00:00:00
If I was not at work, I was driving around. Have you seen her yet? We were all over town.
00:00:18
It was maddening. Her boyfriend said Casey didn't come home last night. Leanne Emery's father confirmed, yes, my daughter's been missing.
00:00:30
Where is Jennifer? Where's Jennifer? Stop. He told me, the police won't help you, I will help you.
00:00:38
If he knew where she was, the only way he would know is because he put her there.
00:00:42
At that point, I knew he was doing nothing but lying to me. It was pretty clear that we were probably dealing with a serial killer.
00:00:51
He says you need to call me by the name of Hannibal. Did he fit that? The movie character?
00:00:56
Yes. I saw numerous images of women being tortured and possibly being killed. My voice was cracking when I said, I think I finally am.
00:01:09
We have only a small little snapshot. There's a lot more out there that we don't know about.
00:01:26
They loom along the Colorado-Utah border. The book cliffs, 250 miles of high dry desert, concealing secrets of what ironically is called
00:01:40
Operation Snowball. A mystery that grew and grew as it rolled along, so big and multi-layered it took years to
00:01:51
find the center. deadly, those who solved it could not quite believe what they'd uncovered.
00:01:59
And so evil, the families of the victims are still trying to understand why. It was a February day in a small casino, in a small casino town, out in Colorado, a place
00:02:18
called Black Hawk. How did you meet him? I met him playing cards. A little casual poker.
00:02:26
Not like she was looking to meet someone. Having already survived a few of the wrecks love can make of a person,
00:02:32
out of the market, pretty much. Her name is Lori McLeod. Divorced, and my daughter was living with me.
00:02:41
And I didn't do a lot of dating. But then, the dealer was dealing, and she looked up, and...
00:02:49
He walked in with his mom. He was wheeling her along in her wheelchair. And I thought, what a sweet guy, and what a doting son.
00:02:59
He was open, revealing. Told her his name was Scott. Scott Kimball. Couldn't take his eyes off her.
00:03:07
The dealer said, Laurie, you're driving this guy nuts. Just give him your number.
00:03:11
And so he said, can I get your number? And I slid it over to him, and I said, you're not a felon or anything, are you?
00:03:21
And he says, Laurie, we were just talking. You know I work for the FBI. In fact, an agent for the FBI, said Scott.
00:03:28
Why this thing from a felon? He was divorced with two kids, loved the outdoors, loved camping and hunting.
00:03:35
And that's how it all began, at least for Lori, the whole awful thing. When things, when people vanished, when life stopped making sense.
00:03:46
Though just then everything seemed extra fine, like a happy new beginning for Lori McLeod.
00:03:52
He brought me flowers and just didn't set everything right. Their first date was Valentine's Day.
00:04:01
He opened her doors, squired her around, a real gentleman, paid for everything. He even took her deep sea fishing.
00:04:10
He had a lot of money. Really? Yeah. Rarely would he be anywhere without, like, two huge gangster wads in his pants, you know.
00:04:19
What a change. What a sweet surprise. Her lawman was loaded. I was a single mother and, you know, I wasn't going to nice expensive restaurants.
00:04:30
I wasn't going shopping a lot or anything like that. And that's what he offered.
00:04:36
Wasn't all he offered, mind you. Scott was not just a gentleman with Lori. He was that way with her daughter, too.
00:04:43
19-year-old Casey. She thought he was great. He was very good to her, too. Scott started spending more and more time at Lori's place in suburban Denver.
00:04:54
And they seemed to be a family of sorts, or on their way to being one, which was very good because things had been a bit up and down with Casey as she matured into adulthood.
00:05:04
After such a wonderful start, when she was little. She was an angel. She was the easiest kid and just precious.
00:05:14
She was always happy and smiling. Casey's getting ready to start fifth grade. You couldn't help but smile yourself when she was around, said her dad Rob McLeod.
00:05:24
She was a joy and she was fun and jovial and smart and giggly. And so it looked, going places too.
00:05:36
I'm really confident that I'll be able to do something with my life after this. I just want to thank you for inviting me.
00:05:44
But life happens, not always as we intended to. Her mom and I got divorced when she was pretty little.
00:05:49
By the time she was a teenager, she was acting out some. And after high school she discovered meth and other drugs sometimes partied with the wrong crowd And even took off and ran away a couple times How did you deal with that
00:06:05
Just patience. She's gone, can't find her, but you know she's off with friends or whatever.
00:06:12
She had that way of disappearing for a while. Yeah. But now she was on the straight and narrow, stable, happy, clean.
00:06:21
Though life choices being what they were, the best job she could find, she told her dad, all embarrassed,
00:06:27
was minimum wage at Subway. But he said... I don't care what it is, you know. An honest job and you're honestly working, take pride in that.
00:06:38
But. Always a but. It was going on Labor Day 2003. Scott discovered something very disturbing.
00:06:47
Inside the apartment. brought it to Lori. He showed me a little glass vial of white chunks of something.
00:06:59
And he said, I think Casey's using again. So you said, no, no, no, it can't be. It can't be.
00:07:05
So she confronted Casey, had to. She kept insisting, I didn't do it. Please listen to me.
00:07:12
Please believe me. This is not mine. It got loud then. accusations, denial, disbelief.
00:07:20
I thought the police would be the best place to go. I just knew that I couldn't sit back and watch her destroy herself with drugs.
00:07:28
So she told Casey, we're going to the police station. Lori went to get her wallet.
00:07:33
And when she came back, that was it. Casey was gone. She'd taken off on her bike.
00:07:39
Scott was there. And I said, get in the car. You have to hurry. I'm envisioning all these horrible things happening to her.
00:07:46
It was hours later by the time Scott found her. Actually treated her and her boyfriend to a motel room where she could cool off.
00:07:54
Don't worry, he told Lori. She'll be back. And when you're ready to talk with her and she's not afraid that you'll turn her in, everything will work out.
00:08:06
A day went by, and two. And then Casey called Scott's phone, asked to speak with her mom.
00:08:13
And she says, I just want to say that I'm sorry and I love you. And the phone went dead.
00:08:20
And even then, Lori had no idea. She'd entered purgatory on her way to her own private hell.
00:08:32
Bad news from Casey's boyfriend. He said Casey didn't come home last night. And Lori starts the search.
00:08:39
I would see somebody that looked like her from the back. and I'd circle the block, you'd start to see things.
00:09:00
When Rob McLeod heard his 19-year-old daughter, Casey, had run away after a nasty spat with her mom, his ex,
00:09:07
he wasn't too worried. Not yet, anyway. I was a little concerned, but Casey had taken off before, and I just thought she got to figure this stuff out herself.
00:09:17
Just what Lori's boyfriend, Scott Kimball, said, too. That's why he was helping Casey get some space.
00:09:23
By putting her and her boyfriend up in a motel for a bit so she could cool off before returning home.
00:09:29
What was going on in her head, though, then? What was she thinking? That she was afraid of me, that I would turn her in.
00:09:37
Scott tried to calm the waters, brought Casey food. Gave her some rides to and from work.
00:09:43
But then a few days later, the boyfriend knocked on Lori's door. He said Casey didn't come home last night.
00:09:50
Subway called Lori, said she hadn't shown up there either. Even though her boyfriend said he could have sworn Scott came by to pick her up as usual.
00:09:58
He says, well, he picked Casey up to go to work. But maybe the boy who was upset was also confused, thought Lori.
00:10:06
Besides, Scott was adamant he wasn't even around the day Casey disappeared. He said, I did not pick Casey up. It must have been somebody else.
00:10:14
He said that day he was not available because he was going up to the mountains scouting a hunting spot.
00:10:20
But now Scott devoted himself to finding Casey, told Lori he'd use his FBI connections to help,
00:10:27
which was more than the local police said they could do because... She was over 18.
00:10:32
Yeah. It was her right to be missing. They just said, go home and relax. She'll come back one day.
