulnerable, targeting people who were looking for a better life and convincing them he could help.

Jennifer Marcum, a 25-year-old single mother, longed to leave behind the strip club where she worked. LeAnn Emry, 24, struggled with bipolar disorder and dreamed of a life with her imprisoned lover. And Kaysi McLeod, at 19, seemed ready to leave behind her years of teen angst.

Kimball’s final victim, his 60-year-old uncle, Terry Kimball, arrived in Colorado out of concern for his injured grand-nephew and stayed to pursue a new business opportunity.

Scott Kimball’s murder spree would go unpunished for years, as he mastered the art of capitalizing on his crimes, side-stepping suspicions and pitting agents against prosecutors.

His FBI handler would repeatedly vouch for him, keeping him out of courtrooms and out of jail with well-placed phone calls to prosecutors intent on bringing Kimball to justice. Meanwhile, Kimball fed the agent just enough lies to keep himself in the clear.

“The FBI was so very easy to convince,” Kimball said in a letter from prison.

But the story of Scott Kimball has a critical second chapter.

It’s a chapter about good, old-fashioned police work, dogged pursuit and focused determination to put away a killer before he could strike again.

LeAnn Emry, a 24-year-old veterinary assistant who struggled with bipolar disorder, was killed two months after Scott Kimball left prison. (Courtesy of Emry family)

It’s an account of the people who spent years unwinding scam after scam and piecing together crime after crime, in an ever-expanding investigation that earned the label “Operation Snowball.”

“These cases were extremely difficult,” Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett said. “Less persistent, less insightful people could have easily missed the clues that they used to bring these cases to closure.”

As shrewd as he was, Kimball was not invincible — not to those who finally managed to see through his cunning.

Like the final FBI agent assigned to Kimball’s case, who pored over evidence and tracked down a body; like the young Lafayette detective, who assiduously retraced Kimball’s steps from check fraud to murder; like the Boulder prosecutors, who kept on him until the prison doors slammed shut; and like the families left behind, who wouldn’t let Kimball get away with one more lie.

Charm offensive

Scott Kimball is variously described as a genius and a psychopath, but almost everyone agrees that at first handshake, he’s one hell of a nice guy.

Kimball charmed bank tellers — bringing them steaks from his beef business — right before passing a bad check and absconding with thousands of dollars.

He convinced fellow inmates to confide in him, to introduce him to their girlfriends and to trust that he could help them set their lives straight on the outside.

“I would say nothing he ever said to me was the truth,” said John Alderman, who met Kimball in federal prison.

Jennifer Marcum was a 25-year-old single mother working at a strip club when Scott Kimball convinced the FBI to let him out of prison early to keep an eye on her, claiming she was involved in a murder-for-hire plot. She vanished soon after. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

The 69-year-old doctor, convicted of tax evasion, learned how to play hearts from Kimball behind bars and engaged him in conversation about medicine and nutrition.

Alderman trusted his former fellow inmate enough to ask him to cash a check for $7,300, and to loan Kimball a truck and trailer once they’d both been released from prison.

Alderman never saw Kimball again.

“I guess this is how con artists work their magic,” he later told investigators. “I do not know how they can keep their lies straight, but he sure worked me over and gained my trust and took the only few possessions that I had left to my name.”

Kimball also wooed the opposite sex with ease, marrying three times and dating a succession of women, often at the same time.

Denise Pierce, 35, fell for the good-natured Colorado rancher when he came out to visit his brother in California’s Coachella Valley. He had an engaging personality, treated her with class and always seemed to have pockets stuffed with cash.

“He was a down-home country boy who liked country music,” she said.

It wasn’t until Kimball was stopped in a high-speed police chase that Pierce learned her new boyfriend was at the center of an intensive missing-persons investigation.

“I would never in my whole life have guessed. The Scott I knew wouldn’t have hurt those people,” she said. “He portrayed himself as someone else.”

On the street

FBI agent, mercenary, cattleman, lumberjack — Kimball liked to be a lot of things, depending on who was doing the asking. And he didn’t have a problem convincing people to come along for the ride.

“He has a very sincere presentation,” said U.S. Attorney Dave Conner, who prosecuted Kimball on federal firearms charges. “Mr. Kimball always has something to tell you that you want to hear.”

Terry Kimball at his home in Lincoln, Ala., in the spring of 1999. An accomplished cook who loved working in his garden, Scott Kimball’s “Uncle Terry” went into business with his nephew and was never seen again. (Courtesy of Karen Johnson)

And Kimball had a knack for sizing people up — especially his interrogators, said FBI Special Agent Grusing. He fished for information, turned questions around and always tried to gain the upper hand.

“He just takes control of the interview,” Grusing said.

Lafayette police Detective Gary Thatcher, who pursued Kimball for nearly four years on both fraud and murder charges, described him as “the most intelligent person” he’s ever met.

“He was pretty good at poking holes in my investigation,” Thatcher said. “This was a guy who had an alibi for anything and everything.”

Larissa Hentz was so taken by Kimball’s charm that she married him and had his two children.

“He knew what to say, how to say it and when to say it,” she said. “He was that good.”

It was with this noxious mix of geniality and cruelty that Scott Kimball hit the streets of Denver as 2003 loomed. He was energetic, he was boundless — he had just been released early from federal prison to act as a confidential informant for the FBI.

And he already had an eye on his first victim.

Click here to read the next chapter »

 

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.”

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)

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)

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.

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.

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.

Kaysi McLeod’s relatives, clockwise from top left, Charlene McLeod, Katherine McLeod, Ginger McLeod, Samantha McLeod and Michelle Strick listen to a live feed outside of the packed courtroom. (Kasia Broussalian/Camera)

Kaysi McLeod’s father said his daughter would have been 26 if she were alive.

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

Lori McLeod faces her former husband in court and says God has received her daughter.

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

Jennifer Marcum’s family reiterated their plea for Kimball to show them where he left Jennifer’s body.

“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 demanded.

Jennifer’s father told the court that Kimball “has destroyed our lives.”

“How many other people are missing as a result of his life?” Bob Marcum said. “It’s time for Scott to be a man and give back what he took from us.”

Kimball remained silent.

After the hearing, his cousin and self-described spokesman, Ed Coet, said Kimball was sorry but laid much of the blame at the FBI’s feet for the agency’s decision to use him as an informant.

“I do want the families of all the victims, and the public, to know that although I must be held accountable for my crimes, none of this could have occurred, and the victims would not have been killed had the FBI not driven me into the extremely dangerous underworld in which both I and the murdered victims found ourselves,” Coet said on Kimball’s behalf.

 

Read the plea deal. (PDF)

Read Rob McLeod’s statement to the court. (PDF)

Read a transcript of Lori McLeod’s statement to the court. (PDF)

Read Darlene Emry’s statement to the court. (PDF)

Read Howard Emry’s statement to the court. (PDF)

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

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.

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

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.

The Boulder County District Attorney's letter.

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.”

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.)

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.

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 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.”

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.

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

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.

With no bodies and no witnesses, Booth and Okubo knew they had no murder case against Kimball. They homed in on the fraud case, planning to use Kimball’s six previous felony convictions to paint him as a habitual offender, allowing for a quadrupling of prison time if convicted of stealing $55,000 from Lafayette optometrist Cleve Armstrong.

Realizing that he wouldn’t easily shake this pair, Kimball came up with a nickname that the prosecutors came to wear as a badge of honor: the Boulder bitches.

“He realized that Katharina and I were not going away,” Okubo recalls. “The Boulder bitches weren’t going away.”

(Camera file photo)

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

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.

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.