When Irene Silverman was reported missing on July 5, 1998, prosecutors immediately had two suspects: a man by the name of Manny Guerrin, who had been renting an apartment in the millionaire's seven million dollar Manhattan mansion, and his assistant, Eva. Silverman had gone so far as to sketch a picture of her dark, private, and very strange guest, who aroused her suspicions so much that she noted his activities on paper.
Police soon traced the mysterious tenant's true identity: Kenneth Karam Kimes, a twenty-three year old man with a police record. But the real culprit, the mastermind, was "Manny's" assistant, Eva - also known as Sante Kimes. This mother and son team had left a trail of cons, thefts and murders all the way from the Bahamas to California over the years, and now had found their way to New York. It was only a matter of time before the special NYPD "Silver Task Force" and the prosecution team put together a powerful case against Sante and Kenny for the murder of Irene Silverman.
As the case unraveled, Sante Kimes' true nature slowly revealed itself: a cold-blooded, calculating killer who lived according to her own mad rules, she conned her way into millions with convoluted schemes, treachery, and subterfuge and left a cross-country trail of bodies. She is one of the very few people in the 20th Century U.S. to have been convicted of slavery, and has been accused of crimes even more bizarre than that. Worst of all, she dragged her weak, but equally evil son into her devious acquisition of houses, furs, and cars, and trained the boy in the subtle craft of thievery and murder.
DEAD END
The Crime Story of the Decade; Murder, Incest, and High-Tech Thievery
By Jeanne King
M. Evans and Company, Inc.
Copyright © 2002 Jeanne King.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-87131-942-X
Chapter One
"Who did you kill, Grandma?"
Wednesday, July 1, 1998, Las Vegas, Nevada
Dawn had just broken, yet the temperature outside Stanley Patterson's trailer home on the outskirts of Las Vegas, miles away from the neon-lit casinos downtown, was a blistering 96 degrees. The worst was yet to come: by mid-afternoon, forecasters were predicting the mercury would climb even higher, to a scorching 104 degrees in the shade ... if you could find any.
Inside the tiny one-bedroom, sparsely furnished trailer Patterson shared with his wife, the morning sun was already peeking through the slats of a rickety wooden window shade when the telephone rang, rousing Patterson from a deep sleep. Turning over slowly, he peered at the clock radio on his nightstand, which read 7:15.
To others, Vegas might be the town that never sleeps, but to Patterson at that moment there was, or should have been, only one 7:15 on the clock, and it wasn't 7:15 A.M. Eyes half open, he reached over and punched his caller ID button to find out who could be calling him at this ungodly hour: it was a 917 area code phone number he did not even recognize. Shit, he thought, who the hell could this be? He pulled the receiver to his ear and managed a groggy hello.
"Hi, how ya doin'?" asked a deep, annoyingly cheery male voice at the other end of the line. "Here's mom." Even half asleep, Patterson had no trouble recognizing the voice as belonging to Kenny. Instantly, as if black coffee had been mainlined directly into his bloodstream, Patterson was jolted awake, and before he could swing his legs off the bed and without even so much as a hello, the woman Patterson knew only as Ellen was on the phone, rattling out a plan.
"Come to New York. I've got an apartment for you to manage that's owned by this old woman. She's eccentric. You've never seen anything like it. Late at night, when she gets drunk, she dances in the hallway in a frilly negligee, tiptoeing like a ballerina. It's a sight to be seen. Listen, Stan, we want you to be the super and manage the building. You'll go in there and throw out all the deadbeats. Evict all the faggots and derelicts in the building. Paint it, fix it up, and bring it up in value."
Ellen, who barked orders like a Marine drill sergeant, spat out her words in such rapid-fire fashion that she rarely left room for words from anyone else. Finally, the puzzled Patterson managed to crowbar in a question. "How do I evict everyone if the eccentric lady is still there?"
"Don't worry about her," Ellen replied. "Just live in the apartment. If someone knocks on the door, ignore all questions. Tell them to leave a card, that the building is being taken over by a corporation, and someone will get back to them."