00:10:38
Just what Scott told her, they'd say. The police won't help you. I will help you.
00:10:44
He would keep track of her social security number in case she ever had a job. He would know where to look for her.
00:10:50
And, you know, he had friends on the street who could help after she was gone. I really felt he was my lifeline.
00:10:58
He was going to help me find her. So, with Scott promising to help, they decided to take a long planned trip to Las Vegas
00:11:07
where Scott made it very clear just how committed to her he was Let's make it solid, let's get married
00:11:14
He felt he could be more helpful to you as your husband He told me that Yeah It felt more secure than me doing it on my own
00:11:22
So she said yes, and they got married, Vegas style All things considered, their honeymoon a few weeks later was very low-key.
00:11:34
It was up in the mountains, a spot Scott had picked for the occasion near the Rout National Forest.
00:11:40
It happened to be Casey's birthday, and Lori could think of little else. As each day went by, did it get better or did it get worse?
00:11:49
Oh, no. It got much worse. But then a few weeks later Scott very excited told Lori that while they were out of the house Casey must have been there There were signs he showed her Casey necklace appeared on a doorknob A neighbor who said he saw her there
00:12:06
Which at first gave Lori hope. But not for long. I would see somebody that looked like her from the back.
00:12:13
And I'd circle the, you know, the block. And I think that was her. That's definitely her.
00:12:19
I think she had that jacket. You start to see things. And your heart sinks again.
00:12:22
And then as time goes on more and more, it's like, if she is into drugs again, would I even recognize my own kid?
00:12:32
You know? Who am I looking for now? Casey always spent Christmas with her dad Rob and his family.
00:12:40
But when that holiday rolled around four months after her disappearance, he too was worried about just what Casey he'd find at his door.
00:12:48
If she shows up stoned or drunk or high, I'm going to be ticked off. So I almost don't want her to show up.
00:12:58
Christmas 2003 came and went. Still no Casey. Months start rolling by, and now the prayers are desperate.
00:13:09
I want my kid home. And the months became another year. Second Christmas shows up and nothing.
00:13:20
And I remember finally going to bed and five minutes after I go to bed, the doorbell rings and I fly.
00:13:29
It's my next door neighbor telling me, well, I saw you were out front, but I also noticed your garage door was still open.
00:13:35
So I thought I'd come over and let you know. And we go into the next year and I mean, I want her home. I want her home.
00:13:43
As did Lori, of course. But life had to go on. In 2004, she and Scott moved to a new place outside Denver and started a cattle business, Rocky Mountain All-Natural Beef.
00:13:58
Scott's two sons often came to visit. Every other weekend we had his boys and they were always fun.
00:14:04
But it was that summer, one of Scott's sons, Justin, was severely injured in a freak accident on the ranch.
00:14:11
And while he recovered, Scott's uncle Terry moved from Alabama to help. Although...
00:14:16
He made me uncomfortable. He was a very strange man. Strange indeed. Two or three weeks later, without a word to Lori, he was just gone.
00:14:27
Scott told her it was pretty wild. Terry had won the lottery and left the country to live the good life
00:14:34
with a stripper he met named Ginger. Scott told me that he had taken off to Mexico. I was just glad he was gone. I just was thrilled he
00:14:44
was not in my house anymore. Besides, Lori had other worries. The business wasn't going too well
00:14:50
and of course the uncertainty about Casey. It was all taking a toll. Scott, she said, was away a lot
00:14:57
and when he was home became short-tempered, downright nasty sometimes. He just had a way of
00:15:04
making sure that I knew he was smart and that I was not smart. Eventually, Scott and Lori grew apart,
00:15:11
and she, once so happy and optimistic, fell into a kind of desperate confusion. Was Casey alive, or was she dead?
00:15:21
I did at one point start to feel like I was just losing my mind. It was all just craziness that I had created in my head.
00:15:28
I was hoping it was me losing my mind instead of her being gone. And in a little town not far away, a local detective heard about some bogus checks and pulled on that investigative string.
00:15:43
No idea that what was going to come unraveled had a lot to do with Casey. Scott's interesting past.
00:15:55
I'm like, who is this guy and what's this whole business about the FBI? And was Scott looking for Casey?
00:16:02
Or busy elsewhere? My gut told me he was just cheating on me. Lafayette is a sweet little place steeped in Colorado history about 30 miles north of Denver.
00:16:27
And here in early 2006, a local bank called the police to report that $80,000 had vanished from a client's business account.
00:16:37
It looked like somebody was forging checks. A young detective named Gary Thatcher got the call.
00:16:43
We started tracing the checks, and all the money was being written to Rocky Mountain All-Natural Beef.
00:16:50
Thatcher looked it up and discovered the company belonged to a guy named Scott Kimball.
00:16:57
A name that meant nothing to Detective Thatcher. We went to the banks and we had video footage of him at the banks cashing these checks.
00:17:05
Did you begin to form the impression this was a con man you were dealing with here?
00:17:09
Yes, definitely. Yeah, we started looking at his background and could see that he had an extensive history,
00:17:15
what we'd call paper cases. And so we could tell that this wasn't the first time that he had done something like this.
00:17:21
And, you know, he'd actually served some time for it previously in another state.
00:17:27
Now that was, as they say, a red flag. So Thatcher went to Scott Kimball's house.
00:17:34
And Kimball's wife, Lori, came to the door. He said he needed to talk to Scott Kimball.
00:17:40
And I said, well, he didn't come home last night, so I don't know where he is. And my gut told me he was just cheating on me.
00:17:47
So Thatcher asked Lori to come to the police station for a formal interview, intending to dig into the fraudulent habits of her wayward husband Instead Lori surprised him with a whole new revelation that her daughter Casey was missing had been gone more than two years and one of the last people to see her was Scott Kimball
00:18:08
He had actually given her money to take off. I knew Scott was in contact with her. He had been
00:18:13
taking her to and from work. She had talked about some suspicious things that Scott had done
00:18:19
that made her believe that Scott kind of knew where she might be. She didn't know if Scott was just trying to hide from her
00:18:30
and he knew where she was staying and just wasn't telling her. Then Lori dropped another bombshell about Scott.
00:18:37
I knew that he worked for the FBI. An FBI agent with a rap sheet? That didn't make any sense to Detective Thatcher.
00:18:49
Why does this guy who's committing check fraud forgery and his wife is suspicious of their missing daughter,
00:18:56
this is the same guy that's also working for the FBI? And I'm like, who is this guy and what's this whole business about the FBI?
00:19:04
Probably not inclined to believe it at first, huh? Absolutely not. This has got to be part of a con.
00:19:08
He's probably just impersonating an FBI agent and telling that to people so that he can manipulate them and get what he wants.
00:19:15
so thatcher called the fbi and couldn't quite believe what he heard scott kimball was not an
00:19:23
agent but he did work for the bureau scott had been an informant so what'd you think when they
00:19:29
said yep he works for us yeah it was really surprising i certainly was concerned about what
00:19:36
scott had been up to and i was also worried about you know how much does the fbi know about do they
00:19:41
know everything that he had been doing while he was an informer for them. Hiring informants is a common practice for the FBI, which uses, sometimes even pays,
00:19:53
criminals and ex-cons for inside information to help crack cases. But now, Detective Thatcher
00:19:59
was beginning to realize he knew a lot more about Scott Kimball than Kimball's own handlers
00:20:04
that the FBI did, not only about his nefarious past, but also how he might actually be involved
00:20:12
with Casey McCloud's disappearance. I was beside myself. It was complicating my case really fast.
00:20:19
Complicated was an understatement. Soon, Detective Gary Thatcher felt like he'd stepped into a horror movie
00:20:26
when the FBI told him why they'd hired Kimball in the first place. He was involved in a murder-for-hire case
00:20:34
that they were working, and they had a female that was also missing. Another young Colorado woman gone missing?
00:20:43
Oh, boy. An anxious father meets with a mystery man. I had a chill down my spine by the time I got done talking to him.
