Irene Silverman

Title

Fifteen Notebooks of a Con: The Murder of Irene Silverman

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

September 16, 2025

Irene Silverman was 82 years old, a former ballerina who had once danced in the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall, when she vanished from her own Manhattan townhouse on East 65th Street on July 5, 1998. She was last seen wearing a nightgown, and her disappearance would eventually unravel into one of the most elaborate, calculated murder for property schemes in American criminal history, orchestrated by a mother and son duo whose true criminal history extended across decades and multiple states, encompassing fraud, arson, slavery, and, investigators eventually came to believe, at least two other murders beyond the one they were ultimately convicted of committing against Irene herself.

A Ballerina Turned Landlady

Irene, born Irene Zambelli, had danced professionally before marrying wealthy real estate businessman Samuel Silverman in 1941. The couple eventually purchased the East 65th Street townhouse that would become both her home and, in her later years, a source of rental income, as she leased out apartments within the mansion to various tenants. By 1998, that same building, valued at somewhere between 7 and 10 million dollars, had attracted a very different kind of tenant, one whose interest in the property extended well beyond simply renting a room.

A Tenant Who Wasn't Who He Claimed

In June 1998, a man calling himself Manny Guerrin rented an apartment inside Irene's mansion. Guerrin was, in reality, Kenneth Kimes Jr., and his mother, Sante Kimes, had a plan for the property that went far beyond an ordinary lease. According to evidence investigators would later assemble, Sante intended to assume Irene's own identity, using forged documents to transfer ownership of the mansion into a shell corporation she controlled, effectively erasing Irene from her own life and property on paper while erasing her from existence entirely in reality.

A Mother's Long Criminal History

Sante Kimes was no novice when it came to fraud and violence. Born Sante Louise Singhrs in Oklahoma City in 1934, she had displayed disturbing behavior even as a child, according to her own younger sister, including pyromaniac tendencies and cruelty toward animals. Her first marriage, to contractor Edward Walker in 1957, produced a son, Kent Walker, and a pattern of suspicious house fires connected to properties Walker had built, one of which netted the couple 10,000 dollars in insurance fraud in 1960. After divorcing Walker, Sante set her sights on an entirely different kind of target. In 1971, having read about the divorce of millionaire motel tycoon Kenneth Keith Kimes Sr. and learning his net worth stood at roughly 20 million dollars, she deliberately pursued and eventually married him in 1981. Their son, Kenneth Jr., was born in 1975. Throughout this marriage, Sante ran an extensive fraud operation that included holding undocumented immigrant maids in conditions of forced servitude, threatening them with deportation to prevent them from leaving or seeking help, conduct that eventually caught up with her in 1985, when she was sentenced to five years in prison for violating federal anti-slavery laws.

An Elaborate Con Documented in Detail

When Kenneth Jr. was finally arrested, investigators recovered an extraordinary collection of physical evidence connected to the scheme against Irene, including her own house keys, cassette recordings of her phone calls, loaded firearms, wigs, masks, plastic handcuffs, a substance resembling a date rape drug, and 30,000 dollars in cash. Perhaps most damning of all were fifteen separate notebooks, painstakingly documenting the mortgage fraud scheme in detail, alongside a forged deed purporting to transfer Irene's multi million dollar townhouse to Sante's shell corporation for a mere 395,000 dollars.

A Stun Gun, Then Strangulation

Irene was last seen alive on July 5, 1998, the same day her two tenants were arrested. Years later, during an entirely separate murder trial in California, Kenneth Jr. finally confessed to what had actually happened to her. According to his account, his mother used a stun gun on Irene, after which Kenneth strangled her, stuffed her body into a bag, and disposed of it in a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey. No trace of Irene's remains has ever been recovered, making her case a murder conviction secured entirely without a body.

A Businessman Who Threatened to Expose Them

Irene was not the Kimes family's only victim. David Kazdin, a Las Vegas property owner, had once allowed Sante to use his name on a property deed years earlier. Sante later used that same property as collateral to forge a 280,000 dollar loan application in Kazdin's name without his knowledge. When Kazdin eventually discovered the forgery and threatened to expose it, Sante ordered Kenneth Jr. to kill him. On March 9, 1998, months before Irene's own murder, Kenneth Jr. shot Kazdin in the back of the head inside his Los Angeles home, disposing of his body in a dumpster near Los Angeles International Airport and discarding the disassembled murder weapon in a storm sewer.

