Kent Walker reveals his mother, Santa Kymes, and half-brother Kenneth Kymes were convicted of plotting to murder New York millionaire Irene Silverman for her $10M townhouse, with sentences exceeding 120 years. Kymes’ notebooks—filled with coded references like "GetIS"—and her escape from Las Vegas jail in 1986 exposed a life of arson, fraud, and manipulation, including alleged ties to a missing Bahamian banker and a $280K loan scam. Walker dismisses supernatural claims, attributing her crimes to unchecked greed and delusion, despite her intelligence and charisma. His book Son of a Grifter (36 years of research) is adapted into CBS’s Like Mother Like Son, while callers share eerie parallels—family violence, bounced checks, and Las Vegas scams—highlighting how her selfishness left lasting trauma. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours stretching from commercially the island of Wand in the Pacific eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands south into South America north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
It was the day of the Greer Disclosure News Conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. And it began in an interesting way.
The disclosure news conference was carried on the web, and many, many who tried to see it live on the web were disappointed.
Here's one.
John writes, Art, it was impossible to connect to Connect Live this morning for the Disclosure Project webcast using the high bandwidth connection.
I could hear 20 or 30 seconds at a time using low bandwidth before getting disconnected.
Well, this person wrote to ConnectLive.com's technical support address and received the following reply.
If you are having trouble connecting, do not fear.
It will be archived in its entirety for the next six months.
The archive will be placed online this afternoon.
There have been a number of sophisticated attempts to jam the signal.
That's what Connect said.
Connect Live said.
Quote, there have been a number of sophisticated attempts to jam the signal.
However, we have very successfully managed to get around those attempts, and thousands of people have watched the live broadcast.
Please keep trying.
Now, who would try to jam the live broadcast?
Who would do a thing like that?
I mean, really.
Who would do something like that?
And so I received many, many, many emails of that sort with the message from Connect that somebody had been jamming them.
Odd.
Very odd indeed.
Well, the American press, you see, takes a little time to get going.
It was a very well-presented news conference indeed.
Now, I haven't had time to see it all on the web myself yet.
But tonight we have it for you on my website.
If you will go, we've got the link, which do.
In fact, let me instruct you now, those of you who have not yet seen the news conference.
The top says Greer Disclosure Project Video.
And kaboom, over there you go.
View part one, view part two, pick your modem speed.
It's all there for you right now under what's new on my website at artbell.com.
So you can see it.
Now, as I just said a moment ago, the American press is a little slow.
They take a little time getting cranked up.
Early this morning on headline news, they were running a banner about it at the bottom of the news, and that ran all morning about the disclosure news conference.
Then Inside Politics did a piece this afternoon on CNN, regular.
And then tonight on CNN headline, I note that every single half hour they're running the story.
And they're not laughing.
I think that for the most part, for the most part, it's been pretty good coverage.
In fact, right now, it's the top news story, at least within the hour, it has been the top news story at ABCNews.com.
And I think we've got a link to that, too.
Let me see.
Well, I don't see it.
I'm sure on our links page, you will find a link to it, ABCNews.com, top story right now.
Heather Wright saw a multi-minute news spot on CNN, 6.30 p.m. Mountain Time for the disclosure conference.
Dr. Greer spoke, as did other UFO observers.
Here's somebody who says King 5 in Seattle did strong coverage of the UFO conference today.
It was so shocking to have them showing their promo for it this afternoon.
Boeing's move to Chicago was first big locally, of course.
And then they went to a review of the UFO conference, and it was quite positive.
Or this on Fox National News.
We just got disclosure coverage at 7.11 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
In a Fox News segment, brief, but no laughing.
Showed part of the interview with one of the sergeants, film clip of discs, but the interview clip had him saying there were machines and beings.
Now get this.
Pentagon said that some of these people, quote, probably shouldn't be talking, end quote, according to the report.
And said there was nothing to all of this UFO story stuff.
Well, if there is nothing to UFO stories, why would Pentagon care if people talked about it?
Interesting.
And then I've got the full ABCnews.com story.
So it looks like Dr. Greer is having some pretty good degree of luck, I would say, in getting this out.
Now, I did not observe any major network coverage, ABC, NBC, CBS.
Did you?
I could be wrong about that.
Maybe somebody got it, but I didn't see anything on the majors.
Nevertheless, this is a process underway.
And you are seeing the first stories carried pretty well on quite a bit of the major media.
It's just one little jump for mankind from there to one, you know, ABC, NBC, CBS.
One small step for the networks, but one great leap for mankind.
Come on, networks, get it on.
So that was the coverage story today on Dr. Greer's, I would say, a pretty large success.
And remember, it's a process, and there will be other briefings and discussions going on in Washington over the next few days that Dr. Greer will be spearheading.
A significant bulge in the Earth's crust has developed over the past four years near volcanoes in central Oregon, but it's not clear whether it could mean a volcanic eruption anytime soon, say geologists.
The bulge, and you don't like to think of the ground bulging, do you?
The bulge, 9 to 12 miles across and about 4 inches high, was detected by satellite radar, according to Willie Scott, a USGS scientist at the agency's volcano lab in Vancouver.
Because it's a volcanic area and there's been a long history of volcanic activity in that part of Cascades, it's possible it might be magma or molten rock moving deep underground, said Scott.
The bulge is located near the Three Sisters, a trio of volcanoes at the center of the Cascade Range in Oregon.
The last major eruption in the Pacific Northwest occurred, of course, in May of 1980 when Mount St. Helens blew up.
The uplift in central Oregon is too broad and low to be noticed from the ground.
So in other words, if you're walking along, you don't go, whoa, a bulge.