00:20:54
Who says he knows things. If he knew where she was, the only way he would know is because he put her there.
00:21:04
When Detective Gary Thatcher set out to find a check fraud suspect named Scott Kimball,
00:21:22
the trail led to a missing woman named Casey McLeod. That was a surprise. But nothing like the surprise Thatcher got when he learned that his suspect, Kimball,
00:21:32
was not only working for the FBI, he was working on the case of another missing woman.
00:21:39
Her name? Jennifer Markham. I couldn't believe how beautiful she was. This is Jennifer's dad, Bob Markham,
00:21:48
who told us she also vanished from a suburb outside Denver, maybe 20 miles south of where Casey had disappeared,
00:21:56
six months earlier than Casey, though. Or at least that's when Jennifer stopped calling her parents back home in Illinois.
00:22:03
We were trying to call her and we didn't get any response on her phone. Bob could sense that something wasn't right.
00:22:10
She was a very happy person. I mean, she laughed a lot. She was always smiling and joking.
00:22:17
Jennifer was 25, a single mom with a five-year-old boy. To make ends meet, she worked in a local strip club.
00:22:25
Bob didn't like it, but he understood. She was doing what she had to do, and she was trying to keep her personal life separate.
00:22:34
There's no doubt in my mind she was a good mother. And she wanted better. She and her boyfriend, a handsome guy named Steve Ennis.
00:22:42
She really loved him. She said, this is the guy that, you know, this is really the one.
00:22:47
What did she want to do with her life? Did she have hopes and dreams, plans? She said, I'd like to open up a sandwich and coffee shop,
00:22:56
and then go into that and get out of the stripping. But things happened. Steve Ennis went to prison on a drug conviction.
00:23:06
And the next year, Jennifer up and vanished. Strange how this doting mother suddenly left her only child behind.
00:23:14
Oh, yeah, we were worried. Did you ever sense at all that she was in any danger?
00:23:19
We wondered if something happened with the drugs. That had to do with Ennis? Yeah, with Ennis.
00:23:25
More than a month after she disappeared, her car turned up in the Denver Airport parking lot.
00:23:31
But no record she caught a flight. And then, nothing. Nothing at all. Though Bob, for two years, kept looking,
00:23:40
sticking up posters around Denver, talking to her friends. And one day he asked a cop friend to run her name,
00:23:48
Jennifer Markham, in a police database. And the very next day, Bob got a call from an agent at the FBI
00:23:55
who said he'd been investigating Jennifer's disappearance. But, said the agent, the case is going nowhere.
00:24:03
There's no new evidence. We haven't got any breaks in the case. But Bob kept calling, prodding.
00:24:11
And finally, the FBI agent set up a meeting with somebody he called his guy, a confidential informant who was helping with Jennifer's case.
00:24:20
I said, well, what's his name? And he said, well, we'll just call him Joe Snitch.
00:24:24
Joe Snitch. Yeah, and that was it. So, on an August afternoon, Joe Snitch and Bob Markham met at this park outside Denver.
00:24:34
The informant did seem to know a lot about Jennifer's case, but not what Bob was hoping to hear.
00:24:41
He told me that he knew exactly where my daughter was buried. We needed to go get Jennifer's body so that she could have a Christian burial,
00:24:50
because she was just, you know, laying covered with dirt somewhere. Wait, she was dead?
00:24:59
First time anybody had flat out said that to Bob. And then another shock. Sitting at that picnic table in the park,
00:25:06
Joe Snitch made Bob an offer to take his family and him up to the mountains to actually find Jennifer's body.
00:25:15
What did you think when you heard that? I had a chill down my spine by the time I got done talking to him.
00:25:20
still in shock about what the guy said about Jennifer and with a sudden very bad feeling about Joe Snitch.
00:25:27
If he knew where she was, the only way he would know is because he put her there.
00:25:32
Why didn't you go? Because I knew that he would kill me. Just that one conversation and Bob was sure Joe Snitch was Jennifer's killer seemed obvious.
00:25:44
That night, Markham called the FBI agent and set up the meeting. I told him this guy killed my daughter.
00:25:51
And he said he was blowing smoke up our butts. Joe Snitch was just making up stories about Jennifer, said the FBI man.
00:26:00
But Bob's instincts were still screaming. Joe Snitch must have killed his daughter.
00:26:07
A few days later, Jennifer's mother, Mary, called Joe Snitch and recorded the call.
00:26:14
Where is Jennifer? Where's Jennifer's stuff? Listen, Mary, you can't be doing this to me.
00:26:21
You can't be freaking out. Did you really, really, really know how my daughter died, actually?
00:26:28
I already told you what I knew. I told you what I can and can't say, and I already told you what I was willing to show you.
00:26:37
You had your chance. I don't get it. What did you show me, Joe? I'll see you later. Bye-bye.
00:26:43
Joe! Joe! Joe Snitch hung up. But Bob Markham had secretly written down his license plate number.
00:26:54
He had a family friend run the plate and learned Joe Snitch's real name. We knew it was Scott Kimball.
00:27:03
Scott Kimball, Lori's husband, FBI informant, and now a potential killer. Who was this guy?
00:27:15
This gets weirder and weirder. Right, very confusing. Another possible victim. I was convinced that it was not an accident or a series of accidents.
00:27:39
2006, January. It was cold in Colorado. But in the little town of Lafayette near Denver, a young cop was trying to grip a case that felt almost too hot to hang on to.
00:27:51
He had started with a batch of bogus checks that led him to a missing woman, and then another missing woman, and then a person of interest who worked for the FBI.
00:28:03
Not an agent, exactly, but Scott Kimball was on the payroll paid by the Bureau as an informant.
00:28:09
Detective Gary Thatcher had never trained for a thing like this. I was the check fraud and forgery guy and this had landed in my lap and it was overwhelming.
00:28:19
It was about to get more overwhelming. Thatcher started calling around to other police agencies in the area
00:28:26
trying to see if anybody else had crossed paths with Scott Kimball. What do you know? Someone had.
00:28:33
Thatcher got a call from a detective in a town down the road, a place called Louisville.
00:28:37
I was contacted by that detective saying, we're looking into Scott for the attempted murder of his son.
00:28:46
Attempted murder of his son? Yes. The investigation stemmed from that freak incident on Kimball's ranch in 2004 involving his 10-year-old son, Justin.
00:28:58
Justin Kimball had an accident on this property. The boy was seriously injured when a heavy steel grate fell on him.
00:29:06
But Thatcher learned there was much more to that story. He had a bad traumatic brain injury,
00:29:15
and Scott put him in the Jeep and was taking him to the emergency room. When he came to, Justin told the police something horrible happened on that ride to the hospital.
00:29:25
He said his dad actually pushed him out of the car. As he was driving? Yes, while he was driving.
00:29:36
This gets weirder and weirder. Right, very confusing. So this is how he was moving the money.
00:29:41
Thatcher met with Boulder County Chief Deputy DA Katerina Booth, who had investigated the incident
00:29:46
back when it first happened. I was convinced that it was not an accident or a series of accidents.
00:29:52
Kimball denied trying to hurt his son in either incident but Booth believed Kimball did try to kill his son not once but twice First by toppling that steel grate on him and when that failed pushing him out of the car
00:30:08
As for why a man would do that to his own son, Booth had a theory. Scott Kimball had been checking and snooping around the insurance policies
00:30:18
and who was the named beneficiary on his son's policy the same day as those accidents.
00:30:25
Booth discovered that if the son had died, Kimball would have collected $50,000.
00:30:32
It was criminally motivated, financially motivated, so that Scott could just get his insurance proceeds.
00:30:39
Did the son survive? He did. That is when Kimball's uncle Terry came to help the family.
00:30:47
And then just as abruptly vanished after Kimball said he won the lottery and ran off to Mexico.
00:30:53
could Terry have shed light on what happened to Kimball's son? Too late now. And Booth, who surely wanted to prosecute Scott Kimball for attempted murder, was frustrated.