There was more. As the cobwebs faded from his head, Patterson heard Ellen tell him that she was prepaying an electronic plane ticket for him on America West and that he should pick it up at the airport in Las Vegas. Once in New York, she instructed, he would take a shuttle bus to the Hilton Hotel and call her on her cell phone as soon as he arrived.
"Don't forget," she added, "I want you to evict these guys. There was a blond Mexican guy renting this apartment for three months for $6,000 and the landlady said it was only for one month. He demanded his money back and couldn't get it. The man had $5,000 on the dresser in his bedroom and somebody stole it from him."
Patterson had no fucking idea what she was talking about. It made no sense, but it didn't matter. From experience, he knew that he'd find out soon enough what Ellen was talking about, and it probably meant trouble.
"Don't tell anyone about this," she warned, talking even faster now, as if that were possible. "Nothing. Nada. Pack enough clothes, because you're going to be there at least a month. And one more thing, Stan, bring your toys," she added ominously.
Patterson knew exactly what Ellen meant, but before he could answer, he heard Kenny yell in the background, "Don't do that, Mom. Don't have him bring any guns. We don't want no shoot-outs in New York."
"You got it all?" Ellen asked, ignoring her son's cautioning words. "And Stan, just make sure you're coming," she ordered.
"How much is in it for me?" Patterson asked.
"More money than you could ever dream of," Ellen answered.
"I'll think about it," Patterson told her, and then he hung up the phone.
Patterson knew better than to believe Ellen's promises of Vegas-sized, jumbo jackpots. After all, he'd heard more than enough versions of the same rap before. Patterson was a construction worker/handyman down on his luck and actually could have used the work Ellen described, though the mention of bringing his "toys" did worry him. He had good reason to be suspicious of Ellen and her offer, and he couldn't help but wonder what she had up her sleeve. Whatever it was, he knew it was trouble, trouble he couldn't afford to get into. After all, he'd met Ellen and Kenny only six months ago, but less than a week ago he had learned that their antics had landed him in deep shit with the law.
At 55, the craggy-faced Patterson was well built and rather muscular. His weather-beaten face and chiseled features had that worn-out, tired look of an old cowboy. Despite his slightly receding hairline, his salt-and-pepper hair made him look somewhat distinguished. Patterson had lived in Las Vegas 22 years and had worked the hotels there since 1978 as a maintenance engineer. But he lost his job in 1997, and since then, the divorced father of four grown children had struggled to make ends meet.
He first met Ellen and her son Kenny in January 1998, when he answered an ad in the Las Vegas Review Journal looking for someone to do home repairs and small moving jobs. Ellen had placed the ad and when he called she offered him $300 to move her belongings from Vegas to a storage facility in Sherman Oaks, in Los Angeles. Ellen was a real charmer, promising him grand trips to the Bahamas, vacations in Hawaii, and enough work to set him up for life. Under other circumstances, he might have been skeptical, but because of the hard times Patterson was going through, he wanted to believe Ellen and her promises of the good life, and so he was blinded by her glib talk and flirtatious manner.
As he sat there on the edge of the bed, the phone at his side, Patterson pondered that first impression of Ellen and recalled her superficial smile that never went higher than her immobile upper lip. He remembered her deep black eyes that stared menacingly through the Coke bottle lenses of her cheap, over-the-counter glasses and her distinctively thick black eyebrows that were plucked into gothic arches that enhanced a suggestion of demonic possession.
As for Kenny, he was a docile, dutiful, humanoid son to the woman he called "Mom" in a way that Patterson found a little creepy. Kenny, who was easygoing, had youthful, collegiate good looks, yet his smile was at times as sinister as that of Hannibal Lecter. Kenny could be personable and charming one moment, but in the flash of a second he could switch, revealing a wild temper that could send shivers up your spine. If he were ever to be played by someone in a movie, Patterson thought Sean Penn would make for perfect casting.