A Trail of Additional Bodies

Investigators eventually connected the Kimes family to at least two other suspected killings beyond Kazdin and Irene. Elmer Ambrose Holmgren, a 50 year old lawyer Sante had hired in 1990 to commit arson on one of her Honolulu properties, disappeared in August 1991 after telling family he was traveling to Costa Rica with Sante and Kenneth Sr. His body was discovered in an Inglewood dumpster months earlier, in February 1991, bearing multiple blunt force injuries to the head, though it would take years before his remains were properly identified. Kent Walker, Sante's son from her first marriage, later wrote in his own memoir that both his mother and Kenneth Sr. had admitted to him that they killed Holmgren. Separately, Syed Bilal Ahmed, a 46 year old banker who managed Sante's offshore accounts, was murdered in Nassau, Bahamas, in September 1996. Kenneth Jr. later confessed that he and his mother drugged Ahmed, drowned him in a bathtub, and dumped his body offshore, though no charges were ever filed in that case, and Sante herself denied involvement, claiming Kenneth Jr. had only confessed to that killing in an effort to avoid the death penalty in his other cases.

An Arrest at the Hilton

The investigation that finally caught up with the Kimes family began in earnest after Kazdin's remains were discovered in March 1998, with FBI agents and LAPD detectives tracing the forged mortgage application back to Sante. A cooperating witness, a handgun seller named Stan Patterson, helped arrange a meeting with Sante at the New York Hilton on July 5, 1998, the same day Irene disappeared. FBI and NYPD agents arrested both Sante and Kenneth Jr. at that meeting, initially on unrelated fraudulent check charges out of Utah.

A Unanimous Verdict on the First Vote

The New York trial for Irene's murder proved remarkable in its own right. The jury voted unanimously to convict both Sante and Kenneth Jr. on their very first poll, not only of murder but of 117 additional charges including robbery, burglary, conspiracy, grand larceny, illegal weapons possession, forgery, and eavesdropping. Sante received a sentence of 120 years, and Kenneth Jr. received 124 years, both effectively life sentences. During her own sentencing statement, Sante delivered a lengthy address blaming authorities and comparing her prosecution to the Salem witch trials. The presiding judge was unmoved, describing her directly as a sociopath and a degenerate, and characterizing her son as a remorseless predator.

A Hostage Situation Behind Bars

Even after his conviction, Kenneth Jr.'s capacity for extreme behavior did not end. In October 2000, while imprisoned, he took Court TV reporter Maria Zone hostage using nothing more than a ballpoint pen, demanding that his mother not be extradited to California, where the two of them still faced the death penalty in connection with David Kazdin's murder.

A Son Testifies Against His Mother

Kenneth Jr. was extradited to Los Angeles in March 2001, with Sante following in June that same year. During the Kazdin murder trial in June 2004, Kenneth Jr. changed his plea to guilty and testified directly against his own mother in exchange for avoiding the death penalty himself. The judge overseeing that trial described Sante as one of the most evil individuals she had ever encountered.

Death in Solitary Confinement

Sante was ultimately returned to New York, where she spent much of her remaining incarceration in solitary confinement. She appointed a family friend as her power of attorney in an effort to pursue a retrial, but died before any such effort could succeed, passing away from natural causes at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women on May 19, 2014, at the age of 79. Kenneth Jr. remains incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California.

Still Missing

More than a quarter century after Irene Silverman vanished from her own Manhattan townhouse, her remains have never been recovered, lost somewhere in the vicinity of a New Jersey dumpster her killer described only in general terms. Her case, along with the broader trail of documented and suspected murders connected to Sante and Kenneth Kimes across New York, California, Hawaii, and the Bahamas, has since inspired multiple television dramatizations and documentary treatments, cementing the Kimes family's place among the most calculating and prolific con artist killers in modern American criminal history, a mother and son who very nearly succeeded in erasing an elderly woman from her own life entirely, on paper as well as in fact.

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