00:31:06
How far along were you? Were you ready to press charges? No. It was just a horrific crime that he had committed on his son.
00:31:11
And we didn't have the right amount of evidence that we could prove that he had committed that crime against his son.
00:31:17
I had always felt incredibly troubled that this young child was so hurt and he didn't have justice.
00:31:26
So when Detective Gary Thatcher showed up at Cotterina Booth's office in Boulder
00:31:31
and told her he had a pretty solid check fraud case going against Kimball, Booth had her own light bulb moment.
00:31:39
Here was how she could get the guy. I really wanted to work on these other cases that Detective Thatcher was working on.
00:31:46
Although it was not my specialty, I said, I'll take those and I'll work hard on those.
00:31:50
Let's hold them responsible for what we can prove. You just had to put a case together.
00:31:53
We just had to put a case together. If they could get him behind bars, even for simple fraud, they'd have the time and chance to get him on the big stuff.
00:32:03
Because it was increasingly clear to them, this wasn't just any case. The more and more we learned about him and believing him to be a potential killer,
00:32:13
working for the FBI as an informant at the same time, that became hard to believe.
00:32:19
An informant who had apparently gone rogue, way rogue, leaving a trail that Thatcher and Booth were just beginning to follow.
00:32:30
If only they knew what they were getting into. Time to talk to Scott Kimball. But first, they'd have to catch him.
00:32:40
I was concerned about whether or not we were going to find him because, you know, a very intelligent, slippery guy.
00:33:01
In March 2006, Detective Gary Thatcher and Prosecutor Cotterina Booth were ready to arrest Scott Kimball for check fraud.
00:33:09
And he, quite suddenly, vanished. He was out of there because he knew the heat was on.
00:33:16
Yes, that's correct. I was concerned about whether or not we were going to find him
00:33:19
because, you know, very intelligent, slippery guy. From his hideout, wherever that was,
00:33:26
Kimball kept in touch with Laurie. When he was calling me and he was on the run,
00:33:32
he kept telling me he was coming back. Lori prayed it would all work out, that Casey would come home just as Scott said she would,
00:33:40
and that the check fraud charges were no big deal. And she, confused, decided to hang on to his things just in case.
00:33:49
I thought, well, if it is true what he's saying, and, you know, everybody's just blowing everything out of proportion,
00:33:56
when things calm down, he'll come back, I want for him to have his clothes and things.
00:34:00
Sounds like you believed his story to some degree. At first, yeah. He sent me pictures from Alaska, and that's where he was.
00:34:12
But investigators had been tracing Scott's calls, and they weren't coming from Alaska.
00:34:18
They told Lori. At that point, I knew he was doing nothing but lying to me, and I felt no loyalty after that.
00:34:26
And finally, weeks into the search, his own cell phone pinned him down in Palm Springs, California, driving a pickup.
00:34:37
We were able to put the authorities in California within a two-block radius of where Scott was at.
00:34:43
A dramatic car chase ensued, which lasted for hours. It was mayhem. He was crashing through farmers' fields. He wasn't at all looking to give himself up.
00:34:53
But finally, he literally ran out of gas and surrendered. We were ecstatic that he had been caught, and now it was go time.
00:35:08
Soon after, Detective Thatcher finally sat in front of his fugitive and tried to pry a little truth out of him.
00:35:16
He always had a fall guy and always had somebody to blame it on, and he was very manipulative.
00:35:21
So what was your impression at the end of that interview about, A, his intellect?
00:35:26
One of the smartest people I had ever interviewed. It was clear I had a lot of work ahead of me and that this wasn't going to be an easy case.
00:35:33
Convinced they were dealing with a very dangerous criminal, Thatcher and Booth hid on a way to keep him locked up as long as possible.
00:35:41
Kimball's trail of financial crimes was so long, it placed him in a special category of crook.
00:35:47
We could do what we call the big habitual criminal. We call it the big bitch. The big bitch or the little bitch It was the big bitch By charging Kimball as a habitual criminal they could put him in prison for a very long time And we were able to do the greater habitual criminal which gave me 48 years on that white crime that theft
00:36:12
Right around that time, he developed a name for you, didn't he? He did. There was another DA in the office who was working on the case, and he termed us the Boulder Bitches.
00:36:22
I didn't mind. I thought that meant I was doing my job. The FBI didn't seem to know exactly what their informant was up to,
00:36:30
but Thatcher and Booth believed he was involved in the disappearance of two young women.
00:36:35
But remember, Kimball was locked up for bank fraud, not murder. And the parents of those missing women were still desperate to find their daughters.
00:36:44
So Bob Markham put up this giant billboard above the strip club where Jennifer once worked.
00:36:49
We were just hoping that somebody would see the billboard and come forward on something.
00:36:55
Bob had also spoken to a local newspaper called Westward about the creepy guy he'd met at the park
00:37:02
and about the private sleuthing he'd done to get his ID. Bob was convinced this man, Scott Kimball, was with Jennifer the day she disappeared.
00:37:12
And guess who came across that article and that one crucial detail? Casey's dad, Rob McLeod.
00:37:20
I was reading that online and down deep in the stories of the last person ever saw her alive was Scott Kimball.
00:37:28
That'll jump right out at you. Yeah, pulls the air right out of your chest. Yes, because Scott Kimball was the last person known to have seen Casey alive too.
00:37:40
So Rob called Bob and the two fathers suddenly understood the awful thing they had in common.
00:37:46
When I heard that his daughter was missing and then found out that his daughter's mother was married to Scott Kimball, unbelievable.
00:38:03
Also unbelievable was when Rob called the FBI and was told by an agent this bad man was a paid informant who worked for the Bureau at the time Casey disappeared.
00:38:15
He didn't think he was the kind of bad guy to be violent. He says he might embezzle $100,000 from somebody or write $10,000 bad checks,
00:38:24
but he says he'd never give an inkling that he would be violent. But that didn't make Rob any less suspicious of Scott Kimball,
00:38:31
because of something Lori finally got around to telling him. And she comes to me and says, well, there's something else I haven't told you.
00:38:39
and she's the week Casey went missing Scott went missing too I didn't know where he was
00:38:47
from the time Casey went missing until a week later he just took off was gone oh my
00:38:52
I never heard that before and now the FBI was about to hear it too because in the fall of 2006
00:39:02
Rob McLeod and Bob Markham arrived at the Bureau's Denver office loaded for Bayer
00:39:06
demanding answers We laid out what we thought was going on with Scott Kimball and our daughters and pretty much told them, you know, you have two choices.
00:39:19
You could be the hero or you could be the zero. My thing is, that's my daughter. She's dumped like a piece of trash somewhere. I want her home.
00:39:27
Dead or alive? Dead or alive. I didn't care if it was a fingernail. I wanted her home.
00:39:38
By now, Casey and Jennifer had been missing for more than three years. But then, in a little town far from Denver, a tiny clue.
00:39:49
Flimsy, probably insignificant. One small slip of paper from this place that was about to change everything.
00:40:01
Everywhere we went, the case just got bigger and bigger. And more terrifying. I saw numerous images of women being tortured and possibly being killed.
00:40:27
It was just before Thanksgiving 2006 in Denver when FBI Special Agent Jonathan Grusing got the call.
00:40:34
The boss wanted to see him. He said that we had a problem. He had just visited with two fathers whose daughters were missing.
00:40:45
And he thought a former informant of ours might have been responsible for their disappearances.
00:40:50
That cannot be a very encouraging thing to hear as an FBI agent. No, we deal with problems all the time.
00:40:56
We try to solve them, but this one was unique. Unique? Well, Agent Gruzing had just gotten a complex, controversial, and downright messy case
00:41:07
suddenly dumped right in his lap. I had no idea that this was going to last possibly the rest of my career.
00:41:14
Three years after Casey McLeod and Jennifer Markham vanished, finding them was now a top priority for the FBI.