It's got to be seen from satellite, but you don't want to think of the ground as bulging.
Bulging is bad.
Bulging is like when you blow up a balloon, right?
Except that here we're dealing with, well, apparently rock and dirt and gazillions of pounds of pressure and possibly molten magma pushing up and causing the bulge.
Kind of weird that you can't see it, but you really wouldn't notice a few inches of bulge, would you?
I don't like these kinds of earth movement stories.
I've never liked them.
I've had a nightmare about the ground opening up and swallowing me.
Maybe that's what will happen to Promp.
Swallowed up.
I'm getting a lot of stories about mold.
We began getting calls from Texas the other night about some mold.
Black mold.
And by God, now I'm getting stories about black mold from all over the place.
I mean everywhere.
Here's one.
Mold has proven deadly, but bleach repairs destroy environment for growth.
The slimy black mold found in three Oakland County homes in the last month is a bona fide public health hazard that has cropped up in more than 20 other states besides Michigan and caused numerous infant deaths.
All it takes to stop it is a cup of bleach and some home repair.
It grows in areas that are constantly wet.
Leaking roofs, Leaky plumbing, sewer backups, frequently overflowing washing machines can create environments for the mold.
But pray tell, isn't this new?
I mean, have any of the rest of you for your life, in your life, dealt with stories of black mold?
Now, they're presenting this in a very straightforward way, but excuse me, I've been around for a while and I haven't heard of black mold before.
Well, I've heard of like refrigerator mold.
I mean, behind your refridge around the coils and all that, there would get to be mold, right?
I had a caller the other night who said he had mold like that inside his refrigerator.
That's really bad.
But I've been around for a while, and I haven't heard about black mold killing people, have you?
Maybe I've just missed it all these years, but all of a sudden, there's black mold everywhere.
And frankly, I don't remember it from any time previous.
Might be, but I've been around reporting on these kind of stories for a long time, and I haven't had black mold stories.
Have you?
Or is it just me?
Now my website, you must go to my website, artbell.com, the second item down under what's new.
Huh.
What the hell have we found?
We've got some photographs for you, and let me read you what the person who emailed me with these photos said.
He said, Art, I was tooling around this weekend in my supercub, and I found this site west of Delta, Utah.
It has what looks like ground radials in all directions and a very healthy-looking power line, dead ending to it, but no sign of buried pipeline or anything else in the vicinity.
73s.
Another ham, ham friend.
And he got some pretty damn good photographs of what appears to be in the desert, partially at least covered by snow, a facility, we'll call it.
Out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
You can see the building.
Then you can see what appear to be ground radials leaving from this building in most directions.
You can see a road.
I think it's a road.
And here is this facility out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Now, the interesting thing is that these radials, you will notice, are melting the snow.
Wherever they go, the snow does not.
It is, in fact, the snow that made the radials visible.
So I would ask that, though, you know, there may be a good explanation for this.
It's not a radio station.
I would assume, and I shouldn't really assume, that the radials are getting hot because they are obviously melting the snow wherever they go.
Now, for the radials to be getting hot, that'd have to be a lot of RF.
Radio frequency.
Oh, lots and lots and lots of it it would take to cause that.
So we've got a mystery installation for you tonight.
There may be some sort of explanation that will make sense once one of you looks at this.
But I would like to know what Frank Oblumquist found.
Wouldn't you?
So anybody knowing what this might be, by all means, email me at artbell at mindspring.com.
It's a genuine mystery.
As is tonight, the location of our newest cat.
You know, we've got a new cat.
I think.
He is Yeti.
We named him Yeti.
And he's a little guy, and he's very emaciated, very, very skinny, about one inch thick.
Well, Yeti has been out and about all day, but Yeti tonight, hissing at my other cats, I might add, and backing them off too.
I mean, this little featherweight is backing off my heavyweights.
And now all of a sudden tonight, Yeti is missing.
We spent the better part of an hour looking for little Yeti.
Yeti has found a hiding place, and we know them all because we have three cats, and they've all used them, and we know every place to look, and Yeti has found a new one.
Nobody's opened the door.
Nobody's gone outside, so we know for sure that little Yeti remains in the building somewhere.
But I have looked behind every piece of equipment, under everything possible, everywhere.
We know all the cat hiding places.
Yeti has found a new one and apparently decided to go to sleep rather than confront my cats.
Now, my three other cats, of course, are giving him the evil eye, avoiding him, the hiss, and he probably feels a little overwhelmed.
So, Yeti has gone and found a place that is like sort of almost out of this time and place.
I mean, impossible.
We've looked everywhere.
Where has Yeti gone?
Is little Yeti living up to his name?
And pulling a disappearing act?
I don't know.
We'll see if he turns up.
Hunger is bound to bring him out eventually.
Anyway, that's the state of affairs to this hour.
Open lines are next.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM From May 9th, 2001 Not without a star Free,
Only one will be free We're huddled close Hang on to a dream On the boats and on the planes They're coming to America Never looking back again They're coming to America I
see you every morning Outside the restaurants The music plays Sonan Chalas
Loving days Loving nights Where would I be without my woman?
Loving days Loving nights Where would I be without my woman?
Loving days Loving nights Loving days
listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight's an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from May 9th, 2001.
Can you imagine growing up in a family with a mother and a brother who were eventually headed for the big house forever, essentially forever?
I'm going to be interviewing a very interesting man named Kent Walker at the top of the hour who wrote a book called Son of a Grifter.
Son of a Grifter.
The mother-son team convicted of murdering and kidnapping a New York millionaires were each slapped with sentences of more than 100 years.