On January 23, as he was loading furniture and documents into a U-Haul truck for the trip to LA, Patterson mentioned to Kenny, who was hanging around watching him work, that he was a gun collector. Kenny seemed fascinated and asked to see his collection. That very day, while the U-Haul truck stood packed and ready to leave, both Ellen and Kenny accompanied Patterson to his trailer where they handled and dry-fired his guns, which included a .380 Magnum, a Smith & Wesson revolver, two .22 Jennings automatics, a .22-caliber Beretta, and a 9mm Glock pistol.
Kenny said he wanted to purchase two of the guns, because, he explained, he couldn't buy them from a firearms dealer since he was only 20 years old. Only later did Patterson learn that Kenny was actually 22 years old and that he was lying simply to see whether Patterson was someone who could actually provide him with his "toys." Despite the show and tell session, no guns were sold that day.
Almost precisely one month after moving Ellen and Kenny's belongings to Los Angeles, Patterson received a phone call requesting his services again. This time, they wanted him to drive still more of their belongings from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, to a home they had rented in the Bel Air area. They also asked Patterson to bring along two .22 Jennings pistols—and then Kenny added a particularly odd request. "Can you find a way to silence them?"
"Why do you need a silencer?" Patterson asked.
"I just want to do some shooting in the backyard, and I don't want to bother the neighbors," Kenny answered, a little too innocently for Patterson's taste.
"Take a potato, take a knife, and bore it out a little bit. It works just as good," Patterson advised, offering Kenny a tip he'd learned from an engineer.
"That's too easy," Kenny replied enigmatically.
Patterson accommodated his new employers and brought the two Jennings pistols with him during the February Los Angeles trip, and agreed to sell the guns to them for $20 apiece. Patterson gave both of them to Kenny to try out. Kenny later returned one of the pistols, claiming it didn't work, but he never returned the other one and never paid for the one he did keep. Kenny and Ellen then prevailed upon Patterson to buy two other pistols for them, a Beretta and Glock, which Patterson handed over only after they promised to reregister them in their own names. He didn't trust them and the last thing he wanted was to have them wind up being used in some crime and then being traced back to him.
Patterson heard nothing more about this odd couple until June 27. He was working on his beat-up pick-up truck outside his trailer that afternoon, when he was approached by two Los Angeles detectives, Dennis English and William Cox, along with a Las Vegas detective named Jimmy Vacarro. The detectives wasted no time showing Patterson they were playing hardball. They told him the woman he knew as Ellen had 22 other aliases, including "The Dragon Lady." They said her real name was Sante Kimes and she was a career con artist with a police record going back nearly four decades, including convictions for involuntary servitude, forgery, and grand larceny. Her son Kenneth, who was always referred to as Kenny, was her partner in crime.
The detectives made it very clear to Patterson that unless he cooperated with them, he could face serious criminal charges as the registered owner of a gun that might have been used in a murder in LA back in March. The victim's name was David Kazdin and he was a former business associate of the Kimeses, who were, the detectives explained, the chief suspects in the murder. Immediately, Patterson knew what happened to that missing Jennings pistol, and he realized the Kimeses had tricked him into supplying them with legally registered weapons.
Patterson was no fool. He was no killer either. He knew that keeping his mouth shut would do him no good and so he wasted no time admitting to the detectives about the gun transactions and he agreed to cooperate, promising to let them know the next time the mother and son duo contacted him.
On that morning of July 1, immediately after receiving Sante's call from New York, Patterson contacted the LA detectives, who then came up with an elaborate plan to arrest Sante and Kenny in New York City, using Patterson as bait.
Over the next few days, "Ellen" called Patterson at least seven more times and each time he spoke to her, Patterson immediately relayed what she said to the LA detectives. When she was sure he was making the trip, Sante, whose speech sounded as jittery as a wind-up toy, gave him final orders for Sunday, July 5. Once in the lobby of the midtown Hilton Hotel, he was to call her on her cell phone number and await further instructions.
Meanwhile, Detectives English and Cox submitted a formal request to the joint FBI/New York Police Department Fugitive Task Force in Manhattan for assistance in a homicide investigation that began in LA on March 13, 1998, and involved Sante and Kenny Kimes, who were now believed to be in New York.