00:41:21
So FBI Agent Gruzing teamed up with small-town detective Gary Thatcher, who'd been working the case for months.
00:41:28
Agent Grusing wanted to get to the bottom of this more than anybody in this case, more than any law enforcement agency.
00:41:34
FBI really stepped up and tried to do the right thing once they knew that there was an issue.
00:41:39
And their informant had done bad things. Lots of bad things. So how and why did Scott Kimball become a confidential informant for the FBI?
00:41:49
Grusing found out in his file. Kimball was a career criminal but his convictions were for grifting crimes nothing violent He been lying and conning and conniving on and off for years and had persuaded the FBI he could help prevent a double murder It was all there in the file
00:42:07
Back in 2002, one of Kimball's cellmates was Steve Ennis. Remember him? Jennifer Markham's
00:42:14
boyfriend, the guy who went to prison for dealing drugs. Ennis and Kimball were buddies.
00:42:19
And there in prison, Scott promised Steve that when he got out, he'd help Jennifer achieve a long-standing dream.
00:42:28
He told Steve he was bringing Jennifer to Washington to set up a coffee shop and get her out of the stripping business.
00:42:35
But Kimball double-crossed Steve Ennis. That was when he'd secretly contacted the FBI, claiming that the murder plot he could help foil had been hatched by Ennis and Jennifer.
00:42:49
Scott was going to prevent two homicides from happening. Two people that were going to testify against Ennis in a trial were about to be killed.
00:43:00
That was his reporting. And the killer was going to be Jennifer. Yes. That was pure nonsense.
00:43:08
But at the time, Kimball's story sounded credible. So after he was released from prison in 2002, the FBI paid him to keep tabs on Jennifer.
00:43:18
He made it his job. He structured it so he would be working with Jennifer. Specifically wanted to.
00:43:26
Correct. Kimball found Jennifer in Denver, told her about the promise he'd made her boyfriend
00:43:34
to launch her in the coffee business. She went to Ennis and asked, in a recorded jail conversation,
00:43:40
can I trust this guy? And Ennis said, yes. and i'll be able to support us both until you get on your feet you're gonna be on your feet in no
00:43:50
time and you're gonna have a good job i'm happy she saw scott as a means to an end to get her out
00:43:57
of the stripping business and was trusting that scott was someone she should be associating with
00:44:02
but of course kimball had no intention of helping jennifer and her boyfriend he'd made up that crazy murder for hire story to get himself in the good graces of the fbi
00:44:12
And then he spun a web to trap Jennifer, his prey. And she, the single mom, had no idea who she was dealing with.
00:44:24
Highly intelligent and very manipulative and a very good reader of the person he's talking to.
00:44:32
Now, grusing like Thatcher thought Scott Kimball was very likely responsible for Jennifer's disappearance.
00:44:39
Probably Casey's, too. So they went back to Casey's mom, Lori, to break the news.
00:44:46
When did you begin to suspect that Scott had something to do with what happened to Casey?
00:44:52
When they started saying something is big or wrong. He's not just a thief. We think he's a really bad guy.
00:44:58
I think you need to buckle up. This is not good. Too many missing people surrounding Scott Kimball.
00:45:04
That's when Lori suddenly realized somebody else was missing. Uncle Terry. He was also living in the Denver area, just like Casey and Jennifer.
00:45:15
And remember, he was actually staying with Scott before he mysteriously vanished.
00:45:20
Scott told me that he had met a stripper and that he was going off to Mexico. And she bought it.
00:45:27
Until now. We fact-checked it right away. He hadn't won the lottery. We knew that Uncle Terry was missing as well, knowing who Scott was
00:45:36
and what the circumstances were that he was probably also a victim of Scott Kimball.
00:45:42
Three people who had close contact with Scott Kimball all suddenly gone. We actually ended up dubbing this case Operation Snowball because it had that snowball effect.
00:45:53
Everywhere we went, the case just got bigger and bigger. Bigger still when Lori remembered something else in her apartment.
00:46:00
Trash bags with Scott's personal stuff. I kept everything. He had just junk. But even the little bits of paper and things, you kept all that stuff?
00:46:11
I didn't go through anything. I just left it intact. Including a grocery receipt from the tiny town of Walden, Colorado.
00:46:22
I figured this could have just been a passing through sort of thing. Without context, that receipt didn't mean much.
00:46:29
But you filed it away. Filed it away. Yeah. And then they got a look at Scott Kimball's computer.
00:46:36
Ugly. I saw numerous images of women being tortured and possibly being killed. Those so-called snuff videos.
00:46:46
It looked like them, yes. But also on that computer, this was puzzling and kind of dreadful.
00:46:54
There was a simple photo of a young woman. No name, no description, and no idea who she was.
00:47:06
A real-life Hannibal? Did he fit that? Yes. The movie character of Hannibal, he thinks two steps ahead, and Scott Kimball does the same thing.
00:47:27
By June 2007, Scott Kimball had cooled his heels in jail for more than a year on those check fraud charges.
00:47:39
While Detective Gary Thatcher and Special Agent Jonathan Grusing tried to sort out exactly what else the man had done.
00:47:46
And what really happened to Casey and Jennifer and his own uncle, Terry. Finally, they were ready to confront Kimball.
00:47:54
and he said of course he'd talk to them no attorney No ground rules, just denials, which he repeated for hours and hours.
00:48:06
I've never murdered anybody. I've never done anything like that. Thatcher and Gruzing patiently listened as they wedged in questions about all those missing people, like Kimball's Uncle Terry.
00:48:18
Terry's not missing. He didn't win the lottery. He didn't go to Mexico. We know that much.
00:48:23
So he's somewhere, I guess, hiding out in the United States. Or Canada or somewhere.
00:48:29
It's real convenient, Scott, that he's hiding out, that Casey's hiding out, and that Jennifer's hiding out.
00:48:34
You know what? I can't tell you anything about where Terry or Casey or Jennifer are.
00:48:40
And if you're going to ask me if I've hurt any of them or killed any of them, the answer is no.
00:48:44
I'd love to have heard the conversation between you and Gary coming out of that interview room.
00:48:50
Yeah, we called it pixie dust. We joked about it. but it's Scott's uncanny ability to get people to do things they would not normally do.
00:49:00
Then they set out to break down Kimball's shaggy dog tales, a fact-checking mission,
00:49:05
and they found one of Kimball's prison mates who was still behind bars outside Denver,
00:49:09
a bank robber named Stephen Hawley. He's in prison for life. He's got nothing to lose at this point.
00:49:16
Before arriving, they checked Hawley's prison records and noticed he had a frequent visitor a few years earlier.
00:49:23
A young woman named Leanne Emery. He was still very passionate about his relationship with Leanne.
00:49:31
Love with her? Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Stephen Hawley told them that he and Kimball had once hatched an elaborate escape plan when they were in prison together.
00:49:40
A plan to get Hawley into Mexico, where Leanne would be waiting for him. And then Scott said, if you give me your girlfriend's number, who's Leanne, I will figure out a way to get you two together in Mexico.
00:49:57
But he says, you can't give her my name. You need to call me by the name of Hannibal.
00:50:02
Yes, that Hannibal. Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal. Did he fit that? Yes. The movie character of Hannibal is very high functioning.
00:50:14
He thinks two steps ahead of most of the investigators, and Scott Kimball does the same thing.
00:50:22
He is normally two steps ahead of the rest of us. And it seemed miles ahead of his prison mate, Stephen Hawley, and Hawley's girlfriend, Leanne Emery.
00:50:31
What did her boyfriend say? How was she to treat Hannibal? Hawley told her that Hannibal was someone not to be messed with, but someone that she could trust.
00:50:41
So, where was Leanne? We find out that she has a dad, and I call the number and ask to speak to Leanne.
00:50:54
This is Leanne's father, Howard Emery, and here is what he told FBI agent Gruese.