That would be the man's brother that I'm going to interview and his mom.
Santa Kymes, 65, was sentenced to 120 years and eight months behind bars, while her 25-year-old son Kenneth received 125 years and four months.
The two grifters were convicted last month, at the time of this writing, May 9th, of killing 82-year-old Irene Silverman in a plot to take her $10 million townhouse.
Kenneth Kimes was convicted on 60 counts while his mother found guilty on 58 charges now that's a That's this man's family in jail forever.
He grew up in a complete life of crime with grifters.
You ever see the movie The Grifters?
You know what Grifters are?
The short con, the long con?
Remember the sting?
Well, sort of in that venue, I suppose.
Uh, except for real.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine what it would be like living in a family like that where crime would be the way you lived?
Crime is the way you lived?
I can't imagine that, but we're going to talk about it with a man who's just written a book.
I don't know a website to send you to immediately, but that's how it would begin if it does.
Very interesting stuff, and we are obviously in the middle of a large change right now.
All kinds of change.
The quickening is actually upon us right now.
So here's an interesting little story for you from CNN.
The headline is, Atmosphere losing ability to clean itself.
A compound that naturally rids the air of pollutants has become increasingly scarce in the global atmosphere in the past decade, according to a new scientific report.
The beneficial cleanser destroys many artificial contaminants in the air, such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide.
It also eats up many gases involved in ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect.
So where's the little guy gone?
Levels of the chemical, the hydroxyl radical known as OH, the dominant oxidizing compound in the lower atmosphere, dropped considerably more in the northern hemisphere than the southern one, researchers said.
The overall negative acceleration in the global OH trend is dominated by changes in the northern hemisphere and suggests rather, a cause for major OH variations.
The amount of OH in the less developed south was on average between 14 and 35 percent higher than the north, concluded the scientists.
It fell about 10 to 24 percent between 1979 and 2000.
Very interesting.
Very, very, very interesting and concerning that that agent which has been keeping our atmosphere clean is beginning to apparently lose the battle, or the battle to propagate itself as it naturally would, resulting, no doubt, eventually in what?
The atmosphere losing the ability to clean itself.
You know, it sounds like one of these futuristic movies where everybody's riding around on motorcycles and zombies are walking in the street and some people have on gas masks and the future is in sealed buildings and underground because the entire atmosphere is ruined.
And I want to say that just to put something out there, you know, humoring my philosophy for just one second, arrested or not, that brain waves themselves are electromagnetic force.
And I'm so sure that a Big Bang Theory was a theory because the mind is, of course, well, I don't want to get religious, but the mind is connected with some great, some being.
Hey, listen, you check out the current issue of Newsweek.
I've got a man who, you know, the God part of the brain guy is coming on the air again, who a lot of people love to hate.
But I have this feeling that he's dead right, that we are wired, that our brains are literally wired for worship, religion.
unidentified
Well, I'm not talking about that.
I'm just saying that, you know, we're intelligent beings is what I mean.
And, you know, the Big Bang theory may not have been a theory because, you know, itself, when your brain waves, impulse, those impulses are like a Big Bang itself.
It's really what I wanted to mention, is basically what I want to say.
Well, to humor you, I guess I would say that the Big Bang certainly could be held accountable for our brain waves because without it, we wouldn't be here, right?
So that's the only immediate connection I see.
So I'll say that to humor you.
Yes, the Big Bang would be connected to our brain waves in the sense that it began everything.
If I understand the conventional Big Bang theory correctly, boom!
And then all this stuff begins moving outward where there was nothing before.
There is suddenly something.
That's a contemplation of the Big Bang and something from nothing or something all that is right now and all that you can see in the skies with all the suns and the planets and the quasars and all the things that are up there.
So mystical and magical and amazing to consider.
All of that came from nothing.
Something smaller than a quark in size.
Virtually undetectable.
And all of this came from that.
Well, when you begin contemplating that, then you begin thinking about God.
Why?
Because there's no other answer.
There is simply no other answer.
I mean, there are theories, but there's certainly no other answers.
It's where most of the best theoretical physicists say, well, you know, we don't know.
Black mold was growing in the back of our tub surround and in the back of where we had pipes that had previously leaked, and we were not quick enough to restore the area, and so the black mold grew and grew and grew.
And I kept getting this repetitious respiratorial illness over and over and over.
And finally, I just said to the doctor, would you please do the right test and see if this is, because I read something, see if this is from mold.
And sure enough, last year it was, and I've been fine.
And we took the wall out, and it was black, and it was wet, and it was oozy, and we had it analyzed, and it was full of bacterium, and we had to wear special things over our face.
My mom told me, like I'm sure your mom did, you don't steal.
And if you get caught stealing like I did, you get marched back to the grocery store when you're real young with whatever you stole and you're forced to give it back to the storekeeper and then feel shame and apologize and you have this lesson that you learned.
And that's, I think, how it happens for a lot of kids.
But their moms at least tell them, do not steal.
What if you had a mom that was teaching you how to steal?
Can you imagine what that would be like?
I mean, you have the exact opposite.
Instead of the moral, ethical lessons that most parents give, they gave the exact opposite, and they were teaching you how to be a criminal.
That's incredible, and that's what my guest is going to be talking about.
I wanted to point out two points of evidence, one of which bears for the case and one against it.
Okay.
First, the one against it, because I think it's important to know the clip that was on your site had some additions that were not in the original footage that I saw.
And those additions were the text that was on the screen.
My guest added that because that's what he talks about.
What he was noting was that that horrible needle that was screwed into the brain, which I'm never going to get used to that concept, was screwed in at the point that my guest was talking about.
