A special report.; A Twisted Tale of Deceit, Fraud and Violence
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Mrs. Kimes went to a Florida bank and took out a $200,000 mortgage on the house. After obtaining the money, she again changed the name on the title. The new owner became Frank McCarren, an indigent man she found in a Las Vegas homeless shelter. In mid-January, investigators said, Mrs. Kimes took out fire insurance on the home in Mr. McCarren’s name. The house was then heavily damaged in a fire on Jan. 31. Arson experts found that fires had been deliberately set, one upstairs and one downstairs, with a flammable liquid. The insurance scam unraveled when Mr. McCarren told investigators that Mrs. Kimes had held him captive, beat him and forced him to memorize prepared lies for the inevitable questions. The insurance money was never paid. Meanwhile, the Florida bank that had given a mortgage on the house contacted Mr. Kazdin, who said he had not applied for any mortgage. Mr. Kazdin, 64, who had known Mrs. Kimes for 20 years, was terrified of her, his family said. And when Mr. Kazdin was found shot to death last March 14, suspicion fell on the Kimeses, whose whereabouts were unknown. They were nearby, in rooms at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Before leaving the West Coast in April, they bought a green 1997 Lincoln Town Car from a dealer in Cedar City, Utah, who agreed to take the order by phone because the Kimeses had bought other cars from him without problems. It was delivered to Los Angeles, and Sante Kimes paid for it with a $14,900 check that bounced. The dealer filed a complaint, but the Kimeses and the car were gone, headed for Florida. In Baton Rouge, La., they picked up an $80,000 motor home from a dealer with a similar scam, paying with a rubber check. The motor home was found abandoned in Florida several weeks ago. By mid-June, mother and son were in New York, where Kenneth, using a phony name, rented a $6,000-a-month apartment at the East 65th Street town house of Mrs. Silverman. By early July, investigators said, the pair had forged the paperwork to take over her money and town house. On July 5, she disappeared. That evening, as Sante and Kenneth Kimes returned to the New York Hilton, they were finally arrested — not for murder, arson or any of the countless scams of which they are suspected, though their car was full of papers that appeared to implicate them in a vast web of criminality. They had been tripped up by the Utah car dealer’s bad-check complaint. More : query.nytimes.com |