00:51:00
She's been missing for almost five years. Leanne lived in Centennial, Colorado, a Denver suburb not far from where Casey, Jennifer and Terry Kimball once lived before they all suddenly vanished.
00:51:16
Howard had been looking for his daughter ever since she disappeared in early 2003.
00:51:22
She had a loving spirit for people who most people would kick out of the way, the handicapped, the disadvantaged.
00:51:32
She was always looking for that person with the broken wing, right? Exactly. It was sort of a compulsion she had.
00:51:41
Leanne was a straight-A student. She was adventurous, liked exploring caves particularly,
00:51:47
loved animals, especially Dalmatians. But there was something else about her. Not her fault, just how she was.
00:51:56
She was diagnosed as having bipolar situation. So she would have periods of depression and periods of anxiety and being impatient.
00:52:08
She made bad judgments. Like the men in her life, Stephen Hawley. She's convincing herself that I'm in love with this person, and he needs me.
00:52:19
Howard didn't know anything about the escape plan, didn't know anything about Hannibal.
00:52:25
All he knew was Leanne said she was going on a caving trip with her friends to Mexico.
00:52:30
And not long after she left, said Howard, Leanne called him from the road. She said, Dad, I want you to know I love you very much.
00:52:39
You know, when you get a message like that, you know something's wrong. Then, just a few days later...
00:52:47
There was a message actually sent to Leanne saying, your car has been found abandoned not far from Moab, Utah.
00:52:56
What did you think when you heard that? I didn't believe it at first. I said no.
00:53:00
Howard called the cops in Moab, and they read him the license plate. Dal gal, Dalmatian girl.
00:53:09
When I heard that, my stomach got sick. I mean, I couldn't, I mean, I didn't know what, I didn't, it was a total shock.
00:53:20
Howard filed a missing persons report, and nothing happened. So he started his own investigation
00:53:27
and discovered a trail of credit card charges and bounced checks in several western states,
00:53:33
which certainly didn't seem like something Leanne would do. And Howard read and re-read some disturbing emails
00:53:41
Leanne sent a cousin before she left on her trip. I'm currently having to trust someone I don't know very well,
00:53:48
but I have to do it to get what I want and need. My orders come from Hannibal for the moment,
00:53:54
and he is a dangerous person to mess with If Hannibal knew I was talking to you he have me killed in a second Howard wrote to Leanne boyfriend Stephen Hawley and heard back
00:54:08
Hawley hadn't heard from Leanne either and was quite concerned. He's saying she is in big, big trouble.
00:54:18
Says you have got to contact the FBI as quick as you can. When Howard first called the FBI, again, nothing happened.
00:54:30
But now, nearly five years later, the FBI was very much on the case. And as Special Agent John Grusing looked at photos of Leanne and compared them to that image he had seen on Kimball's computer,
00:54:42
the mysterious, dark-haired young woman, he knew that was Leanne Emery. Her hair was dyed, and it was only a couple days prior to her disappearance.
00:54:55
There was no mistaking this very disturbing pattern. It was pretty clear that we were probably dealing with a serial killer.
00:55:06
Scott Kimball makes an offer. He said, I didn't kill any of these girls, but I think I can help you find them.
00:55:18
You're going to say what you're going to say because only you know the truth, Scott.
00:55:30
Yes, I do know the truth. It was a strange and frustrating experience talking to Scott Kimball.
00:55:35
I know what I have done and I know what I haven't done. Whatever you have is what you have.
00:55:40
But whatever you have, I know what I have done and I know what I haven't done. The guys seemed to revel in toying with detectives.
00:55:46
I'm not talking anything about Casey. I don't know anything about poor little Casey.
00:55:51
I don't know where she's at. Scott likes to throw in little nuggets, the here and there, of truth.
00:55:58
And I think that any good lie is usually pretty close to the truth. And so he was really good at that.
00:56:05
In the end, Kimball always shut them down. You know, maybe you guys should just take me back to my cell.
00:56:11
Put me in prison, put me in jail, and I'll do my time. But in early 2008, investigators finally had ammunition,
00:56:20
or at least something to trade, since he was facing almost 50 years for fraud. So they leaned on him, hard.
00:56:28
And for the first time, Kimball seemed to give a little. He said, I didn't kill any of these girls, but I think I can help you find them.
00:56:37
Now that would mean something. But having dangled what they wanted, he looped right back to his complex webs of deceit.
00:56:45
Then it was another prison conversation months later. Kimball actually seemed to slip up and perhaps unintentionally reveal something.
00:56:56
He said, because federal prison is a little nicer to serve time in than state prison.
00:57:02
He said, well, what if one of these girls disappeared on federal forest land? And it was at that moment when he said that, that that receipt clicked in my brain.
00:57:14
Yes, that receipt. The one Gruzing came across in Scott's Stuff and saved. A grocery store receipt from a little Colorado town called Walden, near the Rout National Forest.
00:57:28
I thought, well, what if that Walden receipt had something to do with Casey's disappearance and this forest?
00:57:34
So, Gruzing dug the receipt out of his files and, lo and behold, it was dated August 24, 2003,
00:57:42
one day after Casey vanished. But it's a big forest, over a million acres, even if she was here.
00:57:52
Could they ever find her? Gruzy called the U.S. Forest Service. I said, can I just get a map of that area
00:58:00
because I'm ignorant as far as Walden and what it looks like? And they said, no, it costs $8 for a map.
00:58:06
And I said, do you know how much FBI paperwork that is? And they said, well, we can't give you a map.
00:58:12
A clash of federal bureaucracies over an $8 map. After much back and forth, Gruzing talked to another employee.
00:58:23
And this time, he asked directly. And said, have you guys had any missing hikers or someone recovered?
00:58:29
She said, well, right before winter, they did recover a hiker. Months earlier, a hunter, pure chance,
00:58:38
spotted the skull through his rifle scope deep in the woods. The local sheriff had collected the remains back then, and now Grusing sent them to the FBI lab for DNA analysis.
00:58:51
And then he knew. We had a hit that that was Casey McLeod. The news traveled quickly to Cotarina Booth.
00:58:59
I remember running down to the courtroom because my co-worker was in the courtroom, and we hugged and we cried.
00:59:05
It was this mixture of excitement and relief, all mixed into one. Finally, one mystery solved with a saved receipt and some pure luck.
00:59:18
It was like hitting the number in the lottery, frankly. Right, exactly. How is it that a silly little thing like that receipt would pop right into your head?
00:59:26
I don't know if you call it providence, luck, whatever. If I had called on that receipt when I first got it from Lori and say,
00:59:34
do you have any missing people out there? They would have said no. And I would have closed that part of the investigation.
00:59:40
it just makes me grateful that we found her. No one more grateful than the parents who could finally bring her home.
00:59:50
During all this, I had to redefine what home meant. Yeah? Home used to mean you know my house I wanted her It had to change because that wasn going to happen If you have a deceased daughter she belongs
01:00:05
In a respectful place with dignity. A place you can go visit. A place you could go visit.
01:00:12
That's the closest definition of home that I had for her. Though there is no explaining for the uninitiated
01:00:25
the kind of pain that goes with all that Mind-numbing? I don't remember how I reacted
01:00:34
I really don't At that point, there's no hope There's no hope she'll be found alive
01:00:40
It was just over And then it got worse when it dawned on Lori. That particular part of the forest,
01:00:52
the place where Casey was found, was familiar to her, horribly familiar. This was where Scott took her during their honeymoon.
01:01:04
We camped in the woods at a campsite, and he took me, as it turns out, to where he had taken her.
01:01:13
What does it do to you? It makes me sick. I think he went to check out his handiwork.
01:01:22
Because he took off on the four-wheeler, he would be gone for hours. That's really an awful thing to think about.
01:01:30
Yeah. It cut into her heart like a knife. That whole so-called drug episode with Casey,
01:01:39
he must have staged it, staged it all. The clues that she was alive, Scott's assurances.
01:01:45
Just lies and more lies. And now there's no healing, ever. She annulled her marriage to Scott Kimball eventually.