So he added the little caption that said that.
unidentified
Right, but I don't think that was in the original documentary.
But again, my guest is pointing out accurately, if you'll go back and look at the video and put your fingers where my guest said to put them and imagine the center of that point.
You'll find that's exactly where the needle is going in in the video.
unidentified
Yeah, but it'd have to be awfully deep to reach the amygdala.
Most of you morning, and I don't know, some afternoon, some evening, we're all over the place.
I'm Art Bell, and coming up, something a little different.
When I was a child, and I'm sure that when you were a child, your mothers and fathers inculcated into you that you shouldn't steal, right?
You shouldn't steal.
You shouldn't get into fights.
I mean, all the normal things, right, that kids are taught.
Well, what if your family was different?
What if your family instead was teaching you virtually how to become a criminal instead of how to become a good child?
How to steal, how to hurt, how to even kill.
What if that was your family?
Can you imagine that?
Many of you will know the story because of the movie or because of the book that is just coming out nationwide, big hit nationwide.
It's called Son of a Grifter.
Do you know what a Grifter is?
Do you have any idea what a Grifter is?
A Grifter is another way of saying a con artist, I think.
And you may have seen a movie called The Grifters, which was a pretty interesting movie, actually.
Not altogether, perhaps.
It was long ago, but it seems modeled in some ways after Son of a Grifter.
My Guest coming up is Kent Walker, and he was the other brother, I guess would be a way to put it.
I read a thing from Court TV earlier.
Court TV, the mother-son team convicted of murdering and kidnapping a New York millionaires were each slapped with sentences of more than 100 years.
That's serious time.
Santa Kaime, 65, sentenced to 120 years and eight months behind bars, while her 25-year-old son, Kenneth, that would be Kent's brother, received 125 years and four months.
The two grifters were convicted last month of killing 82-year-old Irene Silverman in a plot to take her $10 million townhouse, essentially, I guess, assuming her identity.
Kenneth Kymes was convicted on 60 counts while his mother was found guilty of 58 charges.
Well, this is the end of the story, really, not the beginning of the story, the beginning of the story, and how we got to that point where Kent's brother and his mom essentially have gone to jail for life plus in 100, 125 years.
That's really a long time.
So coming up is Kent Walker, and he's going to tell us what happened.
This really should be a very, very interesting story.
unidentified
Now we take you back to the night of May 9, 2001 on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Now, actually, this is kind of interesting because we were talking for a moment before the interview that's about to begin with Kent Walker.
And Kent, of course, spent quite a bit of his life in Las Vegas.
And so when we finally talked tonight, after even setting up the interview, Kent kind of realized he knew me anyway by virtue of the fact that he'd listened to me on the radio a lot of times.
And just that way, just like you tell your kid to wash the car or mow the yard, my orders were, can't come on, we're going to go shopping.
And shopping meant we went shoplifting, and then I went and distracted the attention for the clerk so mom could stuff her purse with a roast or lipstick, whatever it may be at the time.
I always felt the tension, but it's also all that I knew.
You know, I knew things were different at my house.
I knew, you know, when most kids went home and they did their homework and watched their TV and stuff, I went home and the maids were there, which was different already.
Well, one thing that was interesting with my mother, there really wasn't a lot of money around until she met my stepfather, which was, you know, they got married in the early 70s.
But even if we lived in an apartment, there was a mate, as long as I can remember.
I never remember any time with my mother where there wasn't a mate of some sort in the house.
I know it's a strange statement, and I know it rings with conspiracy theory and all that stuff, but anyone who's going to read this book is going to understand that statement pretty loud and clear.
In fact, my mother's birth certificate is, you know, it's been a question for years and years.
I finally got a copy of the official certificate from the state of Oklahoma.
And this is a certified copy that if you call up, they'll send you the copy.
And I tell you what, you put that birth certificate next to a copy of one of her letters that she would have written in the 70s.
And was the offspring of well-to-do parents who really just didn't know how to handle her because she was just a wild child.
During the sentencing program or part of the slavery trial, well, actually, let me go back.
When she met Ken Kaise, my stepfather, he was from Oklahoma.
And, you know, doing the research for the books, you know, it makes a lot of sense that it really helped her get in the door if she was from Oklahoma also.
And I got a call from my little brother in tears saying that mom and dad had just been arrested.
And so I flew out to California from Kentucky, picked them up, made her back in time to catch the mission.
Then I went up on my mission in Canada, and then I was called into the major's tent, and he says, well, you have to go home on emergency leave because your father's had a heart attack.
And I talked him out of it.
I said, sir, I don't think that's what happened.
And then I got called in the next morning.
I was ordered to go.
And my mother had just called the right people in my chain of command to make sure I would be in Las Vegas to help her out.
When I was very young, a very nice lady kind of took me under her wings.
She was kind of a godmother for me, in fact.
And she lived next door to us, and mom was always looking for the babysitters because sometimes it was not convenient to have a six-year-old son in your tow.
And I kind of got a look at what normal life was like.
And it sounds strange.
Most kids want to stay up all night and get in trouble and stuff.
It felt kind of neat having a bedtime and not having to worry about the cops knocking on the door.
You know, he was born with two extraordinary parents with extraordinary circumstances.
He was tutored at a young age.
He was much more controlled than I was.
He was actually sheltered from a lot of things that I was exposed to at a young age.
We illustrate a little deal in the book when I was walking out of a convenience store in Las Vegas, picked up a pack of cigarettes and a couple of old groceries for the house, and he wanted this thing, a silly putty.
And so I put it in my pocket with every intention of paying for it at the counter.
And I walked out of the front door, I reached in my pocket, and there's this thing, a silly putty.
