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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He says Willis should return to Colorado and hire an escort on whom he can demonstrate the murder.

“I’ll show you exactly what happened and you can just be a bystander,” Kimball says.

Later in the conversation, Willis asks Kimball if he doesn’t in fact want a “Christian burial” for Jennifer.

“My daughter means everything to me,” Willis says.

“You know what?” Kimball replies. “I saw how much she meant to you when you wouldn’t let me into your motel room.”

Kimball warns Willis that if she threatens him, he won’t talk to her anymore. He said his handler at the FBI, Special Agent Carle Schlaff, will be “obligated to move me, to hide me, or do whatever, so just remember that.”

Kimball can be heard telling Willis that he can’t say too much about the case or he will “blow the lid right off the whole thing.”

He also states that Schlaff tells him exactly what he can or cannot say about Jennifer.

The call ends with Kimball telling Willis to let him talk to her daughter, Tammy, about how her sister was murdered.

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

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

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

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

Ask for Joe Snitch, the agent says.

(Date is approximate.)

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

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

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

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

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

(Date is approximate.)

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

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

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

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

Read Carle Schlaff’s affidavit here. (PDF)

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Marcum in 2001. (Courtesy of Bob Marcum)

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

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

Kimball tells Schlaff he can help catch the killer.

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

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

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

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

Kimball was taken to Denver County Jail.

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

New York City. (photos4travel.com)

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

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

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

(Date is approximate.)

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

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

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

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

His contact at the bureau is Special Agent Carle Schlaff.