01:01:55
But there's no escaping the torture he inflicted. I have one job as a mother and I failed to keep her safe.
01:02:03
And I failed. I'm the one that has to live with that forever. But now Deputy D.A. Booth was armed with actionable evidence.
01:02:14
and she turned up the heat on Kimball. When that tide finally turned for us, that's when we got communication back
01:02:22
that he was willing to sit down and talk to us a little bit about these missing women
01:02:25
in exchange for how we would file those homicide cases. They made a deal. It wasn't pleasant.
01:02:34
Kimball would plead guilty to the white-collar crimes and get 48 years in prison,
01:02:38
no death penalty, no first-degree murder charges. but he would plead to second-degree murder and in exchange agreed to lead
01:02:48
investigators to the places he left his remaining victims Leanne and Jennifer and Uncle Terry he was talking actively about where they were gonna be what kind
01:02:58
of equipment we would need he was talking about helicopters he wanted horses and high-tech equipment there was a jail deputy just looking at me like
01:03:07
What are you doing? And I scribbled on a piece of note and passed it to him and said,
01:03:13
we just made the deal with the devil. The search begins. He goes to a different creek bed, says Merry Christmas.
01:03:23
Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. And then we put the flag there. It took time to make that deal with the devil.
01:03:44
It was February 2009 when a convoy of cars pulled out of Grand Junction, Colorado,
01:03:49
heading west toward Utah in search of two women who had now been missing for almost six years,
01:03:56
Leanne Emery and Jennifer Markham. Inside one of those SUVs, Scott Kimball. In another, prosecutor, Cotarina Booth.
01:04:07
And there was, no kidding, about nine big black SUVs, tinted windows. And you'd watch people on the street stop and pause and look as if, like, the president was going down, you know, the street.
01:04:19
Scott loved that there was that much of a production around him. All that was missing was the movie crew.
01:04:25
That's right. Like, this was his show. This was his production. They crossed into Utah and entered a remote and rugged area called the Book Cliffs.
01:04:35
The Book Cliff area is a very vast area. Without his help, there would never be any finding, these bodies.
01:04:42
It was a needle in a haystack. But there was optimism in the air as they rolled through the rugged canyons.
01:04:50
I think we all went there thinking, by the end of the day, we might have Leanne and Jennifer, and we were excited and eager.
01:04:58
Then Scott Kimball said, here, stop here. As he got out of the car, just this grin that came over his face.
01:05:09
And I remember vividly watching him and how he felt very in control and he was loving every minute of it.
01:05:16
But there was nothing there. Not then and not all day. The convoy rolled home disappointed.
01:05:26
A couple of days later, they tried again. He goes to a different creek bed, says Merry Christmas.
01:05:32
This is creek bed number two. This is Jennifer. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.
01:05:37
And then we put the flag there. And everybody dug. I even dug. We excavated this whole area and found absolutely nothing.
01:05:48
And he knew it. We think he did. He played games with us. You start to feel like an idiot after a while.
01:05:53
Yeah that where Johnny and I had to keep our patient hats on Let keep searching Let keep searching But we didn really have any other choice but to play the game with him and to keep going
01:06:06
But after another grueling, futile day, no Jennifer, no Leanne. I was so heartbroken and angry and frustrated because, again, I'm convinced he knows exactly where Jennifer is.
01:06:23
And we didn't get either. We didn't get Jennifer or Leanne. But patience. A month later, they went out again.
01:06:33
Hours in, they approached a dry creek bed. And Scott starts to act a little weird.
01:06:40
And we're watching his mannerisms. And then all of a sudden it was, let's go this way.
01:06:46
It was just kind of odd. So Agent Grusin decided he's going to stay back while we took Scott the direction he wanted to go and search that area.
01:06:54
It seemed like they were close to finding something. But then, Kimball appeared to be leading them astray again.
01:07:02
So Scott's going that way, and I'm going this way. And I walk about 25, 30 feet, just through some trees, over some gravel,
01:07:12
stepping over some logs, and eventually I find a small gray hair clip with hair in it,
01:07:19
with some bones beside it. Whoa. And that was a moment. My voice was cracking. when I said, I think I found Leanne.
01:07:30
And Scott was standing over me. I can still see him today. And he just had an odd look on his face.
01:07:36
It wasn't anger, but it was frustration, maybe. And he says, we are not in the right place.
01:07:43
Let's go search somewhere else. So they got him out of there, and we secured the site.
01:07:49
They called the local coroner, who would come out the next day to start digging for Leanne's remains.
01:07:56
And now the search team's attention turned to Jennifer. We took Scott back to the Jennifer site.
01:08:04
That is, the place he said, Merry Christmas. And that became then multiple sites.
01:08:12
Because she wasn't there. Wasn't in any of the places Kimball seemed to so enjoy taking them to
01:08:18
and insisted they keep searching. At some point, you've got to stop. At some point, you've got to say, we're done.
01:08:24
And we eventually got to that point. They shut down the search for Jennifer and sent Scott Kimball back to jail.
01:08:33
Word traveled fast to Jennifer's dad, Bob Markham, once so hopeful. He was now crushed.
01:08:40
I prayed to God, and I was hoping that maybe somehow we would find something. That hurt you?
01:08:48
Yep. The next day, the coroner and search team, minus Kimball, returned to excavate Leanne Emery's remains.
01:08:59
Then, Gruzing made the difficult phone call to Leanne's father, Howard. And said, we have found her remains, and we were almost 100%, it is Leanne.
01:09:11
But he said, I wanted to know you ahead of time. I don't want you to hear it in the news.
01:09:14
I want you to know from us that, yes, this is her. Later that day, in the dust around Leanne's bones,
01:09:22
they found the bullet that killed her. And that was it. There was no more hope from that point on.
01:09:29
Over the next month, local teams searched without Kimball, excavating creek beds and tracking with cadaver dogs,
01:09:36
hoping to find a trace of Jennifer. No luck. But there was one more big play, this time high in the mountains.
01:09:46
Who would they find this time? Another body. I spotted a gray tarp that was wrapped with rope underneath a tree.
01:09:57
Another bullet. A perfect bullet hole on the back of the skull. They waited for the snow to melt
01:10:18
way up in the mountains. Yet another search. Not for Jennifer Markham, who was still missing,
01:10:25
but for another of Scott Kimball's victims, his very own uncle, Terry. He was the guy who'd moved in with Scott in 2004, then mysteriously vanished, supposedly won the lotto and moved to Mexico.
01:10:38
But no such luck for Terry. Kimball admitted he killed Terry too, hid his body, and remembered every detail.
01:10:49
He reeled off from memory exactly where Uncle Terry was. He provided us a map that was extremely detailed,
01:10:56
and he told us what clothing Terry was wearing, including the change in his pocket.
01:11:03
Kimball said he dumped Terry high in the hills above the famous ski resort, Vail, Colorado.
01:11:09
Up and down they walked in that wilderness for hours, 10,000 feet up. It was getting towards the end of the day,
01:11:17
and I spotted a gray tarp that was wrapped with rope underneath a tree. It was him, the uncle who'd come to help Kimball, and wound up dead.
01:11:29
Parts of his body had been kind of mummified over the years, and right there at the back was a perfect bullet hole on the back of the skull.
01:11:40
We actually found the bullet, and that matched the same bullet as Leanne. Poor Uncle Terry. Never saw it coming.
01:11:49
Why his own Uncle Terry? Why was he a victim? Uncle Terry came to town with a...
01:12:00
case full of money from a divorce. Scott's white-collar crime and check fraud forgery,
01:12:07
he will even admit, is because he has an insatiable appetite for money, and he will steal from anybody
01:12:13
he can. Or the prosecutors wondered, did Kimball commit the crime as part of a cover-up?
01:12:20
It was shortly after him trying to kill his son, and we also wondered if there was ever anything
01:12:26
that his Uncle Terry figured out about that not really being an accident. Scott had delivered Terry and Leanne's remains, but not Jennifer's.