And he looks at me, he screams at me.
You stole a silly putty.
He was in tears because he thought I was going to steal this for him.
And I felt such joy that moment that he was actually upset that I was doing something like this.
I went back and paid for it.
But it just really brought a lot of joy to my life because it confirmed the fact that he had been sheltered from the bad stuff that I never was at that point.
My guest is Kent Walker, who just wrote a book called Son of a Grifter, The Twisted Tale of Santa and Kenny Kynes, the most notorious con artists in America.
A memoir by The Other Son.
The book is just breaking nationally.
It's a big one.
And I believe there either was or will be a movie as well about this incredible, incredible family.
But we've got The Other Son with us here tonight.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Arc Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from May 9, 2001.
I mean, God bless them, they had the hardest clients in the world, but I'm not sure my mother and brother got the best representation in the world either.
But I mean, they put them on 16 minutes before the trial even went on.
And talking to a lot of other attorneys is just something you really don't do.
The one thing about my mother is she was incredibly intelligent.
She was as sharp as attack.
Dahmer Gentile, a friend of mine who represented her in the MAIDS trial, would attest to that.
Every attorney would.
Just how incredibly intelligent she was.
And if something she wanted, she'd do her homework.
She could probably, if she decided to be an attorney today, she could pass the bar in a year.
She'd find a way to learn what she had to learn.
If she wanted to find out about the radio business, she'd have you on the phone picking your brains.
She'd be good at it in six months.
She had a tenacity that was unlike any person I've ever met.
I've been in the direct sales business for 15 years.
I've met some pretty good salespeople.
You can take 10 of the best I've ever met, and they do not have the charisma or the ability to manipulate people as she had.
And, you know, she had a lot of analysts look at her in the course of the trials and stuff.
The only thing I ever heard to come close to explain her behavior is they showed me a bar graph, and one is your age chronologically, and one is your age emotionally.
And hers kind of leveled off at the age of 15.
But then her IQ and intelligent level is extremely high.
So you took someone who's very beautiful, someone who was very intelligent, but emotionally not prepared to handle those deals.
That's kind of the only explanation I could have.
The sad part about it is I've not had any behavioral therapist tell me any reason for it.
And I've come to the realization it's just what she is.
And it's unimaginable that she could do all this without help, that she didn't have some sort of mentor into the finer, you know, the finer points of at least the short cons.
When I was a kid, she taught me one of the lessons I learned from her as a kid, I wanted to buy a pair of walkie-talkies at a grocery store that was there in Palm Springs.
So she gave me a quarter.
It says, go get all the newspapers out of that.
So I put the quarter and opened up and got all the newspapers out.
And she says, you're a cute kid.
You can sell those fast.
And I sold every one of the newspapers, made the money for the walkie-talkies.
These are all her own homes, or homes that she either owned or leased.
And also for the amount of civil cases that she got herself in, it was a great way to stall off the court seeing that she had a fire and that all the records were burned up in the fire, so you had to postpone the case.
She was in, you know, it sounds almost like someone you're in awe of again, but anyone who ever met her was in awe of her, of her intelligence, her charisma.
In order to fully understand it, you'd have to be subjected to it.
And I think the book we did a pretty good job of illustrating that.
But there's no way to truly comprehend it until you were subjected to it.
Before all this happened recently with the arrests and everything, and I found out how severe the crimes were, I probably would have been the guy pretty easy to talk into the death penalty.
It was the source of some of our biggest arguments.
In the book, we go through that.
With Kenny, this is something that happened from 10 years old to 23 years old.
It didn't happen overnight.
And there's a lot of influences.
His father was a very paranoid man, unfortunately, mostly because of my mother, drank heavily, and had his clutches on him in his most formative years.
So you have a man teaching this young guy, 10 to 13 years old, that the rest of the population are vultures out to get you, not to trust anybody.
And then when mom gets out of jail for the slavery case, he was very rebellious.
Well, you know, at the time, I was kind of wrestling with that myself because if it was me going to trial for something like that, it would probably be assault charges or something like that or labor charges.
But there was also a $30 million lawsuit filed against my stepfather, who was very wealthy at the same time.
There was tests, and I'm not sure exactly what the tests are for the trial.
And if a maid wanted to get out of the house, they could have.
But they were emotionally afraid of also.
My mother's, it's ironic, the two big convictions she's gotten so far in her life have been of her own making.
In the maids case, she had written instructions to the tutors and to the maids saying things like, if you leave this house, the authorities will pick you up and put you in jail for the rest of your life.
She used mental intimidation for that in her own writing.
And in the Irene Silverman case, where she was convicted of murder without a body or any physical evidence, the evidence that convicted her and got her a life sentence was 14 notebooks of her own hand describing how to plan and plot the stealing of the mansion and committing the murder.
My mother and brother and I broke it off about a year before this happened.
They were actually living at my house.
And mom had switched from using the Mexican people as maids to using homeless people.
She'd go down to St. Vincent's or Shea Tree in Las Vegas and get people who were down under luck to live with us and bring them into our house when they were living with us.
And I said, you know, we can't do this the way you're treating these people when they get sued.
It's a horrible thing to do.
It turned out to be a horrible argument.
I saw that I lost the battle for Kenny.
So that's where we broke it off.
I didn't know about the Silverman or Kazm murders until I found out in the newspaper.
My guest, Kent Walker, who wrote it with Mark Schoen, S-C-H-O-N-E, The Twisted Tale of Santa and Kenny Kimes, the most notorious con artists in America.
A memoir by The Other Son.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from May 9, 2001.
Coast to Coast AM from May
I thought that we had made it to the top.
