Scott Lee Kimball

Scott Lee Kimball (born September 21, 1966) is a convicted serial killer, con man and fraudster from Boulder County, Colorado, who murdered at least four people over a two-year period; investigators strongly suspect him in as many as 21 other unsolved killings.

For the first year of his murder activity, he worked as an informant for the FBI, which both paid him and protected him from facing justice over some of his fraud schemes.

Almost none of the information he gave the bureau was of any use in prosecuting other crimes, and much of it later proved false; the case greatly embarrassed the bureau.

The agent who oversaw him during this period was disciplined; he insists he was not the only one responsible for enabling Kimball.

Kimball was sexually abused in his teens, which led to a suicide attempt and a life of crime.

Kimball was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1966.

When he was 10 his mother, Barb, came out as a lesbian, leading to his parents' divorce; his father, Virgil, left the state and remarried.

Kimball was strongly affected by the divorce.

In his early adolescence he had his first encounter with law enforcement when police were called to the house after he fired a gun out the window at neighboring houses.

Kimball and his younger brother Brett took refuge at their grandmother's mobile home.

A neighbor of hers, Theodore Peyton, took advantage of their situation and began sexually abusing both of them at a cabin he owned in Nederland, Colorado.

Peyton's abuse progressed from having Kimball touch him and photographing the boy naked to tying Kimball up and raping him, recording the episode on film.

Peyton threatened to kill his father, who lived in Montana, if he told anyone.

Peyton continued abusing Kimball when Kimball would return to Boulder on weekends, after he had moved to Hamilton, Montana to attend high school and live with his father and brother.

The abuse ended when Kimball was 23 and shot himself in the head in a suicide attempt.

The bullet glanced off his skull, but the wound, which left a visible scar on his forehead, was severe enough that he was in critical condition for several days.

A cousin, Ed Coet, remarked that Kimball came out of the experience changed, as if he had "lost his conscience".

Afterwards, Kimball and several other boys whom Peyton had molested reported him to Boulder police.

Peyton was arrested, convicted of seven counts of sexually assaulting a child, and imprisoned.

Kimball continued to feel a deep sense of shame, "less of a man" for it, according to a former girlfriend.

Kimball wrote a letter to the judge, begging him to sentence Peyton to additional prison time, stating, "[he has] denied me my right to a normal, healthy innocent childhood. [H]e has damaged my life forever."

A brief first marriage failed, in 1993 he married Larissa Hentz and moved with her to Spokane, Washington, where they had two sons before divorcing in 1997.

She recalls that process servers were frequent visitors to their house, as Kimball was running scams in the logging industry, and those who partnered with him and were cheated would often use legal means to recover their money.

"He always had an excuse", Hentz recalls.

He is a skilled forger who, while he ran a legitimate business buying and selling organic beef, primarily enriched himself by passing bad checks on the accounts of others and using forged documents; by 2003 he had faced criminal charges in four Western states.

These white-collar crimes also enabled his murders, by allowing him to create evidence that his victims were still alive after he had killed them; he also used their checking accounts and credit cards to further his schemes once they were dead.

Two of Kimball's victims were people close to him: the daughter of his third wife, and his own uncle.

His second wife, who bore his two sons, claims he twice kidnapped and raped her; there was an open arrest warrant for him from the second assault, which occurred after he absconded from work release, at the time the FBI hired him as an informant.

Members of Kimball's family and some investigators believe that a 2004 motor vehicle accident which severely injured his oldest son was in fact an attempt to kill the boy for insurance money; charges were never brought, due to conflicts between the jurisdictions where it could have been prosecuted.

An investigation into a 2006 check fraud scheme eventually led law enforcement to discover the murders.

Kimball, having violated the terms of his plea agreement when he could not lead police to the still-missing body of one of the four victims, faced murder charges in all four cases, in addition to the fraud charges that had prompted the investigation.

Three of the missing murder victims had been found in remote areas of Colorado and neighboring Utah.

Under Colorado laws which quadruple sentences for those found to be habitual offenders, he was sentenced to a combined 70 years for the frauds and the murders after pleading guilty.

While in state prison, he additionally pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted escape.

He is currently serving his sentence in federal prison, at the United States Penitentiary, Florence High in Colorado, a high-security facility immediately adjacent to ADX Florence.

When asked about the abuse and its effect on Kimball in 2010, Peyton said only "that was a long time ago."

Kimball had already turned to nonviolent crime, usually fraud.

At the age of 22 he was convicted of passing bad checks, his first felony, in Montana.

Back in Colorado, he burglarized houses.

Montana also charged him with running an illegal hunting outfitting business.