The LAPD request was brought to the attention of David Stone, a 23-year veteran of the FBI and the supervisor in charge of the New York Task Force. According to the LAPD, the murder victim, David Kazdin, 63, was a former insurance claims adjuster who had investigated the 1973 theft of a tapestry filed by the late Kenneth Kimes, Sr., Kenny's father and the man Sante claimed was her husband. More recently, Kazdin ran a copy machine business near his Granada Hills home in the San Fernando Valley. Over the years, Kazdin and Kimes, Sr., became friendly enough for Kazdin to agree to be listed as owner of Kimes's Las Vegas Geronimo Way home so that some of Kimes's assets could be hidden. Kazdin was getting set to retire when his body was found in a black heavy-duty garbage bag bound with duct tape inside a dumpster behind Los Angeles International Airport on March 14, 1998. Police forensic investigators determined that he was shot with a small caliber pistol.
Technically, Sante and Kenny were wanted only for questioning in connection with Kazdin's murder, but there were sufficient grounds to pick them up and hold them on an outstanding Utah warrant issued in connection with the fraudulent purchase of a green Lincoln Continental Town Car, paid for by a bad check for $14,900. That's exactly what the detectives planned to use, so that they wouldn't tip their hand when the arrests were made.
By Saturday, July 4, Stone had briefed over a dozen agents assigned to the case, who were all ordered to report for work early the next morning. The plan called for detectives to intercept Patterson at John F. Kennedy International Airport and bring him to Task Force headquarters for questioning before sending him over to the Hilton Hotel to flush out the Kimeses.
Stone agreed to the LAPD request that the Task Force would not interrogate the Kimeses about the Kazdin case; instead he would simply hold them, pending the arrival of Los Angeles detectives, who would be dispatched to New York once the Kimeses were in custody.
Sunday Morning, July 5, 1998, New York City
It was a balmy 71 degrees with virtually no humidity—a rarity for New York City in July—when a weary Patterson sauntered off the red-eye flight at JFK airport. Wearing baggy blue jeans, a blue plaid shirt, cowboy tie and jacket, and cowboy boots, his head covered by a Crocodile Dundee hat, he was hard to miss. As soon as he entered the terminal, he was flanked by two agents from the Task Force: FBI case agents Wilfred Baptiste and Emilio Blasse.
"Are you Mr. Dwight?" Baptiste asked.
"Not today," Patterson replied. "My middle name is Dwight."
Patterson's use of his middle name had been a pre-arranged code set up before he left Las Vegas and would be used to initially identify him to law enforcement agents so Patterson, who had long since stopped trusting "Ellen," could be assured that those meeting him at the airport were agents and not cohorts of Sante's.
Flanking him, the agents took Patterson by the arms and hustled him to a waiting unmarked police car and guided him inside. As the car sped into the city, one of the agents asked the obviously nervous Patterson why he was wearing a bulletproof vest underneath his shirt. Knowing that Sante had asked him to bring his guns and knowing that she and Kenny were capable of murder and may have picked up weapons from another source, he replied, "I'm in fear of my life. The Kimeses may kill me."
Traffic that holiday Sunday morning was light, so the car carrying Patterson and the two agents quickly reached the giant federal building at 26 Federal Plaza, where an elevator whisked them to FBI headquarters on the 28th floor. There, in a large room, nine other agents were waiting to interrogate Patterson. After an hour, Patterson, who was periodically glancing at his watch, reminded the agents that he needed to get to the Hilton soon, if they didn't want to arouse the suspicons of Sante and Kenny.
By 10:30 A.M., more than a dozen FBI agents and NYPD detectives had infiltrated the Hilton Hotel at West 54th Street and Sixth Avenue, staking out the lobby and exits and searching the garage for the green Lincoln Town Car that Sante had paid for with a rubber check. Hilton security was notified and the hotel's computer was searched on the possibility the Kimeses were registered there, but nothing turned up and there was no trace of the Lincoln in the garage or parked on the street near the hotel.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from DEAD END by Jeanne King. Copyright © 2002 by Jeanne King. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