9, 2001.
I gave you all I had to give.
Why did it have to stop?
You've blown it all sky high by telling me a lie.
Without a reason why, you've blown it all sky high.
You've blown it all sky high.
Our love had wings to fly.
We could have touched the sky.
You've blown it all sky high.
You've blown it all sky high.
You're listening to Arkbell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight's an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from May 9th, 2001.
I mean, probably one of mom's biggest gifts for being able to give away so much for so long was that she held the image that no one would think, hey, this person couldn't do that.
Do you think that the final long con that she engaged in to literally take over this Sojilite's life and her mansion, her place she lived in, every aspect of her life, and she was convicted for killing her, as you pointed out, even without a body.
and i i'd be interested to know how that can occur without a body i guess it can was fish amount of evidence That's one of the things that made this case so interesting in New York.
And it was a strange thing because what had happened, I made a decision when I read that first newspaper article back in 1998 that I was not going to grace New York.
I did not want to deal with the press.
I did not want to deal with anything there.
But I was worried about Kenny.
I read then that he was put in solitary confinement for eight years is what his term is.
But I also saw that my mother was put in solitary confinement.
I guess the phone rang in her prison also, and they found a shank, which is a pen that's fashioned as a weapon.
So I think she's the oldest person in New York's history to carry a shank at 65 years old.
He said exactly, well, according to news reports, now, when I visited him in January this year, he told me that he never said anything to the press or to the authorities.
But according to what the authorities' news releases were in November, was that exactly what they thought is that he took the body to New Jersey and dumped it in a construction site.
So that one, I don't know.
I don't know if he confessed or not to that, to the authorities.
And Judge, I read one report, and I don't know how accurate this is, that the New York authorities were turned down by a judge to let Kenny go show them where the body was at.
I was starting to say that everything you described about your early life, all the stolen stuff, the eventually stolen houses, the arson, all the rest of it, the maids, you know, it seems like your mom wanted this lifestyle all her life.
And she got it, essentially, by grifting and stealing and doing everything you can do.
And she sort of lived the life that she finally went after in this long con where she assumed a woman's identity.
I can't even, I have lots of questions about that, but it just seems to me that this final act for which she's in prison for the rest of her life or worse now, along with your brother, was a final attempt to reach this life that she'd been trying to have all the way up until that point.
And I think that there's some surprises still left in the Bahamas.
I think that I have no proof on this or anything that, but from what I've learned in the research for the book and doing the media for the book, that there's some very interesting things going to be found out about Bahamas.
But as far as what happened in the Bahamas, I mean, there's a bank collapse and some very interesting facts.
The FBI wanted to help the Bahamian officials in 1996 track mom down and Kenny down because of the missing banker, which is another deal that they're accused of at this point.
And they refused.
So, you know, I don't like to spend in speculation, but it's pretty hard to ignore sometimes.
And I think most people, if they actually take the time to sit down and start writing about everything they've done in their life, or the high points or the low points or whatever, it's quite an experience.
Actually, the Irene Silverman deal, there was a fluke.
They got caught for that.
They weren't picked up for a murder charge.
They had bought a car from Utah with a check they thought was good that bounced.
That's what started this whole thing.
If it weren't for one mistake that she made, which was bouncing a check for a car that she bought, there real good chance they would have got away with it.
Well, no, actually what happened is everything needed to get possession of the mansion was taken care of before the actual disappearance of Iron Silverman.
My crystal ball tells me that they had a bank ready to give them a sizable loan for this mansion, and they were going to take the money and run and go do something bigger in the Bahamas.
She picked up the end of the hose and beat the crap out of this guy because he said, well, boys will be boys.
That kid never picked on me again after that.
You feel pretty safe in that type of protection.
It was good stuff also.
Even as an adult, in researching for Son of the Grifter, people who were in Shante's life are friends.
You couldn't help but to walk away with the feeling that they didn't so much feel the loss of the true victims, they felt the loss of Shantae from their lives.
Well, there are women who have the power and the power to completely, utterly transform anybody in their presence into anything they want.
Now, most women don't use that power.
And I've heard it said that God help men if most women ever learn the power they really have if they wish to use it in the manner that Santa apparently did.
A Los Angeles fast blaster says, Arn, I'm a psychologist, and I know that obsessive note-taking is, in fact, an obsessive-compulsive disorder that they can't, people who do this can't help it.
Yeah, well, I've got letters that mom has sent me since she's been incarcerated, and you take the same paper that my kids take to school to do their homework on, and she fills all the lines, but then she fills all the margins, and then in between the margins.
You just can't put enough in there.
And that's what it's like having a phone conversation with her.
It was all circumstantial evidence, but it was pretty convincing circumstantial evidence.
There was 14 notebooks that were introduced to the jury, and things like GetIS, which would mean Irene Silverman's Social Security number, talk about getting stun guns, handcuffs, duffelbacks, things of this nature.
The way that they infiltrated her life was suspicious.
My brother had given her $6,000 cash to rent an apartment in her beautiful mansion under an alias.
His behavior before she disappeared, like there was a camera in the entryway.
There was no videotape hooked up to it, but he didn't know that.
Once again, all they can do is spin in speculation.
I think there's a story in the Bahamas.
I think there's something to do with the banks down there or something.
I don't know why, but just when we're researching the book and what I've learned since we've been doing the media for the book, I got a feeling they were going for something bigger.
Yeah, and I feel partly responsible for where he's at because he had a bad example, and the big brothers stuck around also.
And he told me that every day during the trial, people, the authorities would say, tell us where Irene Silverman's at, and we'll make Los Angeles go away.
