Kaysi as a baby. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

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

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

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

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

Kaysi at age 6. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

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

“I gave her consistency,” Harper said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Camera file photo)

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

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

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

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

(Posting date is approximate.)

(moneywalks.com)

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

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

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

Kaysi as a teenager. (Courtesy of Rob McLeod)

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

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

Lori McLeod (Mark Leffingwell/Camera)

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

Kimball gets a restraining order against her.

McLeod says he lied about the incident.

Read Lori McLeod’s arrest report (PDF).

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

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

(Date is approximate.)

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

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

Read Lori McLeod’s arrest report (PDF).

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

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

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

(Date is approximate.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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