01:12:36
So now his original plea deal was dead. Once Scott did not get us to the place so that we could recover Jennifer,
01:12:45
then that was renegotiated, and he lost the benefit of his original deal and then received a more stiff sentence.
01:12:54
From Colorado's high-definition news leader... NBC Denver affiliate KUSA-TV was there in the fall of 2009
01:13:01
when Scott Kimball appeared in court in a wheelchair nursing an injury where he agreed to a new plea deal that included two counts of second-degree murder.
01:13:12
He would now be sentenced to 70 years in prison. How do you plead guilty or not guilty? Guilty.
01:13:18
But 70 years wasn't nearly enough for the families of his victims. They spoke at his sentencing.
01:13:25
Scott Kimball has destroyed our lives. Our lives will never be the same. Scott tried to look so humble and everything in the thing, like he was being mistreated.
01:13:36
Scott's an animal. He really is. Howard Emery, six years of pent-up rage, stood face-to-face with Kimball and let it all out.
01:13:47
Since he will not get the death penalty as he deserves, Mr. Kimball must be locked up for the rest of his life.
01:13:54
Me sitting right over here, and I'm right here, and let him know what I felt, and that he didn't just enjoy killing people,
01:14:03
he enjoys torturing them mentally. Rob McLeod had a somber but equally powerful message.
01:14:10
First thing I said was I was there the very moment Casey took her first breath. And you, Scott Kimball, were there to take her last.
01:14:20
And then Lori, Casey's mom and Scott Kimball's ex-wife, surprised just about everybody.
01:14:30
I told him that I think that Casey forgave him, and because of that, I have to forgive him.
01:14:38
If I keep hate for him in my heart he keeps winning and Satan keeps winning I just can have that Scott Kimball didn say a word showed no remorse
01:14:54
and then they wheeled him away, presumably to spend the rest of his life in prison.
01:15:00
Except, as you will see, Scott Kimball, the man who likes to be called Hannibal,
01:15:06
wasn't done yet. In the movie, Hannibal escaped. Could Scott Kimball bring a helicopter in?
01:15:16
There was another scheme that had Scott Kimball all over it. And were there other victims yet to be discovered?
01:15:24
We have only a small little snapshot of what Scott's done. There's a lot more out there that we don't know about.
01:15:37
He was here now, the Sterling Correctional Facility, where, after decades of homicidal con games,
01:15:55
Scott Kimball was serving his 70-year sentence. That was the idea, anyway. New developments today in the case of one of Colorado's most notorious serial killers,
01:16:06
Scott Kimball. In 2017, the man who liked to be called Hannibal, the confessed killer,
01:16:14
organized an escape. Scott and another inmate were going to have another inmate try to break
01:16:19
them out. Bring a helicopter in or something? Yeah, they were going to try to use the helicopter
01:16:23
to bring it into the yard and help them escape out. But the chopper never came because the FBI
01:16:30
got wind of the plan and foiled it before it got off the ground. This is another event worthy
01:16:36
of a movie. Yeah, it was another scheme that had Scott Kimball all over it. So was this finally
01:16:44
the end of Operation Snowball? Hardly. FBI agent John Grusing is still investigating Scott Kimball
01:16:52
in other cases, like this one from 2004. The victim, a young woman named Katrina Powell,
01:16:59
was found mutilated and murdered and dumped in this alley near Kimball's workplace in a Denver
01:17:04
suburb and not far from the places where Kimball's known victims were taken. Detective Bernard Vonfeld led the investigation.
01:17:13
What made it difficult was this lady was nude, no identification, no clothing near her,
01:17:20
and the hands were not present. Agent Gruzing consulted Detective Vonfeld. It was obvious Katrina was a lot like Scott Kimball known victims young attractive vulnerable In fact Katrina had hit hard times recently resorted to working the streets
01:17:40
We were able to find in Scott's own handwriting that he killed a prostitute. Well, this was a letter he wrote to somebody?
01:17:49
Yes, it was writings that we recovered from his jail cell while he was in prison.
01:17:54
Kimball's cellmate also confirmed he heard Kimball bragging about killing a prostitute.
01:18:01
But when questioned by Detective Von Veldt, he denied killing Katrina. But though Kimball had fooled polygraphs before, he failed this one.
01:18:13
At this point, Scott Kimball is the prime suspect. We've got a lot of circumstantial evidence that points towards him being responsible for that murder.
01:18:24
But charges? Not ready, not yet. But there are more such cases, more like Katrina and Jennifer and Casey.
01:18:34
In fact, Agent Gruzing believes there are many more murders, murders committed by Scott Kimball.
01:18:43
If I were to guess, I were to say the number is somewhere between 15 and 21. This is pretty disturbing.
01:18:51
of that many people, that many families, that many unsolved cases. Yeah. Well, if you look at how he killed his four victims so quickly,
01:19:00
this can't be your first homicide. We have only a small little snapshot of what Scott's done.
01:19:10
There's a lot more out there that we don't know about and that he hasn't been connected to yet.
01:19:15
But Kimball is connected to that attempted prison escape and is currently facing charges.
01:19:21
So, could prosecutors use that as leverage to squeeze Kimball into admitting to other murders?
01:19:27
And maybe, finally, leading investigators to Jennifer Markham's remains. I would certainly always be open to the idea of entertaining that if we could get Jennifer Markham back.
01:19:39
And I think that weighs heavy on everyone. Especially Jennifer's long-suffering father, Bob.
01:19:47
It would be the best thing that ever happened in my life. To be able to bury her and let her mom and her sisters and brother have a closing.
01:20:00
This has kind of taken over your life to a great extent, hasn't it? It does. I've cried off and on for 15 years.
01:20:09
Maybe Scott will finally tell him where she's at. In September 2018 the FBI once again resumed searching for Jennifer remains in the book Cliffs but they cannot comment on their progress
01:20:25
Kimball was not there. He just turned 52 and will be eligible for parole in his 80s if he lives that long.
01:20:34
But Scott Kimball will forever be known as the man who once calmed the FBI and committed a string of murders right under the Bureau's nose.
01:20:44
How the hell could this have happened? I think it was just really a perfect storm.
01:20:49
Calvin Shivers is special agent in charge of the FBI's Denver division. The Kimball case happened before his time, but he's been dealing with the fallout ever since.
01:20:59
How was this guy able to persuade multiple police agencies that he was credible?
01:21:04
Apparently he was able to provide just enough information and backstop some of the information that he provided with valid information, and that was the dilemma.
01:21:12
You're looking at, is this information credible? Was it something we can corroborate?
01:21:15
But he would know exactly what you're going to do to corroborate his information,
01:21:19
because he was good that way, right? I would say a master manipulator. Able to manipulate the FBI agent assigned to manage him,
01:21:28
and, for a while, to get away with murder. Does the FBI feel it needs to take responsibility for some of that?
01:21:35
We have made adjustments to how we deal with informants. So that's how you took responsibility?
01:21:40
Absolutely. I'm really focused on, you know, what can we do different? We, I think, are more diligent as an organization to deal with sources.
01:21:47
We recognize, again, there's potential risk, especially with those who are involved or have been involved in criminal activity.
01:21:56
There is one special agent who continues to work the Kimball case with the promise
01:22:01
he will never stop. Not until we know all the victims of the conman killer, Scott Kimball.
01:22:09
What's your motivation for continuing through this? A huge injustice was done. It was somewhat on the FBI's watch, even though that agent didn't have any idea what was going on.
01:22:26
Yet, these dads were losing their daughters. And it's enough to justify me spending the rest of my career trying to right this wrong if I need to.
01:22:39
Among the families we met, the pain and sorrow will never end. Any more than it will for the many others looking for loved ones Scott Kimball may have killed.
01:22:51
No telling how many more secrets and stories might be buried in the book cliffs.
01:22:56
Only Scott Kimball knows for sure.