Well, in other words, whether he would point out now where the body is or not, nobody even cares or wants to know, according to what, if I've heard you correctly.
And I'm sure you don't think that at any point she's going to want Or as you said, will she to the very last moment say it was all a conspiracy and all a lie?
And that's really cold to do the things that have been done.
My guest is Kent Walker, and he's the other brother.
Santa and Kenny Kynes are in jail for life and may face the death penalty.
The both of them were talking with the brother.
It's an amazing thing to go through.
If you have any questions for Kent, we're going to open the lines now and allow you to ask whatever you would like.
And there probably are no really stupid questions in this category because most of us simply have no life that Kent led early and that his brother and mom led up and still, in a way, lead, though they're not actively out committing crimes within the prison system.
I'm sure that actually that's a pretty good question, which I'll ask in a moment.
But there are various levels of hierarchy in a prison.
And I would imagine that already Asante has made her way through many of those levels, to be sure.
So, at any rate, if you have any questions, the opportunity to ask them is coming up next.
unidentified
Thank you.
You're listening to Arkbell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from May 9, 2001.
Kent, you're back on the air again, and that's one thing I want to touch on before we go to the phones, and that is in prisons, there is indeed a hierarchy.
There's a real pecking order that goes on in prisons.
Given your mother's history, I would think that she's already well established in that pecking order, or is she still in solitary?
Well, mom is in solitary still for another month or two.
Kenny, he's kind of the star at the jail he's at in Los Angeles, in maximum security, pretty much a lockdown all the time and stuff.
So he really doesn't have the contact with the inmates to be able to pull that off.
One thing that was interesting, though, after the conviction that made the papers in New York, that mom had been caught trying to conspire with other inmates to get an escape attempt going.
So once she's in the general population, I'm sure she'll be able to pull her stuff.
Well, I think that now with her history being revealed and so much going on with the media, I'm sure that any authorities that have her in custody would take the proper precautions.
Yes, and I just listen to you, Art, almost every night here while I'm making donuts.
Now, my question is, being Mother's Day and the severity of his mother's crime, has he ever thought about possibly getting somebody to talk, maybe she's possessed or something like that, that maybe there's a devil inside of her that's causing her to do all these things in the past?
I'm not a doctor, so there's a little bit of Greek there for me.
I can tell you this, though.
She was examined by many doctors, many doctors.
And the problem is this.
My mother would sit down and figure out, okay, what symptoms should I show to help to help lessen my sentence?
And so she could fool the best of them.
Like I said, I've spoken with a lot of behavioral therapists.
I've talked to people who would know.
And I've not found an answer that I feel comfortable with yet.
And none of the answers they can give, they would always say, well, you know, with your mother, she is so unique that it's almost impossible to tell because you can't tell if she's lying or not.
So it's one of those questions that I wish I could give you an answer to, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just what she is at this point.
On this program, we've dealt with the question of evil, you know, whether there really is an external evil or not, whether it really is inside singly the person involved and there's no external influence at all.
We've had that discussion a million times, and I've used, as an example of what I thought was pure evil, Manson.
You know, usually television over-dramatizes everything, and it sounds like in this movie, whatever they do, CBS does with a movie, like Mother Like Son, whatever they do with this movie, they're not going to be able to overdo it, are they?
Yeah, I saw a little bit of it, and Mary Tottermore did a great job.
Gene Stapleton, I mean, I think there's going to be some awards for this movie.
It's going to be a big deal.
There's talk of a feature on my book at this point because it's two totally different stories, whereas CBS dealt mainly with the Irene Silverman murder and a little bit of the past, whereas the book is going to cover in-depth a course of 36 years.
So you haven't heard the last of Shantae Kimes, hopefully.
There were a series of incidents that I had with a woman that I believe may have been your mother in some apartments along the Alawai Canal, and it involves a bunch of women that my friends and I would see her with, that she seemed to have control over.
There was a situation where they were the maids.
They were maids in an apartment complex.
And I wondered if, I've always wondered if it was your mother.
I became aware of the story after the arson incidents out here in Hawaii Kai.
I know that there was a situation, and it's been a long time since I lived in Hawaii, but Wailaiki Ridge, my father had specced a couple houses up there, and mom had camped a couple of the maids up there, and I believe that was part of the slavery case in Las Vegas.
I got to tell you, what you're telling me kind of rings a bell, but I've been hearing so much, I'm not going to commit to anything unless I know absolutely for sure, and I can't say that.
unidentified
All right.
Well, hey, good luck to you.
Can't have an amazing story.
I know it's going to be with you a long, long time, no matter what happens, and I wish you the best of luck.
Well, when I was a kid, they were like big sisters.
I mean, it's kind of interesting.
We illustrated in Son of a Griffith also, how that even escalated.
In Palm Springs, you know, when I was a young grade schooler, they'd go home for the weekends.
Mom would even go find them boyfriends and stuff.
I mean, they would have dinner with us.
We're like big sisters.
Once my stepfather came into the picture, my mother became more controlling.
And it became, that's when I started wearing uniforms and working the longer hours.
It probably wasn't quite as severe as what it escalated to.
Once I moved to Hawaii, I mean, I used to steal money out of my stepdad's pockets on several occasions and send them back to the mainland because they were so unhappy.
Then once I went into the military, where most of the charges for the, or all the charges for the involuntary service that took place, you know, they talked about being burned with irons and had hot water borne torture.
Yeah, basically, you know, in a controlling fashion.
And at first, when the maids case first hit the media and when it first transpired, I didn't want to believe it because I had the memories of what things were like when I was in the home.
I just thought it was, you know, because of the civil case, you know, trying to get all the money.
But, you know, researching the book now and retrospect, yeah, stuff all did happen.
Yes, I'll go ahead and say this, then I'll hang up and try to listen, and maybe he could go through the bottom of the hour to explain something, because I do identify.
They don't have the money, but I come from a very dysfunctional family.
I'm in my early 40s.
I was the middle of seven.
Three older ones gone, thank God, wherever they are.
Three younger ones in their 30s today.
This sociopathic manipulation is terrifying.
And I identify two of them.
One is in prison now, who I broke it off with.
One has been through prison in 92 when I saw him.
I'm absolutely convinced he attempted to get me into a dark back room and was going to kill me to get the military insurance money.
And one other younger one, not so much trouble, but sociopathic manipulation, name changes, just things like you're saying about your mother.
What steps should I take to protect myself from these three terrorists, younger terrorists, so that never again I have to deal with them, authorities or whatever, just so I can protect myself so the rest of my life I can be in peace.
Yeah, it's the joke I tell my friends, if I'd known I was going to write a book on my life, I would have taken better notes.
You had to dig in pretty deep.
And Mark and I drive-bys of my past.
And I tell you, one interesting experience.
In Palm Springs, we had a house, it was on Twin Palms.
And this house was a lot of events.
I saw my mother throw a knife at my father, and he was actually sticking his arm in this house.
And the house was vacant.
And I guess I grifted.
I probably broke a law.
But I walked into the house.
The doors were all open.
I was in complete disarray, tatters.
Look at it, I'm about ready to be torn down.
And I had to deal with the emotions that came.
I didn't have the memories yet.
And I think it was the closest thing to an apparition I'll ever see in my life because I felt every one of the fears and every one of the sadnesses, but I didn't have the memory to equate it to for a few minutes.
Ken, by the way, I'm from Gainsville, Florida, and my name is Susanna.
And what I called to talk about was the fact that there's an extended member of my family that I was close in age to, except he was a male, and I was related to the wife.
And he was a sociopath.
And what you're describing is very similar to his circumstance and the way he behaved, except it never went quite so far because his wife was very strong, had been grounded and steeped in morality and religion, and knew where to call a halt.
Everyone loved this man.
There was no one who didn't love him.
Including me.
He had a tremendous sense of fun.
Business associates enjoyed his company, wanted to be with him.
She was looked at as the bad guy more than he was.
She was the one that wanted to pour water on the fun.
But fun for him always got out of hand.
And he didn't have a feeling or an idea of, no conscience, where is it wrong?
Why is it wrong?
Oh, it's so much fun.
What's wrong in that?
Or it ends to a means or it serves a good purpose.
There was always a justification that was stronger than any sense of guilt, any sense of guilt.
It wasn't there.
And I can really relate to the 90 days of the month you speak of when things were really happy and mom was the greatest mom in the world and birthday party.
Yes, I see this man.
He could make parties wonderful for his wife.
Then on the 31st day, come home with some outlandish scheme he had that would tear her up, trying to squelch it, make sure it didn't happen.
So, and he was also very good with doctors.
He was capable of convincing doctors that he did have things he didn't.
The only way that a psychiatrist would even be able to look at her was if it was uh something to serve her purpose, and it was to shorten her sentence, so she would get in the books and find out what they're looking for and exhibit those symptoms.
So I don't see how anyone could get a true diagnosis on a personality like that.
I'm facing somewhat of a similar situation, Kent, in that my mother and my brother have violently assaulted many, many, many people.
Yeah, me too.
The last assault, I'm disabled, and the last assault, my mother put me in the hospital, and my brother and my mother put my in-service worker in the hospital, which was bad enough as it is.
But I cannot, and I just happened to be taking pictures, and I took pictures of him assaulting my in-service worker.
My brother is the size of the WWF guys.
He's giant.
Yeah, kickboxing champions, state champions of California and Nevada.
He just kicked out for being too aggressive.
My question for you is, because I'm going to be really pursuing this thing in the courts.
Okay, Mr. Walker, I'm definitely telling an interesting story I've heard this morning, and I'll definitely need to purchase this book.
Just if you could just elaborate a little bit on what you meant by the significance of the check that you said that bounced, Nor, that, I guess, said the domino effect, or eventually led to their conviction.
When they got arrested, they were arrested for a bad check charge out of Utah.
They bought a Lincoln Town car from a dealership there, and then the FBI were looking at them for that.
And then there was also the LAPD was looking at them for the murder of David Kasden.
When they were arrested in New York, they were in custody for two days before they linked them up with the Silverman disappearance, even though they had Mrs. Silverman's passports or charge plates or identification.
And here they were in the biggest city in the United States.
They were under investigation for real estate problems, arsons, and stuff like that.
And no one in NYPD thought to ask if this Eileen Silverman was missing of her stuff.
The way they got caught was on the warrant from Utah.
And one of the investigators, it was either Fed or LAPD, happened to see the mugshot that they put on two days after they were arrested on the local news stations, called up the NYPD the next day, says, we've got the guy you're looking for.
He's right here.
He's been in custody for the last two days.
It was an absolute fluke that they got caught in the first place.
I've not heard anything from mom or Kenny at all in that respect.
But some friends who, well, people I have befriended with the media of the book, who've been part of this investigation on the media side since 1996, has told me some things.
And I think the money was going to the Bahamas to pull something really big off.
I'm going to be thinking about the interview tonight for a very, very long time.
The book is Son of a Grifter is by Kent Walker and Mark Schoney, or S-T-H-O-N-E.
If you'll check the link on my website, you can go to Amazon and get it there, and I highly recommend it so that you can understand what otherwise is totally not understandable.